Vista Bridge

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I haven't done anything with the ongoing bridge project for a while, mostly due to it being winter (even if it's technically spring). I figured I was overdue, then, and I seem to recall there's at least one Gentle Reader out there who actually likes my bridge stuff, believe it or not.

So today's thrilling bridge adventure takes us, well, just over to the West Hills, and the sorta-famous Vista Bridge. Ok, so it's technically called the "Vista Avenue Viaduct", as it carries said avenue over SW Jefferson St., but I still count it as a bridge for somewhat anal and pedantic reasons I'll get to later on. Over time I've learned not to lead off with pedantic crap that nobody except me cares about.

This post has actually been in the works for a while. I dropped by last fall to do the bridge thing, and realized my camera battery was totally drained, so no photos. Then a few days back I stopped by to try the bridge thing again, took a few photos, but ended up with a drained battery again before I had all the shots I wanted. So I charged the thing back up and went back again. In short, many Bothans died to bring you these photos, so I hope this is good enough, as Iʻm running low on Bothans.

Walking the bridge isn't a big deal, and I only mention it because that's part of the ongoing theme. The sidewalks are fine, and there are a couple of bays with benches if you're inclined to stop and enjoy the view. Parking can be a problem, in the unlikely event you're driving to the bridge in order to walk across it and back. And waiting for a gap in traffic so you can cross the street is very mildly annoying. I'm kind of grasping at straws here trying to find something bad to say. Maybe biking across could be sketchy, if it was a rainy night and there were a bunch of aggressive cokehead rich twits in enormous luxury SUVs speeding along while yapping on their mobile phones, too busy daytrading or sending somebody's job to China, to notice you there on your bike, especially if you're being a proper tragically hip Portland cyclist and you're wearing all black, you don't have any lights or reflectors on your bike, you aren't wearing a helmet, your trendy fixie bike has no brakes, and you're riding around town aimlessly after chugging a few PBR's. Under those circumstances, the bridge could be on the dangerous side.

Which sort of brings us to the one thing everyone in town knows about the Vista Bridge. The bridge's common nickname is the "Suicide Bridge" due to its supposed popularity with jumpers. Apparently the stats bear this out, and it isn't just an urban legend. I usually work the phrase "not dying" into the titles of bridge posts, but due to the Vista's reputation I figured it would be a bit tacky this time around. Even I have my limits, believe it or not.

Before anybody goes off on a keep-Portland-weird, home-of-the-world-famous-Suicide-Bridge smugness thing, I ought to point out that most cities of a certain size have a suicide bridge; Seattle has the ginormous Aurora Avenue bridge, for example. If this humble blog had more of a travel budget, and I had more free time, it might be an interesting project to go around profiling the world's "suicide bridges". Although in practice that would probably get depressing rather quickly. And when you told people why you were visiting their fair city, they'd look at you funny and nervously edge away.

Actually I get that reaction a lot, even when I'm not pursuing a ghoulish-yet-dweeby project for the interwebs. Can't imagine why, though.

So I'm not really an expert on the relative merits of various Suicide Bridges, nor do I particularly care to be, but ours does seem as though it's more suited for people who are all gothic or pre-Raphaelite about the process, and who intend to jump for philosophical, aesthetic, ideological, or romantic reasons. People who want to end it all because their hedge fund cratered may want to explore other options.

Around the sightseeing bays, the bridge railing is covered in decorative metal spikes, made of iron and painted green to look like copper. Over the years many of these spikes have been bent over or even broken off. It's easy to imagine that this is the work of generations of distraught jumpers, although garden-variety vandalism is more likely (obviously combined with decades of deferred maintenance). Still, it's kind of an evocative sight.

I'm not sure why it's so popular. (And it really is, at least according to this 1997 DHS study.) It's not that being over land instead of water makes the outcome more certain, really; above a certain height, water is not appreciably softer than land. Maybe it's that one ends up on a busy street instead of in a river, and one is afraid of drowning or something. Or maybe it gets more attention this way; if one took the plunge and nobody noticed, that would kind of defeat the point, wouldn't it? There's an added bonus here, in that one stands a good chance of plummeting onto a test-driven BMW from the nearby dealership. Which certainly makes a statement, of a sort. That's the problem with BMW's -- I'm sure they're excellent cars in a strictly technical sense, but you become the enemy of all things good in the universe if you even consider buying one, and you're practically begging goth-emo failed-poet types to fling themselves through your windshield.

Speaking as a software engineer, which I rarely do, the one thing I do kind of like about the whole suicide thing is that "Vista Bridge == Suicide Bridge" implies "Vista == Suicide", which makes perfect sense if you've ever used Windows Vista. Microsoft even has something they call Vista Bridge, which is some sort of stopgap widget to make Vista and .NET play evilly together.

So can we stop talking about the suicide angle now? Please? Awesome, thanks.

Now let's get pedantic! I think I've mentioned the bridge vs. viaduct issue before, where the difference is whether the structure crosses water or not. If you look down off the bridge, you don't see any water, and you go, oh, wait, I'm on a viaduct. Or maybe you don't. The bridge also has "viaduct" in the official name, so it would seem like it's a settled matter, and I'm being uncharacteristically imprecise in insisting on "bridge". But really I'm not, and there really is water down there somewhere. This is the spot where Jefferson St. becomes Canyon Road (named for obvious reasons), and in this part of the world there's no such thing as a dry canyon. Buried somewhere beneath the roadbed is half-remembered Tanner Creek, which skulks out of the canyon it once carved, turns north, flows directly under PGE Park, and eventually empties into the Willamette somewhere around the old Centennial Mills building. It flows the entire distance deep underground and mostly forgotten. (A post on Platial shows streetcars tumbling into a sinkhole at 18th & Alder that was caused by Tanner Creek -- which was already flowing in a pipe way back in 1904.)

Back when the Pearl District was just a gleam in greedy developers' eyes, there was some discussion about daylighting the lower reaches of Tanner Creek, at least for the stretch where it flows through Tanner Springs Park. As it turned out, the land was too polluted to dig into safely, so daylighting was regretfully dropped.

As I see it, it's not the creek's fault that people shoved it into a culvert. And as modern, eco-pious West Coast types, we really ought to give a nod to the genuine natural landscape now and then. That's my argument, and I'm stickin' to it.

I haven't found a great deal of history about the bridge, but there was a previous bridge here before the current one. The current bridge replaced the earlier Ford St. Bridge, which I understand was a notoriously rickety wooden structure. There's some debate about the origin of the "Ford" in Ford St., some arguing that it honors Henry Ford and the Model T. Others argue the name predates the automobile, and some speculate it refers to fording Tanner Creek. Both of those arguments make way too much sense to actually be true; I suspect the name honors some unremembered minor pioneer or inconsequential real estate baron, this being the West Hills and all. There's an intersection right at the south end of the bridge, and the side street on the west side of Vista is "SW Ford St. Drive", which I guess is a remnant of the old road. Ford St. Drive is gravel most of its length, and it winds around for a surprising distance before dead-ending into a barbed-wire fence near where US 26 goes into the tunnel, at what looks like some kind of utility co. facility -- although that may just be what They want you to think.

Couple of historical images to pass along: An artist's rendering of what the then-proposed bridge would look like; and an old photo of streetcars on the bridge.

Other items from around the interwebs:

• everything2
• Bridge Hunter
• Ragwater, Bitters, and Blue Ruin: "Confusion to the Black-faced Clock!"
• A mention in the 'Fight Club' guy's book about Portland
• Walking Portland
• acycle.org: "Unicorns heart bikes"
FNORDincorporated
• A messageboard thread about the evils of hipsters
• Assorted images: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Alexandra Avenue Bridge

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So today's unusual adventure takes us to an obscure corner of Forest Park to what you might call Portland's own "Bridge to Nowhere". The Alexandra Avenue Bridge is a fairly long and substantial (although narrow) bridge over a deep forested ravine, with a creek somewhere far below. It seems like you've wandered into the back of beyond, although you're actually just a few blocks off NW Thurman St. As you go uphill on Thurman, turn right onto Gordon St., and follow it to where it turns right again and becomes Alexandra Avenue. The bridge is right there. But strangely, Alexandra Avenue dead-ends into Forest Park just a few blocks past the bridge, and doesn't connect to any other streets. The city clearly went to a lot of trouble and expense to build a bridge here, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and basically nobody uses it. So the obvious question is "Why?"






I haven't been able to find a definitive answer, but I have a couple of competing theories:

1. The bridge was supposed to spur residential development further north, and it just sort of didn't work out. Forest Park wasn't created until the late 1940s, and prior to that the whole area was platted out for more upscale West Hills houses stretching off to the horizon. Leif Erickson Drive was supposed to be the main drag through the future ritzy suburb, but there were problems with mudslides, and then the Depression came along, and eventually the city ended up with all the land due to unpaid property taxes. The bridge was built in 1922, which would be the right timeframe for this.
2. It's really more of a "Bridge to Almost Nowhere". There are two things at the far end of the bridge, and perhaps the bridge was always intended just for them. There's a huge Water Bureau tank on the far side, and if you look at the photos above you can see what looks like a large water main under the deck of the bridge. So possibly the water's the main thing, so to speak, and they just figured, hey, if we're building a bridge we might as well let cars use it too. So that's one possibility.

The second thing on the far side of the bridge is the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, which they describe as:

The Salvation Army White Shield Center has been located in Northwest Portland since 1917. The center began as a maternity home and hospital. We continue to serve the needs of pregnant and parenting clients between the ages of 12 and 18 but have added an additional program to serve the needs of adolescent girls who need a safe, secure, and nurturing environment. Clients are referred to the programs by state social service agencies or the juvenile justice system.

The term "maternity home and hospital" in this case meant it was the place where young girls who'd "gotten in trouble" would go to live for a few months until the baby was born and given up for adoption. The whole idea was to be quiet and discreet about it, given the extreme social stigma attached to unwed mothers back then. There'd be the usual cover story about the girl going off to visit Aunt Edna for a few months, and afterward everyone would act -- outwardly -- as if nothing had happened, and society could go on pretending this sort of thing didn't happen, at least not in our fair city. It was a very different time, I'll say that, all about keeping up appearances and "respectability" and false facades. I suppose at the time a "maternity home and hospital" was a way to treat the issue compassionately, while also helping to hide it, so that society could go on not facing facts as they really are.

So because of all that, you don't really want your maternity home to be located on a busy neighborhood street, with nosy neighbors and Model T's whizzing by constantly. If the dates are right, the center was here first, and then the bridge a few years later. So it's possible the bridge was built to serve this place, and Alexandra Avenue was never meant to extend any further than it does.

While researching, I came across the White Shield Project, a site dedicated to collecting memories and accounts about life at White Shield over the years. Here's a forum thread on the same topic, with a few responses discussing the place.

A bit more info via the Oregonian: November 2006 article, and this rather sad Margie Boule story from September '03.



So, in short, I still don't know why the bridge is here. At least I can try to explain how I came across the bridge. If you've read any of my recent posts here, you might have noticed I've been doing a local bridge thing for a couple of months now, on and off. It seems there are a couple of sites on the net that are just big databases of bridges and other structures from around the world. So naturally once I was done looking at the page for the McLoughlin Bridge, or whichever one took me there, I thought, hey, let's see the list of what they've got for the Portland area. From there, went (as I tend to do) hey, I've never heard of that one, what's the deal there? Looked at the photos on the site, decided it looked interesting. Then found it on Google Maps and figured it was reasonably nearby. And thus, a new TODO item was born.



So here are the bridge pages at Structurae, Bridgehunter, and Brueckenweb. You might notice that two of the three sites are out of Germany, for some reason. Also, they all seem to be working off the same master list. The bridge shows up almost nowhere else on the interwebs, but it does show up on the City Bridge Inventory, where we learn it has a "sufficiency rating" of 51.70 out of 100. Which is not great by any means, and it may rank as high as it does because it gets almost no traffic. One component of the sufficiency rating is whether the bridge has enough capacity to handle current & projected vehicle traffic. And on that count, at least, it seems to suffice quite well. The inventory also describes the bridge as in "POOR" condition, and also calls it "Functionally Obsolete" (along with a lot of other bridges in town). The bridge also appears on this list of bridges eligible for repair or replacement. In which we learn that rehab costs were estimated at ~$900k, compared to ~$1.2M to replace the bridge, so rehab it probably is, whenever they get around to it. We also learn that the stream it crosses is simply called "Unnamed Creek". One other little bit of trivia to pass along: According to PortlandMaps, if a neighborhood had sprung up around the bridge, it would have been known as "Blythswood", at least according to the tax rolls (example). If history had turned out a little differently, if the Depression hadn't come along, and possibly if there hadn't been a La Niña year at just the wrong time, (with the accompanying heavy rains and mudslides), right now we might be muttering and shaking our fists at the rich twits up in Blythswood, careening around the narrow streets in their monstrous luxury SUVs. Most likely there would be a "Friends of the Alexandra Avenue Bridge" organization, with big gala fundraisers every so often, and there'd be nature walks and assorted family-friendly activities. The creek below would have a name, and there'd be all sorts of public handwringing about watersheds and native fish species. I can safely say all this based on how the locals get worked up over Tryon Creek and Balch Creek, further south. In any case, as always I've got a few more photos in my Flickr photoset about the place. Updated 9/09: We have linkage from here, on a wiki page about White Shield. I haven't read much of the site, but the person/group/organization behind it appears to be very skeptical about teen programs such as this.