Expensive ‘Weedin Place Park’ is another campground

Remember a little over a year ago, when the Seattle Department of Transportation insisted on spending $70,000 to turn a perfectly usable Roosevelt street, Weedin Place Northeast, into a “park,” complete with large boulders to close it off from traffic and blue geometric shapes painted on the pavement?

Well, it looks as though Weedin Place has joined the ranks of other Seattle parks in becoming an unofficial campground.

Weedin Place had been a small connector street running diagonal between Eighth Avenue Northeast and Northeast 65th Street, just east of I-5 and Ravenna Boulevard.

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Listener Richard, who lives in the area, told Dori a year ago that he feared the SDOT move would make traffic worse — and now he confirmed to Dori that his predictions have come true.

“It creates so much more traffic, which is what I anticipated at the time,” he said. “It’s a great cutoff for people to go down to Green Lake; 65th has been kind of a traffic hazard already, they’ve already restricted lanes on it … so I was concerned about that to begin with.”

Richard explained that the tiny street was a handy shortcut for people getting on and off of I-5. Dori agreed, noting that he himself had used Weedin Place countless times for that very purpose.

“Traffic has gotten worse because now people can’t use this bypass,” Richard said. “They have to wait at the [65th Street] light. [SDOT hasn’t] created things like left-turn lanes or left-turn signals.”

Originally, proponents of closing the street claimed that Weedin Place was never intended to be a park, but that the change was rather a necessity for safety, as there had been troubles with speeding and car accidents on the small street.

The safety argument, Richard said, is extremely ironic considering what Weedin Place Park has become.

“Safety — let’s talk about that because a block down the road there are eight to ten homeless tents sitting out at the park-and-ride [under I-5],” Richard said.

In fact, it was just blocks from Weedin Place that local runner Maria Ball was sexually assaulted by a man who she said came out of a tent off of Ravenna Boulevard.

But the tents have now gotten even closer to Weedin Place. In a photo that Richard took this week, a tent can be clearly seen sitting in the middle of the blue-painted pavement.

“There’s a homeless tent there now, so I don’t know how that improves safety,” Richard said.

Richard joked that if kids want to play baseball in the park, they could use a hypodermic needle for first base and vomit bag for second base. Dori added that a pile of feces could be used for third, but warned that in that case, no one should ever slide into third base.

“What a great beautification of our Emerald City,” Dori said.