Street Ends: North Union and Portage Bays

Dear Diary,

This page gets us from Webster Point at the tip of Laurelhurst all the way to University Bridge.  Most of the photos were taken October 14, but two actually go back to October 13, the day whose first hikes I described not long ago in "The End of the Tour".  As I said in that page, after visiting Froula Playground I headed to Wallingford.  My main purpose there was to take photos of street ends.

In the introduction to this series I noted that legally, the land claimed by the city as street ends is what the city says it is.  That is, the underlying law includes a map, not a theory.

But on October 13 certainly, and I think also October 14, I didn't yet know that.  On October 13 I was still trying to make the theory work.  The theory holds that the street end is the land between the end of the street and the shoreline.  Enough of the street ends fit this theory to make it obvious that the theory had a part in the creation of the map, so it's easy to fall into thinking that the theory is decisive, but it isn't.

On October 13, I was still trying to make reality fit the theory.  By October 14, I'd decided to humour the city, to play along with the pretense that the existing street ends matched the theory.  Only later, I think, did I learn that the theory really didn't matter.

NE 31st St Street End

This is the western of the two street ends held to be justified by the one block of NE 31st St.  Aren't peninsulas wonderful?

Photo 1 - The street that ends

Photo 2 - The land the city appears to claim

Photo 3 - A view over the water

NE 32nd St Street End

Dear Diary, you may have qualms about this project - about the way I photographed the area someone on NE 90th Place probably pays a lot of money to keep private, and pointed out the street sign that identifies the similarly probably-paid-for NE 85th St street end.  But at NE 32nd St even I reached my limit.

Because NE 32nd St doesn't exist.  There is no street sign this time.  What there is, is a driveway, paved in blacktop, that has somehow been represented to mapmakers as a street.  The city would have to produce copies of the checks that paid for that blacktop before I'd believe it was public property.

So find it yourself, if you wish - it's easy enough; Google Maps is among the bamboozled - but I took no photos.

Brooklyn Ave NE Street End

Dear Diary, if anyone reading this page attended the UW and spent much time in the southwest of campus, when I say that this street end is where Brooklyn ends at NE Boat St, they may be scratching their heads and saying, "Wait a minute, Brooklyn and Boat, hang on..."

Sakuma Viewpoint

Brooklyn widens at its end, so if the theory controlled, much, but not quite all, of this university open space would be included.  The city simplifies matters; its GIS map of street ends explicitly identifies the street end with Sakuma Viewpoint.  But the city says nothing louder about its belief that it owns this land.

My belief is that the university and the city made a deal, whose terms included the university's donation of 3.6 acres next door that just opened as Fritz Hedges Waterway Park.

Seems to me it's simple courtesy - and I trust nobody reading you, dear Diary, would wish to be discourteous - to treat Sakuma Viewpoint as one would any university property, even if it may not quite be that.  And university open space is public anyway; I'm writing in you, dear Diary, from such a space right now.  So let's get on with the photos and move on.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

At this point on October 14 I went on to take photos of just-opened Fritz Hedges, which I showed you, dear Diary, a few days later, though not before getting scooped.

It was already kind of late, but I pressed on to four more street ends.  Flipside, though, Sakuma Viewpoint and Fritz Hedges had been my last, no photos, stops the previous evening.  So for the next three street ends, including the last one on this page, I can use photos from both October 14 and 13, although the latter were taken under my first, defective, ideas about how to illustrate street ends.

Eastlake Ave NE (University Bridge) Street End

As long as I clung to the theory, the bridge street ends - three of them in North Seattle - gave me conniptions.  The whole point of a bridge is that it's a street that doesn't end at the waterline.  I think the city already owns the land under the bridges anyway, so this whole thing is pretty much an accounting manoeuvre, but it doesn't make much purist sense.

This tempted me to flights of fantasy, and as it happens, there is a street that ends short of the water right where this street end actually is.  So ....

Eastlake Place NE Street End ?

Photo 1

Photo 2

This street end is the one the city means, east of the bridge, but there's another shore access west of the bridge, which I photographed the night before:

This one may be private, or at least claimed by a private company.

Photo 3

A night view, from the night before:

And that's it for this page.  The next one returns us to "Lake Union's North Shore".  Until then, dear Diary.

Street Ends: Lake Washington - Laurelhurst

Dear Diary,

We're moving way south now, and back to October 14, the only time I've visited the next six street ends.  The first four of those face more or less east, near as I can tell onto Lake Washington, and are this page's topic.

51st Ave NE Street End

Photo 1 - The street that ends

Photo 2 - The land the city appears to claim

Photo 3 - A view over water

NE 43rd St Street End

Photo 1

Alternative photo 1

This would be pretty Machiavellian.  "Sure, we'll build a staircase to your private beach.  Oh, but oops, that makes your private beach public property."  I hope that isn't how it happened.

Photo 2

There's a clearing at the bottom of the stair, then the actual beach.  This shows the clearing.

Photo 3

NE 33rd St Street End

Into each page some rain must fall.

Photo 1

Photo 2, sort of

There are supposedly four street ends in what appears to be a rather wealthy peninsula off Laurelhurst, called Webster Point.  Two are open to the public.  One seems to me to be blatant chicanery on the city's part.  And then there's this one.

NE 31st St Street End

There are two of these; they're the two in Webster Point that are open.  This is the eastern one.

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 3

And that's four.

Well, dear Diary, I did warn you that these pages would probably not interest anyone who didn't like the shore.  I'm afraid six more are coming.

Street Ends: Lake Washington - North

Dear Diary,

It turns out I'd remembered myself as more heroic than I actually am.  On October 20, the day I went to the Morningside Substation Site, aka Wedgwood Community Park, I did get to Matthews Beach, Magnuson Park, and the two street ends in between, but I did not also get several miles further north to the other two street ends this page discusses.  I didn't actually pull that off until the 28th.

That said, I'm circling North Seattle here, so the last shall be first.

Speaking of which.  Several of the pages I've written in you lately have ended on unhappy notes.  Arguably this page will too, but the series as a whole will not.  A sizeable share of the North Seattle street ends that aren't accessible to the public are in this very first page.  In contrast, everything I plan for the last page is wide open.

NE 135th St Street End

Photos taken October 28.

Photo 1 - The street that ends.

Photo 2 - The land area the city is claiming.

NE 130th St Street End

This small beach was introduced under this very name in "Top of the City, Part I" some time ago.  It was in the map adopted in 1993, but is no longer considered part of the street end program, possibly because it's been transferred to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Photo 1

 Photo 2

Photo 3 - The view over the water

Fair warning:  I don't think there's that much blue in the sky in any of the rest of the photos 3.

University Lake Shore Place

As long as I was up there, I thought I should photograph this pretentiously named bit of slope over the Burke-Gilman Trail.

I don't actually know that the bench is in this "park" rather than the trail.

The rest of the photos are from October 20.

NE 90th Place Street End

Photo 1

Photo 2

The city says this street end is adjacent to Matthews Beach.  If you look closely, you can see what I think is a storage area.  Assuming the resident of that house is paying the fee required for use of a street end, what that person is really paying for is not storage space but privacy.  The city has considerately left the southern end of the park nearly impassable with vegetation and streams, but someone still considered it necessary to put up a fence:

NE 85th St Street End

In several places in North Seattle, street signs are posted without actual streets to point to.  At least some of these amount to claims of street ends.

Photo 1

Well, hmmm.  I didn't actually take notes on either the 20th or the 28th, so have had to reconstruct my movements mostly from the photos' order, and only after first writing this page in you, dear Diary, did I realise that this photo probably represents the ending of the real easternmost NE 85th St, visited sort of on the way north.

Photo 2

Just keep in mind, dear Diary, that the fees presumably paid by the people using some of the street ends are what pays for the upkeep of the rest, and even this ending needn't really be unhappy.

Actually, well, I was in Matthews Beach that day, and it's a lot harder to be unhappy, I always think, around ducks.

North Seattle Street Ends: Introduction

Dear Diary,

A few days later than planned, at last I'm starting to tell you about the street ends of North Seattle.

It turns out the legal explanation I gave in "Lake Union's North Shore" isn't particularly reliable.  Let me go into some detail here.  It appears that the basic claim is that when the city acquires a right of way to build a road, but the road doesn't fill that right of way, the city continues to own the unused land.  In the 1990s and probably earlier, people were saying that Seattle had forgotten this ownership.

This led to the creation of a list of 149 shoreline sites for which city ownership seemed especially desirable.  In 1993 the City Council then passed Resolution 29370, which declared the city's ownership of those 149 sites; the PDF version has a map.

In most cases, the sites in North Seattle clearly fit the theory I described last time, according to which the street end is the land between the end of the street and the waterline.  But it often isn't all the land between.  For example, at NE 135th Street that would be a pretty gigantic park:

People are probably still alive who can correct this, but I suspect the compilers of the map negotiated with at least some of the property owners to clarify what land was wanted, and there are many clues that the top priority was boat access.  In essence, I think the street end project originated in a desire for more waterways, of the kind "Lake Union's North Shore" also discussed, places to put boats into, and bring them out of, the water.

In any event, I thought it would take usually three photographs to summarise each street end:

1. A photo depicting my best guess as to the street ending that justified the land claim, usually from a short block away.
2. A photo showing the land area the city apparently is claiming.
3. A photo showing the sea view, one of the things non-boaters are most likely to want from a street end.

So the series that follows presents 3 or 4 street ends per page, of the 28 known to me in North Seattle.  I'll probably have a story or two to tell, but certainly not many.  And as warned before, there are no restrooms or water fountains in any of them.  This series simply documents that fact.

All street ends are claimed by the Seattle Department of Transportation, except a few that have been transferred to Parks and Recreation.

All are on the waterfront, meaning that when a visitor leaves, possibly in a hurry to find a restroom, the direction will normally be uphill.

I hope these photos will be fun for you, dear Diary; taking them was sometimes fun for me.

Before the Ruling at Cal Anderson Park

Dear Diary,

Well, they tell me it's all over, and thankfully no Rachel Corrie today.  So now I can show you the photos I took yesterday.

These fall into three groups.  I'll start with the messages.  When Cal Anderson Park first became a flashpoint, in the days of CHOP and CHAZ, the original Black Lives Matter protestors complained that white activists arriving were diluting the focus to things like saving the whales, say.  Well, probably some of the people there yesterday were some of the people those complaints were about, but this time their focus was strict.  And ...

This time the focus was on my kind.  On me.  These people had not come to the park on behalf of whales, or of the transgendered, or of COVID-19 vaccines for poorer countries, worthy though all of those causes are.  They had taken the risk of coming to the park, and temporarily unhousing themselves, on behalf of me.  How could my heart not sing?

Of course my excuse for being there, if questioned by agents of the city (didn't happen) or by protestors (did), was that I was press.  So my next group of photos is of amenities, the things I've been writing about in you all along, dear Diary.  This took some doing because most of these were within the barricades, but one thing wasn't:

Despite the traumatic events going on, Cal Anderson remained about as messy as a very messy park, rather than the hellhole I'd documented some months ago.  Score one for the kids.

Several photos below depict what I found when I first tried to follow the directions I'd been given for a way through the barricades.  But after taking the photo just above, I decided to make one last try.  And it turned out the entrances were guarded, by strapping young men able to move substantial obstacles, and I just hadn't found a guard.  The one I found at that point apparently decided I was too obviously homeless to be a spy, and shifted a pallet, thus creating a passage this ageing and fattening man barely squeezed through.

The park's older water fountain, of course turned off in mid-December:

The newer, winterised, one:

This was also shut off, but since winterised water fountains in Seattle work by requiring the user to hold the button down for some seconds, no mere photo could depict its being shut off.  So I took a video, which, since I've recently been unable to embed videos, can be watched at YouTube.

I trust I don't have to explain these next shots:

However, I do have to mention that I'm not just ignoring the "sanican"s and hand-washing stations out of my usual snobbery.  I was puzzled by my inability to find them, but it turns out they'd been removed, so determined was the city to make life miserable for people in that place.

To my mind this calls into question the city's claim that it acted only in response to threats against park workers.  Granted those shouldn't happen, but to respond first by removing sanitation, contra CDC guidance, and then removing the campers, ditto - well, that seems much too planned out to have been a knee-jerk response to one incident.

Cal Anderson Park has a category of building I haven't said much to you about, dear Diary, for the sensible reason that they're usually locked, and not just during pandemics.  Ironically, they're called "shelterhouses".  That day, the one at Cal Anderson Park actually was sheltering people, but I trust this photo gets across the essentials.

Presumably once it's repaired it'll go back to being rented out at an astonishingly low $10/hour - see, it's the fees that keep it out of reach for the likes of me.

Finally, we come to the defences.  As I circled these fruitlessly, I began to think that the protestors had read my complaint, in "Cal Anderson Park Is Not a Park", that if the city had really meant to close it they would have fenced it, and had decided to do the job themselves.  My first photo, showing the restrooms and main water fountain as close as I expected to get, actually shows a pre-existing fence, of which there are many in the south.

This next one, though, shows the kids' work:

And as noted above, I took several at what seemed the likeliest entrance.  I can't say I'm happy with what they show.

Oddly, from a distance, the barricades became much less noticeable:

And now they're gone.  Good day, dear Diary.