She Flies With Her Own Wings

The next mural we're visiting as part of our ongoing project is She Flies With Her Own Wings, in the Alameda neighborhood at NE Regents Dr., Ridgewood Dr., & Alameda St. This is another one with an RACC description:

The inspiration for this mural comes from the Oregon state motto—”She Flies With Her Own Wings”—and displays the state bird, insect, flower, tree, and fruit. The creation of the mural involved the participation of nearby kindergartners, their teachers and parents, and neighborhood volunteers.

I have gotten the distinct impression that every weird blog project of mine eventually requires a trip to Alameda. First there were a bunch of tiny not-quite-parks to visit, thanks to the neighborhood's winding streets and tangled intersections. Then there were some public stairs that needed a visit, which I didn't visit the first time because I wasn't doing stairs then. And now there's a mural, which I didn't visit the previous two times because I wasn't doing murals then. As far as I can recall, I think these are the only times I've been in the Alameda area in years, so if you happen to run into me there, it probably means the neighborhood has painted a local intersection, or they've somehow gotten themselves a new bridge or something.

I think I've said before that I don't claim to be a journalist, nor have I ever been accused of journalism. While I was taking these photos, a woman jogged by, saw I was taking photos, and told me she'd worked on painting the mural. A real journalist would have seen this as a great interview opportunity. I just said something to the effect of "Oh cool, I like it.", and she smiled and kept jogging. A real journalist would have headed back to the office, filed a Pulitzer-worthy story just before deadline, and headed off to a nearby dive bar where the bartender calls everyone "pal" or "mac". I created a draft post and then forgot about it for close to a year and a half, and the closest thing I'll ever have to an interview here is being recounted from memory. In short, if you're looking for examples of the groundbreaking internet journalism of the future, this is not the place to look, and I'm not the person to ask.

Wistaria & Alameda/Beaumont Stairs

Ok, in the previous post I mentioned something about having another public stairs post floating around in Drafts. So this is that other post, and the stairs we're visiting connect NE Wistaria Drive on the lower end, and Alameda St. on the upper end, 3 fancy rich-person houses east of where it becomes Beaumont St. I put "Beaumont" in the title because there's another set of stairs between Wistaria & Alameda a couple of blocks east of here, and in theory they might show up here someday, and if that ever happens I'll need a way to disambiguate the two.

Embedded maps usually aren't very useful on stairs posts, since you can't really see them very well. I put one here since you can sort of make out where the stairs are, thanks to the hedges that run alongside it.

NE Morris & 37th

One of the many ongoing projects at this humble blog involves tracking down Portland's handful of traffic circles. I started this because there aren't a lot of them here, and the ones we have often have something interesting in the center, like public art or rose gardens or a fountain. I had an old note on my giant omnibus TODO list/map that there was one more circle to track down, located at NE 37th & Morris in the middle of the Alameda neighborhood. So when I finally got around to tracking it down, I realized it was just one of the little traffic calming circles the city likes to add instead of speed bumps. I normally don't bother with those because they're not very interesting, and there's a lot of them, so I'm not sure why I put this particular one on the list. I mean, I'm sure I would have looked at it in Street View ahead of time and noticed that. There must have been some other reason why a.) I knew this was here to begin with, and b.) then thought it was worth a visit. But for the life of me I can't recall what that might have been. The only thing Google turns up is a 2008 neighborhood effort to add more traffic calming widgets along 37th south of Morris, which the city politely declined to do. And I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be enough to generate a TODO item. I really need to start including a "why" when I put things on a list, or maybe even not put them on the list if there isn't a good "why". Although a significant chunk of this blog wouldn't exist if I'd had a rule like that before now...

Regents & Alameda

View Larger Map

Ok, one more post and we're done with the Tedious Tour of Alameda for the time being. The last nano-park on the tour is a puny triangle of land at the intersection of NE Regents, Alameda, and 29th Avenue. As with the last few, I found it mentioned briefly in a single city document and tracked it down, because apparently I had nothing better to do. This one isn't the site of picnics or mildly amusing snow videos (that I'm aware of), and there isn't any art, or a fountain, or any public stairs, or any other points of interest (that I'm aware of).

It does have a TriMet bus stop, #7306 a.k.a. "29th & Alameda", served by eastbound bus #9. So if you ever want or need to drop by this place for some reason, it's possible to do so without having to figure out the wacky Alameda street non-grid. The regular city street system breaks down here due to there being a ridge in the way, and instead you've got winding streets with names that occur nowhere else in town. The Alameda history site I linked to in a previous post has an interesting article about the origins of some of these names. I mean, the names are mostly those of real estate and business types who were involved in the Alameda development back in the early 20th Century, along with their friends and associates. That's one of the time-tested standard naming conventions for subdivisions, right up there with inoffensive nature themes.

If you'd prefer a somewhat less tedious tour of the area, the city's "Alameda Ridge and Stairs" walking map that covers basically the same territory as my recent series of posts does. You might also enjoy this poem about growing up in Alameda back in the 1940's or 50's.

An old Round the Roses piece from 1986 talks about the history of the area, and notes that the ridge was once known as "Gravelly Hill". The Alameda Ridge wikipedia article further explains that the ridge is, in fact, a gigantic gravel bar produced by the enormous ice age Missoula floods. So, ok, they don't have eyewitness accounts to prove it, but there's a humongous pile of gravel that looks like it was shaped by water, massive amounts of water, and there's only one known source for that much water in this part of the world. So it seems like a rather safe bet. I was surprised to learn about this gravel bar business actually; I tend to assume that anything around here that isn't flat must be volcanic or at least tectonic in origin, but apparently that's not the case this time.

The Cully Neighborhood Association (located a few miles east of Alameda) has a history page which mentions that Thomas Cully (their pioneer founder & namesake) died in a wagon accident while ascending Gravelly Hill. In many societies, such an event would beget an eternal blood feud between the two neighborhoods, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. I'm not actually trying to encourage such a thing, although I admit that as an outsider it would be kind of fun to watch. Possibly we could be semi-civilized about it, and channel the feuding into vicious inter-neighborhood competitions instead of actual vendettas, a la the Palio di Siena.

We couldn't do it as a horse race, obviously, because that would be inhumane. But bikes are an obvious Portland-friendly replacement. Each neighborhood association would sponsor a rider, and they'd all take part in a ridiculously dangerous, and helmetless, race around Pioneer Courthouse Square (including the part with the spiral ramp) every year, maybe during the Rose Festival. I could care less about the Rose Festival itself, but holding it then guarantees that it will rain, which makes the race more exciting. The winning neighborhood gets a big chunk of strings-free PDC money to spend as they like. The winning rider gets, I dunno, a case of PBR, or a bag of weed, or a new bike, or something. I don't really care what the riders get -- as with the original Palio, riders are strictly menial employees. They ride, and that's it. They don't need to have any ties to the neighborhood, and they're expendable if that's what it takes to win. Any casualties are easily replaced, as Portland receives a fresh crop of hipsters every summer, right after college graduation happens across the Midwest. And the survivors can write shoegazing indie emo songs about their fallen comrades and maybe get picked up by a major label, which is the main thing, obviously.

Wistaria & 41st

View Larger Map

So here's another whistlestop on the Great Alameda Photo Freakout of '09, this time the landscaped nano-parklet at NE 41st & Wistaria. Ok, "whistlestop" is an exaggeration, since I didn't actually stop As with the others, I just sort of rolled by and snapped a handful of photos as best I could. Sure, I could've taken better photos, but I would have had to take the other hand off the steering wheel and probably run over some pedestrians or something, which I'm generally opposed to, unless maybe it was Pat Robertson, and I was driving a rental car. And even then it would be a bad idea; I've heard that car rental companies really ding you for body damage caused by caustic demon guts.

So I've only got two photos this time, and basically no material to go along with them. I kind of figured there's be no material at all, actually. But it turns out that during last December's mini-snowpocalypse, a brave passerby shot some video of cars and buses struggling to get up the hill. The angle's a little different than mine and it's hard to place where the viewer who filmed this was standing. Still, I figured I'd pass it along, because watching Portlanders try to drive in snow is always good for a laugh.

Of course the classic of the genre is still "Snow Driving Fail", from the big snowstorm in January '07. It's kinda like air hockey, but on a hill, with SUVs. Hee-larious. Unless you're an insurance company, I guess.

Wistaria & 49th

View Larger Map

More photos from the (Not Very) Great Alameda Photo Freakout of '09. Said event being the morning I tracked down the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial and the nano-parklet at Alameda & 38th, and assorted other spots nobody but me cares about. Well, me and a few loyal Gentle Readers, plus the occasional Google hit that's often the result of someone searching on an unrelated topic -- and typically they don't stay long. I kind of enjoy tracking down really obscure places and things around town, but the downside is that pretty much by definition I don't get a flood of visitors searching for the things I cover. Which is fine, I mean, if it really bothered me I'd stop and do something else.

Still, this is one of those times when I stop and wring my hands and wonder aloud just how far down this particular rabbit hole I intend to go. The "park" at Wistaria & 49th shows up alongside the aforementioned two places in an obscure city document I keep linking to. But it's not really much of a park, is it? It's a steep, narrow, unbuildable strip of land, the result of the city street grid bonking up against the side of the Alameda Ridge. There isn't even a decaying statue of a forgotten politician to hold our interest here. So I'm starting to wonder if I've wandered off the far side of esoteric into... whatever's over there, I'm not sure what that would be. One of these days, I'll be taking third rate photos of some nondescript weedy highway median somewhere, and a white van full of anorak-clad British trainspotters will drive by, and they'll laugh at me and call me a nerd. And it's not like I'll be in a position to argue with them.

There is one point of interest here, which you can see in the top photo. The Alameda area is home to a fair number of public stairs, and one of these staircases forms the short side of the park here. I was doing a public stairs project a while back, until I ran out of examples that I knew the location of. Not knowing Alameda very well, I never covered anything in this part of town. I really ought to have stopped and taken a few shots of just the stairs while I was here, but I'd forgotten all about the old stairs project. I suppose I could go back and take care of that at some point. Which sounds kind of silly, but I'm not going to absolutely rule it out.

The stairs appear on a couple of walking maps, and they point out a number of the other staircases in the area. So I could probably ramp the stairs project back up again if I was so inclined. I can't absolutely rule that out either.

So to address the rabbit hole question: The answer is this far, and a little further. There are two more stops left on the Great Photo Freakout after this one, and they don't even have stairs to make them, uh, interesting.

In my defense, I do have a few posts about actual interesting places and things lying around in my drafts folder. But the boring places are low hanging fruit. The fact that there's nothing much here makes the research part really easy. So I guess it's got that going for it, at least.

Alameda & 38th

View Larger Map

Today's fascinating adventure takes us to the Alameda neighborhood and the 3-way intersection of NE Alameda, 38th Ave., and Klickitat St. There's a little triangle of land here that isn't quite a traffic circle (since it's not a circle) and not quite a city park. I'm not sure it really merits a post here, but I have a couple of photos and a couple of links to share, and bits are cheap on the interwebs, so I figure I might as well. The photos aren't that great because they were taken from a moving car; I hit this and a couple of other minor spots after tracking down the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, and I was short on time, and I didn't see any compelling reasons to stop.

The "park" made it onto the lower rungs of my TODO list after I saw a mention of it in this Urban Adventure League post from 2006, documenting one of their usual bike tour and hip-n-healthy vegan potluck thingys. Alameda is a fairly genteel neighborhood, and you'd think residents would be alarmed about their little park being invaded by a pack of hummus-guzzling hipsters. The post doesn't mention anything about people getting tasered by Officer Friendly, though. Maybe they just left that part out. I dunno.

There's one other brief mention of the place out on the net, in this doc from the city archives, where the parks bureau lists various esoteric locations it's done maintenance work on over the years. In other words, this isn't the last time I'll be linking to that list. Because if there's one common theme in this blog, it's chasing down obscure and esoteric crap that nobody except me cares about ( as proven by my usual readership numbers ). Half of the time, I barely care about it, or at least I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I do.

This time around, the excursion was partly an excuse to wander around the Alameda area a bit. It's a part of town I don't know very well. Apparently I'm even less familiar with it than I thought I was, because nothing looked at all familiar. Fortunately, the interwebs ride to the rescue once again: Check out Alameda Old House History, about the history of the neighborhood. From which I gather it's pretty much been quiet and respectable from day one.

A few semi-related pop culture tidbits to pass along: Klickitat St. features in the Ramona series of children's books by Beverly Cleary. I don't think I ever read any of those as a kid, but basically everyone else has. So this is the general area to make a pilgrimage to, if you're so inclined. Meanwhile, Alameda St. sort of figures in an Elliott Smith song of the same name. And nearby Alameda Brewing has a tasty Klickitat Pale Ale.

If there's any pop culture miscellany about NE 38th out there, I've yet to uncover it. So if I haven't linked to your epic poem about life, love, and death on 38th Avenue, or your gallery of watercolor streetscapes of same, or edgy indie documentary about same, I'm not ignoring you, I simply haven't found you yet. So feel free to post a link in the comments or whatever.

Thx. Mgmt.