Golf Junction Park

The next obscure Portland place we're visiting is tiny Golf Junction Park, on the south edge of Sellwood next to the fancy golf course. It's basically just a small grassy area next to some railroad tracks, with an old passenger railcar parked nearby. (And these photos are kind of old, so I can't promise the railcar is there right now.) A 2011 Sellwood Bee article explains that this spot was once an important railway junction, with Portland streetcars heading south to Oregon City and east beyond Estacada from here. As it was located next to the country club's original clubhouse, "Golf Junction" was an obvious, if unimaginative name for the place. (Though for what it's worth the country club's official history page for that era explains they were also really into polo back then, not just golf, and they hosted a lot of high society teas and whatnot.)

Golf Junction is not exactly a city park; the land's owned by the railroad next door, and leased in perpetuity by a group connected to the Sellwood neighborhood association, which sort of is and sort of isn't part of city government. This group has maintained the park on and off since the park was created in 1996. The park has the aforementioned railcar, though it doesn't seem to be open to the public, and apparently there's a history plaque somewhere nearby that I didn't notice or get any photos of. And that's about all there is to see here. Until the mid-2000s there were old streetcar barns just north of the tracks, but (as a Greetings from Portland post explains) they were torn out to make room for townhouses, with the last bit vanishing in 2012. Oddly enough the electrical substation across the street is historic too; at one time the Portland Traction railroad here was part of the same company as today's Portland General Electric, and the substation was built here to help power their electric streetcars. The streetcar lines just happened to run out to the PGE dams at Willamette Falls and Cazadero (east of Estacada). The much diminished present-day line now dead ends at the OLCC warehouse in industrial Milwaukee, not far from here.

The park is barely outside Portland city limits; just to the north, the rail line & SE Ochoco St. (where it exists) mark the boundary between Multnomah & Clackamas counties, and to the east SE Andover St. here marks the Portland city limit around Garthwick, a little piece of the city that spills over into Clackamas County. (The park's uninformative Clackamas GIS entry is here, for what it's worth.) The Garthwick subdivision was announced in 1914, promoted as an exclusive faux-Tudor subdivision next to the swanky golf course. Ads noted it was outside city limits back then & not subject to Portland or Multnomah County taxes, and promised there'd be chains at the two gates to the neighborhood so it could be closed off from the outside world. The gates are still there, albeit without chains. The ads ran for the next decade and change, so it seems as though the lots sold more slowly than expected. I imagine this was partly due to the long commute; the Sellwood Bridge didn't exist yet, and streetcars of the era weren't famous for being speedy.

From the library's Oregonian archives, here's a July 1979 reminiscence about the old days, riding the interurban line out to the Cedarville Park complex in Gresham for picnics and fishing. (Nearby is the only surviving station on the former rail line.) The railroad wouldn't abandon that stretch of the line for another few years, and the article includes a few photos of what it looked like before becoming today's Springwater Trail. One photo includes a very 1970s-looking guy jogging next to the tracks, as a little foreshadowing of the line's future.