Pittock Acres

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Next up we're visiting Portland's Pittock Acres Park, the West Hills park that's home to the (locally) famous Pittock Mansion. I'm not particularly interested in rich people's historic houses, and I visited mostly for the view and to check out some of the trails in the 54 acre park. It sits between Washington Park (& the Hoyt Arboretum) to the south & Macleay Park to the north, and the Wildwood Trail follows a winding path through the park, but it's not a place I've visited very often, so it was kind of a missing link for me, if for nobody else. It probably seems more remote to me than it actually is because I'm not interested in running across Burnside from Washington Park to get there, & that will all change when the promised footbridge over Burnside goes in.

So I drove there & parked, avoided the line to go inside, and took a few photos from the viewpoint. As far as views from the West Hills go, this is more or less unparalleled. It's worth going for the view, though you might want to pick a sunnier day than I did. Then I took the trailhead heading north toward Cornell, essentially this hike from OregonHikers.org except backwards, starting & ending at the top. I'd meant to also try the trail south to Burnside, but there was a winter-related trail closure, and I might have bailed that day anyway due to aging knees. So that part's still a TODO item, since I'm reasonably sure I've never been on that segment of trail.

Despite my lack of interest in rich people's houses, I have actually been inside, many years ago as a Cub Scout field trip. There was a guided tour, and I mostly remember velvet ropes, and being told not to touch anything, and a bathroom containing a fancy high-tech (for 1914) shower the guide called the "wettest shower in town". We learned all about how the house was built for Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian, who only got to live in it a handful of years before kicking the bucket. It does sort of amuse me that the place dates from a distant era when you could accumulate a vast fortune in local print media.

As you might imagine, the library's Oregonian archives don't lack for articles about the home of the paper's onetime publisher. I keep saying I'm just interested in the nature part of the place, but that's largely not what Pittock's newspaper cared about. I kept reading anyway and it turned out there were a few interesting anecdotes, at least more interesting than I was expecting, so that's probably going to be the bulk of this post, despite my initial intentions. (The photoset above is still mostly nature photos, though.)

So before the Pittocks moved in, this whole area was meant to be a ritzy subdivision called "Imperial Heights". That's not a place name you hear very often in 2018, because the Pittocks bought the entire area and built their house at the very top. There's a heavily graded area around the mansion, but the rest of the ~46 acres are steep forested hillsides that might have been unbuildable anyway, though PortlandMaps shows a couple of unused road rights-of-way through the present-day park, so I gather the developers at least planned to give it a try.

A July 1912 Oregonian article rhapsodized about the neighborhood & surrounding areas being platted out & developed. The article went on about the amazing views, and then points out that even more important is the invigorating atmosphere and freedom from dust and smoke, which was kind of a big deal back then. I recall seeing an urbanism theory from the early 1900s or so, and I don't remember where I saw it, that modern cities would naturally grow westward in the future. The idea was that people would keep moving west to live upwind of their cities' vast factories and their clouds of toxic black smoke. I don't know whether that was at play here. An October 1913 article includes a map of the area, showing old street names, and streetcar lines winding uphill from Burnside from the sorta-intersection of Macleay Blvd. & Tichner, which isn't exactly an intersection anymore due to rockslides and repairs in the 1990s.

In 1917, there was a brief vogue for demonstrating the power of your firm's powerful new automobile by showing it can make it up the hill at Imperial Heights or the hilly parts of Upper Hall Street. south of downtown. First it was doing so at all, and then doing so as fast as possible, which is to say that selling (and buying) cars hasn't changed at all over the past century.

• "Bad Grades Prove 'Pie' for Hudson", April 8th, in which the local Hudson dealer sent their star driver and a stock Hudson Super-Six up the hill at speeds averaging 20 MPH, reaching speeds as high as 35 at times, which would merit an expensive speeding ticket these days.
• "Steep Hills Scaled", April 15th, featuring a local Chandler dealer who made it up the hill while carrying multiple passengers, in front of witnesses and everything. At this point nobody but the Hudson had made it up Hall St.
• "Slow Race' Run Chandler Cars Creep Up Washington-Street Hill. Speed Under Four Miles Test Made May 6th. In which a new variant of the challenge emerged: Driving up the hill as slow as possible in top gear, without downshifting. This was staged as a race between two rival Chandler salesmen, with a box of cigars at stake, judged by the local dealership.
• Four-Wheel Drive Truck Powerful Duplex Freighter, With Capacity Load, Pulls Streetcar Up Grade. May 20th. In which a local truck dealer showed off the new Duplex 4wd truck by driving the hill while towing a streetcar. I wonder why the streetcar company agreed to that.
• "Automobile Salesmen Find Ideal Hill On Which To Test Cars For Every Kind Of Performance", September 23rd, in which we learn auto dealers have taken to using the hill to show off their new models. As an added attraction, at the start of the climb on Burnside (then called Washington St, as an extension of Washington downtown), there was a wide spot in the road where streetcars would turn to make the climb uphill. The photo with the article shows an equally steep road on the south side of Burnside, so I don't think this is the current Barnes Rd. route to the top of the hill. Could be Hermosa, or one of the now-abandoned rights-of-way in the present-day park. (find a streetcar map/reference, this should answer this q.) Anyway, this wide spot was used to show off a car's turning radius. If you tried doing a u-turn on Burnside today, you'd get hit, and cited for reckless driving, and you could weasel out of the charge with an insanity defense. You could also keep going west on Burnside to test out your car's springs on a really rough, poor quality road. Some would argue this is still possible. The article mentions people doing the hill climb at up to 40 MPH.

The mansion was there, recently built, and inhabited by the Pittocks while this was taking place. They can't have enjoyed the ruckus, as much as the wide-eyed coverage by his own newspaper hyped it. The fad didn't outlive 1917, but the Pittocks didn't have long to enjoy their renewed peace & quiet. Mrs. Pittock died in 1918, and Henry followed in 1919, a victim of the global flu epidemic. Their heirs owned the estate for decades after that, and it showed up in the news regularly in connection with high society teas and receptions and other tedious social events, which I won't trouble you with.

Then we get to the events leading up to the city owning the place. In 1959, the house was opened to the public temporarily as part of state centennial celebrations. This was arranged by Eric Ladd, a local restaurateur & antique dealer, who leased the house for the summer. Apparently nobody had lived in the house in years at this point, though Pittock heirs still owned it. Open for tours in the summer of 1959 as part of the state's centennial celebrations. A clue about Ladd's interest in the place came the next year when a grand estate sale was announced, and many furnishings and family collections were sold off. Huge estate sale in May 1960, sold off lots of original furnishings etc. An article previewing the sale mentioned that this might be the last time the public could see the house, as it might be torn down in the near future. The articles don't come out and say so, but it seems as though the family couldn't afford to maintain it & wanted to unload it quickly, and at a loss if need be.

Without going off on too much of a tangent, Ladd had something of a complex history with Portland's historic houses. He spent much of the 1950s demolishing old homes & selling off their salvageable pieces; after a few years of this, he started moving a few of the more noteworthy houses to the area of SW 20th (near the present-day 18th & Jefferson MAX stop), an area he called "The Colony". The whole city was engaged in demolishing its past back then, he was unusual in picking up some of the pieces. After his restored houses opened as an attraction, nobody talked about the earlier demolitions anymore. At one point he opened a restaurant in one of the houses, but closed it in 1960. In 1961 the city wanted to condemn some of his unfinished, stalled restorations. So he may have had money issues of his own at the point he got involved with the the big white elephant of Imperial Heights.

In 1963, the Pittock estate was proposed as the site of a new KPTV broadcast tower, which the city council rejected. The proposal was already in the works in November 1962, just weeks after the Columbus Day Storm. (The usual story is that storm damage caused the sale, but this seems to show there was already a deal in the works beforehand.) A January 1963 article mentions the station was looking at just using part of the estate and donating the mansion to the city. So that might have worked out in terms of preserving the house, but could have blocked the parts that are trails now.

The city eventually bought the estate in April 1964 following a fundraising campaign by local high society people.

After that it's mostly events & exhibits, which I won't bore you with, but I did come across a few items to pass along. You might have looked at the photos of the house and it's semi-secluded setting and think, why aren't they filming movies there? It turns out that there have been a few; it's just that none of them have exactly swept the awards at Cannes, if you catch my drift. I expect a Pittock Mansion film festival would be a real hoot.

The earliest record on IMDb is First Love filmed there in 1977. I couldn't find a First Love trailer on the net to embed here, but YouTube has the entire film uploaded in chunks labeled "clean edited version with provocative scenes deleted". Which sounds boring, although "provocative scenes" from that era often turn out to be sort of... problematic. So I dunno, I haven't watched either version, here's a playlist, make of it what you will.

Next up is Unhinged, a low-budget slasher film from 1982. That's not a genre I'm overly interested in & I'd never heard of this one before; the IMDb plot summary sounds identical to every other slasher movie ever: "Three college girls on their way to a jazz festival crash their car in the isolated woods during a rainstorm, and are taken in by a mysterious family in an old mansion. Little do the girls know, the family has a dark, murderous secret.". Anyway, the trailer's on the 'tubes if you're into this sort of thing:

This was followed a few years later by The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989), a spooky direct-to-basic-cable movie, in which the mansion -- at the risk of getting typecast -- again portrayed a spooky old dark house. Here's a vintage promo, because it's amazing what shows up on YouTube sometimes:

Now we get to the undisputed monarch of all Pittock Mansion films, the immortal Body of Evidence (1993), starring Madonna. Let me admit up front that is the only one of these movies that I have actually seen. I think I've mentioned this before, but I like to tell young hipster newcomers to Portland that Body of Evidence is an accurate documentary about early-90s Portland, all shoulder pads and fog machines and cheesy Enigma music. This is not actually true, of course; it's more of a cheesy 90s Skinemax movie that somehow acquired actors people had heard of, and ended up on the silver screen instead of late-night cable. With, somehow, worse acting and dialogue than its cable peers. It's one of the rare movies that genuinely falls into the so-bad-it's-good category, so you can enjoy it in that sense. Which is easier than admitting you had sort of an embarrassing Madonna thing in junior high, and never quite got rid of those CDs. I may have said too much; luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded), so it's not like the secret's out, really.

As far as IMDb knows, no movies have been filmed here since Body of Evidence, undoubtedly because everyone realizes it can never be topped. Apparently there was an Amazing Race episode that finished here a few years ago, though; I can't find any clips of it online, but CBS has an extremely detailed episode recap.

One other thing caught my eye in the Oregonian archives, and I think I vaguely remember this one. There was nothing 1980s Portland loved more than a good moral panic, and moral panics about no-good teenagers were among the best of all. So here are a couple of articles from September 1986 about the park being a teen hangout spot, which was freaking out the neighbors. It seems the teens were at it again: Drinking, partying, cruising, playing bad 80s music loudly, fighting, carrying on, "lewd activities", and the like. It was all terribly scandalous, because 1980s Portland. Before long the mean no-fun grownups (who had certainly not done anything like this as teens in the 50s & 60s) cracked down and beefed up security, and the "crisis" sort of petered out, because teens only win these things in the movies.