Thomas & 53rd

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[Disclaimer: A comment to this post (see below) asserts that basically everything I have to say about this place, both facts and guesses, is flat wrong. If that's true, I guess you could ignore the text and just enjoy the photos, or you could if they were very interesting, which they aren't. Not to dis any of my loyal Gentle Readers -- there's so few of you, I really can't afford it -- but I do think I'm right about the city limits situation, as I'll explain when I get to it.]

A few photos of our fair city's obscure, unnamed park at SW 53rd Ave. & Thomas St., out in the Raleigh Hills area where Portland morphs seamlessly into Beaverton. The park's an empty, grassy field in the midst of a mid-70's uber-suburban subdivision. No sign, no name, no facilities. The key thing to realize here is that most of the park, and most of the surrounding neighborhood, are just outside Portland city limits. I haven't seen a definite answer about this, but my theory is that the city bought the land in the hope they'd be annexing the area soon. For reasons that probably remain buried in yellowed issues of some obscure neighborhood newsletter, the annexation never happened. So, I guess understandably, the city never put in play equipment or otherwise developed the place. Why go to the trouble, after all, if the neighbors won't be paying any city taxes to support the thing?

This is all pure speculation, mind you, as there's next to nothing about the place anywhere on the interwebs. The parks bureau's info page, such as it is, simply mentions that it was acquired in 1980 and totals 2.57 acres. There's also a vegetation survey page for the park, which doesn't tell us much more. And on PortlandMaps, we learn the place is actually two legal parcels, the northern one lying just outside the city limits, and the smaller southern one just inside.

So here's where I try to justify saying the park's partly outside Portland city limits. If you look at those PortlandMaps pages above, there's a section for each parcel titled "Tax Districts". For the northern half of the park, the list looks like this:

101   PORT OF PORTLAND        134   TV FIRE/RESCUE DIST #1 JT
143  METRO                  161  VALLEY VIEW WATER DIST
170  MULTNOMAH COUNTY        170L  MULT CO LIBRARY LOCAL OPT TAX
180  CLEAN WATER SERVICES    198  TRI-MET TRANSPORTATION
304  MULTNOMAH CO ESD        309  PORTLAND COMM COLLEGE
311   PORTLAND SCHOOL DIST #1

And for the southern half, it's different:

101   PORT OF PORTLAND                130   CITY OF PORTLAND
130L  CITY OF PORTLAND CHILDREN LOP  130M  CITY OF PORTLAND PARKS LOP
143  METRO                           170  MULTNOMAH COUNTY
170L  MULT CO LIBRARY LOCAL OPT TAX   171  URBAN RENEWAL PORTLAND
173  URB REN SPECIAL LEVY - PORTLAND 198  TRI-MET TRANSPORTATION
304  MULTNOMAH CO ESD          309  PORTLAND COMM COLLEGE
311  PORTLAND SCHOOL DIST #1

As you can see, only the southern half has entries for "City of Portland" (and "Urban Renewal Special Levy - Portland", and instead of those the northern bit lists "Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue", "Valley View Water District", and "Clean Water Services" (which is the PC, non-icky name for Washington County's sewer system). You'll see the same distinction if you look at details for houses north and south of that line through the park. I would consider this fairly definitive. Also, here's a photo of a little 4th of July parade in the neighborhood, organized by the Tualatin Valley fire district, not the Portland Fire Bureau. The same photo shows up here, on a page primarily about historic buildings in the neighborhood. Apparently there's a sort of huge historic manor house just a couple of blocks from the park here, and I had no clue it existed. Go figure.

For whatever it's worth, this isn't the only case of a Portland city park lying outside city limits. Elk Rock Island is another example, one a bit more interesting than this place.

You can probably tell from these photos that I didn't stay long. I didn't see anything that grabbed my interest. Plus I noticed that the neighborhood seemed to have a lot of rather elderly residents, and I figured that if I hung around too long someone would call the police about the strange young man wandering around the old vacant lot taking pictures.

Given the aging demographics of the area, I imagine many residents are on fixed incomes and would have no interest in joining the city anytime soon. And until that occurs, I imagine nothing's going to change about the park here. That will probably have to wait until a new generation of homeowners has moved in, and there are kids in the neighborhood again. Although most kids would be just as happy to go play in the big vacant lot as they would be with actual play equipment. I know that was the case with me, and I think I turned out ok, basically, more or less...