Waverleigh Boulevard Blocks

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Today's adventure takes us to the short stretch of SE Waverleigh Boulevard between 31st & 33rd Avenues, just north of Powell and east of the Cleveland High School football field. This stretch of Waverleigh Boulevard is sort of diagonal to the normal Portland street grid, and has a grassy median strip down the center. PortlandMaps (the city's public GIS system) says this median strip is actually a city park, or at least is owned by the city parks bureau. There's another stretch of Waverleigh on the other side of the football field, between 28th & 31st, but instead of a median it has a concrete divider and parking spaces down the center of the street. The whole arrangement seemed kind of unusual, since Waverleigh isn't a major street and doesn't go much of anywhere. So it was time for some research. It seems that back in 1907 this area was the shiny, new Waverleigh Heights subdivision. The first ad in the paper for it sounds both exuberant and shady, sort of reminiscent of realty ads a century later during the great condo bubble.

We take checks, certificates of deposit, clearing-house certificates, shin plasters, or old gold, in payment of lots in Waverleigh Heights.

Put your money in "dirt" and get your money's worth. No worry here. Give us your money and we will do the worrying for you.

The company behind the project, and this dubious ad, was the amusingly-named "Jno. P. Sharkey Company". A few months later they offered a free corner lot at SE 33rd & Brooklyn to the winner of a sorta-anagram contest, strangely enough. Here are the official rules, although I'm afraid the entry deadline is long past:

See how many words you can make out of the thirteen different letters in "Beautiful Waverleigh", not using the same letter more than once in any word. Therefore the letters you can use are B,T,F,U,W,A,V,R,L,E,I,G,H.

A word cannot be used more than once, even though it has different meanings.

You cannot use plurals or the names of persons or places.

Any word now in use in the English language (Webster is our authority) will be counted, but not obsolete words.

Today this would be a decent freshman computer science assignment, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

The median was originally supposed to be a central parking strip the whole length of the street, as it still is further west. Apparently this was an unusual arrangement at the time, since three years later the city was still trying to puzzle out who owned the central strip, and who was responsible for making improvements to it, the city or homeowners whose property faced it. This issue had come to a head because the the developers had left the central parking strip unfinished; the article states that in many spots it was "simply a hole in the ground, which had to be filled at considerable expense." The city faced a looming $2779.37 bill for improvements, and was wringing its hands over whether to pass the cost along to homeowners instead. I haven't run across a followup article detailing what the eventual judgment was, but we know the eastern segment eventually ended up as a city park, not as parking at all, and the western segment sure looks like something the city and not homeowners would be responsible for.

Waverleigh was originally a through street until the stretch between 31st and 33rd was vacated in 1934 to make way for the Cleveland sports field. One city commissioner objected on the grounds that Waverleigh might be a major street someday, but obviously the project went ahead anyway. A strange artifact of this remains, not visible in person, but only in PortlandMaps. Even now, the big block of school district property is broken by a 20' wide strip belonging to the Parks Bureau, directly beneath the football field's north end zone. I imagine this means the Parks Bureau became the owner of it (as well as the extant bit west of it) after 1910 and before 1934, while it was still the median of a city street.

There are a number of other streets similar to this scattered around Portland's east side, though this may be the only one that originated as a central parking strip. Several years ago I tracked down all the examples I knew of at the time and dubbed them the "East Park Blocks", to go along with downtown's North & South Park Blocks. I'm tagging this as yet another one, since I definitely would have included it in the project if only I'd known it existed.

Sandstone Park Blocks

Today's adventure takes us out to the Portland 'burbs, to a 70's-era subdivision along NE San Rafael at 162nd. 162nd marks the border between Portland and Gresham in this area; it's not my usual part of town, and I'm fairly sure I never would've ended up here but for a tip from Gentle Reader av3ed. I imagine s/he saw my "East Park Blocks" series from a few years ago & (rightly) figured I might be interested in this place. (The same person also tipped me about the old survey marker at Peninsular & Farragut. Which in turn got a comment by someone else, leading me to the old city boundary marker in the historic Columbian Cemetery. So feel free to leave your own suggestions down in the comments & keep the chain going.)

The reason we're here is that San Rafael has a wide landscaped median between about 160th and 169th, with an asphalt path down the middle, as it passes through the "Sandstone" subdivision. I was surprised by how many runners and walkers were using it when I visited. If you look at the place in Google Street View, you'll also see a few runners using the path. This alone makes it more park-like than a lot of the places I called "park blocks" in that earlier project, so I think I"ll use the term here too, for convenience. So "Sandstone Park Blocks" is really just my description, not an official name or anything.

Dedicating this much land to recreation space instead of more houses is unthinkable in today's sardine-can-like subdivisions, and it was unusual even back in the 1970s. But this isn't just any old subdivision; a portion of it was the 1979 Street of Dreams. The Street of Dreams is an annual show by Portland-area homebuilders showcasing the latest trends (or fads) in home design. In recent years they've focused on increasingly crass and ridiculous gazillionaire houses, but the 1979 show had houses just a step or two above what the average homebuyer could afford, and the show drew record crowds.

From what I can tell, the dream houses were all located on or near NE 165th, a side street off San Rafael, and the surrounding area (including San Rafael) was largely undeveloped at the time of the Street of Dreams. If you wander along 165th on Street View, you can tell that the architecture is a bit more 70's avant-garde than usual, and no two houses are alike. The landscaped median would have made for a grand entrance into the show area, and the path was probably a big selling point for people who fancied themselves as joggers (since that was a big fad at the time).

The rest of the subdivision came along later, beginning around 1985. In the intervening years, Oregon's economy experienced one of the worst recessions in its history, as the poor national economy meant no demand for wood for construction, and in those days any shock to the timber industry had a large ripple effect on the entire regional economy. So I imagine development ground to a halt for a while here, and resumed when the economy finally began improving in the late 1980s. The Sandstone subdivision was featured in a March 1986 Oregonian article "Housing industry coming out of slump", in fact. (There was also a steady stream of real estate ads as new houses came on the market; see these from April 1985 and October 1986 for example.) The ads and article mention that the subdivision was created by a division of the Weyerhaeuser Corp., the large Seattle-based timber company, so I imagine there was a forest here at some point before the houses came.

More recently, the local neighborhood association's transportation policy advocates for a marked crosswalk at 162nd & San Rafael, which they say is needed due to all the extra foot traffic along the central path. PortlandMaps says the pathway is part of the street right-of-way, but I'm not sure whether it's maintained by the cities of Portland and Gresham, or by a local HOA, or someone else. If it was located in inner NE Portland, say, or St. Johns, instead of distant Gresham, this would be a hip, trendy street. City officials would brag about the median path as a great sustainable walkability feature, or something along those lines. Actually this could still happen; Portland home prices and the general cost of living keep going up all the time, and we may reach a point where only boring rich people can live in the central city, kind of like what's already happened to San Francisco and Manhattan and parts of Seattle. If we get to that point, I've begun to wonder which Portland suburb will become our Oakland or Williamsburg. Downtown Gresham is kind of cute, and it's convenient to the Columbia Gorge, and I think getting around is generally less of a hassle than out in Washington County, so it's probably my leading candidate if I had to guess. In this hypothetical future, I could see househunting hipster couples stumbling across this neighborhood and going nuts for it, the way their predecessors did over Portland's close-in eastside neighborhoods. Not this year, likely not this decade, even, but sooner or later.

East Park Blocks: Omaha Parkway

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This stop on our tour of the East Park Blocks takes us to North Portland's Omaha Parkway, on N. Omaha Avenue between Killingsworth and Rosa Parks Way. If you look at a map of the city, it appears that Omaha Parkway is actually slightly to the west of the park blocks downtown. It's still on the east bank of the river, though, so I'm going to assert that "East Park Blocks" is still a reasonable name. Otherwise I'd have to try to think of a different name, and I don't want to.

It's possible that Omaha Parkway doesn't share an origin with the others, which would explain why it's not on that list. A page at Rootsweb describes it like this:

Omaha Ave. Albina addition, (1891) From Killingsworth Ave. north to Portland Blvd. [until 1891, known as 1st & 2nd Aves.]. before 1915 became N. Omaha Ave.

N. Omaha Ave. Albina addition, (1915) From 157 Killingsworth Ave. (1932) 5 east of Greeley north from Killingsworth to Winchell. [until before 1915, known as Omaha Ave.].

This indicates that the street (or some parts of it) existed prior to 1891, when Portland absorbed the old city of Albina. Doesn't mention anything specifically about park blocks though.

When I'm feeling pedantic (which is regrettably often), I sometimes wonder about a place, "Who waters the grass?" This 1989 Oregonian article says the Parks Bureau waters the grass at Omaha Parkway, or at least they did 19 years ago. And they almost didn't then, due to the Parks Bureau's perennial lack of funds. The place used $2500 worth of water over the course of the summer, in 1989 dollars. Article describes the parkway as a "median strip".

East Park Blocks: Ainsworth Blocks

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The Ainsworth Blocks (our next stop on the East Park Blocks grand tour) are on NE Ainsworth St. between MLK & 37th, the only east-west set of park blocks in town that I know of. They're narrower than the others, almost just a glorified median, but they're also much longer than any of the others, roughly two miles in total. If the Ainsworth Blocks extended much further west, they'd intersect with Omaha Parkway, and the east end is not-quite-due-north of Reed College Parkway. Which may be evidence of a plan, or it may just be basic Euclidean geometry -- any lines that aren't absolutely parallel will eventually intersect somewhere. So whatever.

The place is also known as the Ainsworth Linear Arboretum, the brainchild of a local group called "Friends of Trees". They've got a great deal of info about all the diverse trees that have been planted along the Ainsworth Blocks. Some in the blocks themselves, some along the street on either side, even some in yards facing the blocks.

Beyond that, I haven't found a lot of references to the place. There's one related Oregonian story, indicating that the Ainsworth Blocks lost some trees in a big 1997 winter storm. That story refers to Omaha Parkway as "Omaha Blocks", which also lost trees.

East Park Blocks: Stanley Park

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The next stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks takes us to Stanley Park (or "Ralph Stanley Park Blocks"), running the length of NE Cascades Parkway, due east of the airport. The east end is the little traffic circle right next to IKEA, you can't miss it. These are really the odd blocks out, as far as East Park Blocks go. I almost didn't include them at all, but I figured, what the heck. The main thing is that they're quite new, only created in 2001, which could make them nearly a century younger than some of the others. They're also the only ones in a commercial area, all the others being in residential areas. It's not a remnant of an incomplete early 20th century urban plan, like at least some of the others seem to be. Instead, it's part of an early 21st century urban plan ("CascadeStation"), one that's only recently started to bear fruit.

As a recently escaped longtime suburbanite, I have to say there's nothing about Stanley Park that really grabs one's attention. The area looks like any other chunk of modern big-box suburbia, and the park itself looks like standard-issue strip mall landscaping, not much different than what you'd encounter outside a Barnes & Noble in Tualatin, say. If I didn't know already, I wouldn't have guessed it even had a name, much less that it's considered a "park".

I first heard about the place in an was Urban Adventure League post from 2007. Those guys always seem to be a step or two ahead of me, and it beats me how that keeps happening.

But at least I can tell you a bit more about the place, in case you're interested. The Port of Portland owns Stanley Park, since the whole area started out as sorta-surplus airport land. You wouldn't expect the port district to have a "park system", and I doubt it's their intent to have one, but they have at least two parks anyway: Here, and McCarthy Park out on Swan Island. I suppose if you own and develop enough land, as they do, you're inevitably going to end up landscaping bits of it here and there.

CascadeStation was created to cash in on the new MAX Red Line, so far with mixed results. Here are two stories about the park from around the time the Red Line opened, in which we learn the park's named in honor of the project's lead developer, who died shortly before the Red Line opened.

And then the new MAX Red Line to the airport opened on, umm, September 10th, 2001. If I was superstitious, which I'm not, I'd almost wonder if there was a curse or something.

East Park Blocks: Roseway Parkway

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This stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks is Roseway Parkway, on NE 72nd between Sandy & Prescott, which places it due north (wayyy north) of Firland Parkway. That sure doesn't seem like a coincidence, although I don't have concrete evidence that this was part of a plan.

These are the widest East Park Blocks out there. I'd guess they're about as wide as the park blocks downtown, although I'm notoriously bad at guessing sizes and dimensions of things. The trees are smaller, and the place has a curiously orchard-like feel to it.

Forget connecting the north & south park blocks downtown, you urban visionaries out there -- if you want a real challenge, try hooking the Roseway & Firland Parkways together. Actually no, I'm not seriously proposing that. I'm not sure what the point would be. Even if there was a good reason, it'd cost way too much, which I think is the same reason it didn't happen to begin with.

Some links about the place:

• Oregonian: 2003 tree-planting party. Described as a "parklike strip".
  
  
• The Roseway Neighborhood Association apparently tends to call them the "72nd Avenue Park Blocks".
  
  
• A detailed planning doc about the area, including much about the parkway.
  
  
• International Day festival held there
  
  
• Urban Adventure League beat me to it, as usual. And Firland, and Omaha, too.
  

East Park Blocks: Firland Parkway

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This stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks takes us to Firland Parkway, along SE 72nd Avenue between Holgate & Foster. This is the first chunk of East Park Blocks that I visited, because it's the only one on the list that appears on most city maps. I searched the net a little about the place, and came across a thread in the Foster Powell Neighborhood group on Flickr: "An Olmstead designed park in FoPo?". Which intrigued me, as you might imagine. I'm still not 100% sold on the Olmsted connection, but any parkway like this can at least be fairly called "Olmsted-inspired". For whatever that's worth, I mean. That's the sort of term you use when you're trying to sell real estate, or lure a Starbucks to the neighborhood. Sort of like "FoPo", come to think of it.

After reading that thread and researching further, I came to realize there were a bunch of other stretches of park blocks around town, and a new project was born. It seems these things always start small...



Anyway, Firland Parkway seems like a pretty quiet place, in a (perhaps surprisingly) quiet neighborhood. I did come across a couple of posts about a plant swap held at the north end of the parkway. That's about it for excitement. Which I imagine is how the neighborhood likes it.



I was initially puzzled about why Firland Parkway shows up on maps when the other don't, but I think I've finally figured out the reason. After consulting PortlandMaps, it seems that most of the East Park Blocks are just part of the rights-of way of the streets they're on. Legally speaking, they're merely extremely wide medians, and aren't "properties" in their own right. Firland Parkway is one exception. Why, I don't know, but here are the PortlandMaps pages on the two long blocks that comprise the place. While we're being pedantic and tedious about this, I should note that the city auditor's office is listed as the legal owner of both parcels, rather than the Parks Bureau. This isn't actually all that unusual. You also see the city property manager listed as owner a lot too. Again, I don't know why; it just sort of is that way.

East Park Blocks: Reed College Parkway

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This stop on our tour of the East Park Blocks takes us south, to Reed College Parkway, which as you might imagine is right next to Reed College. And the parkway runs the length of SE Reed College Place, in case the location was still at all unclear.

Well, you'd think it'd all be very clear, but the city sometimes mistakenly calls it the "Reedway Blocks". Reedway is an entirely different street, east-west instead of north-south, and which doesn't have any park blocks along its entire length, as far as I can tell.

Of all the East Park Blocks around town, Reed College Parkway may be the closest to how they were all intended to turn out. Large, genteel houses line both sides of the street, and stately old elms run the length of the parkway. It's really quite nice, although I don't know what you'd have to do to afford a house here. The parkway isn't the only thing that gives the area such a patrician, old money feel, but it certainly helps.

Of course, being next to a rather, er, alternative-minded college, it's not all tea and crumpets on Reed College Parkway. Or rather, when it is tea and crumpets, it just might be performance art, like this 2007 TBA event. (In the article, the parkway is described as a "tree-lined expanse of grass", not as a park. FWIW.) An OregonLive blog post has more about the conceptual art tea party, with photos.

I can answer the perennial "who waters/mows the grass" question this time. Recent meeting minutes for the Eastmoreland neighborhood association shed a little light on the not-quite-a-city-park, not-quite-a-street-median status of this and the other East Park Blocks around town. Like most of them, Reed College Parkway is owned by the city's Transportation Bureau, and in this case they're responsible for watering the grass, but the Parks Bureau has the job of mowing the grass. It's all clear now, yes?

An East County News piece about area residents unhappy with the current arrangement. Our mayor-elect suggests that the locals form a "Local Improvement District" and tax themselves extra to help maintain the place, because the city just doesn't have the money.

Miscellaneous other bits:

• someone else's photo of the place
  
• A tidbit in the Sellwood Bee about tree pruning along the parkway
  
• city-sponsored walking tours
  

East Park Blocks: Intro

Every tourist guidebook to Portland blabs on and on about the Park Blocks downtown. As a result, they aren't really prime blog material here, photogenic as they may be. But as it turns out, the downtown Park Blocks have a number of vastly more obscure cousins scattered around Portland's east side. I've never seen any collective name used for all of them, so I thought I'd go ahead and christen them the "East Park Blocks", by analogy with downtown's North & South Park Blocks. (Although now I'll probably run across another one, on the west side this time, and it'll be back to square one again...)

Most of the East Park Blocks are in residential areas; I think the idea was that a stretch of park blocks makes an area a bit more genteel, and creates a boulevard suitable for promenading about in one's horse and buggy, wearing one's Sunday best. Which doesn't happen much anymore, and doing the equivalent from a car just isn't the same. Still, I figured since they're designed to be enjoyed from a moving vehicle, that's what I'd do. I made a big loop around town, driving up and down each stretch of these park blocks in turn. Most of these photos were taken while I was driving, which isn't exactly "safe", and Legal says I can't encourage anyone else to do it, but I think it captures the effect properly this way.

I've seen indications that at least some of these park blocks are the scattered remnants of an early 20th century master plan, a plan that for the most part went unimplemented. From the city's Recreational Trails Strategy:

The historic foundation for this trail system strategy is the 1903 plan developed for Portland by John C. Olmsted. He identified desirable sites for parks and proposed that they be connected by parkways and boulevards. Although many of the sites were eventually secured, Terwilliger Boulevard (which he helped design) is the only substantial parkway that was created. Some fragments of boulevard (Ainsworth and Reedway Blocks, Firland and Roseway Parkways) were constructed as parts of subdivisions, but most of the Olmsted vision of interconnected parks was not implemented.

I'm not totally sure this is accurate, though. Another two docs, also from the city, discuss the 1903 Olmsted plan, and the various parkways and park blocks do not appear anywhere in the text or in any included maps. I suppose they could've originated in the 1912 Bennett Plan, but I couldn't find enough detail about that to be sure one way or the other. I'd imagine the Oregon Historical Society would have copies of the original plans, which would settle the matter definitively. I haven't gotten around to doing that, though, so I'm going to have to call this a "maybe" for now.

If there was a master plan, it's hard to argue it was a realistic master plan. Now, I realize it was the early 20th century, the days of all-out civic boosterism and Teddy Roosevelt-style bravado, but two of the existing stretches of park blocks are way out on 72nd Avenue, one in NE Portland and the other in SE, separated by a few miles. If the original plan was to have a continuous Olmsted-esque parkway the whole distance, that would've been a pretty damn expensive undertaking, way out at the far edge of the city. To give you some idea, the Portland city limits only extended to roughly 82nd avenue as recently as the 1980s. (The 1980s expansion further east is still bitterly resented in some quarters, but that's a story for another time.) I'm not convinced it would've been a good idea to build out the full plan anyway (again, assuming there was a plan). If the intent was to create leafy, green, stuffy, respectable upper-middle-class neighborhoods, that idea met with mixed success, at best. These days the parkways' surrounding neighborhoods are all gentrifying to varying degrees, but most were decidedly blue-collar areas for much of the 20th century. Which is fine, of course; it's just not what the original planners intended. Given John Olmsted's comments about Milwaukie's "sordid little houses", which I mentioned in my Elk Rock Island post, I think it's fair to assume that urban planners of that era were a snobby, elitist lot, with little care for the needs of the icky toiling classes.

In the present day, the whole parkway concept has kind of fallen by the wayside. The idea of setting aside public space to look at but not actually use is deeply unfashionable now, and we don't do it anymore. (Well, with one notable exception that we'll get to later on in the tour.) The Portland Parks website has little icons on the page for each city park indicating what features are available: For "hiking", there's a couple of people hiking. For tennis, a guy with a tennis racket. For "natural area", there's a duck, a maple leaf, and a magnifying glass. They don't have pages for any of the places we're visiting on this tour, but if they did they'd need to cobble up a "genteel" icon, maybe a couple promenading in Victorian garb, the man in top hat and tails (and perhaps sporting a monocle), the woman in an elaborate period gown with an enormous hat made of endangered birds.

In any case, the list of parkways in the Recreational Trails doc isn't completely accurate. They missed a couple, and got the name wrong on another one. A doc explaining the city's 2002 Parks Levy does a better job -- understandable, I guess, since there was actual money on the line. But they still missed one, for reasons which will become clear a bit later on.

I was initially going to stuff everything into this post, but six embedded Google maps in a single post seemed excessive, so I decided to break it up into a multi-post series instead, so this post is just an intro.

Here's the list, starting at the southernmost and proceeding counterclockwise into North Portland:

• Reed College Parkway
  
• Firland Parkway
  
• Stanley Park
  
• Roseway Parkway
  
• Ainsworth Blocks
  
• Omaha Parkway
  

Updated 2/3/21: I ran across two more of these back in 2014: The Sandstone Park Blocks in a subdivision just over the city boundary into Gresham, and the Waverleigh Blvd. Blocks in inner SE Portland north of Powell.