cyclotram

Cherry Blossom No. 1 (2K12 Edition)

2012-01-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

As seen at the usual location, the two cherry trees at NW 19th & Lovejoy. That sounds like an absurdly specific place to go look for the year's first cherry blossoms, but it's been true for at least the last 4 years or so.

Marion Street Bridge

2012-01-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

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The next bridge in the ongoing project is Salem's Marion Street Bridge. Built in 1952, it's somewhat more attractive than the Center St. Bridge, but it's still not what I'd call a visual treat. The bridge supports have a sort of pointed arch motif to them, similar to Portland's St. Johns Bridge, but in this case I'm not really sure why. Maybe the designer was just a big fan of pointed arches.

One downside of being built in 1952 is that the pedestrian walkway (there's only one, on the north side of the bridge) is pretty narrow. I tend to assume that midcentury bridges are like this because designers figured nobody would walk anywhere in the future. I can't prove that, but it sounds kind of reasonable to me. Anyway, it's narrower than the Center St. bridge walkway, and walking across is just as noisy due to the heavy traffic. I did a loop starting on the Salem side, across the Center St. and back across the Marion St., and I'd have to say the only reason to do this (other than as your daily commute, I suppose) would be purely for the sake of completeness. I'd be very surprised if this pops up on anyone's list of Top 10 Things To Do In Salem.

Just to verify that, I started searching the net for Top 10 lists about Salem. Here's one, which doesn't mention anything about bridges. It does mention going to Portland as #7 on the list, which seems like cheating to me. It also mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum, which sits next to the west end of the Marion St. Bridge. So you'll at least see the bridge, and maybe even park next to a pointed arch. So there's that. Another Top 10 list is less helpful; it's either auto-generated, or was compiled by someone who'd never been to Salem. As far as it's concerned your options are either guided walking tours (lots of them), or river rafting. And not all of the options are even in Oregon. So you can probably ignore that list. A top 5 list actually mentions a lot more than five things to do. It even shows a covered bridge, and mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum. But again, nothing about Willamette River bridges. So apparently this is our little secret for the time being, o Gentle Reader(s). (We really need to come up with cooler secrets, quite honestly.)

Center Street Bridge

2012-01-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge project takes us south to Salem's Center Street Bridge. The present-day bridge is pretty boring; the one semi-interesting detail is that it's the fourth bridge at this location (the part about bridges is somewhat down the page):

Built in 1880, the first Center Street Bridge was the very first bridge over the Willamette River. It was short-lived, however, collapsing during a flood in 1890.
The 1891 replacement was built in a hurry and was considered structurally unsound almost from the day it opened. It still took the city almost 20 years to replace it, however.
The 1918 bridge lasted much longer than its predecessors; it was renovated in 1953 after the Marion St. Bridge opened downstream of it, and was finally demolished in 1969.
The current bridge dates to around 1969 or so. It's actually kind of hard to find reliable information about it. The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the current bridge dates to 1918, even though a quick glance makes it obvious that this isn't the case.

The bridge is four lanes of eastbound traffic, with a pedestrian walkway on the north side, protected from vehicles by a concrete barrier. There's a long spiral ramp up to the bridge from the Salem waterfront, while on the West Salem side the walkway descends into a tangle of highway exits and underpasses. I haven't tried locating the walkway from that side, but I expect it's kind of challenging if you don't already know where it is.

There's suprisingly little to see while walking across the bridge. You see the city's two other bridges downstream, and trees along the riverbanks, and the tops of some low-rise buildings, but Salem is really not oriented toward the river. It hasn't been a commercial port for many decades now, and the idea of chic riverfront cafes doesn't appear to have caught on. Certain Salem-based relatives would argue that the idea of chic anything would have a hard time catching on in Salem -- but I don't live there and I honestly don't know the place that well, so I'm not going to editorialize. I do have a link to pass along though; after the debut of IFC's Portlandia, Salem residents on Twitter began speculating about what a "Salemia" show would be like. The results were pretty amusing, though a bit depressing.

For some reason, one of the conventions around this ongoing bridge project involves warning you about various implausible hazards that might befall you while innocently strolling across the bridge. Based on past history, the most likely candidate would be the city deciding it's time to build the fifth Center Street Bridge, and start demolishing the current one while you're still on it. It's not a city that does anything quickly, though. There's a current proposal out there to build an additional bridge in the greater Salem area, and it'll be years before they'll even break ground on it, if they ever do. So chances are you'll have had plenty of warning -- months or years, probably -- plus I just told you there was a miniscule but nonzero chance it might happen. So can't say you weren't warned.

cargo ship at dusk, waikiki

2011-12-31T19:12:00.000-08:00

fremont st., 8mm

2011-12-31T18:20:00.000-08:00

glacia

2011-12-31T16:11:00.000-08:00

A few photos of the funky "Glacia" ice feature at the Crystals mall in Vegas, which I took while wandering through and not buying anything. A CityCenter press release describes it:

At the entrance, Glacia “cools” guests with large pillars of carved ice that rise as tall as 15 feet. And “rise” is the operative word, as these columns emerge silently from a pristine pool, ascending slowly upward as immense monoliths of frozen water. As each ice monument rises, it is carved at water level into intricate, three-dimensional patterns. Colored lighting combines with the varied ice clarities --sometimes crystal clear, sometimes frosty white-- to produce a visual experience that never repeats itself. Grammy winner Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead is creating a “tonal poem” to accompany this visual surprise.

WET Design describes it in similar terms:

WET's cutting-edge creations help to reveal a world of fascination and wonder at every turn at CityCenter in Las Vegas. The water designs play an integral role in producing an immediate feeling of elegance and surprise throughout the grounds. Crystals, the stunning retail and entertainment district, designed by architects Studio Daniel Libeskind and Rockwell Group, houses Glacia and Halo, two cutting-edge features that exist in pure harmony with one another. Glacia "cools" guests with large pillars of carved ice that rise as tall as 15 feet. As each ice monument rises, it is magically whittled into intricate, three dimensional patterns. Mesmerizing hues bathe this poised feature in spectral light to produce a one-of-a-kind sensory experience. Grammy winner Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead is creating a "tonal poem" to accompany this visual surprise.

halo

2011-12-31T15:44:00.000-08:00

A short video clip of the "Halo" water feature inside the Crystals mall in Las Vegas. A CityCenter press release describes it thusly:

Halo materializes as a series of water vortices held captive within clear cylinders that thrust up through the floor. Sloped, as though about to fall, the swirling water appears caught in constant struggle to right itself with its inherent sense of verticality. These swirls of color serve as a main focal point of the atrium. In between stops at Louis Vuitton and Gucci, guests and visitors are free to walk through and touch or embrace this maze of spinning water while staying completely dry. WET’s elemental features at CityCenter set the spirit for the sophisticated experience that visitors to this unprecedented destination will enjoy.

WET Design, the firm behind all of the CityCenter water widgets, has this to say about it:

WET's cutting-edge creations help to reveal a world of fascination and wonder at every turn at CityCenter in Las Vegas. The water designs play an integral role in producing an immediate feeling of elegance and surprise throughout the grounds. Crystals, the stunning retail and entertainment district, designed by architects Studio Daniel Libeskind and Rockwell Group, houses Glacia and Halo, two cutting-edge features that exist in pure harmony with one another. The unexpected nature of Halo's twisting water vortices, tipped as though about to fall, enlivens Crystals' shopping experience and presents a sense of mystique for guests wandering among the lavish shops. Visitors are free to stroll through, touching or embracing this maze of spinning water, all the while staying completely dry.

coundown clock (post-launch)

2011-12-31T02:24:00.001-08:00

countdown clock (pre-launch)

2011-12-31T02:22:00.001-08:00

bellagio fountain (night)

2011-12-31T02:19:00.001-08:00

bellagio fountain (day)

2011-12-31T02:16:00.000-08:00

river fog

2011-12-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

rain, bricks, trees

2011-12-30T22:18:00.000-08:00

Bolt / Bent of Mind / Untitled (Tall Column)

2011-12-26T21:03:00.000-08:00

Turns out I had another Vegas art post sitting around in the drafts folder. This, or rather these, are "Bolt", "Bent of Mind", and "Untitled (Tall Column)", by the British sculptor Tony Cragg, located at one entrance to the Aria hotel. I'm not really sure which of them is which though, as they're all variations on the same theme and I neglected to check the signage. I may have had a daiquiri or two prior to coming across them, and even without daiquiris one can only stop so many times in a row and go "OOOhhh" and start snapping photos before (justified) spousal annoyance becomes a limiting factor.

This is supposed to be a photo of "Bent of Mind". Although there's apparently a second, larger "Bent of Mind" in Grand Rapids, MI, made of bronze rather than stainless steel. An about.com page about CityCenter art mentions all three but doesn't really help with the whole which-is-which thing.

Anyway, here are some photos from a 2007 NYC gallery show of his works, plus the New York Times review of that show. The NYT article mentions a Brancusi influence to the pieces in the show, which are generally in the same style as the ones at the Aria. I can see the resemblance, or I think I do, but then I generally like Brancusi's work as well. Wait, are we still talking about Vegas here?

kansas city airport

2011-12-26T20:04:00.000-08:00

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A few photos from the Kansas City Airport, taken during a layover on my way back from Florida. It was supposed to be a 2 hour layover, but it expanded into most of a day when our original plane developed mechanical issues.

I quickly realized this was not going to be my favorite airport in the world. The Wikipedia link above mentions that the airport design was TWA's 1960s vision of the "Airport of the Future", a glamorous jet-setting hub for globe-crossing 747s and SSTs. Part of this vision was the idea that you could pretty much drive right up to the gate and hop on the plane with as little hassle as possible. Which might have been really convenient and fabulous at one time, but wedge in some modern TSA gates and bulky security-theater gear, and it becomes a confusing, claustrophobic sort of place.

I actually had to leave the secured zone just to find a hot meal (and, ok, a margarita or two), and had to go back through security -- complete with a full body scanner -- to get back to my gate. Later (as the layover dragged on), I discovered there was supposed to be a Boulevard brewpub somewhere else in the airport & thought I'd track it down. But not only would I have had to pass through security at least one more time, I'd also have to take a shuttle bus to another terminal. So I reluctantly chalked that one up as impractical. Which was a shame, since the food options at the airport are pretty minimal otherwise. I was really hoping there would be a reasonably authentic barbecue joint somewhere in the airport, being Kansas City and all, but sadly that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you don't want the security gate hassle, all they've got are some snack bars -- cold sandwiches, fruit plates, that sort of thing. Oh, and beer. That was one nice thing about the place: They're operating under Missouri liquor laws, which are about the most lenient in the nation other than Louisiana and Nevada. So I walked over to a snack bar and got a fruit plate and a semi-local IPA. They have to open the can for you, but then you can just carry the beer back to the gate to enjoy at your leisure (although you can't bring your open beer with you onto your plane, apparently). So there's that, anyway.

Oh, and here's a sign you won't see at the Portland airport. I kept overhearing people -- like myself just passing through -- muttering the word "tornado", like it's the one solid fact people from either coast know about the Midwest, and they don't like the sound of it. Which is amusing considering the East Coast has hurricanes, and the West Coast has earthquakes and even volcanoes, and that doesn't seem to scare people away. I think the Midwest needs better PR people or something.

countdown clock

2011-12-26T18:33:00.000-08:00

A few photos of the famous countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center press site. The clock and the nearby flagpole date back to the Apollo days (and it shows, as you can see in some of the close up photos), and they're listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I'm sure they kept the original clock around in part because it's such a distinctive, iconic object, and I'd be curious to know who designed it. If the NRHP file for the clock had been digitized that info would be easy to discover, but unfortunately it's yet not available online. If/when I find out I'll come back and update this post with more info about the clock, its origins, and hopefully info on other stuff by the same designer or design team, because that's always interesting, or at least it is to me.

Vida y Esperanza

2011-12-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

A few photos of the cute squirrel sculpture at Mt. Talbert's main parking lot, which is titled "Vida y Esperanza", by Portland artist Mauricio Saldaña. If you saw my post about the park a few months ago, and had the patience to watch the full Flickr photo slideshow, you've seen these photos before. The cute bear sculpture at Jamison Square and some public artworks and benches near the Kenton MAX station are his too. Apparently he also had a role in creating the series of "Urban Hydrology" diatom sculptures near Portland State University.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures...

2011-12-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

The second half of tonight's craptacular movie double feature is "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" (IMDB), a 1964 film about... um, I'm not entirely sure. Supposedly it's a zombie flick, but if you're looking for gory braineating living dead action you're going to be bitterly disappointed. Some brave Wikipedian tried to summarize the plot thusly:

Jerry (Steckler as "Flagg"), his girlfriend Angela (Sharon Walsh), and his buddy Harold (Atlas King) head out for a day at the carnival. In one venue, a dance number is performed by Marge (Carolyn Brandt), an alcoholic who drinks before and between shows, and her partner, Bill Ward, for a small audience. There Jerry sees stripper Carmelita (Erino Enyo) who hypnotizes him with her icy stare and he is compelled to see her act. Carmelita is the young sister of powerful fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O'Hara), and Estrella turns Jerry into a zombie by hypnotizing him with a spiraling wheel. He then goes on a rampage, killing Marge and fatally wounding Bill. Later, Jerry attempts to strangle his girlfriend Angela as well. It develops that Estrella, with her henchman Ortega (Jack Brady), has been busy turning various patrons into zombies, apparently by throwing acid on their faces.

Interspersed through the film are several song-and-dance production numbers in the carnival's nightclub, with songs like "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and "Shook out of Shape". The titular zombies only make an appearance in the final act, where they escape and immediately kill Estrella, Carmelita, Ortega and several performers before being shot by police. Jerry, himself partially disfigured but not a zombie, escapes the carnival and is pursued to the shoreline, where the police shoot him dead in front of Angela and Harold.

If anything, the movie makes even less sense than the summary does. The one actual scary bit is that our hapless punk-kid protagonist (who's also the film's director) bears an uncanny resemblance to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Not sure how they pulled that one off, to be honest. Everyone else in the movie comes off as bored or drunk. Maybe it's just the lighting, or the soundtrack, or the cast just didn't grasp the director's singular vision, or something.

It turns out that (so sayeth IMDB) this movie used the same sound stage as The Creeping Terror, which is the thin thread I'm using to tie this double feature together. Makes more sense than either of the movies, if you ask me.

The Creeping Terror

2011-12-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

Tonight's crappy movie is "The Creeping Terror", an alien-monster-on-the-loose pic from 1964 (IMDB). The Creeping Terror is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, and it's famous for two things that make it stand out from the crowd of low budget creature features:

The creature is basically just a giant shag carpet with a few people shuffling around under it, and you can usually see their feet. Same basic idea as a Chinese festival dragon, but less convincing. It has no obvious way to eat people, so its victims have to crawl into the creature's sorta-mouth under their own power while trying to act like they're struggling.
Instead of normal movie dialogue, the film relies heavily on a narrator who explains what the people on screen are saying to each other. Stories and recollections vary as to why the movie turned out this way. One colorful version claims that voice work was done but the recordings were lost, possibly dropped into Lake Tahoe by accident.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot, such as it is:

A newlywed deputy, Martin Gordon (Vic Savage), encounters an alien spacecraft that has crash landed in fictional Angel County in California. A large, hairy, slug-like, omnivorous monster emerges from the side of an impacted spaceship. A second one, still tethered inside, kills a forest ranger and the sheriff (Byrd Holland) when they independently enter the craft to investigate.

Martin, now temporary sheriff, joins his wife Brett (Shannon O'Neil); Dr. Bradford (William Thourlby, the original Marlboro Man), a renowned scientist; and Col. James Caldwell, a military commander and his men to fight the creature. Meanwhile the monster stalks the countryside, devouring a girl in a bikini, picnickers at a "hootenanny", Grandpa Brown (Jack King) and his grandson while fishing, a housewife hanging the laundry, the patrons at a community dance hall, and couples in their cars at lovers' lane.

The protagonists ultimately deduce that the monsters are mindless biological-sample eaters. The bio-analysis data is microwaved back to the probe's home planet through the spaceship.

Caldwell decides that the creatures must be killed, despite Bradford's objections. He orders his men to fire at the creature, which they do while standing close to one another as it moves towards them. Their gunfire proves ineffective, and all of the troops are devoured. Paradoxically, Caldwell decides a moment later to throw a grenade, and the creature dies instantly.

At the end of the film, both creatures are destroyed, but not before the signal is sent. The dying Bradford suggests that this bodes ill for the human race, but observes that since the galaxy to which the transmission was aimed is a million light years away, the threat may not manifest for millennia.

In modern terms this ending would be an obvious setup for a sequel. Which never happened, or at least hasn't happened yet. I could see the SciFi Channel going for something like this, I mean, you'd have a badly CG'd carpet monster, a crack military team of 40-something washed-up actors, and a woman in the inevitable white tank top, and it would be filmed in Canada, or maybe Romania, and most of the movie would just be our heroes standing around arguing in a room full of computer screens. But hey.

Cottonwood Bay expedition

2011-12-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

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Today's thrilling adventure takes us to tiny Cottonwood Bay Park, on the Willamette River a bit south of the South Waterfront area. It's a tiny nature area along the Willamette Greenway Trail, right next to the swanky Avalon Hotel. In fact, according to a KATU story about the park, the place was spruced up and made into a formal city park in 1995 when the hotel went in.

Prior to that, as a city ecologist describes it, "...the area wasn't a park but was instead one of those forgotten tax lots that just kind of fade into the background without anyone noticing". The article isn't clear about who owned it then, but it doesn't mention anything about the city buying the land, so I suspect it was yet another chunk of land the city owned for years and had completely forgotten about. I've run across so many of those over time that it's easy to imagine that's what was going on.

I would kind of take issue with the "without anyone noticing" bit. I notice this stuff all the time; it's just that nobody notices me. But I digress.

The city's 2009 vegetation unit survey for the place (map, detail pdf) describes the park as "Unit consists of a bank above a rocky and debris laden beach of the Willamette River." It explains the park is indeed dominated by cottonwood trees, and invasive blackberry removal has been very successful.

The survey also notes, perplexingly, that "There is a luxury homeless camp on the north part of the unit on the beach." I have no idea what a "luxury homeless camp" could possibly be. These are archive photos from back in 2007 and I didn't see anything like that at the time, but it's true the economy was in better shape back then. I haven't gone back to check, but my guess is it's a regular old homeless camp, plus a lazy proofreader at City Hall. If they can lose track of a chunk of valuable riverfront land for years, they can probably write nonsensical descriptions of it too.

pelican, cocoa beach pier

2011-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

MSL Atlas V at Launch Complex 41

2011-12-03T22:19:00.000-08:00

Oh nothing, just a few photos of the Curiosity rover's Atlas V rocket sitting on its launch pad. I'm kind of amazed we were able to get this close to it. I mean, it wasn't actually full of rocket fuel yet, and we weren't right next to it, and there was a serious security fence to make sure nobody got any closer, but still.

Besides the lastest Mars rover, a number of fairly significant things have been launched from this spot over the years. The Voyager probes that fascinated me as a kid were launched here back in the 1970s, as were the Viking Mars landers. A fair number of recent interplanetary probes have been launched here as well: Heavy ones like MSL, and light ones that need to go really fast, like New Horizons. Granted they were designed elsewhere, and operated from elsewhere, and only the actual launches happened here, but it's still kind of cool to think about. To me, at least.

Vehicle Assembly Building

2011-12-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

A few photos of the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. This is the building where Saturn V rockets were assembled and Space Shuttles were mated to their external tanks & boosters. The building may be used again someday for whatever flavor of Ares V / SLS / generic huge rocket ends up flying, assuming that it gets funded & nobody cancels it, which remains to be seen.

I used an ultrawide lens to try to capture just how huge the building is, but I'm not sure even that does it justice. There aren't a lot of visual cues to help you grasp the scale of the thing. If it helps, the yellow bridge crane you see in a few of the photos is used to pick Space Shuttles up and carry them around. It's not small crane.

where I was this morning...

2011-11-23T22:02:00.000-08:00

This is the Press Accreditation Building at the south entrance to Kennedy Space Center. You might have noticed the last few posts here have been from Florida, and I just realized I haven't yet explained what I'm doing in Florida. On this humble blog, anyway; I've mentioned it a few times on the intertweets, and on this blog's geeky new Tumblr sibling, Exploration Images, if you happen to be following it too. I've been invited to a NASA tweetup for the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory / Curiosity rover, now scheduled for this Saturday, so I'm in Florida all week: Meeting people, taking lots of photos, contributing to the local economy, and hopefully adjusting to the shift of three time zones in time to wake up for the launch.

I picked up my official tweetup badge yesterday at this building, but needed to come back to pick up a free pass to the KSC Visitor Complex (which I'll probably use tomorrow). The Press Accreditation Building is also where "real" journalists come to pick up their credentials; if you look closely at the top photo, you'll see a sign indicating that there are separate press and tweetup entrances.

Separate entrance or no, it amuses me that I went through the NASA press accreditation process (or at least a variant thereof) on behalf of this humble blog here. Well, and my Twitter account, which has a lot more followers than this blog. Same for the aforementioned Tumblr site. And my Flickr account for that matter. Although comparing follower counts across disparate flavors of social media is really not a fair comparison. For example, following through Blogger is really not utilized all that often, even by regular readers (hint, hint).

In any case, at dinner the other night I talked to a couple of people who'd been here before, some years ago, and the consensus was that the building seemed rather run down, even compared to what it was like just 6-7 years ago, probably due to budget cuts & deferred maintenance. I have no basis for comparison, myself, but to me the unmowed lawn, etc., actually adds to the charm of the place. It's a simple cinder block building that obviously dates to the early days of the space program. I don't know exactly when, or whether it always served its current function, but I have this mental image of stereotypical 1961 reporters lined up for their press passes, all of them wearing fedoras, chain smoking, swilling gin from hip flasks, making cynical wisecracks to each other, driving cars with tail fins, and lugging enormous Speed Graphic cameras around in hopes of nailing a LIFE cover photo. And then John Glenn drops by to meet the newspaper & radio boys and they all start waving notebooks around and chaos ensues temporarily. As far as I know, Walter Cronkite passed through these doors in order to get his Apollo 11 press pass. Or some nameless staffer did it on his behalf, more likely. I realize that's kind of a silly thing to marvel over, but still.

I have to wonder what 1960s media would have thought of 2011 social media. We have photo gear they couldn't have dreamed of, and mostly use it to take cute cat photos. We have no editors breathing down our necks, and usually nobody to enforce deadlines. We can even swear in print as much as we want and nobody can stop us, although I almost never do. On the other hand, with the lack of annoyances comes the lack of salary, so there's that.

some spanish moss

2011-11-23T06:08:00.000-08:00

As seen at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Although basically all Spanish moss looks exactly like this.

unimpressive manatee photos

2011-11-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

As seen at the Haulover Canal viewpoint. For a creature that's invariably described as docile and slow-moving, manatees sure know how to dive at the first sight of a camera. If only they were that talented at avoiding boat propellers. Sigh.

cocoa beach, infrared

2011-11-22T20:46:00.001-08:00

cocoa beach, evening

2011-11-22T20:44:00.000-08:00

cocoa beach, morning

2011-11-22T20:40:00.000-08:00

sunset pelican parade

2011-11-22T20:31:00.000-08:00

As seen in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

some november leaves

2011-11-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

Maybe-Milestone @ Peninsular & Farragut

2011-11-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

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Today's episode of the ongoing milestone quest takes us to North Portland, where the stone pictured here sits along Peninsular Avenue, near the intersection with Farragut St. This one was spotted by keen-eyed Gentle Reader av3ed, who sent me a tip about it (along with a few other interesting spots you'll probably see here sooner or later).

Like a couple of the other recent finds (the big tilted one at 23rd & Hawthorne, and the one marked '5' on SW Spring Garden Road), we have something of a mystery on our hands. As with the one on Hawthorne, I don't absolutely know for a fact that this is a milestone; it doesn't have any numbers visible on it, and neither Peninsular nor Farragut are major streets that you'd think would require a hefty marker like this. What's more, so far I haven't been able to learn anything at all about the thing. Nothing on PortlandMaps, nothing in the old Oregonian database, nothing anywhere on the net that I've been able to find.

So unless new information turns up somehow, we're left to guess at what this stone might be. One possibility is that someone hoped Peninsular would be more of a major street than it turned out to be. It's kind of a grand name for a quiet residential street, so I think this isn't a totally unreasonable guess. As for the time period, it looks newer than the Stark St. milestones, but it's still stone and not concrete like the ones along the Gorge Highway, or the Spring Garden one. The house it sits next to dates to 1894, and the design of the stone does look a bit Victorian, so I'm going to guess a few years on either side of when the house went in.

The stone has a couple of round markings on its sides, as if something was attached there at one point. If this was a milestone, that may be where its key informational bit was once located, and everything would suddenly make sense if only that item hadn't been misplaced at some point.

Another possibility that just occurred to me is that this might be an ornate stone hitching post, and not a milestone at all. I'm not aware of any examples of fancy hitching posts around town -- in downtown Portland people relied on metal rings fixed into the sidewalk -- but it's one other possible explanation I can think of. Maybe the circular parts are where the metal rings were once attached, although I don't see holes that would indicate something had once been bolted there. So I dunno. I'm going to go ahead and tag this under 'milestone' for the time being, since it does look very much like one. If it turns out I'm totally off base here and it's something completely different, I'll fix it later and we can all have a hearty laugh at my expense. Trust me, it wouldn't be the first time.

Columbia Buffer Strip Property

2011-11-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

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Today's obscure city park is the "Columbia Buffer Strip Property", a long, skinnny piece of land that runs along the south side of busy, industrial Columbia Boulevard in North Portland, separating it from the adjacent residential neighborhood. A city document I ran across indicates that the buffer strip was created when Columbia Boulevard was widened around 1970, from leftover parts of lots acquired for the widening, plus vacated rights of way from residential streets that no longer intersect with Columbia.

One reason the leftover land became a park (rather than adjoining houses getting bigger yards, say) is that there's a major sewer line running roughly under the park, in the direction of the nearby Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant, hence several parcels of the park are technically owned by the oh-so-delicately-named Bureau of Environmental Services rather than the Parks Bureau, although there's no obvious difference on the surface.

The park has a meandering bike path along much of its length, and a BikePortland map shows it as a proposed official bike route. Or at least I assume they mean the path through the park, rather than riding among all the semis and dump trucks on Columbia.

I do see people using the path regularly on the rare occasions when I'm up in this part of town, so it's really not the most obscure city park I've ever covered; it's just that there aren't any signs announcing it's a park or giving the name of the place. As is often the case, the Parks Bureau's website is no help, and elsewhere on the interwebs it only appears as a name in a list or on a map. Until now, I guess.

awning

2011-10-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

Today's installment in the ongoing public art series takes us to the pedestrian-only intersection of SW 3rd & Mill St., home to Douglas Senft's "Awning", which graces the west edge of the 200 Market Building grounds. It's an obscure location, and even if it wasn't this is not the sort of artwork that leaps out and grabs you by the lapel, if you have a lapel. You might not even realize it's supposed to be art. I didn't for a long time, until I noticed it on one of the city's official public art maps.

Back in April of this year, Willamette Week named "Awning" its Eyesore of the Week, for pretty much the reason I just expressed: You see it and can't immediately tell what it is. Maybe it's capital-A Art, or maybe it's a "garish and whimsical air vent", as they describe it. It's not obvious, and there's no sign nearby to make it any more clear.

In any case, I have to disagree with the mainstream media here. I don't see how they can call this thing an eyesore when Leland One (aka Rusting Chunks #5) is just a few blocks to the south, which they would have known if they'd done even a little research. It's not just ugly, it's WMD-grade ugly. An unmemorable object like "Awning" isn't even in the same ballpark.

Wheatland Ferry

2011-10-27T00:15:00.000-07:00

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Today's episode in what's apparently now a bridge and ferry project takes us to the Wheatland Ferry, a few miles north/downstream of Salem, OR at the tiny town of Wheatland. It's the same basic idea as the Canby Ferry, but busier; you pay while the boat's moving instead of prior to departure, probably to shave off a few minutes at the dock. At peak times -- summer and harvest time, primarily -- traffic tends to back up waiting to use the ferry. As this is the only river crossing of any kind between downtown Salem and the OR 219 bridge at Newberg, the Wheatland Ferry will likely be replaced with a bridge long before the other remaining Willamette River ferries. Not that it's all that likely in the near term; demand or not, a bridge -- even a utilitarian ugly one -- would still be expensive, and neither the state nor Marion County has a lot of cash lying around.

A 2009 Terry Richard column describes the ferry briefly, although he doesn't have a lot to say about river ferries that I haven't already covered here. There really isn't a lot to cover: You explain where it is, and tell the n00bs how to use the thing, and you might toss in a few snarky non-sequiturs if you happen to be me, which you probably aren't. You'd think there'd be a lot of fascinating history tidbits to share about the thing, given how long there's been a ferry at this location, but I haven't come across any yet.

The ferry does have a sorta-official website, although the page design is a retina-melting throwback to the Geocities/MySpace era. If there's a web browser out there that lets you disable tiled animated-gif background images, that would probably be the one to use. Failing that, welder's goggles would work, or you could try projecting the website onto a wall so that you aren't directly exposing your eyes to it. That's the safe way to observe a solar eclipse, so it might work for this website too. I note, in passing, that the link to their web design firm is a 404. FWIW.

Canby Ferry

2011-10-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

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Longtime readers of this humble blog might be familiar with the ongoing bridge project I've been doing on and off for the last few years. So far I've covered the Portland metro area bridges on the Columbia, Willamette, and Clackamas rivers, the Willamette as far upstream as the OR 219 bridge at Newberg. There are a couple of other river crossings I haven't covered yet, however. Even today, in 2011, there are still three ferries operating on the Willamette River: The Buena Vista Ferry south/upstream of Independence; the Wheatland Ferry north/downstream of Salem; and the subject of this post, the Canby Ferry at Canby, which is operated by Clackamas County. And then there's the Wahkiakum County Ferry on the Columbia, which I did a post about way back in July 2007.

If you've never used a car ferry, the procedure is very simple. You drive to the ferry landing, where there will be a stop sign or a red light, and you wait. The ferry, inevitably, has just left, and you have to wait for it to go all the way across the river and back. Which gives you time to make low-quality mobile phone videos of the ferry slowly crossing the river, which is exactly what I did. When the ferry arrives, it lowers a ramp and oncoming traffic drives off. Then the light will turn green (if there's a light), and an old guy will motion you forward. In my limited experience, ferries always employ a couple of old guys to run the show, and apparently nobody under age 60 or so is permitted to operate them. Depending on what sort of old guy you get, he may motion you to a particular spot, or he'll just assume you already know to drive forward and leave room for more vehicles behind you. You'll pay a small fare, usually a dollar or two, to one of the old guys. At the Canby ferry they do this before the ferry departs, I suppose so they can kick people off who didn't bring a spare dollar. Once the ferry's loaded, they raise the ramp you drove aboard on, and head toward the far bank of the river. The ferry doesn't turn around; there are ramps on both ends of the ferry, and the operators simply face the other direction and the stern for the last trip becomes the bow of the current trip, similar to the situation with Portland streetcars and MAX trains. Also similar to streetcars & MAX trains is the source of power, a set of overhead wires crossing the river above the ferry. Ferries are sometimes also connected to an underwater guide cable, which cuts down on the possibility of being swept downstream in a strong current.

It seems to me that would also cut a lot of the challenge out of sailing a ferry. But I'm not going out on a limb to say it's an easy job. I can already imagine the angry responses I'd get if I did, pointing out various difficult and dangerous parts of running the thing that we ignorant landlubbers have no clue about. Still, easy or otherwise, it seems like the job would get monotonous at times. If I happened to be a ferry operator, I'd be looking for ways to liven things up a little. For instance, every October we'd become a haunted river ferry, and we operators would get scary skeleton outfits and be Charon for Halloween.

Where was I? Oh, right. The ferry departs and slides along its guide cable to the far bank. So you get to sit in your car, not driving, as the scenery glides by for a few minutes. It's kind of weird. The Canby Ferry only takes a couple of minutes to cross, but you can use that time to make another video clip, which is exactly what I did.

Once you're at the other bank, the ramp in front of you is lowered and you go on your merry way. Vehicles may be two or three abreast, and it's not clear who's supposed to go first. I don't recall that being part of the Oregon driver's test, although it's been a couple of years since I took it. A handful of years, even. In any case, this being Oregon the right-of-way thing usually gets sorted out peacefully after a few rounds of false starts and polite oh-no-after-you-please-I-insist handwaving. Then you drive away, and the ferry handles a load of traffic going the other way.

In the research I've done so far, there's a distinct lack of colorful historical anecdotes associated with the Canby Ferry or its surviving cousins. Ferry service at Canby only began in 1914, which is quite late by Oregon ferry standards; many ferry locations were in use by the early 1840s. Since then there have been occasional difficulties, such as in 1946 when the ferry broke free during a storm and was swept over Willamette Falls to its doom, and wasn't replaced until 1953. An article in the November 12th, 1952 Oregonian details the launching of the replacement vessel, which wouldn't go into service until the following year. The article mentions that the Wilsonville ferry just upstream would soon be replaced by what's now known as the Boone Bridge, and describes the new ferry at Canby as the "newest, and probably last, of river ferries to be placed in service in Oregon". This turned out not to be the case; the 1953 vessel was replaced by the boat shown in this post in 1996, and I believe the other two ferries both received new ferryboats around the same time.

Which raises a question: Why is there still a ferry here instead of a bridge, here in the second decade of the twenty-first century? I can think of at least three possible reasons:

Money's one, obviously. Building bridges is expensive, and apparently none of the 3 remaining ferry crossings has ever been a high enough priority to justify the expense. The Wheatland Ferry sometimes gets traffic jams of vehicles waiting to cross, but I've never heard of that being the case at Canby. Although I don't think you can reasonably estimate potential bridge usage by current ferry usage.
Another reason specific to the Canby Ferry is suburban sprawl, or more precisely the avoidance thereof. Portland urban planners tend to see the Willamette River as a natural southern border to the Portland metro area, and there's a fear that if suburbia jumps the river, there will no stopping it until it fills the Willamette Valley down to Salem and possibly points south. So a bridge at Canby would be one too many ways across the moat, I think.
And of course there's nostalgia, because ferries are a vestige of the distant past and some people want to keep them around even if they lose money and don't carry a lot of passengers. Which is more of a reason why they haven't been discontinued entirely rather than replaced with bridges.

In any event, the ferry's apparently cheap enough to run that it's not on the short list for budget cuts even in these austere times, and I haven't seen any recent proposals to replace it with a bridge. So it may be with us for some time to come.

an october rose

2011-10-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

october sunshine

2011-10-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

Columbia Childrens Arboretum

2011-10-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

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Here are a few photos from little-known Columbia Children's Arboretum, in NE Portland not far from MLK and Marine Drive. It's a reasonably large park at nearly 29 acres, but the entrances are hard to find -- or at least they're hard for me to find. I finally located the east entrance (at the end of NE Meadow Lane) the third time I went looking for the place. I really didn't know what to expect since I'd read about the park but hadn't seen any photos of it. I honestly wasn't expecting much, and was quite pleasantly surprised once I started wandering around. Much of the park consists of open meadows with various trees planted here and there. The northwest corner of the park includes a small fruit tree orchard, while the southern portion contains what's left of an unfinished grove of the 50 state trees.

The city describes the history of the park thusly:

In 1900, the area along the Columbia River northeast of Portland was primarily farmland. It flooded every spring with heavy rainfall and melting mountain snows. In the dry summer and fall, water remained in shallow lakes and narrow sloughs. The land between the waterways formed great meadows surrounded by massive cottonwoods and other riparian plants.

John Charles Olmsted looked at this land with foresight. Although most considered it valueless for any other purpose than farming, he proposed acquiring a large acreage in the Columbia Slough region for future parkland. He wrote about the potential of this landscape as a contrast to the hills and river frontages in other parts of town to provide ". . . great stretches of meadow land bordered and diversified by groves of trees. No other form of park has ever proved so attractive and so useful to the masses of the people as the meadow park, particularly when there can be associated with it long reaches of still water as a landscape attraction and for boating purposes."

Olmsted proposed that Columbia Slough Park would not only provide still waters for boaters unsure of the Willamette River's strong currents, but also broad meadows for recreation such as picnicking, strolling, fast driving, horse racing (as long as gambling could be prevented), and golfing if it should retain its popularity. He suggested that the City secure hundreds to several thousand acres while this land remained inexpensive because of its regular flooding and its great distance from city development.

The land Olmsted proposed for Columbia Slough Park surrounds Switzler’s Lake. Much of this land was farmed by a family named Delminico in the early 20th century. Along with other farmers in the area, they built the original levees between 1917-1919 to reduce yearly flooding from the river. By 1920, enough families had moved into the area that an educational facility was needed for the neighborhood children. Columbia School District #33 was organized and land was purchased for a grade school and high school along NE Sixth Ave. An elementary school was built on the property located at the corner of NE Sixth and Marine Dr. The high school property one block west, which was never developed, is now the Columbia Children’s Arboretum. The Columbia School District was annexed by Faloma District #33 in 1935, then reorganized as Columbia District #33 again in 1944. Portland Public Schools finally annexed the land and school in 1964.

When Portland School District acquired Columbia School, it was designated as a middle school. The local youth who attended the school were primarily a very transient population, well below the city average in both education achievement and economic levels. In a goal to strengthen the basic curriculum through science-centered projects, Principal Bill Warner proposed a new program titled Growth through Research, Organization & Work (GROW). Students studied math, language arts, social studies, health, and science as they worked on the 28-acre site that became known as the Columbia Children’s Arboretum.

The land started out as a tangle of blackberries in 1965, but by 1970, students and families had planted 8,000 trees. Students began by planning three different scenarios for the development of the land. An orchard and organic garden was chosen for the area adjacent to NE Sixth Ave. An arboretum was designed for the land on the south side of the drainage ditch with intentions to solicit and plant trees from every U.S. state. The area furthest from Sixth Ave was planned as a natural area where indigenous plants and animals could provide a tranquil setting for study.

Before long, the creation of a garden and arboretum became a community project. Organizations of all sorts began to help the school create its dream. Edward Maddix, a Tigard architect provided construction drawings for the site. Students and staff approached the U.S. Marines for assistance with heavy land moving. Bulldozers were brought in to remove the blackberries and create a pond with an island. The Oregon Association of Nurserymen supplied trees, the Rose Society donated roses for the garden, the pond was stocked with fish by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Rotary Club provided tree labels, and the list goes on. The architect worked with students to design a study shelter that was adopted by Women in Construction. Remnants of the beginning of the shelter still remain, although its construction was limited by the fact that utilities could not be brought to the site.

In 1977, Portland Public Schools built a bus barn on the site of the organic farm area. Eventually, changing demographics in northeast Portland reduced the need for Columbia Middle School, and it closed in 1983. Classes at Whitaker School, located three miles from the arboretum, adopted the GROW program in the 1980s and planting increased. However, the distance between the school and Arboretum became a problem and the program only lasted until the early 1990s. A few classrooms around the district continued to use the Arboretum for field trips. The most constant visitors were neighbors from the new housing developments on the east side of the Arboretum. The neighborhood association created a Columbia Children’s Arboretum Preservation Committee to develop goals and activities in the Arboretum. It has sponsored work parties on a monthly basis for over 10 years. In addition, the committee funded aspects of the East Columbia Wetlands Management Plan to include plans for the Arboretum site. The very first Natural Resources Management Plan in the city, it has guided development and promoted the environmental activities for the Arboretum and adjacent areas since 1988.

In 1999, Portland Parks & Recreation acquired the Columbia Children’s Arboretum land from Portland Public Schools for use as a park. Working closely with the community, a management plan for the site was developed in March 2004.

This management plan mentions a number of improvements that have since occurred, like new bridges over the creeks. It also mentions a few other things that haven't come to pass so far, like playgrounds and sports fields. All in all there isn't a lot at the park that currently justifies the word "Children's" in the name.

The management plan also speaks rather snidely of the unfinished 50 State Trees project:

One of the cultural remnants of the site is the “Grove of 50 States”, envisioned in the mid-70s as a collection of trees from all of the states in the country. The idea was initiated as part of the site’s early education programs and resulted in the planting of several trees. In the mid 90s, many tree identification posts were installed to mark the location of future trees in this collection, as part of a Boy Scout Eagle project.

The management plan says nothing about adding the missing trees. Which is probably just as well; nobody really wants to come see a bunch of sickly state trees from warmer climes barely clinging to life. I'm also not sure what educational value there would be in a grove of state trees; as far as I know the only reason to memorize the list is to win at bar trivia nights. Still, the handful of surviving trees seem to be doing ok, and long needle pine trees make for some interesting close-up photos, at least if you aren't around that sort of tree every day.

On the other hand the plan goes on at length about protecting various habitat areas fringing the park, although the vegetation unit survey for the park lists most of these areas as being in "fair" or "poor" ecological condition. Not sure what to make of that.

Mt. Talbert expedition

2011-10-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

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Today's adventure takes us out to suburban Clackamas County, to Metro's Mount Talbert Nature Park. Which is more or less right across I-205 from the Clackamas Town Center mall. Mt. Talbert is yet another of the Portland area's Boring Lava Field mini-volcanoes. It's not as well known as some of the others because it's way out in the 'burbs, and the park's only been open to the public since 2007.

The park has over 4 miles of well-maintained and clearly signed hiking trails, which compare favorably with anything in the Portland city park system. The scenery's nice too, as the park is in better ecological condition than many of the more popular spots around the region, which are often choked with invasive ivy and blackberries to the exclusion of native plants. The big thing you don't get here is a striking view; the park is heavily forested, and you just get a few scattered glimpses of suburbia looking west. The eastern slope of Mt. Talbert is all subdivisions, so they get a nice view of Mt. Hood on sunny days, but you don't. Still, if you're simply interested in a nice walk in the forest, you could do a lot worse. Just don't bring your dog. Metro's entire nature park system has a strict no-dogs policy.

One of the great things about blogging under a pseudonym is that I can admit I was supposed to be at the office when I took these photos. As far as they know I was at home with a cold, taking it easy & checking email periodically. Which is 100% accurate if, by "a cold" you mean "stressed out", and by "taking it easy" you mean "going for a walk in the woods, taking some photos, like I used to do all the time". And by "checking email" you mean "checking Blackberry, marking new email as read w/o reading it."

More about the park from around the interwebs:

#OccupyPortland - 10/12/2011

2011-10-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

#OccupyPortland - 10/11/2011

2011-10-11T20:01:00.000-07:00

SW 5th & Caruthers

2011-10-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

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A few photos from the tiny triangle of land at SW Caruthers St., 5th Avenue, & Broadway, next to Interstate 405. This place is mentioned briefly in an obscure city document that's resulted in quite a few of the more dubious and pointless-seeming posts in the ongoing parks series in recent years. Like a number of places on the list (and unlike its equally obscure neighbor at Broadway, Broadway & Grant) it seems this is not precisely an official city park; the parks bureau doesn't own it, but has, or once had, a role in landscaping or maintaining it.

TriMet stop 7591 is named "5th & Caruthers", but it's a bit south on 5th and not right at our sorta-park here. Which is the one and only even remotely related item I have to share this time around.

So instead, to make this post somewhat less useless, I thought I'd take the list from the aforementoned obscure city document, format it up for readability, and add links to the places I've done posts about. The posts can't all be blamed on this list, mind you; several places are only mildly obscure and even appear on maps of the city. Now that I've got this list put together, I'm surprised, a little embarrassed even, at how many of these I've been to.

Adams 1977
Ainsworth Blocks 1980
Alameda & 38th 1980
Ankeny & 32nd
Barbur Boulevard
Beach & Borthwick
Beech
Brooklyn & 13th
Bundy 1973-84
Burnside Median
Bybee Bike Path
Campbell Fountain 1975
Carl Place
Caruthers & 5th
City Hall Grounds
Clark-Wilson Park
Clatsop
Coe Circle
Concord & Going ( = Stanich Park and/or Pittman Addition Hydropark)
Collins Circle 1974-80
Columbia Buffer
Coolidge Square 1979
Division & Powell 1988 (aka Kelly Butte)
Dosch & Bertha/Beaverton
Emmanual Circle 1980-84
Fairmount & Sherwood
Firland Parkway 1984-85
Foster/Woodstock Couplets
Franklin & 33rd
Governors 1972-82
Greenleaf
Hall & 14th
Harborview
Harbor Drive East & West
Henderson & 45th
Highland Interchange
Himes 1978-81
Holman & 13th
Jackson & 6th
John Garden 1977-80
Kerr 1980-85
Kingsley
Klickitat Mall
Knight 1979-80
Lombard & 33rd
Lombard & 42nd
Luray Circle
Madrona 1980-90
Mason & 19th
Mason & Gaintenbein
McLaughlin Boulevard
Mocks Crest
Montgomery Street Circle 1989
Multnomah Center 1983
Merger 1976
Municipal Dock 1973-80
9th Street Extension 1989
NYC Building
North Going
Oaks Pioneer Locomotives 1974-78
Omaha Parkway
Overlook Triangle
Portland Center 1975
Powell Boulevard 50th - 90th
Prescott & Albina
Prescott & 15th
Reed College (assuming Reed College Parkway & not the campus itself.)
Regents & Alameda
Rosemont Bluff 1995
Roseway Parkway 1925-84
St Johns Business District 1980
Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial 1985
2nd Avenue Park 1972-74
Skidmore Fountain 1983
Talbot
3rd Avenue Mall 1981
Terwilliger & Taylors Ferry
Thomas & 53rd
Thompson & 17th
Thompson & 24th
Tillamook & 16th
Transit Mall
Tyrol Circle
Union Avenue 1985
Vermont 45th - 50th
Vista & Spring 1974 (aka Jewett Park)
Walker Stadium 1982
Natural Resource Area West Portland 1995
Wisteria & 41st
Wisteria & 49th

#OccupyPortland - 10/7/2011

2011-10-07T23:23:00.000-07:00

#OccupyPortland - 10/6/2011

2011-10-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

wells fargo tower, 8mm

2011-10-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

broadway bridge, 8mm

2011-10-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

bellagio fountain (infrared)

2011-09-26T23:23:00.000-07:00

night balcony...

2011-09-18T23:27:00.000-07:00

view from the balcony...

2011-09-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

quest, september 2011

2011-09-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

reflected, 1st & salmon

2011-09-16T22:41:00.001-07:00

one main place, 8mm

2011-09-16T22:38:00.000-07:00

at sw broadway & stark

2011-09-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

tables, ankeny

2011-09-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

sw 3rd, september 2011

2011-09-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

sw 6th, september 2011

2011-09-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

portlandia, 8mm

2011-09-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

As in, Portlandia the statue (not the TV show), and 8mm the focal length (not the videotape format).

mill ends park, 8mm

2011-09-14T02:50:00.000-07:00

Here you go: An ultra-wide-angle shot of the (supposedly) world's tiniest city park. For the sheer absurdity value. I'm not actually sure whether wide angle shots are more or less absurd than macro shots of flowers in the park, which is another thing I've considered occasionally.

Macro would involve squatting in the crosswalk right in the median of a very busy street, which I'm not a fan of. Plus on the rare occasions when they do have flowers in the park, it's always something uninteresting like marigolds. In short, I haven't gotten around to that macro business yet, and I may never do it at all.

hawthorne bridge, 8mm

2011-09-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Urban Hydrology

2011-09-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Today's adventure in transit mall art takes us to SW 6th Avenue between Harrison & Hall, home to Urban Hydrology, which is one my favorites among the new pieces that arrived along with the MAX Green Line. TriMet's Green Line public art tour describes thusly:

Urban Hydrology, 2009

ARTIST

Fernanda D'Agostino

LOCATION

On 6th Avenue, between Mill and Hall streets

DESCRIPTION

With Urban Hydrology, Fernanda D'Agostino reflects some of the environmental science taking place at PSU in an attempt to thread the needle of beauty, abstraction and content while appealing to both academic and casual viewers. Twelve oversized diatoms carved in granite are sited in the biofiltration strips unique to the the southern portion of the Portland Mall.

An RACC page about the piece describes it in more detail:

Twelve carved granite sculptures based on Scanning Electron Microscopy images of diatoms used to determine water quality in urban waterways. The sculptures are sited along a three block long bio filtration landscape strip in downtown Portland, Oregon, adjacent to Portland State University.

So these shapes are pleasant to look at -- particularly in close up -- and they're based on electron microscope images of diatoms. I already liked them as abstract forms before I learned what they were modeled on, and the diatom angle makes it just that much cooler. Call me a science dork if you like. I really won't be offended.

Bridge of the Gods

2011-09-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

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Today's fun adventure (yes, another one) takes us out to the gorge again, but this time we aren't going to a waterfall. No, this is an installment in the ongoing bridge project, which somehow still isn't done. This time we're visiting the grandly-named Bridge of the Gods. The name refers to a Native American legend about the spot: As the story goes, the original Bridge of the Gods apparently was a pile of debris from a huge landslide on the Washington side of the river, temporarily damming the river and making it possible to cross here without a boat. Eventually the debris eroded away until only the Cascades rapids remained, and the land bridge passed into the realm of myth and legend. And now even the rapids are gone, submerged by Bonneville Dam.

When I heard the legend as a kid I had a mental image of it as an enormous natural arch bridge that collapsed into the river. Which would have been even cooler than debris from a titanic landslide, if somewhat improbable under the rules of real life geology.

If you'll permit me, I'm going to go on a tangent here about "Indian legends". The name "Bridge of the Gods" is almost certainly a Euro-American coinage. At some point in the late 19th Century, some sensitive poetic soul wandered through the gorge assigning melodramatic Victorian names to everything that resembled a geological feature. Some of them stuck around to the present day, like "Angel's Rest", "St. Peter's Dome", "Pool of the Winds", and, well, "Bridge of the Gods". When people of that era said a story was an Indian legend, I suspect they allowed themselves certain artistic liberties, up to and including making stuff up out of whole cloth. There are just a few too many stories about the gods warring over fair maidens, doomed lovers leaping to their deaths together hand in hand, and so forth, all things that also just so happen to be cliches in schlock Victorian poetry. It doesn't really help that one of the main sources for the legend's Wikipedia article presents the tale in genuine Comic Sans. Oh, and doesn't cite any sources of its own either. And here's an even more stilted version, starring "Coyote", "Thunderbird", and the "Spirit Chief", among others. Again, no sources are cited. So until I can find either a tribal source saying yes, this is the story as it's always been handed down, or an academic source supporting the idea, all I can really say is that it's a story that's widely claimed to be an Indian legend.

So enough about legends. The current bridge has a Structurae page with details on the bridge's unexciting cantilever truss construction, and the Port of Cascade Locks (which owns and operates the bridge) has an info page about it, including current toll info.

You can't really tell from these photos, but there's no sidewalk on the Bridge of the Gods. However it's also the official way to cross the Columbia if you're hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Apparently you just hike on the roadway and hope vehicles on the bridge notice you. Did I mention that the bridge deck is an open metal grate, so you can look down and see the river far below? And it's really, really windy in this part of the gorge? And that you have to pay a fifty cent toll for this privilege? It's true. It's not hard to imagine what the obligatory "not dying on the bridge" angle is this time

Another key part of the bridge project involves me walking across and taking photos from the bridge and of it. But that only applies when a bridge has a sidewalk on it. If it's technically legal but I'd have to walk in the road on on the shoulder to do it, I'm generally going to pass on the idea. I realize Pacific Crest through hikers do it all the time, and may even schlep a pair of quarters all the way from the trailhead on the Mexican border in order to do so. But Pacific Crest Trail hikers do a lot of other things I don't do, and I'm not all that broken up about it. The only person I know who's tried hiking the whole thing ended up breaking an ankle a couple of weeks in and had to be rescued. In contrast, in the 5-some years this blog's been around, I have a clean record of zero broken ankles and zero wilderness rescues, and I kind of like it that way.

Fern Rock Falls

2011-09-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Today's adventure takes us out to Fern Rock Falls in the Oregon Coast Range along Highway 6. The name may be unfamiliar, but if you've ever driven Highway 6 to the coast you've probably glimpsed the falls for a split second. Twenty-nine miles east of Tillamook there's a large gravel parking lot on the westbound side of the road, and the falls are right at the far end of the parking lot. Yes, this is that waterfall. I was always kind of curious about it and wanted a better look, but it was only recently that I figured out exactly where it was. And more importantly, how to stop there without becoming a statistic.

There are small, unobtrusive road signs right at the parking lot that simply say "FALLS". There aren't any of the usual helpful "Fern Rock Falls, 1/4 Mile" signs letting you know you're almost there, so you have to be on your toes if you don't want to miss the place. GPS helps, of course, but it's still kind of tricky.

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If you're coming from the west you'd have to turn across oncoming traffic, which you probably don't want to do. Highway 6 has enough trouble with people crossing the center line accidentally, and that rarely ends well, so doing it on purpose is probably a bad idea too. Needless to say there isn't a turn lane, so traffic behind you could also be an issue. So instead of rolling that particular pair of dice, I hit the falls on the way back from Tillamook, a day trip that also included a visit to Munson Creek Falls. Going eastbound, it's shortly after milepost 29. The road bends to the right and suddenly it's right there. I knew I was almost there, thanks to GPS and what I hoped were accurate coordinates I'd found on the internet somewhere. But I still had to brake quickly to make the parking lot entrance. It helps to have nobody tailgating you while you're looking for the falls parking lot; nobody's expecting you to hit the brakes and turn off the road in the middle of the Coast Range, and they may not necessarily be ready to brake as quickly as you are. There are a couple of slow vehicle turnouts between Tillamook and the falls, which is a good opportunity to let any impatient drivers behind you pass and go on their merry way.

One thing I haven't been able to figure out is who owns the place -- and by extension, who's responsible for the poor signage and so forth. There aren't any signs at the falls that give any clue, and Tillamook County doesn't have a lot of freely available GIS data on the net so I can't figure it out that way either. It's not within the Tillamook State Forest boundary, and there aren't any state or park signs to be seen. I've come across the occasional unsigned state park so I can't rule out that possibility, but if I had to guess I'd say it's probably either part of ODOT's Highway 6 right of way (but not an official highway rest area, since it's not on the list), or it's on private land.

One other fun detail is the name "Idiotville" on the map just west of the falls. Wikipedia insists there was once a town around here, or more precisely a logging camp, said to be so remote at the time that only an idiot would work there. Hence the name. I haven't checked extensively, but as far as I know there's absolutely nothing there anymore. Despite not actually, y'know, existing outside of the USGS official list of geographic names, Idiotville has its own Facebook page, a semi-official Chief Idiot (currently Charlie Sheen), and a Yelp page (not an actual review, but still). And the aforementioned Wikipedia page obviously. Plus now it's even got an entire paragraph about it on an Important Local Blog Of Note. So there's that.

Sunset Falls

2011-09-12T03:07:00.000-07:00

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The fourth and final stop on the Lewis River waterfall excursion is Sunset Falls, several more miles upstream from Moulton & Yacolt Falls, just inside the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The Forest Service's Sunset Campground is located right next to the falls, so parking is still pretty convenient even though we're way out in the middle of nowhere at this point. However since it's National Forest land you're going to need to buy a day pass in order to park legally. I seem to remember it was about $5. Because of that I stayed and watched the falls longer than I otherwise would have, in order to feel like I'd gotten my money's worth.

There's also one more twist to getting to the falls: Shortly after Moulton Falls, Lucia Falls Road veers away from the river and becomes Railroad Avenue, the road to the town of Yacolt. If you want to continue upriver, you need to turn right onto Sunset Falls Road, which will take you the rest of the way.

After Sunset Falls the road continues on into the forest as National Forest Road 42, but I don't know what condition the road's in or whether there's anything interesting up that way. Besides more forest, obviously.

Yacolt Falls

2011-09-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

The third stop on our East Fork, Lewis River waterfalls tour is Yacolt Falls. It's on a tributary of the main river, a short hike from Moulton Falls. Tributary or not, this is far more photogenic than Moulton Falls if you ask me. A post about Yacolt Falls at Wild About the Northwest expresses much the same sentiment.

While I was here, an older gentleman who was visiting the falls saw my camera and decided he really needed to convince me to start taking photos of trains. There were railroad tracks somewhere nearby, apparently, and trains occasionally rolled by carrying stuff, and apparently the process was so fascinating and needed to be documented meticulously, and I ought to drop everything I was doing and go wait an open-ended amount of time for the next train to rattle past.

Needless to say, I passed on his proposal and hit the road for the next waterfall.

Moulton Falls

2011-09-12T00:25:00.000-07:00

The next stop on our tour of Lewis River waterfalls is Moulton Falls, about 4.5 miles upstream of Lucia Falls. Moulton Falls is in Clark County's Moulton Falls Park, and like Lucia Falls, it's a short, easy walk from the parking lot right off of Lucia Falls Road. Rather than include another Google map this time, here's a photo of the official park map:

Moulton Falls is the one on the left on this map. The map shows another waterfall just upstream (to the right), but it was more of a ripple, a rapid at most, and I didn't bother taking any photos of it. The waterfall on Big Tree Creek is Yacolt Falls, which is really the park's main event if you ask me. We'll get to that one in a subsequent post.

The "no touching the river" rules apply here too, just so you know. I don't find these rules particularly onerous, I have to say; when I go somewhere like this, generally I'm lugging a camera around. So going in the river and getting wet is pretty much the very last thing I want to do. Ok, meeting up with a cougar would be worse, as would a Deliverance-style run in with hostile locals (which could be a serious possibility, if the belligerent Tea Party-type political signs I kept seeing along the road are any indication). But getting the camera wet would be right up there behind those.

Lucia Falls

2011-09-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

Today's adventure takes us north a bit, to Lucia Falls on the East Fork of the Lewis River, NE of Battle Ground, Washington. This is the first of four Lewis River waterfalls you'll encounter while driving east/upstream on Lucia Falls Road. Three of them are pretty much right next to the road, too, so there's barely any hiking involved. This stop on the tour is clearly marked as Lucia Falls Park (operated by Clark County), which consists of a parking lot, a short, easy loop trail, and the falls.

Oh, and a bunch of signs explaining firmly that you are not supposed to go swimming, or diving, or rafting, or inner tubing here, and there's no fishing allowed, and, in short, you're not permitted to so much as touch the water, ever. And it's not for your protection, either, but for the endangered salmon. Which sounds kind of ridiculous and draconian until you realize there are no dams between Lucia Falls and the ocean. So the thinking is that the salmon on this branch of the Lewis River are maybe not quite as doomed as most salmon populations are, and they're going to great lengths to keep it that way. There may actually be a court order to that effect; I haven't been keeping track that closely, but it wouldn't surprise me.

One upside to the falls being a protected place is that at the right time of year you can come and watch salmon try to jump the falls on the way to their spawning grounds. There are a lot of other places you can go to fish or ride an inner tube down the river, but far fewer places -- at least accessible ones -- where you can see salmon doing their thing. So there's that.

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If you're unfamiliar with the area and need to find Lucia Falls Road first, it's reasonably simple. First go to Battle Ground, either SR 502 east from I-5, or SR 503 north from Vancouver. SR 503 is also known as 10th Avenue within Battle Ground, so you either stay on it, or turn left onto it, depending on which way you're coming from. After you're out of town, SR 503 also goes by Lewisville Highway. Drive north until you get to Rock Creek Road and turn right. It curves south & becomes 152nd Avenue. The road then curves right and becomes Lucia Falls Road (although a dead end part of 152nd also continues south). Once you're on Lucia Falls Road, all you need to do is watch for signs that say "Falls" on them.

tecotosh - 8mm

2011-09-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing with assorted test shots with the shiny new lens, here are a few of TECOTOSH, my friendly neighborhood civil-engineering-themed modern sculpture. The link goes to an old blog post of mine with more photos, so you can get an idea of what it looks like in real life, when you aren't seeing it through an insanely wide angle lens.

a photo for caturday

2011-09-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

rusting chunks, 8mm

2011-09-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

A few test shots of our old friends the Rusting Chunks, taken with a shiny new Sigma 8-16mm ultrawide-angle lens. The lens was a splurge for an upcoming vacation, and I figure I ought to learn to use it a little before getting on the plane.

The main use for the lens is actually not for wacky perspective games, but for really really wide, but normal-looking landscapes, interiors, and so forth. But tradition holds that I always go take photos of the Rusting Chunks first thing when a new gadget arrives, so here they are.

storm, wahclella falls trail

2011-09-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

sunrise, encore las vegas

2011-09-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

cargo ship, honolulu

2011-09-03T02:27:00.000-07:00

reconstruction (infrared)

2011-08-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

A few IR snapshots of the once and future Edith Green - Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, which is currently being transmogrified from a fugly 70s office block into a modern (and hopefully less fugly) 21st century green building, complete with eco-fabulous hanging gardens on the west face of the building.

I haven't seen any updates on this recently, but at one point not long ago they still weren't sure exactly how they were going to water and maintain these hanging gardens. I admit it would be entertaining if they botch that part, and the federal building ends up with a wall of dead brush or a vertical dandelion farm. I'm not actually rooting for that to occur; I'm just saying it would be entertaining.

concrete & concertina wire

2011-08-28T02:07:00.001-07:00

peeling paint on a quonset hut

2011-08-28T02:05:00.000-07:00

a sixpack of streetlights

2011-08-28T01:57:00.001-07:00

nickel orwell

2011-08-28T01:55:00.001-07:00

Kelly Butte, 1906-1910

2011-08-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd try something different here on this humble blog. Longtime readers might have noticed that I often reference the Multnomah County Library's Oregonian newspaper archives. Usually I do this to flesh out the historical background on something obscure I found around town and took photos of. This time I thought I'd start with the database, pick out a place and a time period to search on, and just see what the paper had to say.

I settled on Kelly Butte as the subject for this, since it's an mysterious and little-known place and I've already milked it for quite a few page views over the years. For the time period, I went with a five year span starting in 1906, since -- at least according to the database's imperfect OCR system -- this is around the time people started calling it "Kelly Butte" rather than "Kelly's Butte" -- which sounds like the sort of place where desperadoes cut you off at the pass or something.

The city's nuclear bunker was still half a century in the future, but Kelly Butte wasn't just a pastoral wilderness in the early 20th century. In 1906 the county opened a new jail and rock quarry at Kelly Butte, and most of the news items over our five year period are of problems with running the jail, and of miscreants being sent there.

When a convict was sent to Kelly Butte, it was a sentence to hard labor, breaking rocks in the hot sun, just like the cliche. Except for the hot sun part, this being Portland and all. The part that always confused me about the whole breaking rocks thing was what the purpose of it all was, other than just to be mean to prisoners. It turns out that, at least in the Portland case, we needed all that gravel for road construction. In 1906 Multnomah County was just beginning to pave local roads, and the county needed a massive supply of gravel for all that paving work. Prison labor was cheap, and prisoners couldn't up and quit when they realized how miserable and dangerous the work was. The quarry operated for quite some time, so if you live anywhere in SE Portland the roads you drive or ride on were first paved with prison labor gravel from Kelly Butte.

As this was before the advent of modern heavy machinery, the gravel operation needed a substantial labor force. And as you'll see, the county obliged by sentencing people to months of hard labor for laughably trivial offenses. If the authorities merely felt you were the wrong sort of person, they'd find a way to ship you off to "the rockpile", as Kelly Butte was then nicknamed.

Multnomah County was organized on the County Court system at the time -- a system still used by rural counties around Oregon -- in which the county commission is chaired by a County Judge, who doubles as, well, a judge. So the same person could (and did) order the construction of a new jail and then sentence people to break rocks there. And as this was before the advent of modern conflict-of-interest laws, the same judge could also serve as a prominent member of the local Good Roads Association, lobbying for more and better paved roads. It seems to have been quite a cozy arrangement. I haven't yet searched the archives to see just how long it went on or what eventually became of it.

I haven't come across any examples of the Oregonian or the general public objecting to this arrangement. Although this is probably a good time to remind everyone that a local newspaper is not an objective source of historical facts or even a mirror of contemporary public opinion. This is true now, and was even more true in 1906; the Oregonian of that day reads like a combination of the Portland Mercury, a British tabloid, and The Onion. The paper reveled in lurid crime stories, and gleefully sneered at everyone involved. Which makes the articles fun, often hilarious to read, but perhaps not always reliable as historical documents.

That said, I do get a sense there was something more to this rockpile business beyond the paving racket. Portland was still a lusty seaport of the Old West in those days, full of unattached young men seeking their fortune by means fair or foul. They seem to have made the authorities rather anxious. More than once an offender was given a choice: Go to the rockpile for 90 days and do some good honest manual labor (which presumably was a first step toward settling down and becoming a respectable citizen), or leave town on the next ship or train and never return. It would be interesting to learn which option was more popular.

NOTE: If you want to follow the links here you're going to need a Multnomah County library card, or some other way of accessing the America's Historical Newspapers database. I've excerpted some of the news articles here so everyone can at least get a taste of what the 1906 Oregonian was like. The newspaper database is quite fascinating, and I highly recommend checking it out if you can, although browsing through it can easily suck up hours or days of your time if you let it.

Also note that this post currently peters out in mid-1910. I'd stopped there when I was initially writing it, and then the post lingered around in the Drafts folder awaiting further action. So I decided I'd go ahead and publish it now, and either leave the rest of 1910 as an exercise for the reader, or do the rest at some future date and update the post at that point, and hopefully remember to remove this little notice so as not to confuse people.

1906

Road to the Rock Quarry, March 6th, 1906

The county is to open a road to the rock quarry, recently secured at Kelly Butte, between the Section Line and Powell Valley roads, preparatory to undertaking some extensive road construction. There are 12 acres in the tract, and the rock is considered the best for road work found anywhere near Portland. It is proposed to complete the road to the quarry and take out rock for the crusher. The gravel that has been used for so many years on the county roads of Multnomah was excellent for the time when travel had not become so heavy as at present, nor where the loads on the farmers' wagons so heavy as at present. The gravel roads are now quickly cut to pieces by the tremendous travel to Portland, and hence the county will give the roads a coating of crushed rock, which will stand the heaviest possible wear. Judge Webster has announced that the roads of Multnomah County are to be made the best in the state and models of construction, which may now be done, as the county is out of debt. The quarry at Kelly Butte is central and accessible from all portions of the county.
July 6, 1906:

PLAN BRANCH JAIL
---
It Will Adjoin the Kelly Butte Quarry
---
SAVING IN TIME PROPOSED
---
Prisoners Will Work Ten Hours a
Day and Will Not Have to Go
From and Come to Multnomah Jail

The new structure will be 67 feet long, 22 feet wide, and the walls 12 feet high. The floor will be of cement and the roof constructed of sheet iron. The walls will be strong enough to withstand any attempted outbreak by the prisoners. There will be 48 bunks, and accommodations for eight guards, although that number will not be employed.

...

The structure will cost about $3000 and similar buildings may be erected close to other rock quarries.

The prisoners are to be worked ten hours a day getting the rock from the butte and crushing it. A traction engine will haul the rock to the crusher. Kelly Butte contains 12 acres of solid rock 80 feet high.
County Judge Webster, commissioners Barnes & Lightner
September 16th, 1906 obit for Plympton Kelly, described as "a pioneer of 1848", and son of prominent pioneer "Father" Clinton Kelly.

There were five sons in the Kelly family, and all helped in clearing the home farm that comprised Waverly, Kenilworth, and Richmond, in the southeastern portion of Portland. In 1850 Plympton filed on 350 acres of Government land on the Section Line road, erected a log cabin, and then went to work to clear away the heavy growth of timber. It is known as the Kelly Butte farm. By dint of hard work, he developed one of the finest farms in Multnomah County.
STOP MAKING EYES, November 6, 1906. Wherein the city threatens to arrest all men found idling about town and leering at women, and send them up for an arduous course at "Rock College", a.k.a. the Kelly Butte quarry. The Oregonian reports all of this with great glee. It reads like something out of The Onion, really.
A followup piece from the next day, wherein a Captain Slover of the city police said "Combined with the threat of the rockpile at Kelly Butte, the order had the effect of clearing out the many professional idlers in the North End. It is wonderful what magic there is in the rockpile."
The first prisoners arrived at Kelly Butte the same day, all convicted for vagrancy and sentenced to break rocks for terms between 20 and 90 days.

Chief of Police Gritzmacher is elated over the fact that in the future city prisoners found guilty of vagrancy and other misdemeanors must serve time at rock-breaking instead of being held in jail, fed three square meals a day and kept warm with fires paid for by the city.

It is the prediction of Chief Gritzmacher that there will be much less crime this Winter because of the establishment of the rockpile.

The article makes sure to point out that one prisoner, a certain Hugh Simmons, was also known as the "Jamaica Coon". No doubt they realized their readers cared deeply about such details.
Dr. Ganzer Fractures Rock Clad in His Sunday Best, October 27, 1906, wherein a certain "Doctor" Ganzer feels that breaking rocks at the quarry is beneath him, and soon gets his comeuppance.
A brief item from November 25, 1906:

Portland has a lot of Caruso "mashers", especially cigar store and street corner "johnnies", who, while not "pinching" their victims, otherwise make themselves a nuisance. Regimen at Kelly's Butte would do them good.

Yeah, blame it all on that Enrico Caruso and his operatic stylings, corrupting the youth of America. I'm guessing this is a derogatory reference to Italian immigrants, but early 20th Century slang can be impenetrable at times.

1907

Oak-Street Social Happenings, January 25, 1907, wherein a prominent idler (whose crime isn't entirely clear) is permitted to catch the next windjammer to South Africa instead of breaking rocks for six months.
A brief strike by the prisoners, March 1907, in which they demanded 8 hour workdays. So the county stopped feeding them until they relented.
A suicide attempt (dated June 7, 1907), by an "Opium Fiend" incarcerated on Kelly Butte and unable to obtain opium. This was considered quite hilarious in 1907.
August 19, 1907: A local Methodist minister was arranging to drop by on Sundays and preach at the inmates, and send volunteers around every few days bearing flowers and religious tracts.
September 16, 1907: The first newspaper report of an escape from Kelly Butte. Jack Earle, a former private detective, was convicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, namely two minor girls found in his company in a North End saloon. He then jumped bail and fled to LA before being recaptured. It was suspected that he had accomplices in his escape, his wife among them, and he was also considered a master of disguise due to his private detective work. The Oregonian speculated that he may have fled south, and might not be recaptured this time.

Toward the bottom of the article, it's mentioned in passing that this was not the first escape from the butte, but other escapees had been recaptured eventually. Note that the prison was only about a year old at this point, and the county had initially bragged its walls would thwart any escape attempts. Hmm. Go figure.
There are several instances where a ne'er-do-well was given a choice: Leave town posthaste, or go break some rocks for us. For example, the October 19, 1907 paper had the tale of a notorious Chicago pickpocket named Jimmy Bryant, nabbed while doing his thing at the Multnomah County Fair in Gresham. (The fair was held much later in the year in those days, it seems). He'd been convicted before, along with a pair of associates, for, uh, working the crowd during a visit by President Roosevelt in 1903. Also had a 1901 arrest in New Orleans for pickpocketing during a carnival, along with another band of associates. The article's worth it just for the colorful nicknames.
In the same month, on October 31, the paper reported a lurid domestic case among the toiling classes. After reporting the juicy details and recounting various incidents involving the unhappy couple, the Oregonian states "Roach was found guilty and sentenced to treat his wife better on penalty of being sent to the Kelly Butte training school for athletic young husbands".

1908

February 20, 1908, saw a report of an ongoing ugly feud between the County Court and the Sheriff over who was responsible for running the "rockpile", and whose budget paid for feeding inmates. Not entirely unlike the Mean Girls vs. Bernie Giusto feuding of a few years ago.
The 27th of the same month saw another feud, this time between a County Commissioner and the Mayor of Portland, the latter claiming that Kelly Butte was churning out an inferior product. The article refers to the "Base Line, Powell, and Section Line roads", where "Base Line" is today's Stark, and "Section Line" is Division.
Two days later came an amusing exchange between Mayor Lane and City Auditor Barbur regarding the firing of a street sweeper:

"Brooks was employed in the Streetcleaning Departent", explained Auditor Barbur

"What is he doing now?" asked C.A. Cogswell, a member of the Board.

"Breaking rock at Kelly Butte", replied the Auditor. He was found guilty of a misdemeanor, and the Municipal Judge sent him to the rockpile."

"Then he is in the street work yet", remarked the Mayor. "And crushed rock is scarce, too."
On May 16, 1908, MAX THE MASHER IS SENTENCED TO KELLY BUTTE ROCKPILE, subtitled "Washington-Street Lady-Killer Will Exercise His Fascinating Arts on Big Boulders at County Stockade for Next 60 Days". Let me again point out this is the real Oregonian, not The Onion. Apparently Max, a.k.a. Marcus, who "owns a bootblack stand somewhere", liked to hang out daily at the corner of 12th & Washington (now home to the fancy Indigo condo tower), roguishly tipping his hat to ladies not of his acquaintance. Yes, that was his entire crime, as far as we are informed. Tacky behavior, sure, but 60 days breaking rocks? Sheesh.
June 5, 1908: 40,000 PEOPLE SEE AUTO RACES. On this day Kelly Butte was part of the course for the Northwest's very first automobile race. Two races, in fact, both consisting of multiple circuits of a 14 mile course around Portland's outer eastside. Seven cars started the 50 mile edition, but only two finished, with the others coming to grief at Kelly Butte, Gresham, or the Gravel Pit. The winning time was a blistering 1 hour, 13 minutes. The paper proudly notes that despite all the breakdowns and crashes, not a man was hurt during the races. So there's that.
August 4, 1908, in City News In Brief a prisoner broke his ankle while fleeing falling boulders from a dynamite blast. Yikes! In other news, a local inventor announced his amazing new musical instrument, the "Pneumatone". I found a picture ad for one in the October 1912 issue of Popular Science, page 112. I could be wrong about this, since he was awarded a patent and all, but it sure looks like a fancy sort of kazoo.

Also, we're informed about the hugely successful fruit trees belonging to J.H. Revenue, on his farm east of Sandy. If that surname sounds familiar, you may remember a recent post here about the Revenue Bridge over the Sandy River, which is a whole other historical tale.
On September 18, 1908, Kelly Butte was visited by a grand jury, which was trying to puzzle out the ongoing feud between the Sheriff and the County Commissioners.
And on October 3, 1908, the grand jury asked a judge to rule on what the current law meant, which he did. In passing, the story mentioned that the guy who broke his ankle back in August was now suing the city for damages.
November 18, 1908 saw another inmate strike, this time demanding that one of their number be released from the "dungeon". Which I think is 1908-speak for "solitary confinement".
The next day, the grand jury reported back, stating they were pleased with the current state of affairs. They further recommended that the county repeat the experiment on Wiberg Butte, now known as Rocky Butte. The county later did this, and that jail operated until the mid 1980s.
On the same day, the sheriff personally helped recapture a Kelly Butte escapee.
And on the 20th, the prisoners strike ended. As with the previous strike, they eventually knuckled under due to lack of food.

1909

And then, on January 2, 1909: EX-GUARD CHARGES MURDER AT BUTTE, subtitled "Johnson Alleges Most Brutal Conditions". Johnson, a former guard turned whistleblower, went public with claims about mismanagement and officially sanctioned brutality at the Kelly Butte jail. In one case, a prisoner was brutally beaten by others as jail officials chose not to intervene, and the prisoner died of internal injuries a few days later. This beating, it seems, was directly related to the recent inmates' strike.

Oh, and the jail administrator then decided on his own to release the guy responsible for the murder, for reasons as yet unknown.
On the 4th, a brief editorial concurring with the criticism.
And on the 5th, Johnson met with the grand jury, which was continuing to investigate the Kelly Butte situation.
On January 31st came the grand jury's final report. It seems they visited the butte again on the 13th, were treated to a nice hot meal and a demonstration of the jail's bloodhounds, and concluded everything was great. In fact, the place really needed expanding.

Elsewhere, they also recommended replacing the current Poorfarm with a location outside city limits. This later happened, the Poorfarm was moved to Troutdale, and eventually became the McMenamins Edgefield complex. FWIW.
On the same day, however, it was announced the sheriff would take over running the jail, with personnel changes:

In the first place, the County Court and Commissioners, and particularly Judge Webster, was desirous of retaining Superintendent A.S. Briggs. The Sheriff would not hear of this, for no man ever in the employ of the County has been so generally and persistently charged with incapacity in public office. So Briggs must go.
On February 6th, the lawsuit by the prisoner injured in the boulder incident had his case nonsuited (i.e. thrown out) on a technicality.
March 6th, someone was sent to break rocks for stealing copper wire from a rail line near Estacada. Which is a surprisingly contemporary-sounding crime. Or today's examples are a surprisingly retro crime. I'm not entirely sure.
March 11th, another prisoner strike, this time for better food. They held out for a few days before capitulating on the 16th.
April 1: Rumors circulate that A.S. Briggs is in line to run a new rockpile, this time in the Linnton area. April fools? We'll see...
April 17: Yet another escape. This time the guy escaped by scaling sheer rocks as they were preparing to start blasting. He made it as far as Gresham before being recaptured, and the article speculates he had help.
April 32: Why yes, Mr. Bill Squires did have help during his escape attempt, a pair of area farmers who assisted him:

With a full knowledge that the man was an escaping criminal, these farmers provided him with a hat and coat, instructed him to walk in a furrow so they could plow it under and thus throw the pursuing dogs off the scent, and also offered him a gun, which would be handy in case it became necessary to do the Tracy act and kill the Deputy Sheriffs who were in pursuit. The accomodating gentlemen who were so willing to aid in starting a possible line of tragedies were arrested, but the grand jury failed to return a true bill against them. This will be very pleasing news to the rest of the convicts, who might have been deterred from a jailbreak by the belief that they would get no such warm welcome from the citizens in the vicinity of the rockpile.
May 9: Grand plans were announced for Mt. Tabor, with a new park, new reservoirs, and new homes & streets, served by a new streetcar line. The article mentions the possibility of extending the streetcar to Kelly Butte to serve the county rockpile, for the transport of prisoners and crushed rock. The transportation issue had been discussed repeatedly since the jail's inception, but had never been addressed.
May 26: Fred Fisher, a former cook at Kelly Butte, was arrested and charged with having a pair of stolen revolvers. He worked at the butte during the Briggs administration, and was dismissed shortly after the change in control.
June 9: As rumored, former superintendent A.S. Briggs was picked to run the new quarry up in Linnton. The article states that, despite being a county facility, the quarry will be worked by city prisoners. Presumably so the quarry won't fall under the purview of the county sheriff. The county seemed to be going to absurd lengths just to spite the sheriff and benefit one favored minor civil servant. One gets the strong impression that there's more to the story than the paper is telling us. Perhaps Briggs kept the daguerrotypes, as they say.
July 7: The county planned to let prisoners earn a small amount of money during their stay, to prevent them from being completely destitute after being released (and presumably then reoffending).
July 20's City News In Brief brings us this bit of period color:

PARDONED; WILL MARRY WOMAN
David La Mora, sentenced to Kelly Butte for a year by Circuit Judge Bonaugh upon conviction of a statutory offense, has been pardoned by Governor Benson, and was released from the County Jail yesterday afternoon. The pardon was conditional upon his marriage to Frances Meyers, an employee at the Yale Laundry. La Mora was at first given to understand that he would be held in jail until after the marriage, but when he said he had no money with which to purchase a license, or to pay the preacher or judge as the case might be, he was released with consent of District Attorney Cameron.
August 12: News of a government lottery giving away lands on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Although the article just says "Flathead Reservation" and fails to even mention the existence of any Indians. One of the lucky winners just so happened to be serving time on Kelly Butte during the auction, but as a Spanish-American War vet he was entitled to send a proxy.
And then, on August 19, the county announced it would abandon the Kelly Butte works and rely exclusively on stone from Mr. Briggs's operation in Linnton. The county insisted that very little paving work remained to be done within hauling distance of Kelly Butte, except for a few miles here and there, so there was no longer any need for the operation. How... convenient...
On the same day, this small item:

INSULTS GIRL; WILL BREAK ROCK. --
Della Livingood, a 17-yearl-old street singer, was complainant in Municipal Court yesterday morning against Gus Berg, arrested Tuesday night by Deputy Sheriff Beatty, for telling the girl her singing was "rotten". "I am a plain-spoken man", Berg told Judge Bennett. "I will give you 10 days at Kelly Butte," said Judge Bennett. "That may give you time to deliberate before speaking to young ladies on the street."
The next day brought news that the jail may not close after all, assuming a delayed rail line is finally completed.
September 2: The new Linnton quarry officially opened for business, and a number of city prisoners were moved there from Kelly Butte. It's amazing how fast things can happen when you don't have basic environmental, safety, or zoning laws in place.
September 16: Bill Squires tried to escape again, but this time didn't make it off the prison grounds. Not a very impressive escape attempt this time; it was the old "run for the fence when the guard turns his head" trick. Whereupon the guards tried the old "shoot at their feet a couple of times and watch them give up" trick.
September 22: Kelly Butte received an official visit by Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, Government Inspector of Prisons. The article mentions that she looked favorably on the Kelly Butte operation, but much of the piece is devoted to marveling at the novelty of an important female federal official. It does mention in passing that Mrs. Foster had special praise for the work of Lola Baldwin, the country's first female police officer.
September 23: The ongoing feud between the County Court and the Sheriff continued, with a new report from the county claiming that feeding prisoners was twice as expensive after the sheriff took over the jail. The sheriff pulled no punches in his reply, arguing that the numbers for the time before he took over were inaccurate and far too low:

"For instance, it was formerly a very common occurrence for men sentenced to long terms on the rockpile to vanish suddenly, after eating a few meals, and never to be heard of again. As most of these escapes were carefully concealed from the public, these elopements would leave, in sme cases, a surplus of several hundred meals to be used in reducing the 'per capita' cost for the others.

"Opium smoking and whisky drinking were also quite freely practiced among the prisoners, and as 50 cents worth of opium would take the place of $5 worth of food, there was a mathematical saving effected from that cause. To make the meal account fit the sentence account may have simplified the bookkeeping, but it was a method by which it was fully as difficult to determine accurately the cost per meal as it would be to tell how much the county is paying Judge Webster for his vacations and private law practice and how much for looking after the work of the county. I have never been able to secure any accurate data on the amount of rock crushed, either this year or last, but am not surprised at the showing made by the County Court.

"With the vast sums of money which the Court has been spending on the roads in ever-increasing amounts, it was a very simple mathematical problem to figure the cost of meals down to a mere fraction. Yet no practical man who ever engaged in the business of feeding people as a business venture ever believed they could be fed, except mathematically or theoretically, at the prices claimed by the County Court, without a loss. Inasmuch as the work of figuring down the price of meals and figuring up the output of rock under the old regime will enable some of the hard-working Commissioners to get in 'per diem' that otherwise might escape them, I am willing that the Court should follow the same practice with the crushed rock that it has followed with the meals"
November 24: The city proposed building a "detention hospital" on or near Kelly Butte, on land donated by the county. A "detention hospital" being an involuntary quarantine facility for people with contagious diseases. The location was hailed as an ideal one, although it turns out this was Plan B. Plan A would have been a westside location along Canyon Road, but a city councilman owned land nearby and didn't want a detention hospital in his neighborhood.
November 27: Proving that the only thing new about NIMBY is the acronym, the proposed detention hospital ran into local opposition, from people who quite emphatically did not want this in their backyards. Although one local landowner suggested that putting it on top of Kelly Butte instead of right on the Section Line road might not damage property values quite so much. Notably, this time the Oregonian refers to the institution not as a "detention hospital" but as a "pesthouse", which seems like a much more pejorative term.
December 3: Another grand jury review of the county's operations gave Kelly Butte far from stellar marks, primarily due to overcrowded jail space. Colorful phrasing abounds: "Kelly Butte Disgraceful", "Kelly Butte quarters cramped and very unsanitary; disgrace to civilization", "Kelly Butte Disgusting", "In the name of common decency we ask that this be remedied at once." The report goes on to criticize broken kitchen ranges, a lack of modern electric lighting, and the use of unsanitary wooden bunks instead of modern iron ones.

I get the impression that grand juries were once used for a sort of general inspection & external audit of the county's operations. It's not clear whether that was actually a valuable function or not, but it's an interesting idea in the abstract.

1910

January 11: More metal thieving, with two culprits being sent to the rockpile. Of the other pair: "When asked why they stole the wire, they said they were 'broke' and needed the money."
January 29: CARD-PLAYER IS CONVICTED. Apparently the simple act of playing a friendly game of draw poker was a crime in 1910 Portland, despite being a traditional pastime of the Old West. The case at hand illustrates the one upside of this prohibition: If you happened to lose $400 during a five day poker marathon, you could always call the cops and rat out the guys who took your money. And off they go to break rocks. Of course you got a similar sentence, since you weren't exactly innocent either. And then they were pardoned, and you got your sentence suspended, and everyone switched over to civil court to continue fighting over that $400.

It's interesting to note, apropos of nothing, that later the authorities sorted out the poker problem by simply legalizing it. And curiously, the world didn't end. Just sayin'.
February 20: More on the proposed pesthouse, which they now describe simply as a "smallpox hospital". When you put it that way, I frankly wouldn't want it in my backyard either.
February 26: A very 1910 story: Man cons two other men out of the princely sum of $14. Man is sentenced to six months. Man is in no condition to break rocks. Man's son writes half-literate tearjerking letter to judge, explaining that his mother is distraught, and he (the child) is unable to earn enough to support the family in his father's absence. Judge sends them a check from his own pocket, court recommends a pardon.
March 17: A piece about the good roads movement mentions that County Judge Webster belongs to the Good Roads Association. Lobbying for paved roads while supplying the raw materials for paved roads seems just a little conflict-of-interest-ish, doesn't it?
April 24: Another story with a kid in it, but less of a family togetherness angle. Seems his dad had a beef with the neighbors, and decided to resolve it by dynamiting their cabin. Son inadvertently rats out his dad when, under questioning, said he saw his dad stockpiling dynamite. When asked how he knew it was dynamite, he said he knew the smell from riding on wagons to Kelly Butte.
May 22: Another example of a crime that actually isn't new:

An individual of the male gender, incarcerated at Kelly Butte by the county on conviction by the city of attempting assault upon a little girl, seeks freedom on the ground that the city cannot send one of its prisoners beyond city limits for punishment. But for an offense like this the city should have authority to send the culprit to one of a variety of places, one of which is so far away that no traveler has ever returned from it.

shadows of rustling leaves

2011-08-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

If you follow this humble blog semi-regularly for whatever reason, you already know I can get a bit wound up over interesting shadows & reflections. Here's today's edition: Shadows of the morning sun shining through rustling leaves. This probably ought to have a soundtrack - either of the rustling leaves themselves, or some spacey New Agey type music possibly.

This was one of the easier blog posts to create. It was basically wake up, roll over, grab phone, film interesting shadows. Ok, then Bluetooth to laptop, upload to YouTube, copy & paste embed code to Blogger, and write the text you're reading now. Still, not terribly complicated. If I'd gone anywhere at all as part of creating this I'd put the word "expedition" in the title for the sheer irony value, but I can't even do that this time. So, well, enjoy...

Stanley Cup in Portland, August 17, 2011

2011-08-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

So the Stanley Cup visited Pioneer Courthouse Square around lunchtime today, and I stopped briefly to take a few photos. If you don't like these, I suspect you can find better ones on the interwebs somewhere.

I haven't been paying close attention to current events and coming attractions here in town of late, so I didn't realize the Cup was coming to town until I saw a mention of it on Dave Knows Portland. I don't know how he manages to keep track of all this stuff, especially since he lives in Astoria these days.

In any case, his story in turn links to an old post of mine about the Portland Rosebuds and the 1916 Stanley Cup. Which, I'll point out once again, was ours for about a month. It's not just me being eccentric here either. It's a minority opinion, but I'm not alone here. From the book Deceptions and doublecross: how the NHL conquered hockey by Morey Holzman & Joseph Nieforth, pp 99-100:

As PCHA champions, the Portland Rosebuds took over stewardship of the Stanley Cup from the 1915 winners, the Vancouver Millionaires. Team manager Ed Savage dutifully engraved his team's name on the coveted bowl:

PORTLAND, ORE.
PCHA CHAMPIONS
1915-1916

thus solidifying the City of Roses' claim as the first U.S.-based club to win the Cup. (This practice ended after the 1916 series; thereafter, a team could only be recognized as Cup champs if it won the Stanley Cup series. Reference sources therefore consistently name the 1917 Seattle Metropolitans as the first champions from south of the border.)

The Rosebuds would not get to keep the Cup for long, however. Georges Vezina starred in leading the Montreal Canadiens to their first Stanley Cup championship, as they beat Portland three games to two.

So there. Told ya.

Jaguar XKSS, Portland Art Museum

2011-08-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

A few photos of a Jaguar XKSS at the Portland Art Museum's "The Allure of the Automobile" exhibit. This is one of only 16 that were built before the Jaguar factory burned down, including the XKSS blueprints. So that was that. This particular car was once owned by Steve McQueen (of Bullitt fame), so it has a bit of extra car-nut cachet to it. Another went to Cuba and spent the entire Cold War there, before making its way to a rich collector in the decadent West in the 1990s. Another went missing for many years before turning up in Chicago a few years back -- and then making its way to the hands of another rich collector. I don't usually post car pics here, but I recently did the "go to the car show with dad" thing and ended up with a bunch of photos. He's a bit of a car nut, ok, more than a bit, and I remember him going on about the XKSS -- how rare they are and how it's a shame there's no chance of ever seeing one in the flesh, and so forth. So when one came to town, I figured he might be interested in having a gander at it. And oh, how right I was. Lunch was a bit later than we'd planned due to all the extra XKSS ogling. So that was kind of cool. Also in the back of my mind I figured it'd be interesting to take photos of something else for a change, instead of the usual flowers, statues, bridges, etc. The light isn't really the best for photography; this is the first time the museum's allowed cameras in for a special exhibit, and they aren't really set up for it. I understand they've been doing special "photographers only" sessions, where they let you bring a tripod and even use a bit of flash, which I suppose is what you'd want to do if you were really going to be hardcore about this. So the problem is that you've got rather dim artificial light, with lots of little spotlights, lighting cars that are often extremely shiny and sometimes painted very dark colors to boot. Plus you've got tourists constantly elbowing you. I'm just happy I remembered to bring a wide angle lens so I could fit the whole car into the frame. That's my one and only beginners' photo tip for today: If you're in cramped quarters taking photos of a car, you'll want a wide angle lens. This is also true for other kinds of large object. So yeah, in short, this is not exactly the famous 1980s "Decisions, Decisions" poster you're looking at here. But hey.

glass effects

2011-08-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of old (circa 2005) digital photo experiments from the archives, along the lines of "what happens if I shoot through this glass object" -- besides confusing the hell out of autofocus, I mean.

I was originally going to title this something along the lines of "seeing the world through the bottom of a glass", but that conveys entirely the wrong tone, & is the sort of half-clever play on words that tends to get newspaper headline writers in unintended trouble. So nix on that.

from the archives: digital photo #1

2011-08-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

Was looking through old photos last night and thought, hey, I know, I'll post the boring first digital photo from my first digital camera. And then explain that it's merely the first surviving digital photo, since Canon's instructions said to take a photo and then delete it so you learn how. Which was a useless exercise, in retrospect, since I pretty much never delete photos. So the original original photo, now lost to posterity, was an amateurish unboxing photo taken inside the long-vanished BJ's brewpub near Lloyd Center.

Meanwhile the photo you see here shows a cold, rainy November day at the 7th Avenue MAX stop. Little did I know how many photos of cold, rainy weather I'd be taking in the coming years. Speaking of which, right now it's a cold, potentially rainy day in August, which is just wrong.

Munra Falls expedition

2011-08-06T18:14:00.000-07:00

A few more Columbia Gorge waterfall photos, this time of Munra Falls, a small waterfall on the trail to Wahclella Falls, which is off the same freeway exit as Bonneville Dam. It's far from the largest or most spectacular waterfall in the gorge, but when I say it's on the trail, I mean that almost literally; it rushes down a rockface right next to the trail, and you could probably reach out and touch it if you wanted to. It's like a waterfall petting zoo, really.

The one surprising thing is that it's acquired a semi-official name, one which is at least used commonly around the interwebs:

Portland Hikers' Field Guide has some basic info about the falls & states they're about 35 feet tall. Which isn't much by Gorge standards, but I still wouldn't go over it in a barrel.
A forum thread at the same site mentions that the stream is called Munra Creek, and this is far from the only waterfall on said creek.
More info at Waterfall Record and Waterfalls Northwest. The latter has another photo and directions to the falls, if you need directions for some reason.
Someone's Panoramio photo, which looks a lot like the top photo here. There aren't a lot of fresh, innovative camera angles to be had at this particular waterfall, I'm afraid.
I sort of assumed the word "Munra" was an anglicized Indian word, but it's actually a surname. Katherine Sterrett Munra ran the railroad's "eating house" nearby, somewhere in the Bonneville area, from the 1880s to the 1920s. As far as I know, the original building no longer exists.
Yet another forum thread at Portland Hikers' Field Guide discusses place names on old maps of the Gorge, including various things named "Munra". Nearby Munra Point was once called "Mount Munra" at one time. Everything was just a bit more melodramatic back then.

reflections, dreamer fountain

2011-08-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

Fremont Bridge, Seattle

2011-08-04T23:55:00.000-07:00

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The bridge project takes us north again, to Seattle's historic Fremont Bridge, not to be confused with Portland's own vastly larger (but less historic) Fremont Bridge. As with the nearby Aurora Bridge, this one photo was taken way back in 2006, well before I ever thought of this bridge project. So I didn't take a lot of photos, and I didn't walk across the thing.

For something that's apparently quite the quirky and beloved symbol of a quirky part of town, I haven't come across a lot of interesting stuff to share (and, coincidentally, to pad this post out to a more respectable length). It has a Structurae page if you're interested in the engineering side of things. If you're more up for the artsy-quirky stuff, it turns out that in the summer of 2009 the bridge hosted its own artist in residence. Residence, in this case, meaning hanging out in one of the drawbridge towers, watching the world go by and gathering artistic thoughts. Which sounds like a great job, although I expect the living-in-Seattle part would quickly become annoying. Still, if this software thing doesn't work out, maybe the sorta-new bridge in Charleston needs a blogger in residence, or if not, maybe the shiny new one next to Hoover Dam does, or possibly one of the Ala Wai Canal bridges, or the Millau Viaduct, or, or, or....

aberdeen, wa | september 2006

2011-08-04T23:34:00.000-07:00

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From the archives, a few photos from Aberdeen, Washington, a gritty blue collar logging town and seaport on the Washington coast. We occasionally pass through the town on our way to Lake Quinault and points north, and I seem to recall taking these photos as we drove through without stopping.

The one thing in Aberdeen that I wish I had a photo of and don't is a little addendum to the big "Welcome to Aberdeen" sign at the edge of town, a small acknowlegement that Kurt Cobain slept here, once upon a time.

150k

2011-08-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

So my Sitemeter counter just ticked over to 150,000 a few minutes ago, for whatever that's worth. That number sounds fairly huge, even spread over the 5.5 years this humble blog's been around. Although that also works out to about 75 visitors per day, which is distinctly non-huge. So whatever.

In any case, lucky visitor #150,000 arrived, not from Google, but from something called Fast Browser Search, which I'd never heard of before. They searched on the phrase "octet plus one", which led to an old bad movie post of mine from way back in December '06. You'll have to go read the post if you're curious why I used the phrase; as for the search hits I get on that phrase (a surprisingly high number), I haven't the foggiest idea about what they're actually looking for, and the other search results besides me don't offer any obvious clues. This particular visitor didn't stay long, and all I know is that he or she is a Comcast customer somewhere in the US, on either Pacific Daylight Time or Arizona (blech!) Time, using Internet Explorer 7 (blech!) on Windows XP (blech!), and (I think) MS Office installed (blech!). And they arrived at precisely midnight local time, which seems appropriate somehow, this being a serious major milestone and all.

This milestone probably just means this blog's warranty has now expired, and everything will rapidly go to pieces after this. I would find that entirely unsurprising.

In any case, if you find yourself pining for a bit more tasty bad movie goodness, why not check out the new Tumblr site called Trailr that I created a few days ago? It's not just cheesy movie trailers, but I liked the name and I wanted to use it even if it's only mostly accurate. So enjoy, or whatever.

screamer, sw morrison

2011-07-31T19:41:00.000-07:00

after hours

2011-07-31T19:36:00.001-07:00

car coming

2011-07-31T19:33:00.001-07:00

scrub jay, july 2011

2011-07-31T19:30:00.000-07:00

flag shadow

2011-07-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

horsetail falls, may 2011

2011-07-20T00:45:00.000-07:00

Ferry Street Bridge, Dayton OR

2011-07-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

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A few photos of the Ferry St. footbridge over the Yamhill River in Dayton, OR. I happened to be in the area back in April and stopped briefly for a look. In retrospect I probably ought to have, y'know, looked around the town itself as well, but I was on vacation and trying to hit a bunch of places on the blog todo list, and being a bit monomaniacal in the process. And in my defense, a torrential downpour opened up while I was on the bridge, so it wasn't really a great day to be walking around looking at old buildings and so forth.

The city of Dayton is thinking about replacing the current bridge with a new structure, as they think it's a bit long in the tooth for a wooden bridge in this climate. That document doesn't go into any depth on the origin of the current bridge; it mentions it was built some time in the 1970s (but they weren't sure exactly when) and the easement status for it is unclear. Which kind of suggests to me that building it wasn't an official city project. Or it was and they just weren't as wound up about meticulous recordkeeping back then. Or everything's documented to the hilt, but whoever wrote the report didn't spend a lot of time on historical research. These are all possibilities.

As the name of the bridge suggests, the bridge is at the foot of Ferry Street, which is the main drag through town. And as the name of the street suggests, there once was a ferry across the river at this spot. The local historical society's "about" page mentions that the ferry came first, in the 1840s, and the town later grew up around it. The book A History of Oregon Ferries since 1826 has a couple of pages about Yamhill River ferries, and it seems to indicate Dayton didn't get a (non-railroad) bridge over the river until some time in the 1890s. The current bridge is just outside of town, a bit upstream. There's a bit of debris on the bank of the river immediately upstream of the bridge that looks like it might have been a dock at one point, although it's hard to imagine that any part of a wooden dock would have survived the elements for ~120 years. It's probably something much newer and unrelated.

In any case, the bridge seems nice enough. It has that groovy 70s Oregon look, where we were all going back to the land and building everything out of good, honest solid wood from here on out: Geodesic dome houses, hot tubs, probably even the solar panels. Note that this was back before anyone ever heard of spotted owls, obviously. It totally looks like it could've been someone's DIY project, using plans from the latest Whole Earth Catalog.

The only problem with the bridge is that it doesn't really go anywhere. There's a bit of parkland on the far side of the bridge, along with what looks like, um, the municipal sewage lagoons. Or maybe they're just irrigation ponds, I'm not totally sure. But that's about all there is. The bridge might be convenient if you're on one of those long distance bike rides around the Willamette Valley that my coworkers love to brag about doing, and you'd kind of like to avoid riding on state highways clogged with 18 wheelers and casino-bound RVs. That would make sense anyway.

small subjects, tanner springs

2011-07-14T01:42:00.000-07:00

green & violet, tanner springs

2011-07-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

lovejoy fountain, july 2011

2011-07-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

Rippling Waters Park expedition

2011-07-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

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Today's thrilling adventure takes us out to little-known Rippling Waters Park along Gales Creek in western Washington County. Those of you who are, inexplicably, long-time readers might remember me mentioning this place twice before; for the rest of you, a brief recap. Washington County doesn't have an extensive county park system; there's Hagg Lake south of Forest Grove, little Metzger Park near the Washington Square Mall, and this place, which almost nobody has ever heard of. It seems that the county itself forgot about the place for several decades, and when they finally realized they owned it, they promptly put up the big scary No Trespassing sign you see here. There wasn't (and still isn't) money in the budget to operate it on an official basis, and they can't ignore people using it on a less than official basis because then someone would inevitably get hurt and sue for big bucks. The only approved visitors seem to be occasional groups of volunteers, pulling up invasive plants and taking water quality samples and so forth. And, unofficially, it seems the place has always been a traditional local fishing and swimming hole.

So you might have noticed I didn't get very far on this so-called expedition. I didn't even pass the No Trespassing sign, since I wasn't sure how strictly that was enforced. I wasn't in the mood to get tasered that day, or to get tasered later after posting photos on the net, or for that matter to get sued after someone else saw the photos on the net, went to the park, and got tasered. So there's that. I mean, if I thought there was something really amazing I needed to see past the sign I would've considered it. But some underbrush and a creek? Nah.

Also, I was on my way back from a quick day trip to the coast (including a visit to Munson Creek Falls), and I was running a bit behind schedule (and about to get stuck in Portland weekday rush hour, as it turns out), so even if there was an unexplored Egyptian tomb just up the trail I still might have left it for another day.

The point (at least this time around) was simply to find the place and take a token photo or two so I could reasonably do a post about it. I was intrigued by the park, or at least the idea of the park, when I read those 1999 Oregonian stories about the place. I was fascinated that a chunk of land this size, ostensibly a public park, could simply fall off the county's radar and be forgotten for decades. It's fair to say that, in a roundabout sort of way, this eventually led to this humble blog's ongoing park project, for good or ill.

I checked the Oregonian historical database for earlier mentions of the park, and there are a few starting back in the 1920s. The articles suggest that the park had already been around for a while when it first appeared in the Oregonian. My guess is the Portland paper started mentioning the place around the time its readers started buying cars and it became possible to visit the park on a day trip from the city. As a caveat, I'm not absolutely certain these early mentions are about today's Rippling Waters Park. The park in those days seems to have been privately owned, and offered swimming and group picnic facilities (numerous mentions of the place were in relation to company picnics, school reunions, etc. being held there), and even overnight cabins. I realize I didn't venture very far into the park, but I didn't see any of that stuff, or any obvious evidence it had once existed. So maybe it was the same park (or a portion of it) and nature's thoroughly claimed it back over the last century, or maybe it was another place by the same name in the same general vicinity. I can't rule that out since I ran across quite a few midcentury real estate listings advertising that they were in the Rippling Waters area. In any case, that early period came to an end in the 1940s. This notice appeared in the July 13, 1941 Oregonian:

RIPPLING WATERS PARK -- Famous park on Gales Creek, Wilson River road, 16 a. [acres?] picnic, swim, cabins. Must be sold. Take Portland or sub. home as part. LYMAN ROSS, ALOHA OR Excl. agent

Additional sale notices appeared over the next couple of years, and then the park basically dropped off the Oregonian's radar until 1985, at which point it was a poorly-maintained county park. Neighbors complained to the county about unruly teen parties (which, given the year, could easily have included classmates of mine) and even occasional gunfire, and the county briefly considered what to do about the place. A couple of typical stories from that era:

July 10, 1985 article "Complaints bring county steps to limit park use"
June 6, 1985: Park status asked for Rippling Waters trail

I didn't go through and read all of the 1985 stories, since it's quite obvious that if they made any grand plans for the park, they didn't follow through on them. Chances are they punted on the idea when they realized it might cost money. The big scary Keep Out signs may have come later, during the even briefer 1999 handwringing episode about the park.

So I realize there are pretty big gaps in the story. We don't know when the place started, and we don't know when or how the county ended up with it, assuming it's the same park. I imagine we'd have a much clearer picture if only there was an online database for the Forest Grove newspaper, or even the Hillsboro one, but as far as I know neither of those is currently available. So feel free to leave a comment if you happen to know anything more about the place, or you have fond (if vague) memories of those wild 1985 keg parties you'd like to share, or you'd just like to cuss me out for telling the entire internet about your local secret swimming hole. I suppose that would be only fair, although I've been telling the internet about all kinds of local secret spots for years now, and I've never once been important enough for anyone to even notice, much less care.