Rockwood Sunrise

Next up, here's a slideshow of Rockwood Sunrise, the large sorta-triumphal arch structure at the Rockwood MAX station. This was created by Seattle artist Dan Corson, who also did Mercurial Sky (the lightshow for the Director Park canopy, downtown Portland), and Nepenthes, the series of giant illuminated pitcher plants along SW Davis in Old Town. I liked both of those, and I think I like this too. Not quite enough to make any further pilgrimages out to Rockwood just to see it again, but hey.

TriMet's Blue Line art guide describes it:

• Tall, brightly painted steel rays constitute a highly visible landmark for the station and a beacon of civic pride for the community
• Imagery was inspired by the ferris wheel — once an annual feature in Rockwood, the bold colors of the Hispanic culture, and the universal symbolism of the sunrise
• Translucent tips of the rays illuminate as the trains arrive and depart the station
• Sunrise image also appears in the shelter glass pattern designed by Corson

This was added back in 2011, along with Civic Drive Iris further east, after the City of Gresham and TriMet scored some much-needed urban renewal money and (as usual) had to spend some of it on Art somewhere. And it just so happened that the eastside MAX Blue Line -- the original 1980s MAX line -- had somehow been built without Whimsical Public Art at each station, and this obviously needed to be remedied somehow someday. So retrofitting existing MAX stations with new art became a thing, killing two birds with one stainless steel whatzit.

The urban renewal effort was precipitated by the 2003 closure of the old Rockwood Fred Meyer store[1]. The store sat empty for a number of years after the closure and it quickly became clear the store had been a regional retail tentpole for the surrounding area. Other businesses closed. Crime was up, pedestrian traffic was way down. Gresham is close enough to Portland that planners still aspire to be good urbanists, and they've probably seen all the literature about declining inner-ring suburbs and wanted to ward off that outcome. The key thing to know is that closed/abandoned big box stores are really hard to reuse[2]. The buildings are just too big for most retailers to make use of, and difficult to subdivide, and luring a replacement big box retailer is harder than you might think because many of them really want to use standard floorplans, with standard store fixtures & displays that look exactly the same in every store. Then you can just order a thousand of those and use them worldwide, and not have to customize things based on what your store was before it was yours. And long story short, Gresham concluded that reusing an old Fred Meyer building was a nonstarter, and it was a great chance to build something denser and more urban, seeing as it's right next to a MAX station.

Gresham's Redevelopment Commission called the project "Rockwood Rising" for a while, but "Downtown Rockwood".

A 2009 blog post from the Wilkes East Neigborhood Association (blog last updated in 2013) was disappointed at lack of progress redeveloping the site, and yeah, the area hasn't completely filled in with new construction, and there's no way to know what the area would be like if there was still just a vacant Fred Meyer there, now abandoned for over two decades. But it's hard to imagine the area would be better off that way.

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Footnotes

1. Fred Meyer stores don't close very often in the Portland area. There was an original and very small store downtown that closed sometime in the 70s or 80s, after decades where every Fred Meyer ad ended with someone muttering "Not Available at 6th and Alder" as quickly as possible. Then out on the urban periphery they closed a few stores in less-affluent areas.

The Walnut Park store that closed in 1989, store eventually became home to Portland Police North Precinct. Boys & Girls Club just south of there, and Transition Projects just across MLK.

82nd & Foster closed in 2017 and quickly transformed into the Emmert International Marketplace mall, anchored by a large Shun Fat grocery store.

2. References on the vacant big-box problem below. The most egregious example of this I've seen was in the Deep South in the late 90s, around when Wal-Mart was transitioning chain-wide to newer and much larger Super Wal-Mart stores. Land was cheap and there were usually no pesky land use or zoning laws to worry about, so the cheapest possible approach was usually to build fresh on ex-farmland really far from town, and just walk away from the old stores that were being replaced. And when every business and every developer does this in a headlong rush, you get a sort of creosote bush development pattern, where the "good part of town" is an ever-expanding ring (for small values of "ever") rushing outward as fast as it can, abandoning previous generations of perfectly good infrastructure after a few short years of being the hot new area. Eventually Georgia realized it couldn't afford to build the distant Outer Perimeter freeway that developers fantasized about, which would have enabled a vast sprawl zone larger than several of the smaller European countries. But the newcomers are still coming and have to go somewhere; I'm just not sure how they're making it work if they aren't building more freeways now. Anyway:

• Next City: "How Abandoned Big-Box Stores Can Bring Communities Together"
• Community Playmaker: Big Box Redevelopment: Opportunities In Old Malls
• Institute for Local Self-Reliance: "Preventing Dark Malls & Vacant Big Boxes"
• Strong Towns: "An Empty Big-Box Store Is a Lesson In 'Commercial Density'"
• The Big-Box Store Dilemma: What to Do When a Large Retailer Closes

Mercurial Sky

Here are a few photos of Mercurial Sky, the art installation / lightshow at downtown Portland's Director Park . This is by Seattle artist Dan Corson, who also created the Nepenthes (which are illuminated as well) along NW Davis in Old Town. Portland doesn't have a lot of public art that needs to be seen at night. Other than the two Corson pieces, there's More Everyday Sunshine along the NS streetcar line, and the untitled neon piece on the parking garage at NW 1st & Davis. There might be others, but these are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Anyway, the RACC page for Mercurial Sky describes the concept behind it in more detail. The digital video aspect wasn't obvious to me as I was watching it, but it's possible I was being impatient and didn't stay long enough. This might be a fun place to sneak in the occasional Rick Astley video without most viewers noticing.

Mercurial Sky is an ever-changing array of light played on LED tubes integrated into the Director Park Canopy. The digital video only emits from the lighted bars, and provides a sense of movement through an abstract tapestry of light and color. If you stand farther away, or look in nearby reflections, the images are compressed and give a clearer view of the video.

“...it seemed like a natural idea to infuse the randomness of the movement of nature into [this hardscaped park]... The inspiration for the images came from my own personal interests and exploration in natural patterns of movement. You can see the natural elements of water, fire, and air expressed in the video. You can also catch movements from creatures under a microscope and worms crawling across fresh moss, jellyfish pulsating, birds flying, and strings of kelp swaying in the ocean current.”

Nepenthes

I don't get a lot of reader suggestions here on this humble blog. I do try to follow up on them when I get them (the stone marker at N. Peninsular & Farragut, for example), although I can't guarantee exactly when I'll get to take photos, much less put a post together. A couple of months ago, Gentle Reader @howrad took an Instagram photo captioned "new art for 5th/Davis corner, hanging out in PDC basement for staging.", and mentioned me so I'd be alerted to it. So I knew something was on the way, for a change. Then I just had to wait for it to be installed, and then wait for a chance to take some photos, and then I had to figure out what it was called so I could google it. Still, by my usual standards of timeliness here, this post counts as lightning-fast breaking news. Don't get too used to it.

Anyway, this is Nepenthes, which an RACC press release describes as:

Artist Dan Corson and RACC are currently installing Nepenthes, a series of four illuminated sculptures along NW Davis Street. These glowing sculptural elements are inspired by the carnivorous plants called Nepenthes, which are named after the magical Greek potion that eliminates sorrow and suffering. By referencing the patterns of native Oregon native and other carnivorous plants and inserting a quirky expression of nature into an urban environment, these sculptures celebrate Old Town Chinatown neighborhood's unique and diverse community.

This project represents the fulfillment of an opportunity that developed during the Portland Mall Project to increase pedestrian connectivity between Old Town/China Town Festival Streets and the Pearl District. In conjunction with Old Town/Chinatown stakeholders, the Mall design team created a pathway along NW Davis Street, via a sculptural lighting design, which links the music and cultural activities of Old Town/Chinatown to the activities in the Pearl District, also along Davis Street, such as galleries, the Museum of Contemporary Craft and Portland Center Stage, and vice versa.

I always roll my eyes when design people talk about creating corridors or gateways or what have you. This particular corridor is supposed to connect the Pearl District to one of the city's previous attempts to gentrify Old Town. "Festival streets" were a huge urban design buzzword circa 2006, and the city decided Old Town ought to have a couple of them. So they repaved NW Davis & Flanders in concrete between 3rd & 4th, planted some palm trees there, and added some ill-fated Chinese dragons that didn't stick around long. It's been about five years now, and so far the hoped-for upscale real estate boom hasn't yet arrived in Old Town. The city's development people must find this really frustrating. The super-swanky Pearl District, one of their great successes, sits just a few blocks west. But try as they might, they just can't seem to lure the gentrification gods to the other side of Broadway. Hence, I suppose, this corridor of giant lighted pitcher plants.

Don't get me wrong, I think the pitcher plants themselves are pretty cool, although I do sort of wonder how durable they'll be over time. Now that they're lighted I'll need to go back at some point and take some night photos. It's strictly the location that I'm being snarky about. And I could be wrong about that. This may finally be the tipping point, the thing that finally makes Old Town safe for rich Californian retirees, and unaffordable for all the ooky poor and homeless people who live there now. But the city's been trying to make Old Town respectable and family-friendly since roughly 1850, and it hasn't happened yet. I have to say I'm skeptical this time will be any different.

Updated: Apparently these pitcher plants were weird and Portlandy enough to momentarily catch the eye of the Big Serious National Interweb Media, and both Gizmodo and The Atlantic have stories about them now. Still, you (yes, both of you) read it here first, for once. Don't get used to that happening.