Singer Creek Falls

Next up we've visiting yet another waterfall in Oregon City that isn't Willamette Falls. Right next to the city's famous municipal elevator, there's an Art Deco walkway with a few flights of stairs that also connects the city's upper and lower halves, and this walkway also includes a water feature that descends the bluff in around 5 stairsteps. This "water feature" is Singer Creek Falls, another of the Northwest's many Works Progress Administration projects from the mid-1930s. The idea here was that they would start with an existing, 'natural' waterfall at this same location and improve on it, giving it clean, modern lines, and adding the ability to easily light the falls at night. This seems like a bizarre idea now, but 1937 was the year of Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge, and Man Improving On Nature was all the rage back then.

For more info about that project, there's a city planning page about the falls, plus a page at Living New Deal (which is a great site for general WPA fandom, btw.). Also see a post at Meandering through the Prologue, and a photo at The (Daily) Rail Photo.

Somehow I didn't notice any of this during previous visits to the elevator, and I had no idea it was here until stumbling across it on Google Maps, I guess based on previous search history. I can only speak for myself here, but it's possible that if your brain is focused on looking for midcentury public elevator stuff, maybe an unexpected Art Deco urban waterfall simply won't register, and vice versa. After visiting for the waterfall this time, I later found out that there's public art at the base of the falls, specifically a Lee Kelly sculpture titled Moontrap (2011), which I completely failed to notice at the time. I wonder if it's named after the low-budget SF movie from 1989 starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. So if I decide I need photos of it I'll need to make yet another visit to the area, and probably miss out on yet another interesting detail while I'm at it.

The usual waterfall websites have absolutely no info about this one, as traditional waterfall snobs aren't really sure what to do with a place like this. So instead we'll have to figure out the height for ourselves, going by the state LIDAR map. If we take this point as the top and this point as the bottom, the falls could be up to 70' high, though that might be a bit generous; we can at least say the cliff is around 70', and the falls may be a few feet shy of that on either end. Also shows what looks like a second path or stairway coming up diagonally from 9th to right around where the stonework ends up top. No stairs or trail are visible on Street View now, so it evidently was closed or fell out of use at some point.

A news item about the upcoming redesign project explained what was coming in detail:

Designed by City Manager J.L. Franzen, a series of waterfalls will feature the Singer Hill park project which was started last Monday under WPA. These falls, formed by diverting Singer creek into a series of five drops by means of natural stone incased in cement, probably will be lighted and will constitute one of the most beautiful spots in the country, either day or night. The WPA crew which is working under the direction of Mr. Miller, foreman, and which will be augmented Monday with additional workers, will brush out the bluff for approximately two blocks between what would be the extension of the alley between Seventh and Eighth streets to the alley between Ninth and Tenth and between the railroad and Singer Hill highway. Trails along the bluff will also be built. The new course for the water which now plunges down the hillside from the outlet at the head of the stairs at Seventh and Singer hill will be 20 feet wide. It will include four 10-foot drops and the other a 12-foot drop. Water will be picked up where it goes under the stairs, carried over the falls which will be just south of the present stream, then dumped into a pool at the foot of the falls. Stone for the falls and pools will be obtained from the city quarry on Center street.

• November 1896: mention of the creek as one of the many Willamette tributaries flooding at the time
• 1909 Journal : a local furniture co. harnessed the creek to power a little 75hp generator, partially powering their operations
• May 1935: proposed as part of a park along the bluff, along with a second WPA project to upgrade everyone in town to a modern, graded gravel road, at minimum.
• September 1935: WPA approved the sum of $1835 toward the project; mentions flood control
• January 1937 (Journal) : the falls turned to icicles during a cold snap, were still under construction at the time
• January 1938 (Journal) : a roundup of great new things around OC, with a photo of the falls and another of the stairs. The article explains that the city was deeply dysfunctional back in 1925, noting that city council meetings drew large public audiences, not out of people being all civic-minded and public-spirited and whatnot, but because the meetings tended to end in a free boxing match between councilmembers. Now, however, things were swimming right along under the modern council-manager form of city government. It mentions the total project cost for the falls came to around $22,500.
• I've never come across a photo of what the original falls looked like. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've never seen one. But I did come across the next best thing in an October 1938 Oregon Journal column. The paper's weekly "In Old Oregon" feature reprinted someone's 1847 sketch of the Oregon City skyline, featuring the town's few scattered buildings at the time, along with the creek tumbling down the bluff. A note along with the feature offered to pay $2.50 for readers' photos from the old days suitable for publication. That's almost $60 in 2025 dollars.
• A rather gross 1959 sewer incident: The city was busy replacing the pipe carrying Singer Creek thru downtown Oregon City from the base of the falls to the Willamette, and city workers kept bumping into old un-mapped, unrecorded sewer pipes, dumping raw sewage straight into the river.
• The falls have been illuminated for the holidays on and off over the years, and (for example) they were brightly lit for Christmas 1964. The linked article claims the falls are 90' high overall, which is more than you get just adding up the drops.
• The city was still busy putting parts of the creek underground in 1967, as part of a larger project to eventually pave part of John Quincy Adams St. The older part of town atop the bluff uses a street naming convention common to US cities of a certain age, where the streets parallel to the Willamette are named for US presidents ordered chronologically extending uphill away from the river, with a slightly odd twist. The order didn't look quite right, so I double-checked a list at the Library of Congress and realized Oregon City had skipped over anyone who became president on the death of his predecessor. And as a result, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson aren't honored with streets of their own, which is probably just as well. It seems there had been a rather vociferous (yet long-forgotten) public debate around whether a Vice President actually becomes President as part of the succession thing, or merely takes over presidential job duties without scoring the upgraded job title, salary, official residence, and so forth, as the constitution was a bit ambiguous on this point. Tyler's presidency overlapped with Oregon City's brief tenure as territorial capitol, so it was a contemporary issue at the time, and locals evidently disagreed with his taking the oath of office and calling himself "President". Once established, they then had to apply the same naming convention as the city expanded away from the river. The naming convention ended with US Grant, sparing the city from having to figure out what to do about presidents with non-consecutive terms (like Grover Cleveland, and that one orange guy), and two Roosevelts, and two Bushes with very similar names, that sort of thing.
• A 1968 article about the same project primly notes that "[p]resently the creek is not as pure as might be desired", but it was hoped that a future project would connect the neighborhood to the city sewer system instead of feeding directly into the creek.
• The city didn't light the falls for the holidays at first in 1970, but a small child wrote a sad letter asking the city to please turn them back on, and they did.
• September 1970, a Journal photo of a city maintenance crew hosing debris out of the falls in preparation for fall
• 1985 experiment stocking the creek with coho salmon. I think the idea was that the falls look a bit like a fish ladder, and maybe a few salmon out there were athletic and ambitious enough to pull it off, eventually leading to a new subspecies of supersalmon that would hopefully also be delicious.
• ...but it later turned out that it wasn't an experiment at all, but an attempt to put the baby salmon in a sort of protective custody, after an unexplained (but suspicious) mass fish kill at a Clackamas Community College facility.
• The current lighting dates to 2012, funded by a $17k Rotary Club grant. The city posted a video of the illuminated falls shortly after they went live. Watching it, I found myself thinking the phrase "vintage YouTube video" about something that was posted 11 years ago.
• another 2012 article relates one of the city's many ghost stories. Ghost is a small redheaded child who died in a 1913 typhoid epidemic, seen around town as an ungentle reminder that drinking untreated water straight from local streams is not safe. At this point the ghost is probably trying to head off to wherever ghosts go when their work here is done, only to be blocked by a local measles epidemic ghost who says "I used to think I was done here too", and they both swear up a storm at the local antivaxxers.
• April 2021 article mentioning the falls; I had never heard of them before despite being right next to the elevator