Anhinga

Next up in obscure public art, we're taking a trip down to industrial Milwaukie, home to the Oregon Liquor & Cannabis Commission head office, which consists of a low-rise midcentury office building attached to the state's vast central booze warehouse. In front of the office is a small midcentury concrete pond and (I think) water fountain, which was almost completely dry when I swung by. On a pedestal in the middle of the pond is a roughly life-sized statue of an anhinga, a heron-like bird native to South America and parts of the US East Coast. This was created by the artist Wayne Chabre, whose work has appeared here a few times before, largely at MAX stations and Multnomah County offices.

As a state agency, the OLCC is required by state law to spend 1% of the budget of any big capital project on art, whether they really want to or not, which is how the Anhinga came to be here. And as part of the state's public art collection it has a has a Public Art Archive page, which doesn't have a photo of it, but says it's from 2017 and describes it briefly:

A cast bronze representation of an Anhinga bird perches on a rock with wings outstretched in the feather-drying pose in the spring-fed pond to the north of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission headquarters. Acquired through Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places Program, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.

I did run across a couple of photos of another anhinga statue, seemingly an identical copy of the one here, but located in Florida instead. Which is at least in the bird's natural range. Before I stopped by to take a few semi-obligatory photos, I had some snarky remarks lined up and ready to go. At first I thought it was an uninspired and odd choice, and figured they just called around until they found a local artist who happened to have suitable unsold inventory that week at the right price point.. I was about to say that a less puritanical agency in a less puritanical state could have a lot of fun with alcohol-themed art. Maybe commission some whimsical kinetic art on the subject of beer goggles, or maybe flair bartending, or Henry Weinhard's proposal to have Portland's Skidmore Fountain re-piped to serve beer, or who knows what. I was going to go with the snark angle, but then I swung by to take these photos and realized the anhinga's awesome and terrifying hidden superpower, so I'll tell you all about that instead.

You see the feather-drying pose the statue is in? Note how it bears an uncanny resemblance to a Canada goose dominance pose, and then look at the geese sorta-clustered around it. Sure enough, the statue had attracted a small cadre of geese as its devoted cult followers, transfixed by its pure radiance and unable to turn away and leave the statue's presence, while also not getting too close to The Anhinga because just look at it. See how incredibly dominant it is? It just stands there with its wings out, ready to rumble, defeating all challengers without moving a muscle, standing its ground and not flinching even a little no matter how many humans stroll on by. The geese were clearly very impressed by this display, and continued to hang out here even though their little pond had just about dried up. Because of course The Anhinga is the Chosen One and will provide a newer and better pond for its flock of true believers if the need ever truly arises.

Elsewhere on the internet, and semi-related, here's a Reddit thread about how to assert manly-man dominance over a flock of geese, because Reddit. Most replies repeat the internet-wide onventional wisdom that this is impossible, but these people had clearly never heard of the anhinga statue trick. He who controls the anhinga, controls the goose. And in Oregon the OLCC controls The Anhinga, god help us all.

Which begs the obvious question: Exactly why has the OLCC built a small army of fanatical trained geese? What are they planning? And do they really need that many geese just to enforce state liquor laws? I mean, I can see how geese would be really useful in chasing down drunk boaters. And yeah, breaking up bar fights and ejecting unruly patrons when the bouncer isn't up to the job is right up in their wheelhouse, if The Anhinga so wills it. Swarming hapless grocery clerks en masse if they ever sell a hard seltzer to a 20 year old, or fail to card a 55-year-old grandma? Also an ideal job for geese. Honking at 200 decibels to ruin hip hop concerts? Flapping and hissing at any shenanigans in the Champagne Room? Geese. You and I may or may not approve, but the more you think about it, you have to admit there's a certain logic to the idea.

But it won't stop there. It never does. As The Anhinga's fame continues to grow and its army of believers swells, the state will look for and find more ways to employ them. Playing chess for money in the park? Geese. Unpaid library fines from before COVID? Also geese. And before long every billionaire will have a private goose armada, mostly for status, and then cheap knockoff anhinga statues will hit the market and the longtime head of your HOA will install one and start enforcing the CC&Rs with geese. And then one day, maybe years from now, maybe decades, the geese will discover they've been tricked into worshiping a false idol all this time, and then the great rebellion begins...

Falls Creek Falls, Skamania County

Next up we're visiting another highlight of SW Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest: A stupendous 335' waterfall that's been saddled with the unimaginative name "Falls Creek Falls". This is located on Forest Service land in the Wind River country north of Carson, WA, the same general area as Panther Creek Falls, which we visited about a year ago. If you've been to that one in person, imagine it with even more water and over twice as tall, and you'll have an inkling of what Skamania County's Falls Creek Falls is like. Naturally there's an OregonHikers page about the easy trail to the falls, as do GaiaGPS, and Friends of the Gorge.

AllTrails has one for that trail, and the longer route you'll need to use in the winter due to seasonal road closures, plus a longer loop that also takes you to another viewpoint above the falls.

In addition to those, there are a couple of other trailheads off the gravel road to the falls, about a mile shy of the falls trailhead. These just access a couple of extremely easy short loop trails you can stop and explore on your way, but I would encourage people to stop and have a look around at least once if you're in the area, since they're something you don't encounter very often: A pair of ongoing forestry science experiments begun by the Forest Service's nearby Wind River Experimental Forest around a century ago. Apparently this area near the falls had been clearcut a few years before that (which is probably also when the road was built), so the area was seen as sort of a blank slate, where you could plant trees per your hypothesis and then check back every few few years or decades to see how they're doing, without interference from other existing trees. One experiment aimed to determine how far apart you should space your Douglas Fir saplings when replanting after a clearcut, while the other planted a plot with seedlings all of the same spruce species, but grown from seeds taken from all across the tree's natural range to compare how they fared here. If you want to know how either of these experiments turned out, you'll want to take the trail to its far end where a vintage sign will explain what they've learned so far, though the spacing study one that I looked at appears to have been last updated sometime in the early 1960s.

If you're looking for a longer hike, Alltrails also documents a 23 mile out-and-back route that continues up Falls Creek past the falls to an equestrian campground. My impression has been that a lot of trails around the Gifford Pinchot seem to be horse-friendly. I'm not sure it's a majority of trails, but it seems to be pretty common. And yet, on the other hand, I can't remember the last time I encountered a horse out on the trail. (Ok, other than this one city park in Lake Oswego that sits next to an upscale riding club stable) I don't know what to make of that -- is owning a horse less popular than it used to be? Or maybe it's just trail riding out in nature that's less popular than it was decades ago? Did they overbuild during a brief horse fad, like they did with waterski facilities? (And on the other hand, fear of overbuilding is one reason cities were so reluctant to build skate parks at first, until teen skaters grew up and a few of them became city park officials or city council members. I don't know, but I can tell you, based on things I've heard from multiple horse-owning friends, that owning a horse in 2024 is rather expensive and time consuming, sort of like owning a highly flatulent sailboat.

I started this post assuming there would be a bunch of old news articles to pass along about the place, with vintage group photos of hikers in uncomfortable 1890s hiking gear posing in front of the falls, and colorful stories in the motoring section about setting out to prove you can indeed make it to the falls in style in a swanky new Pierce-Arrow sedan. I was surprised to find there was almost none of that in the papers, and unless I've missed something the first time this specific waterfall was mentioned by name in a Portland-area newspaper was actually a Roberta Lowe column in the Oregon Journal, 1982. Which is very strange, given the size and volume and (relative) proximity to Portland.

After getting a bit more creative with search terms I located a 1921 Oregonian article that mentions the falls. It seems the Forest Service was gearing up to sell lots for summer cabins near Government Mineral Springs -- similar to what they were doing along US 26 on the way to Mount Hood -- and heading a list of points of interest in the surrounding countryside is "the 700-foot falls on Falls Creek". As inaccurate as that number is, there aren't any other reasonable candidates for what place they had in mind.

It's almost like they were avoiding the name. My personal theory is that a newspaper editor or two objected to it, on the grounds that "Falls Creek Falls" (and its "Fall Creek Falls" variant, for that matter) cannot possibly be a serious legal name, for chicken-and-egg reasons, and forbade anyone from using that abomination of a name in print. I can't prove this is what happened, but it's exactly the sort of curmudgeonly thing that newspaper editors live for, if their city doesn't have its own masked crimefighting superhero for the editor to obsess over.

Longtime readers might have come into this expecting me to go on about the name in roughly the same way, but without the 8am gin shots and constant cigar chomping and periodic screaming, and somehow even more pedantic about it. And ok, that was one potential direction I could have gone with this post. But then I ran across something a lot more interesting to share with you instead.

A few years ago there was a very large study of US regional dialects, with a lot of emphasis on mapping out which of various common terms people used for a particular thing. The two that seemingly everyone knows about are 1.) the generic term for a carbonated beverage being "coke" across the South, "pop" across most of the midwest, and "soda" in New England, the West Coast, and right-thinking people everywhere. And 2.) the bewildering variety of terms for an oblong sandwich usually made with deli meats and cheeses, where the country defaults to "sub" wherever there isn't a local term for the same thing (hoagie/grinder/po'boy/etc.).

So it turns out there's a clear geographic divide in the use of "Falls Creek" vs "Fall Creek", both as a creek name and as a waterfall name, with Washington State strongly preferring "Falls", and Oregon siding with "Fall". Here's a table with numbers from the World Waterfall Database and the USGS Board on Geographic Names.

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Area	NWWS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	NWWS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek'	USGS: 'Fall Creek'
Ore.	4	16	0	3	7	62
Wash.	16	1	2	0	26	13
Idaho	2	4	0	1	15	29
Calif.	0	1	0	0	16	8
Alaska		-	0	0	23	9
Mont.		-	0	0	2	20
Wyo.		-	0	0	6	9
Colo.		-	0	0	5	16
World	82	110
USA			5	2	142	234

And here are a couple of maps (based on nationwide USGS search results) to help visualize the situation. The blue dots are instances of "Falls Creek", while red dots represent "Fall Creek", picked because those are the queries that return the most data points.

As you can hopefully see here, "Falls" is preferred across WA, northern Idaho, and the mountainous parts of Montana, plus Alaska. "Fall" is strongly preferred in OR, and used (I think) exclusively south of a line somewhere around Salem. That line might actually be the 45th parallel or something close to it, or we could make it a geology dad joke and just call it the "Fall" Line. In any case, south of Salem there isn't another "Falls Creek" anything until southern California. There aren't enough of either variant in the Southwest or Midwest (and apparently all of Canada for that matter) for any discernable pattern to emerge. Then along the East Coast "Fall" is more prevalent south of the Virginia-West Virginia border and "Falls" is more common north of there.

A few other scattered name variants exist: Oregon has one "Fall River Falls" and one "Falls City Falls" (and I have a still-unfinished draft post about the latter), while Washingon has one "Falls Camp Falls", one "Falls Lake Falls" and a "Falls View Falls". There are also a few variants only found outside the Pacific Northwest that track regional synonyms for "creek": "Fall(s) Branch Falls" in southern Appalachia, with one outlier in Texas; "Fall(s) Brook Falls" in mountainous parts of the Northeast, roughly Pennsylvania thru Maine; a "Fall Hollow Falls" in Tennessee; a "Fall Kill Falls" in New York; a few "Fall River Falls" with no discernable pattern across the country; and a couple of "Fall Run Falls" in PA. "Waterfall Creek Falls" is only used in a handful of places in the US, but dozens of them exist across Australia and New Zealand.

I can think of at least one other vastly overused name with at least two common variants: "Rocky Creek" is common across Southern states, while everyone else goes with "Rock Creek". Relatedly, "Rocky Branch" sounds like the pure mountain stream your grandpa (allegedly!) used for his legendary moonshine, always two steps ahead of the confounded revenuers, while "Rock Branch" just sounds fake, a name the revenuers might use in a failed sting operation.

I don't have an obvious explanation for this difference. To make a place name official, the proposal typically goes through a state-level agency or designated authority first before the USGS gets a look at it -- the Oregon Historical Society handles vetting proposed names here, for example -- and whoever it is might standardize on using one variant or the other, hopefully based on existing local usage, but possibly just the opinion of one old guy with a bowtie who thinks one or the other feels "more grammatical" somehow, but can't explain why exactly. Whatever the reason, this is bound to magnify existing patterns over time, or create them if there isn't already a pattern. And now from looking at those maps you might think everyone has a strongly held opinion about this like they do about exactly what to call a sandwich and exactly what goes on it. Where honestly I don't think anybody cares that much, myself included. The mysterious part is just that the Columbia River is usually not a linguistic divide, and I don't know why it would be one in this case.

I could just blame the whole mess on unimaginative and barely-literate pioneers again, but let's suppose it's something else entirely. Let's suppose that the name -- in either variant -- is a literal translation of the original (and very common) Sasquatch place name, which is unpronounceable with human vocal cords. The Columbia River would have been a natural linguistic barrier back in their heyday, as Sasquatches were never strong swimmers and never discovered the art of boatbuilding, and so the Northern and Southern dialects of their language would have slowly diverged over time after the original Bridge of the Gods collapsed and eroded away. I'm not saying this is exactly what happened; I'm just saying that it's the only theory I've got that fits the available evidence.

Wind Gate

Next up, we're still on the Reed campus after looking at Trigger 4 and Seljuk, the college's two Lee Kelly rust sculptures. We're done with Kellys for now, but we've got one more midcentury abstract thing to look at while we're here, this time a sorta-organic shape that sits on the college's very large front lawn. The 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it:

This big hunk of bronze has been here quite a while. No idea who the artist is. I can remember seeing Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg sitting a few yards from here, surrounded by a few thousand frolickers + adherents in 1967. Summer of Love, baby.

Apparently this is a bit of a campus landmark, and a basic search of the interwebs quickly returned the title and artist info I was looking for. So this is Wind Gate, by Portland sculptor Hilda Morris, who also did Ring of Time outside the Standard Insurance Plaza tower in downtown Portland (which has always been one of my favorites, and which secretly doubles as an interdimensional portal across space and time, if you know the trick), and Winter Column at the Portland Art Museum.

According to Confidential Sources that I am not just making up on the fly, Wind Gate is a sort of miniature portal that just moves air around. It was thought that a full-scale people-moving portal was overkill since nobody was all that interested in leaving campus no matter how easy it was, but a device that brought in balmy tropical breezes while the outside world endured ice storms, and bracing arctic air during heat waves, now that sounded fantastic, in theory. In practice it was immediately repurposed for venting weed smoke off to somewhere else, initially to avoid detection by The Man (for the first week or two, until it became clear The Man didn't care) and after that it was to save the world. Which I realize sounds crazy at first, but let me try to explain, to the degree that I understand the situation:

I'm unable to confirm this part, but as the story goes, shortly after Wind Gate was activated, a Classics professor learned to control the device and configured it to always vent into some cave or deep chasm at Delphi, in ancient Greece, on his personal theory that the Oracle's enigmatic prophesies were caused by great clouds of weed smoke from the future. Which honestly is just a variant on the more common ethylene gas theory, if you really think about it. Furthermore, Reed was the only known institution that a.) was capable of generating that much smoke, and b.) had a portal for sending it across the Atlantic and back in time, where it was needed. Therefore students would now have to shoulder the burden of keeping the Oracle baked on a long-term basis. There was no way for people on the present-day side of the portal to tell what time of day it was on the other side, or whether the Oracle was going to be prophesying soon or about what, or whether she was even in the cave at any given time, and letting her go ahead and try to tell the future while sober risked altering our timeline in untold but probably catastrophic ways. And that's why, ever since that realization over 50 years ago now, there has always been at least one brave student volunteer (and often a whole crowd) near the portal 24/7/365, in all weather conditions, smoking as much weed as possible and trying to keep the Oracle properly hotboxed at all times, just in case a visitor shows up asking what to do about the Persians.

Seljuk

Fresh on the heels of Trigger 4, here are a few photos of Seljuk, the other Lee Kelly on the Reed College campus. The Walking Tour I keep referencing says this one is from 1996, which seems a bit late to still be working in Cor-Ten steel. Kelly did eventually (mostly) switch to stainless steel sometime in the 2000s, and I do like those a bit better, but if you just want to wallow in pure 1970s-ness you need to find one of the Cor-Ten ones. Maybe sit nearby and just vibe with the art, maybe bring some twine and practice your macramé knots while vibing with the art, I dunno, whatever floats your boat. It's between the library and the Education Technology building, which I guess is the computer lab building. This is the school that Steve Jobs dropped out of before starting Apple (another factoid from of my extremely small stockpile of Reed trivia), so I suppose they can call their computer lab building whatever they want.

No, I do not know why it's called Seljuk. To me it doesn't look particularly Turkish, or Persian, or any flavor of Central Asian. Maybe it was inspired by the Robo-Seljuk Empire of the late 21st Century, and Kelly was trying to warn us about what's coming.

The 2006 Portland Public Art blog post that covered the other large outdoor art on campus didn't mention this one. Maybe the author just missed it somehow, or was lost and thought they were back at Trigger 4 again, just seeing it from a different angle. Having two Kellys on the same campus really seems like... gilding the lily? Or sort of like gilding, except you're applying rust instead of gold, and there may not be a common word for that.

Trigger 4

One of the longest-running themes here on this weird little website involves tracking down public art by the prolific Portland-area sculptor Lee Kelly. Not because I'm a huge fan of his work, but because... well, it's complicated. I tried to explain the situation in a couple of posts last year, about his Sulawesi and Icarus at Kittyhawk, and I don't really have any fresh insights to add as to why this ongoing project exists and why I keep tracking down stuff of his every now and then. It may be because nobody graduates art school in 2024 wanting to make giant abstract whatzits out of rusty Cor-Ten steel, and encountering one of Kelly's thingamajigs in the wild feels like encountering a live brachiosaurus while out for a walk. They're huge, and dumb, and they're relics of a bygone age that's never coming back, but they and their kind once dominated the planet somehow, which makes them oddly fascinating in their own way.

In the last couple of posts in this series, I mentioned a Walking Tour of Lee Kelly art, which was put together for a 2010 Portland Art Museum retrospective. I hadn't looked at that map for a while, but I was reminded of it again a few weeks ago, and remembered that there were two Kellys on the Reed College campus, so I figured I'd go find them. I had not actually been there before; like a lot of private liberal arts colleges, it operates in its own little bubble. Students tend not to stray far from campus, and as far as I know there isn't much on campus to pull in "townies" (do they even use that word? I have no idea.) The college only seems to make the local news when there's a problem with their undergraduate-run nuclear reactor, which doesn't happen very often.

So of the two Kellys, we're starting with Trigger 4 (1979), because the brief walking tour entry said it's in front of the Studio Arts building, which is next to the east parking lot, so you should park there. This being the sort of walking tour where you mostly have to drive between the many stops, because his stuff is freakin' everywhere. Anyway, it was quite easy to pinpoint Trigger 4 on Google Maps with this info, since it's big enough to be visible from space and all.

A 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it briefly but vividly:

Big lunk of a Lee Kelly off the East parking lot, a Balder before the art department. I imagine some poor Martian anthropologist trying to puzzle these things out in 1700 years. Why? Why did they venerate the piles of iron?

That about sums it up. Frankly I can't think of anything to add to that.

Upper Beaver Falls

Back in 2020 we paid a visit to Columbia County's Beaver Falls, located between Rainier and Clatskanie along a surviving stretch of the old Lower Columbia River Highway. Few people realize anymore that the famous Columbia River Highway was more than just a few photogenic miles of windy road through the Columbia Gorge, and it once crossed the whole state, west to east, under a variety of names. The LCRH was the portion that continued downstream from Portland all the way to Astoria and Seaside. That route was never as spectacular as the HCRH through the Gorge, but it had a number of scenic highlights along the way... almost all of which were then bypassed in the 1950s and 1960s in the name of progress, where "progress" just meant getting to Astoria as quickly as possible, And to some the current road was just a temporary intermediate state in a wider modernization effort; in 1964, Gov. Hatfield proposed extending Interstate 80N (today's Interstate 84) all the way to Astoria, explaining that it was justified by "the industrial development on the Lower Columbia River".

In any event, that post ended up being rather long because I was encountering much of this history for the first time. Somewhere among all my nested tangents I mentioned there was one more waterfall along Beaver Creek, or at least one more, but I had missed the place to pull off the road for it, and didn't feel like going back for another go at stopping there. Then earlier this summer I had the idea to head out to Astoria since I hadn't been there in years, and at least go see the Peter Iredale shipwreck and Youngs River Falls and then take it from there. So I figured I might as well check off this TODO list item while I was heading through the area.

So with that lengthy introduction, here we are at Upper Beaver Falls, which looks like your average 15' roadside waterfall in the Northwest. Unlike a lot of these it isn't marred by an ugly concrete fish ladder from the 1950s, since the 50' waterfall downstream is an insurmountable barrier to salmon, and neither waterfall is much of an obstacle to the legendary anadromous beaked whales I mentioned in a 2020 post about Ecola Falls (which is upstream of Multnomah Falls). Unlike its downstream sibling, the little falls here aren't protected by a semi-forgotten county park, so in theory some private landowner might try to mark it off limits at some point, though at least part of it probably falls within the old highway right of way, plus the state may very well own the creek itself, so long as it's "navigable" -- which may involve someone taking one for the team and going over the lower falls in a kayak. I couldn't find any evidence that anyone has done this, but it might be possible; the pool below Beaver Falls is supposedly quite deep, and there are a lot of YouTube videos showing people going over much taller waterfalls than this in kayaks and surviving and going on and on about how stoked they were about it. (Disclaimer: As always, Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and common sense dictates that when I -- a non-kayaker and non-xtreme-sports person -- say something looks doable, basing that entirely on stuff I've seen other people do in other locations on YouTube, that is not a legally binding promise that it is, in fact, doable, and you and/or your next of kin can't sue me for putting some cockamamie idea in your head. Are we clear on this? Thx.)

Finally, I should note that there's room for more than one car at the falls, and there was a weird bit of drama going on among the other people there when I stopped by, as I tried to explain over on the 'Gram:

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Harrison Square Relief Panel

Some months ago I realized a new incarnation of the legendary[1] Spella Caffe had opened in my neighborhood, specifically in the lobby of the 1970s brutalist Harrison Square office complex. When I went to check it out I realized there was some groovy 1970s art in the lobby that I needed to take a few photos of, so I did, and fortunately it had a legible signature on it so could figure out the rest of the story from there.

This panel was created by Portland sculptor James Lee Hansen, whose work has appeared here a few times before, most recently in a July post about his Autumn Rider, located (a bit incongruously) at a shopping center in Gresham. As for our current subject, Hansen's website just calls it Harrison Square Relief Panel, and the only other info about it I could find on the interwebs comes to us from the July 8th, 1973 Oregonian, which ran a a photo of the freshly-unveiled art. The photo caption is brief but informative:

HANSEN SCULPTURE INSTALLED —- Becky Smith views new sculpture by James Hansen on main floor foyer wall of new First Harrison Square building. Commissioned by Jack J. Saltzman, the work is composed of nine sections, some in polished steel, some in steel given blue, yellow, and black automotive lacquer finishes. Hansen did bronze “Shaman” in front of State Highway Building on East Capitol Campus in Olympia in 1971.

So, working with automotive paint on steel is a cool idea. It occurs to me that it may have been easier to do this in 1973 than it is today; Hansen had the good fortune to be working at a time when cars came in lots of colors, which is not something new car buyers seem to want anymore in 2024. It seems like everyone wants to buy the largest, most threatening truck or SUV they can afford, and they only want them in the blandest colors available: black, white, grey, or beige. Like they're going for the Secret Service VIP motorcade look: Tough and official, and yet not drawing attention to your specific vehicle. I mean, I say that but I just bought a new car earlier this year (a fast little hatchback, not a chonky SUV), and the only available colors that I liked were blue and black, and I somewhat preferred the blue, but they had a black one on the lot while blue would have to be a special order that wouldn't be ready for months, so I got the black one. And the free market will undoubtedly chalk that up as yet another vote against cars coming in colors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While looking for that one photo caption, I ran across a number of other vintage news articles about the then-new building that I thought were interesting. So it's time to bust out that Multnomah County library card again, and put on your best disco boots, because here we go...

• 1971, the design for the building was unveiled with great fanfare. One of the last developable blocks in the South Auditorium district
• August 18th & 19th articles on the groundbreaking for the new complex. The second story includes a photo of Mayor Terry Schrunk and Mayor-elect Neil... er, the guy we don't talk about.
• A 1972 photo of the complex under construction, along with a few other cutting-edge modern buildings like the Lincoln Tower condos, a few blocks further south on 1st
• July 1972 photo from the topping-out of the building, featuring pine trees in planters being emplaced by crane. Content warning: The photo also features that one creepy mayor whose name has fortunately been lost to history.
• In other 1972 announcements, the new building would soon be home to a swanky new fine dining restaurant. Which led me to several other stories about the Portland fine dining scene in the 1970s. Which was just as groovy as you'd expect, but just a bit off topic for this post, so I moved all that stuff down to footnote 2.
• The building won a Portland AIA award in June 1973
• October 1974 profile of the main developer behind the complex. The article helpfully explains that "entrepreneur" is a fancy new synonym for "hustler", a word people used to mean as a compliment back in the good old days.
• June 1975: One of the anchor tenants was the local office of Xerox Corp., and they were currently showcasing the shiny new Xerox 9200, a large, cutting-edge photocopying system. These would have been built at the Xerox campus in Silicon Valley, while somewhere in the same complex the company's research division was hard at work on the Xerox Alto, the first computer system with a modern GUI. Which was a revolutionary idea, but one that Xerox made approximately zero dollars from, even as Steve Jobs & Co. wandered around the lab making detailed notes on everything they saw.
• In 1976, the building took part in a previous episode of mural mania here; they went by "supergraphics" at the time. This was seen as a cheap way to liven up the city's recent crop of modern buildings. Which feels like a bit of an indictment of 1970s architecture -- it's only 3 years old and already needs livening up?
• An article about some other art installed around the same time as the Relief Panel, & designed by a local artist, brutalist concrete planters outside the main entrance to the building. I don't think they're there anymore, though I also usually don't pay much attention to concrete planters, so I may have to check again next time I'm getting coffee.

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Footnotes

1. Coffee

Yelp reviews for the previous location on SW 5th between Washington & Alder. 2012 Willamette Week article called them "universally beloved", but then they had gelato at the time, and I'm not sure the new location does. A 2016 article said they had the best coffee in the city (which is kind of a big deal), and imagined it as a sort of caffeinated wormhole connected directly to Rome or Milan. A 2009 Oregonian piece -- when they were still a humble food cart -- also crowned them the best coffee place in town, serving the best gelato in town.

An April 2023 Portland Monthly article on best local coffee places mentions a place out in the Rose City Park neighborhood that uses Spella beans, as a place you can get the coffee without making the trek to the downtown-ish mothership. At some point in the last decade the local media ecosystem collectively decided their readers live on the eastside, and things downtown are now a trek instead of having a convenient central location. Possibly right around the time living close in on the westside (or at least in a trendy or trend-adjacent corner of the westside, i.e. the Pearl, South Waterfront, or NW Portland) became unaffordable on a print media paycheck. This is an unusual development, possibly the first time it's been this way.

2. 70s Restaurants

• December 1972 Journal article on the planned Georges III, an upcoming swanky restaurant planned for Harrison Square, by one of the co-owners of The Captain's Corner, the big movers-and-shakers restaurant of the day. He mentioned that startup costs were expected to run around $200k in 1973 dollars, or around $1.4M today.
• 1973 piece insisting South Auditorium was on the verge of becoming a trendy neighborhood. The new Harrison Square complex was going to get a new fancy restaurant, joining a surprisingly long (as in, nonzero) list of neighborhood restaurants.
• To give you some idea of what a swanky restaurant was like in those days, here's an article from a few months later about The Captain's Corner, where the marquee menu item was the steak & lobster combo ($8.75, or $60.66 in 2023 dollars), which I gather was a bit of premium over the many other surf-n-turf joints around town. Other menu items included chicken livers with wine & mushroom sauce ($4.25 then, $29.26 now), bacon-wrapped scallops in white wine sauce ($4.75 / $32.93) and shrimp curry Bombay ($4.95 / $34.31). The Georges III article above notes that Captain's Corner still employed three of the original Captain's Corner Girls. It doesn't elaborate on what was involved in being a Captain's Corner Girl, but just going by the year it probably had something to do with cocktails or cigars, plus cleavage.
• 1974 review of Georges III. We're told the restaurant was superb, with an affordable and relatively adventurous menu by early 70s standards, including such exotic dishes as "prawns Genoa" and "baked oysters Ralston", whatever those are, or were. You could even order l'escargots if you were up for a walk on the wild side (the reviewer wasn't), and the old standbys like cream of mushroom soup were prepared fresh in house, and the whole bill came to $25.25 for cocktails, wine, dinner, and dessert for three people. At one point the reviewer marvels at the the location:

  Where this once was a rundown, ugly area, there is this sparkling park-like situation, handsome buildings, Portland's most concentrated area of fine apartments, and just generally a sense of well-being.

• A positive review of Georges Three from October 1977 (they had dropped the roman numerals in favor of "Three" a couple of years earlier; maybe they figured a name too much like "George III" was a bad look with the Bicentennial coming up). But within two years it was gone, replaced by a ribs place called "Fast Eddie's", which seems to have stuck around until around 1983, and as far as I know that was the last food or beverage business in the building until Spella arrived in early 2023 or late 2022. Meanwhile, Captain's Corner got a largely negative review in October 1978 and was still open a decade layer. Though at this point it's been gone for decades too.
• One last item and we're done with this restaurant rabbit hole. As of October 1970, the Oregonian still had a section of the paper called "Women's News", as it had been for decades, but on October 12th the headline story concerned an upcoming womens' equality conference. One of the accompanying photos shows a Captain's Corner waitress chatting with a local rep from the local AFL-CIO Waitresses' Union. Another story on the same page relays some remarks by a (female) judge in the state family court system cautioning readers that getting divorced is not all just fun and games; it's expensive, time consuming, and blended families are weird and complicated, and won't someone please think of the children, basically.