Take Flight

Our next stop on the ongoing mural project is in the middle of the Pearl District. The Pearl as a whole isn't home to a lot of murals. It's full of shiny new condo towers these days, and no self-respecting condo HOA would ever let someone paint on their building. The very idea is laughable. The south end of the Pearl is still home to some older buildings, though, many with big blank walls, and at least one has sprouted a mural recently. The Low Brow Lounge is a dive bar at NW 10th & Hoyt; I'm not sure how old it actually is, but it seems like a relic of the Pearl's old days as a blue-collar light industrial area, full of auto shops and plumbing supply stores and so forth. One wall is now home to the striking owl mural you see here. This is Take Flight, a new Ashley Montague mural painted in October 2014. I'm sure someday this block will become another cookie-cutter tower for the $500 pinot noir crowd, but until then there's at least a cool owl to look at, and the lounge reportedly fries a mean tater tot.

For those of you keeping score at home, I don't actually know whether Take Flight is an official title; wiredforsound23 on Flickr used that name, and he appears to generally know what he's talking about, street art-wise. So I'm going with that in the absence of anything more definitive, just because I need to call this post something.