SE 15th & Alder

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A couple of photos of the intersection at SE 15th & Alder, which is home to one of the many "street graphics" created by Portland's City Repair Project. A street graphic is just a large design painted on a city street, usually in an intersection, with the painting (and periodic repainting) done by neighborhood volunteers. Each design is different; this one has a sort of vine motif, I suppose because the intersection also hosts a City Repair-designed compost site.

I'm not sure how many of these there are around town, total. The first one was Share-It Square, the intersection of SE 9th & Sherrett (hence the name), down in the Sellwood neighborhood. As this was a strange new thing back in 1997, the neighborhood first had to convince the city that painting a lightly used residential intersection wouldn't be the apocalypse. The apocalypse didn't happen, and street graphics have multiplied since then. Probably the best-known of them is the one at Sunnyside Piazza, the giant sunflower design at SE 33rd & Yamhill. That was the first one I ran across and I immediately thought it was a great idea. I don't automatically think that about everything the City Repair people do; I tend to roll my eyes when they try building structures out of mud and sticks and hay and so forth. But the street graphics are great.

I'm thinking it might be fun to take up these street graphics as a new blog/photo project, actually. It feels like this humble blog needs a fresh new project. I was doing local bridges for a while, but I've done the major ones, and a lot of the interesting minor ones. Same goes for fountains and city parks. I'd love to travel enough to keep this humble blog in business just with travel photos, but I never seem to be able to pull that off. The ongoing public art project is rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns as well; I'm already having to wander further and further afield (relatively speaking) to locate increasingly obscure (and often mediocre) artworks. I often wonder whether this is interesting to anyone other than me, to be honest. And the thing with the public art project is that it's difficult to talk about publicly-funded art in Portland without talking about art-world cronyism and gentrification. That's kind of unavoidable, but I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately -- often about the same narrow list of topics -- and generally taking a rather negative attitude about the world and whatever part of it I'm writing about. I really don't intend for this to be that sort of blog, if I can help it.

The missing element here, so far, is a list or map of street graphic projects. That's bound to exist somewhere, since a single group seems to be behind organizing all of them, and each one requires a city permit. So far I've run across a list of 2013 projects, and a map of 2012 projects, but not a complete list or map or guide or whatever. If anyone out there in Gentle Readerland has a pointer to something like that, I'd appreciate it.

A secondary motivation here is that these street graphics are fairly huge, and camera phone photos (like the ones in this post, & most other recent posts here) don't really do them justice. Phone photos are easy. I always have the phone with me, it takes reasonably ok photos, and I can upload to Flickr directly from it, without any intervening USB tethering + iPhoto + GIMP + Flickr Uploader steps. But the results are never as good, and a project like this would be an excuse to dust off the ol' DSLR and probably its ultra-wide angle lens. That looks like the best option outside of using a quadcopter camera drone, and that just feels sort of un-neighborly.

The formula for a street graphic blog post is probably going to look something like this: Photos, obviously; probably an embedded Google map, if it shows an overhead view of the thing; an explanation of what the graphic is about, or whatever else I can dig up about it; and (since the previous item probably won't be lengthy) I'll probably check the Oregonian database on the off-chance that something newsworthy happened at the intersection at some point.

As for today's intersection, far as I can tell the corner of SE 15th & Alder has appeared in precisely one news item since 1861: A purse-snatching reported on March 4th, 1928. The victim was relieved of a purse containing $3 in cash, a checkbook, and keys. So yeah, be careful when visiting. There could easily be malevolent purse-snatching ghosts, or vengeance-seeking wronged ghosts whose purses had been snatched, if you believe the nice people on cable TV.