Next up we're visiting Portland's obscure and very small Rosemont Bluff Natural Area. It's a triangular bit of hillside, just 2.3 acres in all, in a neighborhood of mid-1950s suburban-type houses. From what I've been able to figure out from county survey data, the subdivision to the east ("Rosemont Addition"), was platted out in 1891, and to the south "Marchmont Addition" was filed back in 1889. A bit to the west was "Parkhurst Addition". But the present-day park was part of a larger parcel that was never subdivided, for whatever reason.
Being a large single parcel may have helped clear the way when Multnomah County needed a site for a new modern "juvenile home". The main advocate for building it had been County Judge Donald E. Long, and it was eventually named after him, and it's still in operation under the same name now. Most of the lot was a flat area at the base of the bluff, and "juvie" was built there, served by an extension of NE 68th avenue that curves along the base of the bluff. I haven't seen any evidence that the county ever had specific plans for the bluff itself. So I think what happened is that it became a sort of unofficial neighborhood park. Maybe it was neighborhood volunteers, maybe teenage inmates next door, that info doesn't seem to have made the papers either way. It did happen around the same time the county divested itself of its chronically underfunded, ok, largely unfunded county park system, and maybe that's what prompted them to spin off Rosemont Bluff to the city too. Possibly local residents pushed for the county to do this, thinking they would get a better park out of it. That's just me speculating, but it seems like a reasonable theory in the absence of actual documentation.
It seems like this was successful for a long time; the park got a well-designed trail that connects the upper and lower ends of the bluff, complete with a couple of switchbacks. It felt like it could be a little corner of Mt. Tabor or Washington Park. It was really nice, and somehow felt much larger than it is. Then COVID hit, and apparently the park became a huge homeless camp for a while, and contributed to the general sense that public order had broken down across the city and police were basically just not doing their jobs anymore. I mean, I have a lot of questions about the supposed post-COVID crime wave, how much of it was real and how much media hype, and what the actual causes and effects were, but we're not going to resolve that today.
The key takeaway right now is that the city appears to have decided to abandon the place permanently and walk away and dropkick it into the nearest memory hole, sort of like what they did with Kelly Butte a few decades ago. The City Parks website used to have a page about the place here, but not anymore. There isn't even a copy of it in the Wayback Machine, which is remarkably thorough by city standards. Maybe this was on the theory that homeless people might hop on a computer at the library and use their advanced research skills to find new places to set up camp, and not mentioning it on the website will somehow prevent this from happening. I have my doubts that it really works this way, personally. And call me a cynic if you want, but I think it's just as likely that some well-connected developer wants the land and they just need the public to forget it's supposed to be a city park. Of course they'll also need to move the juvenile facility somewhere else, so if there's a sudden chorus of local movers and shakers insisting that needs to happen ASAP, you can reasonably assume there's a done deal and the fix is in.
So, here are a few items from around the interwebs, offered as evidence that the park really does exist, because apparently I need to do that. Eppur si muove, there are four lights, and all that.
The twolots on PortlandMaps, showing that the city does technically still own the place, for the time being.
It appears on the old "efiles list", which given the dates on that list probably means the city was already doing occasional maintenance work on the place while the county still technically owned it.
The park was first mentioned in the paper in 1997 in a brief item about a volunteer cleanup effort
Those PortlandMaps pages up above will tell you the park is in the North Tabor neighborhood, in fact the eastern park boundary is also the official boundary between North Tabor and Montavilla. But back in 2008 there was a short-lived movement to officially name the whole neighborhood "Rosemont" (after the park) instead, after residents narrowly rejected "North Tabor" in favor of remaining "Center". Which seems thoroughly, hopelessly nondescript, and possibly inaccurate, but the article notes this was one of the city's very first neighborhood associations, dating back to the early 1970s, and the name was originally "CENTER", an acronym standing for "Citizens Engaged Now Towards Ecological Review". Eventually after enough of these proposals the local citizenry relented and went with "North Tabor", which is clearly the most realtor-friendly option. Maybe it finally passed after enough of the local activist Boomers shuffled off to the great big Woodstock festival in the sky, I dunno.
For what it's worth, a brief Willamette Week item from May 2017 insists that the geographic center of the city is a dive bar on NE 28th in Laurelhurst, but they just say that without proof. I also don't have proof, but I do have a nagging suspicion this isn't the right place either.
Next up we're visiting Portland's Copper Mountain Property, another really obscure city park that you probably haven't heard of. The name alone inspires thoughts of rugged wilderness adventures, doesn't it? It caught my eye on PortlandMaps or maybe MetroMap and figured I should check it out. So I packed up the Adventuremobile X-9000 with the essentials (dogsled, salt pork, hardtack, flamethrower, rocket boots, etc.) and set off to see what destiny had in store...
Ok, who am I kidding? The name sure sounds exciting, but it turns out that's just the name of the investment firm that owns the adjacent property to the east. There is no mountain to see here; it's just two skinny (and completely flat) lots just off Airport Way in industrial NE Portland, and I only burned any time on visiting because I was already in the area making a necessary Costco run.
There is also no copper here; if there had been, it would have been stolen as scrap metal years ago by the area's vast homeless population. In theory this narrow strip is home to a trail that connects this stretch of Airport Way to the Columbia Slough Trail, and that might have made it a potentially scenic and interesting place in the not-so-distant past. But not right now, and probably not in the immediate future, and I have literally no idea what to do about it, and I also don't want to devote a whole blog post to the subject, especially since I don't have any actual policy ideas to kick around.
For what it's worth, there's another similar bit of city land maybe 1/4 mile to the east, also connecting the slough to airport way, but without a trail, or (as far as I can tell) a name, and it isn't labeled as greenspace in PortlandMaps, but I think it's the same basic idea other than those details. I have no idea why the two places are treated differently, but I have a hunch that the reasons are not very interesting.
The normies at Google have no additional info about this place, and will try to steer you to Metro's Cooper Mountain Nature Park instead, because there's no possible way you could really want to come here (which I guess is fair this time around); or if you can persuade Google you really did mean "Copper" and not "Cooper" it'll push you toward a different Copper Mountain with vastly more mainstream appeal, a skiresorttown in Colorado. Which, again, is fair this time around. Come to think of it, every other place on Earth that has a vaguely similar name seems to be better and more appealing, and this isn't the first time that's happened. And now I remember why I sort of lost interest in doing "obscure city park you probably haven't heard of" posts like this: There may still be a few hidden gems out there, but by and large the others are obscure for good reason and probably ought to stay that way.
Next up we're visiting another Portland city park, this time in SW Portland a bit off Barbur. It's your basic ballfields-and-playground arrangement; I usually don't bother with these, and to be honest with you we're only visiting this one because of its name. Or rather, the lack of a name. The official city parks website just calls it "A Park". Until December 2020 the park was known as "Custer Park" after the infamous general, but then outgoing city commissioner Amanda Fritz removed the embarrassing name by executive order.
Now, naming or renaming things in Portland is a long and complex process involving public hearings and consulting everyone who could possibly count as a stakeholder. But thanks to a quirk in city ordinances it's apparently quite trivial to un-name things. The city commissioner with Parks & Recreation in their portfolio simply announces that a name has been yoinked away, and poof, it's gone. Of course the risk with doing this on your way out the door is that the next Parks Commissioner won't necessarily put the same priority on doing the harder part, coming up with a new name for the place. Thus the park has gone without any official name for the last two years.
This naturally showed up on the park's (non-renamed) Yelp page, and a Reddit r/Portland thread, with a few examples of the usual conservative shrieking, though this may have been more subdued than usual due to Custer's earlier work in ending the Confederacy. Still, it may please them to know Custer still has lots of stuff named after him, including a very imposing 2nd place participation trophy at the Little Bighorn battlefield itself.
Closer to home, a street nearby still goes by SW Custer Drive, and there are bits and pieces of street named SW Custer St. stretching from the river all the way west to city limits, though never more than a few blocks at a time due to the hilly terrain. None of those have been renamed yet, though the name has been preemptively removed from a future MAX station planned for the Hillsdale area, on the theory that the street will likely be renamed too before the new line opens. The first newspaper mention I found of streets named Custer was small item from 1897 about Fulton Park, so it already existed at that point. This was a brief mention in a list of recent city council actions, and the next item concerned legalizing fireworks within city limits for a couple of weeks in January for Chinese New Year. That sounds unusually progressive for 1897 Portland, so I imagine the non-Chinese population just saw it as another chance to be reckless and irresponsible with fireworks, which is always a winner here.
The lack of a name doesn't mean the city's neglecting the place, by the way; there's a proposal to give it a naturepatch, one of the new commissioner's pet projects. There's also a proposed stormwater facility that would be near or possibly conflicting with the nature patch, which might explain why the stormwater project was on hold last time I checked.
So here we are at the end of 2022, and the park still doesn't have a name. Around the time of the de-naming there was a change.org petition with a specific new name in mind, but I'm reasonably sure Portland (like most major cities) has a blanket policy of not responding to change.org petitions. Although it will get you signed up for endless fundraising emails until the heat death of the universe, so there's that to consider.
I should point out that renaming things in Portland isn't always this hard. Around the same time this park was de-Custer-ified, a park in outer SE Portland was renamed from renamed from "Lynchview Park" to "Verdell Burdine Rutherford Park" without the park going nameless for years first. And it's not as if the park was ever actually a place to come and view lynchings; if I remember right, it was just named for some unremarkable midcentury developer or landowner named Lynch. But still, the name doesn't exactly sound good to contemporary ears. And before anyone goes on a rant about 21st century people being so oversensitive, there's a local precedent. Back in 1966, the city was about to get a couple of new city parks as part of the South Auditorium urban renewal project, and it was decided to name them after early pioneers who had staked out the original settler land claims in what's now downtown Portland. There were three of these guys: Asa Lovejoy, Francis Pettygrove, and Stephen Coffin. Let's see if you can guess which of the three isn't honored with a city park or anything else being named after him. Not because he was a notably bad person, but because "Coffin Park" just really, really doesn't sound good.
In any case, the very latest in the naming situation came back in August of ths year, when the city
asked the public for suggestions, explaining that the kinds of names they were looking for should:
• reflect and inspire the community
• honor Native and Indigenous communities
• are symbolic or significant
• create a sense of community and inclusion
• are future facing and imagine a Portland for all
So it's possible there's already a new name in the works and they just haven't announced it yet. Or maybe voters approving a complete revamp of how city government works threw a wrench into the works, since city bureaus won't be under individual commissioners anymore. Maybe it seemed better to leave the renaming until after the revamp happens. Or maybe they just didn't get any good suggestions and aren't sure where to go from here.
Before they announced that process, I had taken a look at old county survey records to see if there were any interesting (and non-murdery) historical names associated with the area that might at least be inoffensive enough to make it through . There were a couple that might work, but nothing really stood out, and none of those would really "honor Native and Indigenous communities", and I really like that idea. So I kicked that research down to a footnote in case they do rename the streets someday, or maybe if the neighborhood gets a second park someday and it needs a name.
Or, I dunno, if the city can't come up with a good, appropriate name, maybe we should just leave it as "A Park" forever, like the old genericbrand items stores used to carry in the 1970s and 1980s, the ones with the white label and black letters that just said "Lima Beans" or "Beer" or whatever was inside. (Apparently this practice still exists in Canada, except the labels are yellow, metric, and bilingual.) I mean, if it works for lima beans, why can't it work for a whole city park?
So that's about all I've got on the name front, but I did run across a few news items and historical odds and ends along the way, so there they are mostly-chronologically:
1959: the city decided it maybe ought to rent some port-a-potties for this and a few other parks for Little League games, so people wouldn't have to go find a bush during the 7th inning stretch. It must have been an exceedingly slow news day. This is the first mention of the park in the newspaper, though it had existed for five years at that point.
1962: the city must have installed actual restrooms shortly afterward, as local residents were annoyed, though, as in the immediate wake of the Columbus Day Storm the restrooms had power restored before their houses did.
A couple of sorta-vintage photos of the park from 1963 and 1975, looking about the same as now but with smaller trees and vintage cars.
Things got pretty exciting here in July 1969, when the park hosted a city-sponsored "Flower Children Carnival". The blurb describes it: "Featured will be booths, rides, and tennis golf, a game created by Park Bureau staffer Neil Owens.". I can't tell if it was aimed at kids or hippies, reading that.
Your city has not forgotten you, flower children. Wednesday from 1 to 5 pm your very own “Flower Children Carnival” is scheduled at Custer Park, SW 21st Ave. and Capitol Hill Road. It will be sponsored by the City of Portland Bureau of Parks and Public Recreation.
See, you ARE loved, after all!
They’ll have booths to test your skill, to go fishing, and many others. Amusement rides will be bountiful… such as the caterpillar-covered merry-go-round, the slide tunnel and others.
There will even be a putt-putt for those who get their jollies from tennis golf (a game created by Neil Owens of the Park Bureau staff).
So, as the park folks say in their announcement, “all beautiful people gather and come to Custer Park” Wednesday. (Don’t take that “beautiful” part too literally — you’re all invited.)
June 1973, in another city-sponsored event, the park hosted a performance by a traveling mime troupe, which would include their original adaptation of "The Red Balloon". Because 1973. I got to see the original in grade school a couple of times, I guess on the theory that kids love anything containing balloons. Watching it in 2022 as an adult, it just makes me think of all the marine life harmed by eating balloons that drifted out to sea and deflated, and the planet rapidly running out of helium.
A 1976 letter to the editor, in which a visitor from Madras, OR complained about people not cleaning up after their dogs in the park.
A late 1990s neighborhood conflict over a longtime unofficial right-of-way into the park from the north. It seems residents thought it was public property, but it wasn't, and the new owner closed it as part of a renovation project. A followup said he'd had a change of heart & wanted to work with the neighborhood association on restoring some sort of access, though a 2000 subdivision plat for that spot doesn't show an easement, and I didn't see a path on Street View or by walking past where I imagine it would have been if it still existed. So who knows.
A while back I took a look at county survey records to see if maybe there were any historical names -- of the non-murdery variety this time -- associated with the area that might work as a replacement. So the first attempted subdivision of the area was in 1891, when the land around the park was platted as "Ma Belle Park". Evidently that didn't take off, and it was vacated piece by piece starting around 1916. Still, it has "Park" right there in the name, so "Ma Belle Park" might work. The same area was later re-subdivided as "Raz Hill" starting in March 1927, expanded in December 1945 mostly south and east of the park, with a smaller "RazEstates" to the north.
Next to Raz Estates an "Alpine View" was platted in 1957. Portland doesn't have have an "Alpine View Park" so that might work too, though it sounds a bit generic, and someone ought to check on a sunny day and verify there's still is an alpine view from the park, as that could have changed in the last 65 years. "Raz Park" would make sense too; not only were they the previous landowners before suburbia got here, but were later involved in the creation of nearby Stephens Creek Nature Park. Though in general I think we're better served by not naming anything after people for a while. The oldest regular land survey I see for the area is from 1871, just the 10th survey registered with Multnomah County. It's just a brief handwritten note though, adn the handwriting is fairly illegible, so no luck there. A 1920 road survey, in which today's Capitol Hill Road was surveyed as County Road #876, called the area due south of here "Latourette", centered roughly on where the Barbur Safeway stands now. That may have just been the name for a streetcar stop and not a neighborhood; either way it was probably someone's name and again, name moratorium.
Several more survey records in connection with building the new subdivision in the early 1950s. The first, in 1952, calls the area the "Raz tract", while a
1954 revision vacated a few of the roads proposed earlier, and
another tweak a few months later shows a "Proposed Park", half the size of the current park. After that, my guess would be someone realized that a park just big enough for a Little League diamond is going to result in a lot of errant fly balls through windows and made the park bigger.
A few recent photos from Portland's Tanner Springs Park, a sort of pseudo-natural nature park righ in the middle of the Pearl District. This place was a regular staple here for a number of years, starting in 2006 and tapering off in 2014 for no particular reason. I happened to be in the area last month and wasn't in a hurry so I stopped in and ended up with a few wildflower photos, so here they are.
(I think it's fine to call them wildflowers, even if someone technically planted them here as part of a planned garden. I'm using the term in the sense of "local native species of flowering plant" and not by how "wild" an individual plant appears to be. Just tossing that out there in case any angry internet flower pedants stumble across this post. I have never actually met an angry internet flower pedant, mind you, but generally speaking if a thing exists, someone is mad about it on the internet. So it just sort of stands to reason.)
Here are a couple of photos from Portland's Catkin Marsh Natural Area, an obscure city park in industrial NE Portland on a branch of the Columbia Slough, east of NE 33rd and west of the airport. The park consists of a 53 acre wetland area -- surrounded on three sides by the now-defunct Broadmoor golf course, and the fourth by warehouses -- plus a long skinny strip of land along the south side of the slough connecting out to 33rd, which is the only part shown in the photos. I took these while stopped briefly along 33rd after taking the car through DEQ at the test station nearby. I didn't actually turn the car off, much less get out for a closer look, so the photoset is somewhat less than comprehensive this time around.
The city bought the land fairly recently, in December 2012 -- it was part of the golf course before that, maybe serving as a natural water hazard. It was included in the city's Natural Areas Restoration Plan when it was updated in 2015, which rated it in 'Fair' health and as a high priority for restoration, though without any specifics on what they might do about it. They did remove a couple of culverts blocking this section of slough in 2017, at least. And with that, we've covered just about everything the city's said publicly about the place.
I gather the longer-term plan is for an extension of the Columbia Slough Trail to run through here someday, which I imagine is gated on both money and acquiring land or easements further east so the trail doesn't just dead-end on an abandoned golf course or at the airport security fence. The new owners of the Broadmoor site want to build warehouse space there, so making a deal for the unbuildable wetland parts of the course seems doable, in theory.
For anyone feeling really impatient to go visit the rest of the park for some reason, on the map above you can see an unofficial boot path through this strip along the slough, and conceivably you could get there that way, on an unofficial basis. But note the chest-high tall grass in the photos, and remember it's growing on top of a muddy, slippery bank that you won't be able to see because grass. So you stand a really good chance of going for a swim, which I cannot recommend here. As a data point, the city advises not eating fish from the slough more than once a month, due to PCBs and other contaminants, and discarding most of the fish even then. The slough as a whole is not considered a Superfund site, on unspecified technical grounds, but I still think this would be a bad place to take a mud bath or see what the water tastes like. Ewww. Just ewwww.
Next up on the grand(ish) tour we're visiting SE Portland's Powell Park along Powell Blvd between 22nd & 26th. It's your basic neighborhood park with a playground and ball fields, of the type I usually don't go out of my way to visit, though it does have an early 20th century gazebo for picnics & concerts, which I guess is a (mildly) interesting architectural feature. Longtime readers might remember I used to live nearby in the Brooklyn neighborhood back in the 90s, so this used to be one of my local neighborhood parks, but it wasn't the closest one and I didn't visit that often. To be honest, this post exists largely because I was in the area anyway, fetching drive thru from the Burgerville across the street, and I snapped a couple of photos while waiting for a traffic light without actually stopping & getting out. So with that out of the way, let's skip right ahead to our usual grab-bag of historical and news items:
The park started appearing in the Oregonian in the mid-1920s, although the articles talk about the park like it had been there for a few years already. It was probably still fairly new because a lot of the early news items are budget and construction stuff. A June 1, 1924 story concerns the city hiring the lowest bidder to build bleachers for the park's baseball fields, which cost $1483 in 1924 dollars. That's about $21,281.38 in today's dollars (per the BLS calculator). A couple of years later (Sept. 12 1926) the city parks chief asked the council to fund a variety of construction projects. For Powell Park, the request was for "Flag pole, $100; apparatus, $5000; move handball court, $400; three fountains, $225; 20 lights, $2500". (The park doesn't have any fountains now, unless maybe drinking fountains count.) The next day, the city council considered a request for $1067.11 to build a "comfort station" in the park, which might mean the present-day gazebo.
An August 14, 1931 item notes the park would be hosting a concert full of Sousa marches and other popular tunes that evening. Beyond the marches, the program featured various things like a Stephen Foster medley and some arranged excerpts from a comic opera, and it ended with the Star Spangled Banner, which had just been adopted as the official national anthem 5 months earlier, believe it or not. A couple of now-obscure pieces I was able to find on Youtube sound exactly like the background music for 1930s cartoons: Boccalari's "Dance of the Serpents" (not to be confused with Debra Paget's Snake Dance), and M.L. Lake's "Slidus Trombonus", which the paper describes as a "trombone comedy". No jazz, though. By 1931 all the cool kids wanted to listen to the devil's infernal jazz music, even in stodgy old Portland, so I imagine this was a wholesome families and oldtimers sort of event.
With a few rare exceptions (like the previous news items), nearly every mention of Powell Park in the Oregonian has been in the sports section, concerning city baseball and softball leagues of all ages and skill levels. For a bit of the typical flavor, here's a July 28th 1940 sports page, in which local baseball leagues take up nearly the entire page. Local sports being a big deal back then, the top story in the Oregonian that day related to local soap box derby races, a sport that later fell into a decades-long decline until Portland hipsters revived it as a drunken ironic activity for 20-somethings. Meanwhile a smaller news story explained that the Nazis were bombing England. Additional WWII stories below the fold concerned the Axis marching into Romania and Ethiopia, and bombing Malta. So the paper's priorities might seem a tad... skewed. But then again, it's 2018 and Trump's burning everything down, and here I am writing about a marginally interesting city park, and I can't quite bring myself to do otherwise, and you're here reading this post, and I appreciate the company. It feels like it helps, somehow. The people of 1940 would not have known or used the phrase "self-care", of course, but I think I understand why they did what they did.
In another rare non-baseball item, in August 1970 a big rally was held here as part of the People's Army Jamboree, an antiwar protest coinciding with the national American Legion Convention in Portland. This was one of several rallies around town, including one at Duniway Park, but overall the event had lower turnout than envisioned, thanks to Vortex 1, a state-sponsored hippie music festival out at McIver State Park near Estacada. The state guessed correctly that most hippies would choose a party over a protest if given the choice; meanwhile US troops stayed in Vietnam for another three years. I mean, a massive rally in Portland probably wouldn't have changed the course of the war anyway, but now we'll never know, will we?
Here's an odd September 27th, 1977 article detailing points of interest along SE Powell out to where I-205 is now. As a harried commuter in modern 1977 Portland, it was your lot in life to be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way home to your Gresham split-level ranch. So the Oregonian offered up a list of mildly interesting semi-landmarks along the way if you were up for a little sightseeing. The article mentions the canceled Mt. Hood Freeway a couple of times; I don't know if the article was aimed at disgruntled suburbanites who weren't getting their (temporarily) speedy new freeway after all, or what. But oblique grumbling that doesn't get around to the real point is a very Portland thing. Incidentally, if the sights (including some restaurants, a nursery, and a cheap motel) didn't hold your interest as a professional commuter, the adjacent Scott's 88 Centers ad offers a Fall Value Days special on 8-track tapes starting at $1.88. Though it neglected to specify which 8-track tapes.
A September 2002 Willamette Week item had a hearty chuckle about a planned weed potluck at the Powell Park gazebo. As it turned out, the activists behind it were merely a decade or so before their time. Sure, public consumption is still technically not legal, but it's probably just a matter of time at this point.
The gazebo was
gated off circa 2013, supposedly to thwart homeless people trying to use the (formerly) public restroom. The city, unsurprisingly, took the opportunity to require reservations to use the gazebo & charge for the privilege. The city proposed doing the same thing at Colonel Summers Park; I'm not sure whether that came to pass, but it usually does. I ran across two neighborhood blogposts grumbling about the unpopular new policy.
Next up we're visiting SW Portland's MaricaraNatural Area, 17 acres of forest in a quiet neighborhood west of Marshall Park. The city's description of it is fairly brief:
In fall 2010, 1,500 feet of new natural-surface trails and 2,600 feet of improved trails were opened. Located in a residential neighborhood, the site includes a wetland, protected stream, important native plant species, and an older second-growth forest.
I thought the park was quite nice, although doesn't look entirely natural yet; I gather volunteers went through and removed every single ivy plant and blackberry vine and other nonnative plant, and replaced them with ferns and oregon grapes. The effect is as if it was professionally landscaped to look like a natural forest, though I imagine that will go away after a few years. I didn't see a single invasive plant (of those few I recognize on sight), and I was looking. I think the lesson here is to not be on the wrong side of a Portland neighborhood association enlisted in a righteous cause. Or at least, I could swear I read that this is what happened, but I'm unable to find a link to back that up. Possibly I dreamed it, and it's just that the park was never overrun by the usual invaders in the first place, as unlikely as that sounds. The neighborhood association holds regular community ivy pulls just over in Marshall Park, if that's a data point.
For city park posts, I usually rummage around in the library's Oregonian database to see if anything interesting ever happened here. The park does have a slightly convoluted origin story, though I'm kind of a nerd about these things and it's hard for me to judge how interesting it's going to be to anyone who isn't me. But it's what I've got, so here goes.
Our story starts back in the 1950s, as suburbia was expanding, and the country was in the midst of a massive baby boom. If you're running a public school system, especially during a baby boom, one of your many jobs is to try to understand how many new schools you're likely to need over the next decade or two, and where you're likely to need them, and buy land accordingly before it gets prohibitively expensive. That happened here in 1956, the plan being that half of the land would go to a school, and the other half would become a park. You see this model all over the city (like at SE Portland's Sewallcrest Park); I think the idea was that playgrounds and ball fields are paid for out of the city budget, rather than by the school district, and could be used by adult softball leagues and so forth when the school wasn't using them. PortlandMaps indicates the northeast quarter of the park had already been platted out as a new subdivision called "Caravel Heights" before the school district bought it. Incidentally, the tax roll IDs insist the homes just east of the park are part of "Edgecliff", and to the north is "Boese Addition", while the SW corner of the park and the land south of it is "Galeburn Place". To the west is just "Section 29 1S 1E".
Anyway, two things were different in the case of Maricara Park: First, they obviously never built a school here. Second, although the area was part of Portland public schools, it was outside city limits & would remain so until the 1980s, so the park half ended up as part of Multnomah County's chronically underfunded park system. As far as I can tell, the county's idea of a park system involved buying or stumbling into random chunks of land in unincorporated parts of the county, and then doing absolutely nothing with these places for decades on end.
Finally in the late 1980's, after years of complaints and bad publicity, the county decided to get out of the parks business. This was around the same time the city of Portland began annexing surrounding unincorporated areas, so parks within the new city limits largely transferred to the city during the 1982-87 timeframe. The remaining ones mostly went to Metro, with one going to the city of Gresham, and another tiny one being sold off & probably developed. The city didn't immediately have any spare cash for the new parks, and several (like Maricara) remained undeveloped into the 2000s. The other half of today's park belonged to the Portland school district until 1999, when they finally accepted they were never going to build a school here, and Metro bought it with a bit of greenspace money. Oddly enough the east half of the park is still technically owned by Metro, but the city administers the whole park.
As for the name of the park, that seems to come from SW Maricara St., which ends at the west side of the park. The street name, in turn, has a slightly weird origin. It got its current name in August 1930; it seems Portland's postmaster asked the county to change the names of a few streets that had segments inside and outside city limits, which was apparently beyond the Post Office's ability to cope with. As the old saying goes, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stayed these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but Portland street names were a whole other story. So the name was duly changed from Laurel Avenue. Which is weird because the only present-day street I see named Laurel is in the West Hills off Vista Ave., near Jewett Park, nowhere near here. The 1930 article neglects to mention where the name "Maricara" came from originally. I suppose it may have just been someone's name.
In any case, the city's park planning process finally got moving in the mid-2000s, and resulted in an extensive 2008 Habitat Management & Trail Plan for the park that roughly describes how it is today, and features a few photos of what it looked like back then. It includes a brief history blurb, complete with city ordinance numbers:
Multnomah County originally purchased the eight-acre
property for a park, and transferred it to the City of Portland in 1988
(Multnomah County Order #88-117). Metro purchased the adjacent
nine acres in 1998 from Portland Public Schools who had owned the
site since at least 1958 (Ordinance #173252, April 14, 1999). PP&R
accepted management of the Metro parcel, which is zoned as open space,
in accordance with the Tryon Creek IGA (Ordinance #171795).
More recently, there was a small controversy here around some unknown person(s) adding "fairy doors" to trees around the park. The city disapproved, as this was not part of the Plan. City workers removed any "fairy doors" they saw, but they kept reappearing, and the Tribune spun it as mean city bureaucrats beating up on local artists and dreamers. The story eventually dropped out of the news without the public learning whether either side "won" the conflict.
The OregonHikers Maricara Loop Hike page includes a photo of a fairy door, for what it's worth. Also here are a couple of posts about the park from Exploring Portland's Natural Areas and The Nature of Portland; the latter has a few interesting plant and bird identifications. Speaking as a former Boy Scout, I feel like I ought to be able to identify plants and animals like that, since it was drilled into you that this was an essential outdoor skill. In my defense, though, that was a very long time ago, and I am fairly sure that many of these species had not actually evolved yet.
Next up we're visiting Portland's Pittock AcresPark, the West Hills park that's home to the (locally) famous PittockMansion. I'm not particularly interested in rich people's historic houses, and I visited mostly for the view and to check out some of the trails in the 54 acre park. It sits between Washington Park (& the Hoyt Arboretum) to the south & Macleay Park to the north, and the Wildwood Trail follows a winding path through the park, but it's not a place I've visited very often, so it was kind of a missing link for me, if for nobody else. It probably seems more remote to me than it actually is because I'm not interested in running across Burnside from Washington Park to get there, & that will all change when the promised footbridge over Burnside goes in.
So I drove there & parked, avoided the line to go inside, and took a few photos from the viewpoint. As far as views from the West Hills go, this is more or less unparalleled. It's worth going for the view, though you might want to pick a sunnier day than I did. Then I took the trailhead heading north toward Cornell, essentially this hike from OregonHikers.org except backwards, starting & ending at the top. I'd meant to also try the trail south to Burnside, but there was a winter-related trail closure, and I might have bailed that day anyway due to aging knees. So that part's still a TODO item, since I'm reasonably sure I've never been on that segment of trail.
Despite my lack of interest in rich people's houses, I have actually been inside, many years ago as a Cub Scout field trip. There was a guided tour, and I mostly remember velvet ropes, and being told not to touch anything, and a bathroom containing a fancy high-tech (for 1914) shower the guide called the "wettest shower in town". We learned all about how the house was built for Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian, who only got to live in it a handful of years before kicking the bucket. It does sort of amuse me that the place dates from a distant era when you could accumulate a vast fortune in local print media.
As you might imagine, the library's Oregonian archives don't lack for articles about the home of the paper's onetime publisher. I keep saying I'm just interested in the nature part of the place, but that's largely not what Pittock's newspaper cared about. I kept reading anyway and it turned out there were a few interesting anecdotes, at least more interesting than I was expecting, so that's probably going to be the bulk of this post, despite my initial intentions. (The photoset above is still mostly nature photos, though.)
So before the Pittocks moved in, this whole area was meant to be a ritzy subdivision called "Imperial Heights". That's not a place name you hear very often in 2018, because the Pittocks bought the entire area and built their house at the very top. There's a heavily graded area around the mansion, but the rest of the ~46 acres are steep forested hillsides that might have been unbuildable anyway, though PortlandMaps shows a couple of unused road rights-of-way through the present-day park, so I gather the developers at least planned to give it a try.
A July 1912 Oregonian article rhapsodized about the neighborhood & surrounding areas being platted out & developed. The article went on about the amazing views, and then points out that even more important is the invigorating atmosphere and freedom from dust and smoke, which was kind of a big deal back then. I recall seeing an urbanism theory from the early 1900s or so, and I don't remember where I saw it, that modern cities would naturally grow westward in the future. The idea was that people would keep moving west to live upwind of their cities' vast factories and their clouds of toxic black smoke. I don't know whether that was at play here. An October 1913 article includes a map of the area, showing old street names, and streetcar lines winding uphill from Burnside from the sorta-intersection of Macleay Blvd. & Tichner, which isn't exactly an intersection anymore due to rockslides and repairs in the 1990s.
In 1917, there was a brief vogue for demonstrating the power of your firm's powerful new automobile by showing it can make it up the hill at Imperial Heights or the hilly parts of Upper Hall Street. south of downtown. First it was doing so at all, and then doing so as fast as possible, which is to say that selling (and buying) cars hasn't changed at all over the past century.
"Bad Grades Prove 'Pie' for Hudson", April 8th, in which the local Hudson dealer sent their star driver and a stock Hudson Super-Six up the hill at speeds averaging 20 MPH, reaching speeds as high as 35 at times, which would merit an expensive speeding ticket these days.
"Steep Hills Scaled", April 15th, featuring a local Chandler dealer who made it up the hill while carrying multiple passengers, in front of witnesses and everything. At this point nobody but the Hudson had made it up Hall St.
"Automobile Salesmen Find Ideal Hill On Which To Test Cars For Every Kind Of Performance", September 23rd, in which we learn auto dealers have taken to using the hill to show off their new models. As an added attraction, at the start of the climb on Burnside (then called Washington St, as an extension of Washington downtown), there was a wide spot in the road where streetcars would turn to make the climb uphill. The photo with the article shows an equally steep road on the south side of Burnside, so I don't think this is the current Barnes Rd. route to the top of the hill. Could be Hermosa, or one of the now-abandoned rights-of-way in the present-day park. (find a streetcar map/reference, this should answer this q.) Anyway, this wide spot was used to show off a car's turning radius. If you tried doing a u-turn on Burnside today, you'd get hit, and cited for reckless driving, and you could weasel out of the charge with an insanity defense. You could also keep going west on Burnside to test out your car's springs on a really rough, poor quality road. Some would argue this is still possible. The article mentions people doing the hill climb at up to 40 MPH.
The mansion was there, recently built, and inhabited by the Pittocks while this was taking place. They can't have enjoyed the ruckus, as much as the wide-eyed coverage by his own newspaper hyped it. The fad didn't outlive 1917, but the Pittocks didn't have long to enjoy their renewed peace & quiet. Mrs. Pittock died in 1918, and Henry followed in 1919, a victim of the global flu epidemic. Their heirs owned the estate for decades after that, and it showed up in the news regularly in connection with high society teas and receptions and other tedious social events, which I won't trouble you with.
Then we get to the events leading up to the city owning the place. In 1959, the house was opened to the public temporarily as part of state centennial celebrations. This was arranged by Eric Ladd, a local restaurateur & antique dealer, who leased the house for the summer. Apparently nobody had lived in the house in years at this point, though Pittock heirs still owned it. Open for tours in the summer of 1959 as part of the state's centennial celebrations.
A clue about Ladd's interest in the place came the next year when a grand estate sale was announced, and many furnishings and family collections were sold off. Huge estate sale in May 1960, sold off lots of original furnishings etc. An article previewing the sale mentioned that this might be the last time the public could see the house, as it might be torn down in the near future. The articles don't come out and say so, but it seems as though the family couldn't afford to maintain it & wanted to unload it quickly, and at a loss if need be.
Without going off on too much of a tangent, Ladd had something of a complex history with Portland's historic houses. He spent much of the 1950s demolishing old homes & selling off their salvageable pieces; after a few years of this, he started moving a few of the more noteworthy houses to the area of SW 20th (near the present-day 18th & Jefferson MAX stop), an area he called "The Colony". The whole city was engaged in demolishing its past back then, he was unusual in picking up some of the pieces. After his restored houses opened as an attraction, nobody talked about the earlier demolitions anymore. At one point he opened a restaurant in one of the houses, but closed it in 1960. In 1961 the city wanted to condemn some of his unfinished, stalled restorations. So he may have had money issues of his own at the point he got involved with the the big white elephant of Imperial Heights.
In 1963, the Pittock estate was proposed as the site of a new KPTV broadcast tower, which the city council rejected. The proposal was already in the works in November 1962, just weeks after the Columbus Day Storm. (The usual story is that storm damage caused the sale, but this seems to show there was already a deal in the works beforehand.) A January 1963 article mentions the station was looking at just using part of the estate and donating the mansion to the city. So that might have worked out in terms of preserving the house, but could have blocked the parts that are trails now.
After that it's mostly events & exhibits, which I won't bore you with, but I did come across a few items to pass along. You might have looked at the photos of the house and it's semi-secluded setting and think, why aren't they filming movies there? It turns out that there have been a few; it's just that none of them have exactly swept the awards at Cannes, if you catch my drift. I expect a Pittock Mansion film festival would be a real hoot.
The earliest record on IMDb is First Lovefilmed there in 1977. I couldn't find a First Love trailer on the net to embed here, but YouTube has the entire film uploaded in chunks labeled "clean edited version with provocative scenes deleted". Which sounds boring, although "provocative scenes" from that era often turn out to be sort of... problematic. So I dunno, I haven't watched either version, here's a playlist, make of it what you will.
Next up is Unhinged, a low-budget slasher film from 1982. That's not a genre I'm overly interested in & I'd never heard of this one before; the IMDb plot summary sounds identical to every other slasher movie ever: "Three college girls on their way to a jazz festival crash their car in the isolated woods during a rainstorm, and are taken in by a mysterious family in an old mansion. Little do the girls know, the family has a dark, murderous secret.". Anyway, the trailer's on the 'tubes if you're into this sort of thing:
This was followed a few years later by The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989), a spooky direct-to-basic-cable movie, in which the mansion -- at the risk of getting typecast -- again portrayed a spooky old dark house. Here's a vintage promo, because it's amazing what shows up on YouTube sometimes:
Now we get to the undisputed monarch of all Pittock Mansion films, the immortal Body of Evidence (1993), starring Madonna. Let me admit up front that is the only one of these movies that I have actually seen. I think I've mentioned this before, but I like to tell young hipster newcomers to Portland that Body of Evidence is an accurate documentary about early-90s Portland, all shoulder pads and fog machines and cheesy Enigma music. This is not actually true, of course; it's more of a cheesy 90s Skinemax movie that somehow acquired actors people had heard of, and ended up on the silver screen instead of late-night cable. With, somehow, worse acting and dialogue than its cable peers. It's one of the rare movies that genuinely falls into the so-bad-it's-good category, so you can enjoy it in that sense. Which is easier than admitting you had sort of an embarrassing Madonna thing in junior high, and never quite got rid of those CDs. I may have said too much; luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded), so it's not like the secret's out, really.
As far as IMDb knows, no movies have been filmed here since Body of Evidence, undoubtedly because everyone realizes it can never be topped. Apparently there was an Amazing Race episode that finished here a few years ago, though; I can't find any clips of it online, but CBS has an extremely detailed episode recap.
One other thing caught my eye in the Oregonian archives, and I think I vaguely remember this one. There was nothing 1980s Portland loved more than a good moral panic, and moral panics about no-good teenagers were among the best of all. So here are a couple ofarticles from September 1986 about the park being a teen hangout spot, which was freaking out the neighbors. It seems the teens were at it again: Drinking, partying, cruising, playing bad 80s music loudly, fighting, carrying on, "lewd activities", and the like. It was all terribly scandalous, because 1980s Portland. Before long the mean no-fun grownups (who had certainly not done anything like this as teens in the 50s & 60s) cracked down and beefed up security, and the "crisis" sort of petered out, because teens only win these things in the movies.
The next obscure Portland place we're visiting is tiny Golf Junction Park, on the south edge of Sellwood next to the fancy golf course. It's basically just a small grassy area next to some railroad tracks, with an old passenger railcar parked nearby. (And these photos are kind of old, so I can't promise the railcar is there right now.) A 2011 Sellwood Bee article explains that this spot was once an important railway junction, with Portland streetcars heading south to Oregon City and east beyond Estacada from here. As it was located next to the country club's original clubhouse, "Golf Junction" was an obvious, if unimaginative name for the place. (Though for what it's worth the country club's official history page for that era explains they were also really into polo back then, not just golf, and they hosted a lot of high society teas and whatnot.)
Golf Junction is not exactly a city park; the land's owned by the railroad next door, and leased in perpetuity by a group connected to the Sellwood neighborhood association, which sort of is and sort of isn't part of city government. This group has maintained the park on and off since the park was created in 1996. The park has the aforementioned railcar, though it doesn't seem to be open to the public, and apparently there's a history plaque somewhere nearby that I didn't notice or get any photos of. And that's about all there is to see here.
Until the mid-2000s there were old streetcar barns just north of the tracks, but (as a Greetings from Portland post explains) they were torn out to make room for townhouses, with the last bit vanishing in 2012. Oddly enough the electrical substation across the street is historictoo; at one time the Portland Traction railroad here was part of the same company as today's Portland General Electric, and the substation was built here to help power their electric streetcars. The streetcar lines just happened to run out to the PGE dams at Willamette Falls and Cazadero (east of Estacada). The much diminished present-day line now dead ends at the OLCC warehouse in industrial Milwaukee, not far from here.
The park is barely outside Portland city limits; just to the north, the rail line & SE Ochoco St. (where it exists) mark the boundary between Multnomah & Clackamas counties, and to the east SE Andover St. here marks the Portland city limit around Garthwick, a little piece of the city that spills over into Clackamas County. (The park's uninformative Clackamas GIS entry is here, for what it's worth.) The Garthwick subdivision was announced in 1914, promoted as an exclusive faux-Tudor subdivision next to the swanky golf course. Ads noted it was outside city limits back then & not subject to Portland or Multnomah County taxes, and promised there'd be chains at the two gates to the neighborhood so it could be closed off from the outside world. The gates are still there, albeit without chains. The ads ran for the next decade and change, so it seems as though the lots sold more slowly than expected. I imagine this was partly due to the long commute; the Sellwood Bridge didn't exist yet, and streetcars of the era weren't famous for being speedy.
From the library's Oregonian archives, here's a July 1979 reminiscence about the old days, riding the interurban line out to the Cedarville Park complex in Gresham for picnics and fishing. (Nearby is the only surviving station on the former rail line.) The railroad wouldn't abandon that stretch of the line for another few years, and the article includes a few photos of what it looked like before becoming today's Springwater Trail. One photo includes a very 1970s-looking guy jogging next to the tracks, as a little foreshadowing of the line's future.
Next up we're paying a visit to North Portland's MadronaPark. I really do try not to say "you probably haven't heard of it" (and I was avoiding the phrase before it was cool), but this really is a pretty obscure one. It's due north of the Skidmore Bluffs, on the far side of the Going St. road cut, and it has sort of a view of the river from the south end of the park, and there's a small playground and a couple of basketball half-courts at the north end, and those have an unusual origin we'll get to in a bit. The rest of the park is just overgrown brush and trees, though. Supposedly the park's named after a particular madrona tree somewhere in the park, but I don't think I have any photos of it. Or at least there aren't any "This way to the famous madrona tree" signs, so who knows? The city's 2016 guide to official heritage trees doesn't mention any trees here, so maybe it isn't all that special, or the tree just isn't there anymore.
Since the scenery isn't that remarkable, we'll do like we often do here & play amateur historian for a bit. The city notes the land for the park was donated by Amos Benson, son of timber baron Simon Benson. You might know the elder Benson as the namesake of Benson bubblers, Benson High School, the Benson Hotel, Benson State Park at Multnomah Falls, the Simon Benson house on the Portland State campus, and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. Though not as famous, Amos did pretty well for himself too, and a huge historic house of his can be seen next to the new city park at N. Polk & Crawford. So you tend to assume the donation was another act of noble civic-minded philanthropy, but that's not quite what happened.
To get the full story, we have to dive into the library's Oregonian newspaper archives again. Here's the September 16th, 1921 article on the donation of the park. It describes the park's semi-accidental origins:
This property and a few acres north of it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Benson from the Portland Gas & Coke company at the time that the county board of commissioners was endeavoring to locate the Greeley-street extension through the property. The gas company began litigation to stop the roadway and the property was then acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Benson for the sole purpose of permitting the roadway to be constructed without the delay that would ensue as a result of any legal battle.
The tract which has been given to the city is a sightly one, overlooking the river and Swan Island. It connects with the proposed boulevard system extending around the city, and is a valuable acquisition in that it will give a park to a section that now has no recreation spot. No playgrounds will be installed, it was announced.
Park Superintendent Keyser noticed the tract and its desirability as a park site. He conferred with Mr. Benson and as a result the donation was made.
Benson owned the land rather briefly before the big philanthropic gesture. Here's a September 14th 1917 article about the proposed Greeley extension, in which Benson is described as a major promoter of the project. Benson, it seems, had no interest in the area except for his precious road, and he quickly pawned the surplus land off on the city as soon as they expressed an interest in the place.
Wanting the land is not the same thing as having plans for it, and it appears the city never had any ideas around what to do with the park beyond not installing a playground. A 1933 guide to city parks said the park was undeveloped but had views over the city airport, which was still on Swan Island at that point. The park's next appearances in the news were due to repeated citizen complaints. A
1937 complaint to the city council stated that the park was continually being torn up by cars, spraying dust everywhere. Then there was another complaint the next year, possibly by the same person, informing the city that the park hadn't been cleaned since 1933 & was overrun with poison ivy. Neither article indicates the city promised to do anything about the park's condition, and the string of complaints seems to end at two, so either the original complainant gave up in 1939, or his annual complaints stopped being newsworthy.
The park itself rarely figured in the news over the next couple of decades, but for a while after World War II the surrounding neighborhood sometimes went by "Madrona Park", I guess that being the sort of name that sells real estate (such that Seattle has a Madrona park & neighborhood of its own, which I had to weed out of search results). It inspires thoughts of nice respectable real estate, on nice level land, laid out in a nice conventional grid. Which is doable in this part of North Portland, but not without a little unsavory help. In 1947 the Oregonian explained how the city used garbage to fill in uneven terrain in the Madrona Park area and other eastside neighborhoods. The article begins “Some of Portland’s best families are living on old potato peelings, coffee grounds, and egg shells.”, which is a pretty great lede. It goes on to explain that improving the landscape with garbage is being done scientifically, not randomly, so there's no cause for concern. I'd never heard of this before, so at some point the city must've stopped bragging about this scientific feat. I was also surprised not to see any angry letters to the editor complaining about the paper hurting property values by publishing this, or wondering if doing this was safe; it would be decades until anyone thought to ask how buildings on top of garbage would hold up in an earthquake. For those of you who don't have a local library card & can't get to the original article, here's a list of spots around town that got the scientific garbage treatment between 1923 and 1947. Some of the intersections listed don't exist today, but presumably did back then:
Guilds Lake (now industrial NW Portland), the original site, used until the entire lake was filled in.
A gravel pit around 37th-38th Avenues & Klickitat & Siskiyou Streets, in the ritzy Alameda neighborhood. You can actually kind of see this one in Google Maps if you turn on terrain view, since it has an even slope stretching over several blocks instead of a steep bluff like the rest of Alameda.
Another old gravel pit south of Rose City Golf Course at NE 65th & Tillamook, a few blocks from one of the painted intersections I like to track down now & then.
Penn St. gulch, to provide a road to the Swan Island airport. I'm guessing this is today's Going St. but I'm not entirely sure.
A sand pit somewhere in St. Johns.
A gulch at Alberta & Greeley, which would put it right under an Adidas building just north of Madrona Park here (the park, not the neighborhood).
A gravel pit at Alberta & 39th, which I think puts it under the Alliance High School campus.
A gulch in Overlook park.
lastly, the old Mt. Hood Railway cut at 90th & E. Burnside, probably under the religious school that was built there shortly thereafter.
The article explains that all future garbage would be sent to the new St. Johns Landfill, which operated until 1991 and is meant to become a park someday.
The park did make another brief appearance in the news in in the summer of 1952, when it hosted one of 3municipal forest fire lookouts to keep an eye Forest Park across the river, in response to a huge forest fire that had occurred there recently. In other parts of the state, old fire lookouts have been converted into amazing AirBnB rentals, but probably nothing that cool ever existed here.
1964 saw the one big change that's happened to the park over its history, when the city leased a chunk of it to Bess Kaiser Hospital next door for use as a parking lot. Curiously I have not been able to find a single news item about the original lease deal, and not for lack of searching. It's possible they kept the deal really quiet, since since turning parks into parking is rarely a popular move. It's also possible the database search feature is missing links here and there, which I already had grounds to suspect. At some point in the 80s or 90s, I'm almost positive there was an article about city workers coming to look for Madrona Park & not being able to find it, and realizing the part they were looking for was under a parking lot. It would have been easier to lose track of a park back then, in an era of paper records & no GIS systems. I could have sworn the article was about Madrona Park, but no such article shows up in search results no matter how I query for it, so either the search feature's broken or I'm broken, either of which is possible.
By 1968 the hospital wanted to expand further and offered to buy the whole park outright for $33,000. The city turned them down this time, admitting the park was lightly used but was part of the plan for a "Willamette Crest Greenway" connecting Overlook Park to the University of Portland. Most of this land is in public hands now, but it's been 50 years and the proposed greenway hasn't quite happened yet. It still sounds like a good idea, though.
The hospital closed in the late 1990s, and the campus was bought by Adidas in 1999 to be rebuilt as their new North America headquarters. It seems strange now, but less than 20 years ago the paper described the surrounding neighborhood as "struggling". I was about to say this was recent, because 1999 doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I suppose it kind of was. The city's lease arrangement continued with the new neighbors, though the parking lot became basketball courts and a playground, and apparently there is or was a skate park somewhere in the area too.
Which brings us to the present day, and now you know the complete history of yet another weird and unimportant place in Portland, or at least you know a few random anecdotes about it. Plus there's a chance you can now tell your fancy rich friends that they live on garbage, which is always great.
