Community Garden Fence, McCoy Park

Ok, next up on our temporarily(?)-revived public art thing, here are some photos of the Community Garden Fence at McCoy Park, created by artist Suzanne Lee. The brief RACC description:

The New Community Garden Fence panels mark each of the four entries to the garden and represent different areas of the world. The images of food and plants along with their quotations offer visual and cultural references which reflect both the similarities and differences between cultures.

As you might've guessed, this is another post that sat around as a forgotten draft since 2014, shortly after I took the photos here. So the standard disclaimer applies: Old photos mean it may or may not look like this now, your mileage may vary, no refunds. The last photo in the set is from a distance to show more of the fence in context, which is the only photo I took of the garden itself. Which is a little odd since I had an occasional "take photos of community gardens" project going at the time, but I always tend to do this, going full tunnel vision on one particular topic for a while and not noticing the mural I walked past on my way to look at an obscure bridge, and a month later not noticing an obscure bridge on my way to an especially interesting waterfall, or not attending to the growing stack of real life to-do items that pile up while chasing this stuff. I do really enjoy chasing rabbit holes all the way down, but I can't pretend there isn't a downside to being like this.

This was originally supposed to be the third of four public art posts set in or near the same park; the fourth would have been about Ancestor Tree, a very large conceptual art thing that was meant to be a centerpiece of the park. It was a chunk of a huge London plane tree that had been cut down during the New Columbia rebuild, trimmed and flipped upside down so it looked like a tree stump balancing on the tips of its roots. I was not a big fan of it based on photos I'd seen, and snarking about it might have been fun. But apparently the ex-tree was no match for the elements in its new form, and it began to rot not long after installation. So the city removed it in 2012, before I got around to stopping by for photos. The article talks about maybe finding some sort of replacement art to take its place, but I gather this never happened and the site remains an open grassy field instead, which is a perfectly fine thing to have in a city park.

The article doesn't say what happened to the semi-rotten art afterward. They probably just woodchipped it, but sometimes it's easier, from a bureaucratic standpoint, to just ship things off to an obscure warehouse to be forgotten in long-term storage, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So who knows. It would be weird and unsettling to run across it lurking in a shadowy corner of a vast, dimly lit warehouse, but I guess that's still better than being stuck with a warehouse full of unwanted Confederate statues like a lot of cities in this country. So there's that, I guess.

Johns Community Garden

Next up are a few photos of the Johns Community Garden in St. Johns at N. Edison St. & John Ave. A lot of community garden photos that show up here are taken in the off season and are kind of unattractive for that. So the good news is that these were taken in August, the bad is that they were last August and this has been sitting in drafts all this time, unposted. But that's sort of part for the course these days.

Anyway, on a related note that only I really care about, this is also the latest installment of one of this humble blog's more dubious projects: At one point I ran across a cryptic list of really obscure places in the city's online archives, and set to tracking them down. This was listed incorrectly as "John Garden", so it took quite a long time to figure out what that referred to. So, mission accomplished on yet another one of these places, unless maybe I ID'd it wrong.

Blair Community Garden

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's Blair Community Garden, near SE 33rd & Stark. It's a fairly small garden, and it's a little unusual in that the city doesn't actually own it, even though it's part of the city's garden program. The land belongs to the assisted living facility next door, and when it changed hands in 2005 the garden went on hiatus for five years. Eventually the local neighborhood association managed to cut a deal with the facility's new corporate owners; among other things, some of the garden plots are now reserved for facility residents, which I suppose is only fair. The garden was revived in late 2010, I suppose just in time to plant bulbs for spring 2011, or anything else that needs to go in the ground early. (I generally don't grow plants from seeds, so I'm a little hazy on planting times for most things.)

When I see mentions of "new corporate owners", for me it conjures up images of community gardens being bulldozed, maybe in favor of a monocrop of Monsanto's new carnivorous franken-tobacco, and neighborhood pets disappearing when they wander too close, and expensive lawyers in expensive suits, and whistleblowers "vanishing", and an uncanny glow at night, followed by desperate aerial spraying, and the National Guard coming in with flamethrowers, and finally a massive coverup with City Hall's full support. Luckily this hasn't happened so far, unless maybe they have a really excellent professional-grade coverup in place.

Front & Curry Community Garden

Here are a few off-season photos of the Front & Curry Community Garden, at... ok, the address is actually Curry St. and Naito Parkway since this part of Front Avenue was renamed in 1996. The city hasn't gotten around to renaming the garden itself yet, for whatever reason. Anyway, I realize gardens aren't that photogenic in mid-January, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, but I happened to be in the neighborhood. I was fetching a pizza from Caro Amico nearby, if you must know. I guess it's mildly ironic to take photos of the neighborhood vegetable garden while loading up on pepperoni and cheese, and then crashing on the sofa to watch the Olympics.

The city parks website says the land here was acquired in 1952, but the city's community garden program didn't officially begin until the 1970s with the first one at Sewallcrest Park in SE Portland. So I'm not really sure what was here in the intervening time. If I had to guess, I'd guess it was a vacant lot left over from the Front Ave. widening circa 1940, and the city ended up with it later but never did anything with it until hippies arrived and wanted to go back to the land without leaving the big city. I'm speculating here because the historical record (by which I mean the Oregonian database) doesn't have a lot to say about the area.

The few historical items I've found, none of any particular consequence:

• The 1892 Mayor's Message mentions there was a fire hydrant here back then, at a time when city fire hydrants were still something of a novelty.
• Rosie the Riveter got a DUI here in March 1943.
• An October 1946 DUI with a twist: The offender was arrested here while driving home after her husband had been arrested for a separate DUI incident a few blocks north at First & Sheridan.
• An ugly land use conflict in August 1958: A landowner right around here was trying to appeal the denial of a zoning change, which led her realtor representative to go off on a two hour angry conspiracy-laden rant in front of the city council. Councillors stated they generally favored the landowner's position but were quite put off by her representative's manner. I haven't found a follow up article stating what the council eventually decided, though all the buildings here look heavily pre-1958 so I would guess the proposal didn't go through.
• The one and only mention of the garden, in a March 1979 article about community garden sites. It's just describes as an unnamed lot at SW Front & Curry, so I'm guessing it was new at the time.

Colonel Summers Park expedition

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A photoset from Portland's Colonel Summers Park & Community Garden, at SE 17th & Taylor. I've gotten into the habit of saying I don't bother with neighborhood parks like this, where most of the park is devoted to ball fields and play equipment. But the community garden is fairly photogenic, and there's a little history to pass along, so I'm going to make yet another exception, like I did for Irving and Sewallcrest Parks earlier. Before we get to the history bit, some info about the park's standard-issue features, since those are what almost all visitors who aren't me come here for. The park includes basketball and tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a covered picnic area. It formerly offered a wading pool for kids, but like the ones in other parks around town it was permanently closed in 2010 due to state health regulations. There's a neighborhood campaign to build a splash pad to replace the old pool.

Because this is the middle of a very hip part of town, it also attracts things like adult dodgeball, bike polo, and assorted as-seen-in-Portlandia activities. Years ago, coworkers and I used to come here on Friday afternoons and hit a volleyball around, which is one sorta-sport that hipsters still haven't discovered somehow. It was fun, but you had to watch out because dog owners weren't always that meticulous about cleaning up after their pets, and there was always a chance of finding a little grenade lurking in the grass if you weren't careful. Ah, memories.

As this is inner SE Portland, the park has also hosted Food Not Bombs and Occupy Portland events in recent years.

The southwest corner of the park contains a small memorial to the park's namesake, Col. Owen Summers. He was widely regarded as the "Father of the Oregon National Guard" (even our National Guard says so), and he was best known for his service with the 2nd Oregon Volunteers in the Spanish-American War. The same obscure conflict memorialized by two memorials in Lownsdale Square, another in Waterfront Park, yet another in Lone Fir Cemetery (though it's primarily a Civil War memorial), and probably others elsewhere. That war was an ugly episode in our national history, and it's kind of embarrassing that Portland built monuments to it all over town.

Summers himself was said to be a decent guy, and the Oregon volunteers came home before the guerrilla war in the Philippines got going in earnest. Still, I'd be perfectly happy with renaming the place back to "Belmont Park", which is what it was called until renamed in 1938 in a fit of patriotic fervor, for the war's 40th anniversary. The park was rededicated on September 13th, 1938, as part of the city's war anniversary festivities. The Battleship Oregon opened at its "permanent" waterfront home the same day. Although that turned out to be far from permanent, thanks in large part to the day's top news story, the infamous Munich Agreement that enabled Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The juxtaposition of the two stories is kind of mind-boggling. In any case, page 7 of the paper was a full page of Spanish War festivities photos, including one showing the dedication of the Summers memorial plaque. A page 5 story covered the dedication in more detail. As far as I can determine, Summers had no connection to this particular spot, and it's not clear why the city selected this park to name after him rather than one of the others around town.

I can't tell you a lot about the memorial plaque itself. The inscription says it was created by someone named Daniel Powell, but I can't find much in the way of info about him. The Smithsonian art inventory mentions one work by someone named Daniel Powell, located at Bok Gardens in Lake Wales, FL, co-credited with 15 other artists. I don't know if it's him, but the dates are potentially correct. A history page for the Oregon Society of Artists lists him as the organization's president from 1942-44, and describes him as "High school teacher. Sculptor, sketch artist." An April 14th, 1945 Oregonian article on the Society's Spring Art Show mentions him:

This year the society, in addition to showing paintings, drawings, and small sculptures, will exhibit two sculptures of heroic size, one of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and one of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, completed in the Sabin high school art classes under the direction of Daniel Powell, society member who is art instructor at that school.

I haven't found any record of what happened to these student-built heroic sculptures after the art show. "Sabin High School" was a short-lived boys' alternative high school program based at Sabin Elementary School, 1939-1947, which was formerly part of Thomas A. Edison High School.

Sewallcrest Park expedition

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I was rummaging through some old photos recently and realized I had a few from SE Portland's Sewallcrest Park, particularly of the community garden there. Like Irving Park, it's the sort of neighborhood park I usually don't bother with here: It has ball fields, a playground, an off-leash dog area, and so forth, and it's perfectly nice and pleasant and a great thing to have in one's neighborhood, but as far as I know there isn't anything particularly unique about it versus all the other neighborhood ball field/playground/dog parks around town.

I do have a few historical tidbits to pass along, at least. Nothing quite so exciting as Irving Park's role in early auto racing history, but hey. The land purchase for the park was announced in a brief blurb on December 8th, 1940:

32 Lots Bought In Sewall Crest

For park purposes, the city of Portland last week acquired from Edward C. Sewall 32 lots situated in Sewall Crest.

The properties include 22 lots between SE 31st and 32nd avenues and ten lots east of 32nd, all between SE Market and Harrison streets.

So first, a bit about who the park is named for. Edward C. Sewall (assuming I have the right one) was born and raised in Portland, and was head of the otorhinolaryngology (i.e. ear, nose and throat) department and a prominent researcher at Stanford Medical School until his 1940 retirement. His 1957 obit doesn't mention anything about Sewall Crest, so I'm not absolutely sure it's him. But his is not a very common name, and a doctor investing in a little real estate on the side would not be exactly surprising.

It seems Sewall was prominent enough that the there's a photo of him in the National Institutes of Health's "Images from the History of Medicine" archives. A few hits come up for various works of his without doing a medical literature search: He wrote a 1909 favorable book review of the new 5th edition of Politzer on the Ear, a then-standard work by the founder of modern ear medicine. A 1915 Journal of the American Medical Association mentions Sewall presenting a paper on surgery of the pituitary gland via the nose, which was apparently a hot new cutting-edge technique at the time, and modern variations on the approach are still common today. I'm sure I could dig up a lot more if I cared to try searching medical literature, but that would probably take this blog post too far afield. The Sewalls don't appear to have lived in Portland at any point after he joined Stanford, but they showed up regularly over several decades in the Oregonian's society pages when visiting friends and family here. As of 2004, there was an endowed Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Otorhinolaryngology position at Stanford Medical School.

In any case, apparently "Sewall Crest" (two words) was the name of the surrounding housing development. The park, and the nearby elementary school that was built later, have seemingly always been called "Sewallcrest", one word. Beats me why.

The park showed up in the Oregonian roughly once or twice per decade in the years after its creation. In October 1950, an article titled "City Planning Future Parks" gave a laundry list of proposed improvements, funded by a parks levy passed the previous year. The article stated that "no significant additional development" was expected in the coming year for several playgrounds around the city, including the Sewallcrest one. It's not clear from the article exactly what amenities the park had at that point.

Later, in May 1961, a citizen ballot initiative was announced which would have built several new community swimming pools around the city, including one proposed for Sewallcrest Park. The chief petitioner on the proposal just so happened to work for a contracting firm that, wait for it, built swimming pools. Which is truly an amazing coincidence, if you think about it. There seems to have been no further mention of the proposal in the paper, so it's not clear if it even made the ballot. Obviously it didn't pass since there's no such thing as a Sewallcrest Community Pool. One of the other proposed pool sites was SW Portland's Gabriel Park, which finally got a pool and fancy community center in 1999, thanks to a 1994 ballot measure.

The park expanded slightly in 1971, with the purchase of another vacant lot, this time thanks to an "open spaces" grant from the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development. In 1974 the Open Spaces program was consolidated into the present-day Community Development Block Grant program. Apparently federal HUD money can still be spent on this sort of project; it's just that there's far less money available than there was in 1971.

The community garden arrived in 1972, and apparently was the first one in the city. A young Portland Community College employee had seen something similar in England, and worked to, uh, transplant the idea here, just when the idea of living off the land and growing one's own food had become fashionable again. By 1979, there was already a long waiting list to get a community garden plot. In the present day, I've heard stories of people waiting over a decade for plots in certain parks to become available.

sunflowers, colonel summers park

Water & Gibbs Community Garden

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A couple of photos of the Lair Hill neighborhood's Water & Gibbs Community Garden, one of the Parks & Rec Bureau's many community gardens around Portland. I didn't actually wander in to take any closer photos; community gardens are public property and all, but it feels like wandering in to take photos of other people's tomatoes is just not the done thing, etiquette-wise. It just seems sort of paparazzi-like, somehow.

In any case, if you're interested in having your own community garden plot, you can get on the city's waiting list here. Although be advised there's a huge demand for garden plots, and there's usually a wait of several years before one becomes available.