Reading Rooms, Willow Creek MAX station

The next installment in the ongoing public art thing takes us out to the Willow Creek MAX station, out in the westside 'burbs, where we're taking a look at the station's oversized teracotta tables and chairs. TriMet's Blue Line Public Art Guide describes the furniture and the general theme of the stop:

Early plans for a library branch at this station inspired the theme of reading and literature. Though the library is no longer planned, the theme blossomed, resulting in the creation of several living rooms, places where one can curl up with a good book under the cherry trees. The cherry tree was chosen because of the role it has played in literature from different cultures.

Cast concrete furniture is clustered in groups. Literary references are sandblasted onto the backs of the chairs and on tabletops. Word scramble puzzles under the three shelters contain names of authors and characters from children’s books. Letters from the world’s alphabets are randomly tossed in seven locations along the bus and light rail platforms.

A September 1998 Oregonian piece by the paper's architecture critic (back in the olden days of yore when newspapers could afford architecture critics) offers a bit more detail, crediting Seattle artist Norie Sato for the design:

* Willow Creek/SW 185th Street: Although it had one of the smallest budgets, this station in a few years is apt to be one of the nicest. Using inexpensive, off-the-shelf Victorian-themed furniture, artist Sato created a series of outdoor "reading rooms" for a proposed branch library. The design team artists also successfully fought Tri-Met's objections to blooming trees, which require higher maintenance, to create a station worth an unplanned stop.

This post sat around in Drafts for several years before I finally figured out who designed it, which is one of those pesky little details I like to know before I hit 'Publish' if at all possible. If you look at the Tri-Met public art guide I linked to, you might notice that it generally offers little or no information about who created most of the art along the Blue Line. These glaring omissions were not accidental. As I mentioned in a 2018 post about the Milikan Way MAX station art, this is an enduring legacy of the silly late-80s and early-90s culture wars, back when right-wing busybodies had nothing better to do than fill their adult diapers over a few examples of controversial art funded by You, The American Taxpayer™. (If that era was before your time, or you just generally don't follow art news that closely, the Wiki bios of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano might be a good place to start.)

The important thing to know about that historical episode is that it happened right around Peak Gingrich, and so the GOP outrage led to a few years' moratorium on any new public art in all federally-funded projects, which was long enough for that particular culture war to blow over and the GOP to find something new to go shrieking about. If I recall correctly they switched over to impeaching the president for having an affair, while they were all quietly having affairs too, but that's a whole other story. The moratorium happened to coincide with the design work for phase 1 of the Westside MAX line, from downtown Portland out to 185th. So, officially, everything decorative along that stretch of track was considered Design and not Art. It was all, officially, a collaborative effort by the whole Westside MAX Design Team, each element contributing to a single unified (and uncontroversial) theme at each station. No individual credit was given, and if the individual bits of design had names, the public was not supposed to ever find out what they were called or who made them, or else the whole city gets stomped by a mile-high Gingrich kaiju or something. I mean, in reality that almost certainly won't happen; the Culture War industry currently has bigger fish to fry, like banning vaccines, and burning books, and persecuting non-Aryans, and ending democracy once and for all, forever. It's not that they aren't still mad about art; it's just that everyone who'd be detained for making decadent art is already destined for the camps for any number of other reasons. Besides, they have their own art and artists now, like this guy

As it turned out, the MAX line was delayed several years because tunneling through the West Hills turned out to be a lot more complicated than anyone had expected, and the federal ban actually expired a few years before the line opened. So they were able to tell us a few names and titles here and there, like Core Sample Time Line at the underground Washington Park station. Other info sorta-leaked out later via an obscure, now-defunct RACC web server (RACC being Portland's regional public art agency), as with Transplant at the Elmonica MAX station. That server was for the agency's "design roster", listing local artists with past experience handling public commissions and the bureaucratic stuff that comes with them, and a track record of getting quality work done on time and within budget. The program still exists, and a recent (2017-2020) collection of artists' resumes includes a couple of references to prior work on MAX projects a quarter-century ago, and to the Willow Creek station specifically, but that didn't give me enough to go on, and years went by until I took another look at this post and happened to search the library's newspaper database with exactly the right search terms.

The really sad thing about all this is that the proposed library never happened. They did open one at a different MAX stop closer to Hillsboro, but it closed after a few years, and the area even lost the longtime Tanasbourne Library after a bond measure for a new building failed, and the existing version of it lost its lease in a mini-mall on 185th & Evergreen and had nowhere to go, and now the only option nearby is the Aloha Community Library, a scrappy underdog nonprofit (as in, it gets zero government dollars and relies on volunteers to keep the doors open.) down at the shopping center at Kinnaman and Farmington, several miles away.

Sulawesi, SW 17th & Morrison

Back in February I finally hit "Publish" on a post about Icarus at Kittyhawk, the Lee Kelly art at the Beaverton Central MAX station. That post was stuck in Drafts for ages because I didn't know what it was called, until I finally found that crucial detail on a walking/driving tour map of Kelly art around the Portland area. I said at the time:

In fact the map includes a lamentable number of others that I wasn't aware of and have never visited. Somehow I feel like I have to add them to the ol' TODO list now, although for the life of me I'm not sure why.

...and sure enough, here's a TODO item from that map. This is Sulawesi (2008), on the West Portland Physical Therapy building at SW 17th and Morrison. I actually like this one. It's a reasonable size, and somehow it actually fits with the building it's on (the circa-1958 Annand Building) and looks like it's always been there, despite being about a half-century newer. Usually at this point I would go off on a tangent about the cool midcentury building, but I haven't found any interesting info about it by name or by address. I can tell you the building once housed an office of the Equitable Life of Iowa insurance firm starting in 1958, and they were seemingly hiring new stenographers every few months, year after year, and after that other tenants came and went over time, and I have no historical anecdotes to share about any of them, or the building, or anything really. Which at least makes this an easy post to finish, so there's that, I guess.

I'm glad I checked that walking map again before hitting 'Publish', since I had gotten the name of the art wrong. Sulawesi (the correct name) is an island in Indonesia, the 11th largest island on the planet and home to 20 million people. I almost mistakenly called the art "Surabaya", which is a city on the island of Java, elsewhere in Indonesia. The Surabaya metropolitan area is home to about 10 million people. So that would have been kind of embarrassing. Searching for more info under the correct name comes back with a result for "Sulawesi I" (1997) a similar Kelly sculpture outside a library on the Oregon State University campus. The OSU one is described as "A wall-mounted sculpture with silver leaf with looping and linear forms reminiscent of script." That could be the origin of the name here too, or it's named for resembling the weirdly-shaped island itself, which looks a lot a letter in some unknown alphabet.

Icarus at Kittyhawk

Next up we've got a fresh entry in a couple of long-running projects here. Some years ago this humble blog was largely about public art, in Portland or wherever else I happened to bump into it. When a new MAX line opened, there would always be a whole new batch of art of -- let's be honest here -- uneven, mostly fair-to-middling quality to write about, with the posts tagged blueline, greenline, yellowline, and so forth to make it easy to check them all out in one go and compare and contrast and so forth. That was a fairly well-defined, limited-scope project, but I still occasionally run across stuff I'd missed earlier, or things I couldn't post about because I didn't know the title or the artist.

Another sort of subproject was tracking down additional art by people whose other work I liked, or at least thought was distinctive in some way, and the resulting posts are tagged so if you just want to binge on Manuel Izquierdo art (for example), it's easy to do that. One of the resulting tags is for the late Lee Kelly, the prolific local artist behind Leland One (aka "Rusting Chunks No. 5") and countless other welded steel whatzits that have cropped up across the Northwest since the mid-1960s or so. I've never been a big fan of his stuff, though I'll admit some of his older work truly radiates groovy 1970s-ness, for good or ill. It's more that his stuff is fairly unavoidable if you try to do a public art project in this corner of the world.

That long-winded intro brings us to Icarus at Kittyhawk, at the Beaverton Central MAX station. TriMet's revised Westside Blue Line public art guide describes it thusly:

Icarus at Kittyhawk, 2005, by Lee Kelly was inspired by the myth of Icarus with its timeless message about the danger of human arrogance.

The 10’ tall stainless steel sculpture with seat was purchased with funds left over from the Westside MAX project and held by METRO.

The title is kind of funny given the location: The Beaverton Central project was a late-90s attempt to transplant Pearl District-style urbanism to the 'burbs: Retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, topped with several floors of upscale condos. That, evidently, was the Beaverton version of flying too close to the sun. The initial project ran out of money during construction, and the main condo building sat empty and exposed to the elements for a number of years before finally being completed in the mid-2000s. The condos eventually sold, and they finished an office building or two to flesh out the complex a bit, and a variety of short-lived restaurants and retailers have sort of cycled through the area ever since. But except for a couple of buildings on the old Westgate theater site, the expected forest of ever-taller imitators spreading across downtown Beaverton never happened. Or at least it hasn't happened yet.

Icarus doesn't seem to have arrived with any great fanfare, as the only mention of it I found was in the June 2005 meeting notes from the "Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation", a now-defunct regional government body:

On April 27th, the pedestrian environment at the Round in Beaverton received an injection of culture with the installation of "Icarus at Kittyhawk," a sculpture in stainless steel by Oregon City artist Lee Kelly. TOD Program staff secured funding for the project and worked in partnership with TriMet, the City of Beaverton and regional arts commission on artist solicitation and selection.

As a former westside resident on and off since the mid-1970s, I'm more than happy to snark about Beaverton all day as a private citizen, but the snide remark about Beaverton getting "an injection of culture" in official meeting minutes is... a bit much.

Come to think of it, going by the timing Icarus would have arrived while I was still commuting into downtown from darkest Aloha, since I didn't move downtown and start this weird little blog until November of that year. I don't recall noticing it at the time, but then again I had no idea I would end up doing weird projects like this, so I wasn't keeping detailed notes at the time.

Anyway, Icarus was also a stop on an exhaustive "Walk • Bike • Drive" map of Kelly art across the greater metro area, along with two others just within Beaverton city limits, the others being Arch with Oaks along Sunset, and another at PCC Rock Creek that I've never seen. In fact the map includes a lamentable number of others that I wasn't aware of and have never visited. Somehow I feel like I have to add them to the ol' TODO list now, although for the life of me I'm not sure why.

Transplant

Next up is another installment in our occasional tour of TriMet MAX art. Art along the westside Blue Line can be sort of hard to figure out sometimes; TriMet's official guide doesn't always mention titles and sometimes doesn't even name the artists, and I don't feel like I can do a proper public art post without knowing those two things. For example, take the group of decorative brick carts (i.e. benches that look like carts) at the Elmonica MAX station at SW 170th. TriMet's description of the station explains that Westside design team artists and Don Merkt echoed the act of transplantation—moving objects, plants and people from their original environment to a new place. Three brick carts symbolize transplanting, transporting, transforming.. At some point I ran across an RACC page that was a bit more specific, saying the group of carts was called Transplant and was created by Merkt. Unfortunately if you follow that link now you'll get an ugly IIS server error; I don't know whether it's a website error or the page has been deleted without redirecting to a nice 404 page, but it's been this way for months now. Anyway, I seem to recall there was a longer description on that missing page, though I feel like I understand the general concept already without a longer description. Still, it's too bad, if only because quoting a extended block of art lingo makes one's blog post look a bit larger and fancier.

In any case, this humble blog has previously visited a few other artworks by Merkt: Driver's Seat on the downtown transit mall near Union Station, Water, Please at the city water pollution lab next to Cathedral Park, and On TV at the cable access studio building on NE MLK. I think there's also something of his along the new MAX Orange Line, but I haven't gotten around to Orange Line art just yet.

Three Creeks One Will

Next thing we're looking at today is Three Creeks One Will, the giant blue cylinder in front of Beaverton's new City Hall building, next to the Beaverton Central MAX station. The city's Public Art Tour Map describes it:

The art of Devin Laurence Field brings together universal and archetypal symbolism, the vernacular of a given site or culture, and natural forms to communicate ideas about the evolution of the complex relationship between the built environment and the natural world.

The name sort of weirds me out, for some reason, even if the One Will isn't doing any triumphing. Anyway, the current City Hall building was once home to Open Source Development Labs, which was meant to become the center of the Linux operating system universe, putting Beaverton on the map next to Microsoft's Redmond and Apple's Cupertino. It turned out the Linux universe didn't really need or want a center, so that effort eventually fell by the wayside. And many years before that, the Beaverton Central area was home to a municipal sewer plant. The city eventually concluded that a centrally located sewer plant wasn't popular among people with noses (a key voting demographic), so they moved it and the land sat empty for a few decades until the long-troubled Beaverton Central project came along.

Matrix Hill Park

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It's time for a rare suburban adventure here on this humble blog. We're headed to Beaverton's Matrix Hill Park, a high point on Cooper Mountain just off Murray Blvd., directly uphill from the new mini-Walmart. The Walmart location was previously a (late, lamented) Haggen grocery store, and long before that it was a rock quarry owned by the Cobb Rock Co. The steep cliffs left over from the quarry days result in sweeping views to the south and east. Granted you're just looking at miles and miles of suburbia, but you can see quite a lot of it from here. There's a bit of a view to the north too, but you're better off going to nearby Sexton Mountain Meadows Park if you really want a better look at the suburban jungle of central Beaverton.

Since it's out in the 'burbs, Oregonian coverage is spotty at best, so I only have a few bits and pieces of info about the place. If the database search function is to be believed, Portland's paper of record has mentioned it precisely once, in May 2001, in an article about volunteer efforts in Beaverton-area parks. However an OSU Extension newsletter from 2010 says the park had just opened to the public. That seems odd, but maybe the Tualatin Hills parks district owned the land for a long time without officially opening it to the public. I'm not really sure, but the path up to the viewpoint looks pretty new, so it's certainly possible. The park district's September 2011 board agenda includes a capital projects list, showing they were spending about $40k per year on renovations here at the time. And a Winter 2010 Metro newsletter showed lots of volunteer events to pull invasive blackberry bushes here.

The park's also mentioned briefly in a 2013 US Fish & Wildlife study, "Willamette Valley Conservation Study: Nature-based Recreation and Educational Opportunities and Underserved Areas Assessment", but it's simply listed as "Existing opportunity identified in spatial data", which I think means they noticed it on a map and didn't investigate it further.

What I really want to know, and what nobody is telling me, is where the name "Matrix Hill" comes from. It's obviously not a native Indian name, nor is it likely to be a pioneer-era name. The first mention I've seen of the name was in 2001, which is a couple of years after the movie The Matrix came out. I'm really hoping it's not named after the movie. I mean, my first guess would be that some clueless polo-shirted real estate developer of the 80s or 90s wanted to build on the hill, and came up with the name independently because he thought it sounded high tech and upscale. This seems plausible because developers are always a rich source of cheesy place names.

But just suppose the park district had asked the public for suggestions, circa 2001 or so; maybe they put the suggestions up for a public vote, and allowed online voting. And suppose that a group of Matrix fanboys decided to troll the vote, and the district was somewhat less than tech savvy and never caught on to their l33t h4x0r script kiddie sk1llZ, and the rest is history. I have zero evidence to back this idea up, so it doesn't even count as a proper theory. But at minimum it would make a great urban legend, so feel free to repeat it if you want to. Be sure to add that we're lucky "Matrix Hill" eked out a win, as a rival tribe of fanboys was rigging votes in favor of "Park-Park Binks".

Dwight S. Parr Park

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I was out in deep westside suburbia last weekend running some errands, and I stopped for lunch at a teriyaki place I used to frequent back when I lived out there. I'd forgotten there was a tiny park next to the restaurant; once I noticed that, I figured I ought to take a couple of quick photos and see what I could could come up with about the place. Dwight S. Parr Park (a.k.a. "Dwight S. Parr Woods Natural Area") only comes to 0.63 acres, and the entire park is a stand of old, tall conifer trees, with a short path winding around between them. Taking the trees into account, it's possible the park is actually taller than it is wide.

From what I can tell, the park's named after Dwight S. Parr Jr., former president of Parr Lumber, and son of the company's founder. The missing parts of the story here are a.) How a postage-stamp sized chunk of forest came to be preserved while suburbia sprawled out all around it, and b.) How it came to be named after a lumber and building supply CEO. Spidey sense says there might be an interesting story here, but it happened in the 'burbs so the Oregonian didn't cover it, and Beaverton's Valley Times doesn't seem to have online archives available. Apparently the UO Library in Eugene has the Valley Times on microfilm, but that just seems impossibly inconvenient; I don't even know what year to search for, for one thing. So if you happened to come across this humble blog and can fill in some of the missing parts of the story, feel free to leave a comment below. Thx. Mgmt.

Arch with Oaks

If you live or work in Portland's western suburbs, you've probably driven the Sunset Highway more times than you can count. And at least one of these times, you were probably stuck in traffic next to the giant steel archway next to the eastbound lanes of Sunset, just east of the Cornell/158th exit you probably should have taken to avoid this traffic snarl. If you were really bored, you might have wondered what the deal is with this arch. It's even possible you're stuck in traffic right now and you're googling the arch on your phone. Anyway, today's your lucky day, other than the whole traffic nightmare obviously. This arch is called Arch with Oaks, and it belongs to the surrounding Cornell Oaks Corporate Center business park. It was created in 1986 by Lee Kelly, a prominent local sculptor since time immemorial. There are a lot more works of his around Portland, mostly closer to downtown; I've covered enough of them here that I've added a 'kelly' tag to the posts to keep track of them all. Despite that I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan, for the most part. I'll make an exception for the arch, though. I actually like this one.

The Smithsonian art inventory page for it (the first link) says it's 30' high. Kelly's website says it's either 38' or 48' feet high depending on which page you're looking at. I'm terrible at guessing heights, but the 38' number feels about right.

A September 11th, 1986 Oregonian article about Arch with Oaks explains that the developers opted for a giant arch sculpture instead of a traditional sign as a sign of "quality", to attract a better sort of tenant to their shiny new business park. Plus it was a gift to the community and a symbol for the entire Sunset Corridor. It probably didn't hurt that the arch cost them $100,000 in 1986 dollars, while an ordinary sign was estimated to run around $130,000. Pretty sure everyone loves to talk about quality and aesthetics when it's saving them $30k, roughly the price of a new BMW 3 series back then.

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It took a while to figure out how to visit Arch with Oaks. It sits astride a creek in a open area in the business park, north of Greenbrier Parkway next to the FOX 12 TV studios. I came by on a weekend morning, parked in the studio's visitor parking lot, and took a lightly used walking trail over to the arch. It turns out there's actually a "Private Property, No Trespassing" sign right next to the arch to discourage people from standing under it, I guess, although I didn't notice any taser-happy security guards lurking around while I was there. Your mileage may vary, obviously. (Oh, and there's apparently a geocache somewhere nearby, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Oh, and not to be pedantic here, but most of the trees near the arch are willows, not oaks. There are a couple of oak trees next to the office building on the opposite side of the creek, but they aren't a prominent presence around the arch, so the name seems just a little misleading. Maybe there were more oak trees here before this part of the office park was built out. Sort of like the old cliche about subdivisions being named after what they replaced ("Aspen Grove", "Pacific Vista", that sort of thing).

Griffith Park, Beaverton

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Today's adventure takes us out to the 'burbs, to Beaverton's Griffith Park. You're probably wondering why we're leaving the city and venturing out to the 'burbs, and wondering whether it's the start of an alarming trend. So no, I haven't sold out to the man or anything, or at least not any further; I was merely shopping in the area and happened to stop at a thrift shop across the street from the park just in case they had any vintage camera stuff or old computers or anything (they didn't). The park was across the street, so I figured I'd take a minute and snap couple of photos and then see if I could throw a post together and try to make this part of Beaverton seem halfway interesting. Which remains to be seen.

The park is a sort of irregular oval shape in the center of a suburban office park that includes Beaverton's city hall, across Beaverton-Hillsdale from Fred Meyer. One weekend in late June it hosts the annual Taste of Beaverton festival (which I've been to at least once), and there are concerts every so often, and it seems to be an outdoor lunch spot for office workers when the weather cooperates. I haven't seen it in midwinter, but given the bowl shape of the place it's bound to be a mud pit. It was probably a lake or a marsh at one point, back before anyone -- or at least anyone with power -- cared about wetland protection. The bowl shape also makes the park "problematic" as a possible site for public art, according to the city's Public Art Master Plan, which may explain why there apparently isn't any art there.

I can't find much in the way of contemporary or historical info about the park, unfortunately, not even any hints about who it's named after. This is probably because it's way out in suburbia and therefore mostly off the Oregonian's radar, and so far I haven't come across an online archive of Beaverton's Valley Times newspaper anywhere. So the first mention of the park in the Oregonian is from July 1979. The Tualatin Hills parks district had just purchased the historic Jenkins Estate on Cooper Mountain, and it turns out that the purchase was enabled by redirecting some cash that was originally slated for a fountain in Griffith Park. Which is funny because I was just thinking that the park needed a fountain. Now we know why it didn't get one. So yeah, that's pretty much the only semi-interesting historical anecdote I've discovered so far.

The results of a Google image search are basically unrewarding too; despite specifying "Beaverton" in the search, most of the photos you get back are of the vastly larger and more famous Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Which I guess makes sense. Beaverton's one does make an appearance in an interesting blog post of dusk and nighttime photos from around Washington County. Not sure I'd go so far as to call the photos "esoteric", but someone's making an effort, at least.

Another blog post I ran across mentions that some online maps insist the middle of Griffith Park is a mysterious place called "Beburg". I can actually field that one; "Beburg" is a railroad designation for the tracks around central Beaverton. As far as I know, the name has never been used outside of the railroad industry and the railfan community. If you're into that sort of thing, there are lots of photos around the net, both current and historical. A few examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. The USGS seems to have picked up on the name and decided it's an official 'locale', namely the triangle of land bordered by the rail lines, highway 217, and Beaverton-Hillsdale, of which Griffith Park is roughly the center. I agree this isn't a very colorful origin story. I absolutely agree it'd be a much better story if Griffith Park was the site of an ancient lost city, or maybe a lawless town of the old west, and the very name "Beburg" struck terror in the hearts of the region's citizens. It'd be great if Griffith was a noble sheriff, or knight, or something, and he brought Beburg's infernal tyranny to an end once and for all, and the smoking crater where Beburg once stood is now an idyllic park named in his honor. It would be a great legend, and Washington County's really short on great legends, so feel free to use it if you think your audience will buy it.

Thomas & 53rd

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[Disclaimer: A comment to this post (see below) asserts that basically everything I have to say about this place, both facts and guesses, is flat wrong. If that's true, I guess you could ignore the text and just enjoy the photos, or you could if they were very interesting, which they aren't. Not to dis any of my loyal Gentle Readers -- there's so few of you, I really can't afford it -- but I do think I'm right about the city limits situation, as I'll explain when I get to it.]

A few photos of our fair city's obscure, unnamed park at SW 53rd Ave. & Thomas St., out in the Raleigh Hills area where Portland morphs seamlessly into Beaverton. The park's an empty, grassy field in the midst of a mid-70's uber-suburban subdivision. No sign, no name, no facilities. The key thing to realize here is that most of the park, and most of the surrounding neighborhood, are just outside Portland city limits. I haven't seen a definite answer about this, but my theory is that the city bought the land in the hope they'd be annexing the area soon. For reasons that probably remain buried in yellowed issues of some obscure neighborhood newsletter, the annexation never happened. So, I guess understandably, the city never put in play equipment or otherwise developed the place. Why go to the trouble, after all, if the neighbors won't be paying any city taxes to support the thing?

This is all pure speculation, mind you, as there's next to nothing about the place anywhere on the interwebs. The parks bureau's info page, such as it is, simply mentions that it was acquired in 1980 and totals 2.57 acres. There's also a vegetation survey page for the park, which doesn't tell us much more. And on PortlandMaps, we learn the place is actually two legal parcels, the northern one lying just outside the city limits, and the smaller southern one just inside.

So here's where I try to justify saying the park's partly outside Portland city limits. If you look at those PortlandMaps pages above, there's a section for each parcel titled "Tax Districts". For the northern half of the park, the list looks like this:

101   PORT OF PORTLAND        134   TV FIRE/RESCUE DIST #1 JT
143  METRO                  161  VALLEY VIEW WATER DIST
170  MULTNOMAH COUNTY        170L  MULT CO LIBRARY LOCAL OPT TAX
180  CLEAN WATER SERVICES    198  TRI-MET TRANSPORTATION
304  MULTNOMAH CO ESD        309  PORTLAND COMM COLLEGE
311   PORTLAND SCHOOL DIST #1

And for the southern half, it's different:

101   PORT OF PORTLAND                130   CITY OF PORTLAND
130L  CITY OF PORTLAND CHILDREN LOP  130M  CITY OF PORTLAND PARKS LOP
143  METRO                           170  MULTNOMAH COUNTY
170L  MULT CO LIBRARY LOCAL OPT TAX   171  URBAN RENEWAL PORTLAND
173  URB REN SPECIAL LEVY - PORTLAND 198  TRI-MET TRANSPORTATION
304  MULTNOMAH CO ESD          309  PORTLAND COMM COLLEGE
311  PORTLAND SCHOOL DIST #1

As you can see, only the southern half has entries for "City of Portland" (and "Urban Renewal Special Levy - Portland", and instead of those the northern bit lists "Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue", "Valley View Water District", and "Clean Water Services" (which is the PC, non-icky name for Washington County's sewer system). You'll see the same distinction if you look at details for houses north and south of that line through the park. I would consider this fairly definitive. Also, here's a photo of a little 4th of July parade in the neighborhood, organized by the Tualatin Valley fire district, not the Portland Fire Bureau. The same photo shows up here, on a page primarily about historic buildings in the neighborhood. Apparently there's a sort of huge historic manor house just a couple of blocks from the park here, and I had no clue it existed. Go figure.

For whatever it's worth, this isn't the only case of a Portland city park lying outside city limits. Elk Rock Island is another example, one a bit more interesting than this place.

You can probably tell from these photos that I didn't stay long. I didn't see anything that grabbed my interest. Plus I noticed that the neighborhood seemed to have a lot of rather elderly residents, and I figured that if I hung around too long someone would call the police about the strange young man wandering around the old vacant lot taking pictures.

Given the aging demographics of the area, I imagine many residents are on fixed incomes and would have no interest in joining the city anytime soon. And until that occurs, I imagine nothing's going to change about the park here. That will probably have to wait until a new generation of homeowners has moved in, and there are kids in the neighborhood again. Although most kids would be just as happy to go play in the big vacant lot as they would be with actual play equipment. I know that was the case with me, and I think I turned out ok, basically, more or less...

Sexton Mountain (seriously)

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This is Beaverton's Sexton Mountain Meadows Park, the little park at the top of the hill in the semi-ritzy / wannabe-ritzy Murrayhill area.

The photos aren't real enthralling, despite the altitude. In that part of town, when you go uphill all you see is more Beaverton. Probably if one was to go to the far edge of the big water tank here, one could look down and see even more Beaverton, if one so desired.

So you may have gathered I'm not posting this because I wanted to share some cool photos I took. Nah, the photos are strictly illustrative this time. And I don't have any fascinating historical tidbits to share, unless you think 1991 is ancient history. Which it is, actually, in interweb years. So without further ado, permit me to present a silly story from the ancient USENET days of yore: "The Ballad of Sexton Mountain". Snort. Giggle.

The subdivision mentioned in the story has a website here. Lots of talk about bylaws and CC&R's, but oddly not a word about their persistent signage issues. Their site does have a photo of their entrance sign, in a non-vandalized state no less, but I didn't check whether it's actually there or not...