When a blog post lies around in Drafts for ages, it isn't always because I'm too busy, or I'm procrastinating, or just lazy, or what have you. Sometimes it's because, try as I might, I'm unable to find any useful information about the subject of the post. Several years ago I did a post about North Portland's Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia. At the far tip of the point you'll find the anchor shown above; it's either an old but real anchor or a sculpture of an anchor, and I don't know which because there wasn't a sign or a label or any indication of who made it or who put it there, much less why. The usual practice here is that public art gets its own blog post, apart from the one about the park it's in, so I duly created a draft post for the anchor. But all these years later I still don't know anything about it, and it's not for lack of searching.
My one and only hypothesis goes something like this: The park was originally created in 1973 by the Port of Portland, after dumping a bunch of soil there from a dredging project. I bet the anchor dates to around that time, before the city took it over in 1984. I bet they just sort of thought the tip of the point deserved something decorative, and an anchor was the obvious choice for a park owned by the local port district. Maybe they just made the anchor in house & didn't really think of it as fancy public art, which would explain why it's not in any of the usual inventory databases. They may not have even kept records about it. That's just a hypothesis, mind you. If I ever find out what the deal is, I'll update the post, though I wouldn't hold my breath waiting around for that if I were you. And as always, feel free to leave a note here if you know anything more about it.
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