Ok, the next stop on our eastbound tour of HCRH Mileposts is number 28, as seen above. For anyone just joining this little adventure, this milepost marks 28 miles eastbound from downtown Portland, as measured from the corner of SW Washingon & Broadway, across the river on the old Stark St. Ferry, then across the eastside on Stark to the Sandy River, and then along the original Columbia River Highway route to here. And it's taking us a while because we're stopping every mile to look at another one of these things, and (since the mile markers themselves aren't that compelling to visit) I usually rattle off some trivia about what else is nearby.
So 28 miles puts us just west of the Bridal Veil area, and it's another case where I ended up just snapping a couple of photos while rolling by, since there's nowhere to park right next to it, and parking further away and then walking along the shoulder doesn't seem overly safe. I mean, taking photos while rolling past at 5mph isn't 100% safe either, nor do you get a lot of quality photos that way, but it seemed a bit better than the other options at the time. The milepost itself was intact last time I checked, so -- as usual -- let's take a quick peek at what's in the surrounding area:
Roughly across the street and downhill from the milepost is a large house that looks for all the world like a plantation house from the deep South. This is not a common architectural style in the Northwest, and the reason it looks that way is because it was originally built to be a fried chicken restaurant. No, seriously. That was the big national food trend around the time the old highway opened, and it was kind of a special occcasion dish and not something most people made at home a lot, so several chicken dinner places opened along the old highway, enough that you needed a sort of theme to stand out from the crowd. The Chanticleer Inn (located where Portland Womens Forum State Park is now) obviously had the view as a big selling point, while Forest Hall here went for genteel Southernness. Patrons were asked to call ahead and make reservations, and the restaurant bragged (in a genteel sort of way) that they had an actual black chef who had moved here from Kentucky, and dinner at Forest Hall was the real deal. (Now imagine if the road had opened a century later, in 2016: The road would be lined with cutesy little cafes selling twee artisanal cupcakes, and very few of them would have survived the pandemic.)
Later on, in the 1940s, the restaurant changed hands and was called the Maxwell House for a while, named for the owners and not the long-gone grand hotel in Nashville, TN or the national ground coffee brand named after the hotel, though the name sort of referenced them in a way you couldn't get away with now, in the modern era of advanced global trademark policing. I don't know if the owners meant to reference this, but the Nashville hotel was also famous for hosting the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, and long story short there was no limit to how problematic a simple chicken dinner could be in those days[1]. You still see still occasional news reports of white racists trying to harrass black people with sneering references to fried chicken or watermelon, which is just about the least effective racial insult I can imagine. The harrassers always think they're being so bigly and threatening, but outside their little cultural bubble they just come off as jealous they weren't invited to the cookout, and have to go home to another plate of microwave hot pockets or a big glop of mayonnaise casserole.
Anyway, the most important thing to know about all this is that the building is now a private residence, and has been for years, so don't go knocking on doors and poking around as if it not being a restaurant is negotiable somehow.[2]
Also nearby (and frankly the one big attraction of this mile of the road) is Bridal Veil Falls State Park, which is home to the namesake waterfall, and the overlook trail, and the "Pillars of Hercules"[3]. The latter is a group of eroded basalt columns that you can see from the overlook, and (unofficially) from below too, while avoiding speeding trains that pass very close to the otherwise climbable rocks. I gather that rock climbers do this all the time, though that's not much of a data point as to whether it's a good idea or not.
- Years ago I lived in a small-ish town where I shared a first and last name with one of the few local dentists. He didn't list a 24-hour contact number for his office, so every now and then people would find me in the white pages and call at all hours thinking they were calling their dentist at home. I would try to explain they had a wrong number and I was not a dentist, much less their dentist, nor I did not have their dentist's private home number handy. That was usually the end of the conversation, but I remember a few trying to haggle, like they thought I could be persuaded to drive to a stranger's house at 3am with a pair of pliers and maybe a small hammer, and, obviously, no novocaine, to yoink their bad tooth. My point is, I don't know the current residents of the house, but you should assume they're about as likely to fry you a chicken dinner as I am to have a go at your bum tricuspid.
- Further along the local spectrum of problematic-ness was the "[racial slur] Chicken Inn", a notorious restaurant chain that doubled and quintupled down on crude racial caricatures as their entire theme. And yes, there was a Portland location (and a Seattle one), and yes, they were hugely popular for decades, right up until sometime in the mid-1950s when society hit one of those cultural tipping points and the really overt racist stuff just wasn't respectable anymore. Kind of like the moment around 2020 when Confederate statues and monuments finally stopped being respectable, although the new orange president is doing everything he possibly can to roll that back. Not long after the Portland location closed, the building was stripped of its... decor (which hopefully nobody kept as a memento), and Clyde's Prime Rib moved in, and has been there ever since, since prime rib plus live jazz never really goes out of style, or at least it hasn't in 70 years. At whatever point the city eventually hits the 90% vegan + EDM-only threshold they might need to re-imagine the place a bit.
- The original Pillars of Hercules are, of course, the giant rocks standing on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar in Greek mythology, and marking the edge of the known world. The northern rock being the Rock of Gibraltar, and the southern one is... well, nobody seems to agree on that part, and maybe the Greeks just sort of assumed there was another Gibraltar on the other side and didn't bother checking, because if the mighty Hercules could create one pillar with his bare hands (and the myths differ on whether he created them or was just here performing mighty deeds in the neighborhood once upon a time) he could certainly create a second one, and as a proper civilized Greek he would feel obligated to make a matching pair for the sake of classical symmetry. I had this idea that the two pillars were supposed to be enchanted and would occasionally rush out and smash together, crushing any ships that happened to be between them. But no, I was thinking of the Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, a completely different pair of rocks that were tasked with guarding the Bosporus, the strait that serves as a gateway to the Black Sea, and is now the center of present-day Istanbul. Also, the rocks were a danger to Jason and the Argonauts, and not Odysseus and his crew, who never went anywhere near the Bosporus. I mention all this because the local Pillars were so named because the original 1870s railroad tracks once passed through a narrow gap between two of the pillars until the tracks were moved in the 1890s or so, and I was about to make a dumb joke that the tracks were moved because the pillars got ornery and kept crushing trains as they passed through, and then a few years later a random commenter would notice and point out my mistake and laugh and tell the others, and the crowd of sneering Classicists would quickly get out of hand, and it would all be very embarrassing. So, sorry about the tangent, but I had my myths crossed for a bit, and it could happen to you too, so I figured a quick PSA was in order.
