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Today's expedition takes us back to outer SE Portland's Ventura Park on SE Stark between 113th & 117th. I've mentioned the park here before as the home of Milestone P7. The milestone is one really distinctive thing about the place, but it does have a small rose garden too. So I took a few rose photos, and I thought I'd post some of them, along with a couple of the rest of the park, I guess for context if nothing else.
I don't have a lot of trivia to share about the park, I'm afraid. And there's nothing really earth-shattering, so I'll forgive you if you just scroll down to the roses.
Anyway, there's an elementary school just north of the park, and this part of town is far enough east that the school's in the David Douglas school district rather than part of Portland public schools, even though it's within Portland city limits. Longtime Portlanders might recall that a large chunk of east Multnomah County was only annexed to Portland in the late 1980s, and City Hall still tends to regard the area as a mysterious and distant colony -- or at least that's how it seems to local residents. The park is an even more recent acquisition. A 1993 city doc mentions that it was recently transferred to the city from Multnomah County. The county decided to get out of the parks business after the Measure 5 property tax limit passed in 1990. Some of the old county parks went to Metro (including Mason Hill Park, Broughton Beach, etc.), and it seems others went to the city. The doc also refers to Ventura Park as "Park 2", and gives the dates "1957-1992". My guess is that 1957 is when the park was created. Which would kind of make sense -- "Ventura Park" is a very 1957-sounding name, and the adjacent Ventura Park Elementary turned 50 in 2008.
The park's hosted a summer concert series for the last couple of years, so there's that. Seems like it would be a great place for a concert really. If it was closer to downtown and located along Hawthorne or Mississippi instead, it would probably be inundated with concerts, and there might be a permanent stage or something. That may yet happen, if gentrification ever reaches this far east.
Ventura Park is also supposed to get a skatepark someday, according to the city's skatepark master plan. We do actually have a skatepark master plan, believe it or not. That actually does make sense to me, as odd as it might sound initially. The city's existing skateparks do appear to get a lot more use than ballfields typically do, from what I've seen. So if you're trying to benefit the largest number of park users on a limited budget, skateparks may be the way to go. Even if the beneficiaries are disproportionately teenage male non-taxpayers.
There's also a basketball court somewhere on the west side of the park, according to a site that attempts to catalog all the world's basketball courts. Which could actually be a handy reference if you play, which I don't. No user reviews of the court here, in any case.
Oh, and here's a blog post I ran across, someone else writing about the park. And, well, that's about all I've got. So let's get to the roses, shall we?
