Dans la Nuit (Lovers)

Semi-fresh on the heels of Floating Figure (last month's rather stale public art post), here are a few photos of Dans la Nuit (Lovers), also by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise. It used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, on the right side of the main entrance, across from Floating Figure, having replaced Auguste Maillol's La Montagne around 2014 in conjunction with a temporary Lachaise exhibit. The two sculptures quietly went off exhibit or maybe left town sometime in 2020-21 while everyone was focused on the pandemic, and protesters were busy toppling statues of various dead presidents right next door in the South Park Blocks.

This post and its companion are another reminder that this humble blog does not aspire to be anyone's hub for breaking news: I took most of these photos back around 2014, shortly after the big Maillol-Lachaise swap-out, before the little nameplates were installed. Obviously I couldn't hit the big orange Publish button at that point, since I didn't actually know anything about the newly arrived art, so I saved a couple of draft posts with placeholder titles and moved on. A year or so later I was in the area and noticed the nameplates and duly took photos of them, but by then I'd moved on to other projects and just left it at that: I knew the photos were saved somewhere in either iPhoto or Flickr and I could probably find them again if I was in the mood to finish these posts, and I could always go back and take new photos if I genuinely couldn't find the older ones. Meanwhile fresh sedimentary layers of draft posts kept accumulating on top of this leftover art stuff from 2014, and eventually the art (and the nameplates) weren't there anymore, and Google was (as usual) pretty useless without already knowing the titles, or at minimum the artist. Then a few months ago I stumbled across the 'lost' nameplate photos during a brief, yet tedious, photo-organizing bender and remembered I'd been looking for them. So I added those photos to the appropriate photosets, updated everything with the actual names, did the usual internet research, even got some words in place... and then saved the posts as updated drafts, to languish for a few more months. Because, as it generally is with these things, taking the photos and researching and writing is ninety percent of the work, while editing is the second ninety percent of the work.

Floating Figure

Next up we've got a few photos of Floating Figure, a sculpture by French-American artist Gaston Lachaise that used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, to the left of the main entrance. (Another Lachaise, Dans le Nuit (Lovers), sat on the right side of the entrance.) It replaced Auguste Maillol's La Riviere sometime around 2013-2014, and went off exhibit sometime during the recent pandemic; Floating Figure is clearly visible on Google Street View imagery dated June 2019, and absent in Microsoft's Bing Streetside View dated September 2021, so that gives us a rough time window for when they were removed.

What I don't know is whether the removal was pre-planned, or happened because of the recent bout of civic iconoclasm that resulted in toppling the dead president statues along the Park Blocks and elsewhere around town, as well as Harvey Scott on Mt. Tabor, the gun-n-bible-totin' pioneers in Chapman Square, and even the Thompson Elk that used to be in the middle of SW Main St. So maybe the museum figured they'd be targeted eventually, once the supply of slaveholding aristocrats and other canceled white guys ran out. Which, I dunno, I don't recall that anyone was toppling statues over cis- and hetero-normativity or excessive Pepe-le-Peu Frenchness at the time, but who knows.

Graffiti, SE 8th & Woodward

This photoset is just some graffiti on a midcentury warehouse in industrial SE Portland. It's not part of a wider project, and it also isn't social commentary about anything at all. I just happened to notice it when I was in the right mood and liked the combination of the aggregate texture with the dark grey glossy paint (probably over previous graffiti) and then the purple and hot pink graffiti layered on top of that, and the fact that it got this way thru a completely adversarial series of events. I don't think anyone involved was going for a "look", including whoever added the latest color bits, which are strictly low-end, so-and-so-was-here stuff.

If I've sold you on the look, or at least the idea of it, and you want to go see for yourself, or maybe you think it would appeal to anonymous art collectors and money launderers in Zurich or Dubai, and you're about to send in your jackhammer goon squad, er, street art extraction team, you're probably out of luck. I took these photos months ago and (although I haven't gone back to check) it just stands to reason that it's been painted over at least once since then, with who knows what. And (as far as I know) the technology doesn't exist yet to pick apart all the paint layers to be framed and sold separately, as incredibly lucrative as that would be.

At that point my brain went off on a tangent and dreamed up a Next Generation episode on that theme, and I don't have any more material for this post, so I might as well tell you what it is. Ok, so the Enterprise shows up at the planet of the week, which has two long-warring continents. At one point centuries ago the forces of continent A captured a priceless painting belonging to continent B, and a completely different but equally priceless masterpiece was then painted on top of the original out of pure spite, and it's been a major bone of contention ever since. Picard volunteers to have Geordi separate the two paintings with the transporter, both completely unharmed, which is obviously very delicate work and might involve remodulating the phase inverters or some such. Continent A's national museum curator (a very aggravating person) reluctantly agrees, and it seems to go well at first, but right at the end a transporter accident turns both paintings to piles of dust, or so it appears. A major diplomatic incident ensues, and the locals arrest Geordi or maybe Picard, and a renewed global war looms. Closer investigation reveals a second transporter beam, traced to offworld art thieves in league with the curator, and the crew has to perform an even trickier transporter thing to get both paintings back unharmed, like somehow beaming them out of a sealed cargo hold on a cloaked ship at warp 8, swapping them out for other paintings of exactly equal mass without the subterfuge being detected. Maybe a quick Raiders of the Lost Ark in-joke happens at this point, seeing as they're both Paramount franchises. The crew pulls it off, the thieves' ship is last seen entering Orion Syndicate territory, still unaware of the swap, and everyone else lives happily ever. Right at the end we learn the replacements were a velvet Elvis and a painting of dogs playing poker, both from Riker's personal collection.

Lotus Cafe Mural

Continuing the theme from the previous post, here's another long-gone Portland mural. This time around it's the one on the back of the Lotus Cafe building, which was demolished in 2018 to make way for yet another generic steel-and-glass (and thus non-mural-able) hotel tower, a late entry in the city's inexplicable late-2010s hotel bubble. The cafe itself closed in 2016 after 92 often-sketchy years in business. It was, believe it or not, a popular and trendy dance club when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, despite its location amid government office blocks, far from any other nightlife options. Eventually the place settled down to being a kinda-mundane after-work happy hour spot, popular among people who had settled down into kinda-mundane office jobs nearby, present company included. In fact the photos in this post were taken from my office at the time, looking down at the doomed mural a few days before the rest of the Lotus building came down. Most likely I had fresh coffee with me and had to set it down to take these photos, and it's reasonably likely that I then forgot my coffee and walked back to my cubicle without it. At that point, still needing caffeine, I probably would have made a second, successful coffee run to the break room. Eventually I would have remembered my misplaced coffee and retrieved it, and (if it hadn't been forgotten overnight) possibly checked whether it was still drinkable. Because, after all, it was quite a long walk from my desk to the break room and back, and it's not as if coffee turns into worthless decaf as it gets cold. And this is the point where I sigh loudly and admit I sometimes miss working in an office with other people in it, in case you were wondering how year 2 of the pandemic is going these days.

Google Maps now labels the former Lotus site as the "SW 3rd and Salmon Tower", with an image that appears to be a CGI architectural rendering, not a photo. Somewhat embarrassingly, I do not actually know whether the depicted building currently exists outside of AutoCAD (or whatever architects use these days). I'm sure I've walked past the site sometime within the last six months, and I like to think I would have noticed a brand new 20-story hotel, but I have no recollection of seeing one. So it's possible they haven't gotten around to building it yet, and maybe they never will. On the other hand, the building in that rendering is remarkably boring even by circa-2021 standards, so it's also possible the building is there and I've even seen it in person, but it sort of fades into the background immediately without really registering. I am, in fact, so bored just looking at it that I can't muster any enthusiasm to go for a quick 15 minute walk and double check, though I absolutely agree that would be the responsible thing to do. If it's there, most likely it would just fade into the background again without being noticed, and I would come home still not knowing whether it exists, having been rained on for my trouble, and I'm annoyed just thinking about it.

The old Lotus merited a few pages in Jeff Dwyer's Ghost Hunter's Guide to Portland and the Oregon Coast published in 2015 right around the pop-cultural peaks of both national Portland-mania and of ghost-hunting reality shows. As the story goes, the building's cellar was home to some sort of angry male evil spirit, still nursing a grudge over whatever happened to him back in the Shanghai tunnel era. I have to admit I'm not really a ghost expert, so I have no idea what happens when you tear down an old haunted building and replace it with an utterly sterile new one. Does that free the ghosts or drive them away somehow? Or does a new building just make them even angrier, like the thing in Poltergeist where greedy developers only moved the headstones? I kind of suspect the latter, but again this is not really my bailiwick. So, as always, feel free to chime in down in the comments if you can field this one.

a long-gone mural @ ne 15th & burnside

So a fun thing about losing track of old draft blog posts is that occasionally the subject of the post no longer exists when I circle back to the post again. This happens a lot with murals in Portland; other than a few city-owned ones, there's no expectation they'll stick around for the long term, and usually no budget to touch them up as they age. Some fade away, while others fall prey to vandals, developers, or others located somewhere along the vandal/developer spectrum. Then there are a few spots around town where every so often they just have someone come in and paint a new and different mural over the current one, which is what happened here. Where "here" means one side of the Columbia Art & Drafting Supply building, at NE 15th & Burnside. So the one shown here was painted in 2013 by Portland artist Ashley Montague and was apparently just called "Columbia art mural". And, well, that's all I can really tell you about it, to be honest.

Montague painted a second mural on the same building a few months later that went by "Visual Guardians", which drew a bit more attention at the time, maybe because of the large tiger. It featured in a 2014 r/Portland Reddit thread that in turn links to an Imgur photo of it being painted in late 2013. I somehow got the idea it was called "Beastmaster", thanks to someone else's Flickr photos that I ran across, and did a post about it under that name. So it's about a long-gone mural, under the wrong name, and the embedded "Beastmaster" (1982) movie trailer I included due to the wrong name is now a dead link. Which -- if nothing else -- is an impressive amount of brokenness and wrongness for such a brief post.

A comment on the "Beastmaster" post says the mural had been replaced sometime before November 2016, while current (as of right now) Street View imagery is dated June 2019 and shows what the building's 3 mural spots looked like at that point. If they're on something like a 3 year rotation, they may have cycled through up to 3 new designs since I took the photos here. Which is fine, of course; I'm just mentioning this in case anyone still thinks this little website here is some sort of slick, professional breaking news and current events operation. This may be hard to believe, but we (as in, I) don't even have a single news helicopter. Strange but true.

Arts Base murals

Here's are a few photos of the Arts Base murals on a former upholstery store at N. Williams Ave. & Wygant, as seen back in December 2014 when I took these photos and promptly forgot about them in the Drafts folder. A 2011 Portland Street Art piece explains that a group of artists & local residents rented the abandoned store, covered the outside in murals, and converted the inside to studio space. City Hall, on its usual quest to seek and destroy all unpermitted fun, declared the murals to be graffiti and ordered them painted over. Eventually the city relented somewhat and agreed the murals could stay, but the artists & their studios in the building had to go, because zoning. So the end result was a brightly painted and now re-abandoned building, at least as of December 2014 when I stopped by. Through the magic of Google Street View, I see that the same murals were still there in November 2015, but by June 2016 they'd been replaced by a much more sedate -- even tasteful -- yellow and grey geometric pattern. I can't help but think the swanky new townhouses across the street had something to do with the murals being toned down.

ne 23rd & alberta mural

This mural was on the side of a building at NE 23rd & Alberta just over a year ago. It was created by artist Pablo Garcia, who also did the elephant mural that replaced it, which I don't have photos of, as well as the rose design on the front of the building, which you'll see in the next post.

bird sculpture, 1st ave.

Here's another item to file under the "gone" tag. Until recently, the big office complex at SW 1st & Market was home to the Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance firm, and the building's main lobby featured this sculpture of a flock of birds over the front desk. I noticed it while walking past the building, and immediately figured it was a Tom Hardy sculpture, since it looks very much like a smaller version of his large flock of birds at Lloyd Center. I don't have actual confirmation of this, but his style is pretty distinctive. You could see the resemblance comparing the photos, if my photos of this one were better. Unfortunately I won't be able to get better photos; the lobby's been renovated since I took these and the sculpture's no longer there.

Old Wives Tales mural

The next stop on the mural tour is the former Old Wives Tales restaurant at SE. 13th & Burnside, which had a nice painting of Mt. Hood over the front door. The restaurant closed about a year ago when the building was sold to rapacious apartment developers. I haven't checked back recently but I'm told the old building has already been demolished, so I'm applying the "gone" tag to this post. Given the current state of the Portland real estate market, I'm going to be using the "gone" tag a lot going forward.

Geometric Windmill

This is going to be a somewhat unusual art post. Geometric Windmill is a sculpture that sat in Lake Oswego's Millennium Plaza Park back in 2007. I was relatively new at blogging back then and neglected to get a photo showing the name of the thing, so the photos sat around unused in iPhoto for aeons. Well, internet aeons, but you get the idea. So I dug the photos out some time last year and started digging around looking for a name. Mostly, I admit, because it seemed like an interesting and non-trivial internet search problem to work on. I actually ended up doing some Google image search, looking for anything similar to my photos here, and/or any art from Lake Oswego taken during the right time period. This eventually led me to an old city arts page with a little info on it, crucially giving the name and artist. It's by Minnesota sculptor Tom Brewitz, who specializes in kinetic art like this. A page on his website includes a video of Geometric Windmill doing its thing (though note that it's a 14mb QuickTime download, not just something you can watch on YouTube). The sculpture has long since left Lake Oswego. At one point it was included in the Port of San Diego's Urban Trees 3, a rotating exhibition along the San Diego waterfront. More recently, the city of Mount Dora, Florida purchased it around 2013 or so and installed it to spruce up the city's downtown. So that's the story. I suppose it's not really much of a story, and I realize probably nobody besides me cares at all, but The Case of the Geometric Windmill was a longstanding (albeit minor) mystery here at this humble blog, and I'm a little pleased to have finally sorted it out.

Kiosk Kiosk Kiosk

Back in March of this year, I was walking past downtown Portland's tiny & neglected Ankeny Park when I noticed a big black plywood cube occupying the middle of the square, in front of the old fountain. It was obviously some sort of art whatzit, so I took a few photos and hit the interwebs to figure out what I was looking at. There were even free brochures in a box next to the cube, so I grabbed one of those too.

I was all ready to roll with an art post. I was going to brag about how I was on top of current events for a change. I'd figured out it was a temporary installation as part of this year's Portland Biennial, a big contemporary art event organized by Disjecta. I discovered it was called Kiosk Kiosk Kiosk and had a twin in Jamison Square. I found Twitter and Instagram photos of it. But then I dug into what the thing was supposed to be about, and the post quickly went on the backest of back burners. The art's been gone for months now, and I'm only now getting around to posting about it at the end of the year, as I'm cleaning out my Drafts folder.

You might notice the sides of the cube have words cut into them. These are brief quotes from a gentleman named John Zerzan, who advocates for a political philosophy called "anarcho-primitivism". The idea, I gather, is that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were an unstructured, leaderless utopia, and humanity must return to this primal utopian state. Getting there involves abolishing modern technology, science, medicine, agriculture, domestic animals, logic, mathematics, art, even symbolic thought. I am not making this up. I am not sure where they stand on abandoning bipedalism and going about on all fours. As a data point, Zerzan used to be buddies with Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, but they had a falling out and Kaczynski now calls Zerzan crazy. How this got into the local Biennial is anyone's guess.

The observant viewer will quickly notice that the kiosks are made of plywood (an industrial product), painted with spray paint (another industrial product), and presumably the words themselves were cut with a power tool of some sort. The pieces all fit together because they were measured (i.e. math was involved). These pieces were created elsewhere and presumably moved here with the help of technology of some sort -- even bikes and horses count as verboten modern technology if you're taking anarcho-primitivism seriously, as I understand it. The kiosks' existence was announced on the internet, which involved technology last time I checked. And of course they're art, and are all about symbolic thought & communication. They're literally covered in words. So the charitable course would be to assume this was was intentional and the art is an ironic statement about hypocrisy and political art, something along those lines. I'd call it reasonably clever work in that case, I mean, it got me annoyed enough to rant about it, which almost nothing does. Unfortunately I haven't seen any indication that that's actually true, though; as far as I can tell, the kiosks were all about true believers proselytizing in an especially ill-conceived way. Which is disappointing. Or maybe the ambiguity is intentional and part of the art too. I have no idea.

You can probably tell already that primitivism -- anarcho- or otherwise -- holds very little interest to me as an ideology. Software engineering is my day job. It interests me, and it's what I'm good at. I'm... skeptical that I would be better off junking it all and running around in a loincloth trying to spear a moose or something. And frankly the whole concept strikes me as yet another kooky idea from a bearded old white man who wants to play Old Testament prophet. It's the oldest and most tiresome schtick in the book. Apocalyptic vision of a hopeless future: Check. Ascetic hairshirt ideas in response, rending of garments, gnashing of teeth, ashes, sackcloth, etcetera: Check. Legions of adoring acolytes, who (presumably) will be spared the coming doom: Check. I yawn just reciting the checklist. This is far from the only contemporary example, obviously. See also the Dark Mountain Project, Edenhope, and the US Revolutionary Communist Party. Oh, and pretty much every religion ever.

Still, I can see how some people (likely of a young and impressionable bent) might be temporarily intrigued by the idea. And that's fine. I'd wager that all anthropology undergrads spend about a semester as anarcho-primitivists (albeit largely non-practicing ones), idealizing hunter-gatherer societies as the source of all that's right and good in the world. Sometimes it takes more than a semester to wear off. Occasionally it never does.

If that describes you, and yet you're somehow here on the internet reading this, I have a bit of unsolicited advice. A common criticism of all flavors of primitivism is "If living as a Stone Age hunter-gatherer is as great as you say, why aren't you doing it?". Proponents apparently argue this is an ad-hominem attack, and terribly unfair. I would suggest, instead, that it's your golden opportunity to convince a skeptical public that it's a superior way of life. This is the problem with any utopian idea of any ideological stripe: You can talk all you want about the idea's merits, but the bulk of society will remain unconvinced without a concrete example to look at. If you want people to abandon their suburban tract houses and minivans, and head off to the forest to forage for roots and grubs, you should expect a serious sales job; not everyone will simply take your word for it that this is the One True Way.

And the inevitable followup question: When the sheeple decline to wake up, despite your efforts, what does Plan B look like? That is, if convincing them fails, is coercion next? I realize that sort of goes against the "voluntary cooperation" school of anarchist thought. But if your overarching goal is to end civilization by any means necessary, and put an end to agriculture, technology, and medicine -- public opposition be damned -- I don't see how you can pull that off without it becoming a dystopian nightmare. People who know how to grow crops or mill grain would be enemies of the State (and you'd clearly need a State to police all of this, despite all the anarcho-talk). You'd need to drive people out of their evil, technologically-produced homes, take away their livelihoods, and even grab their pets away, all in the name of ideological purity. Use of the few remaining tools would be heavily regulated, lest it re-evolve into prohibited technology. Doctors, too, would be enemies of the new regime, along with anyone upset over the now-astronomical infant mortality rate. And then there's the really big problem, namely that you can't support the Earth's current population on nothing but foraged berries and grubs and the occasional squirrel, and your idea requires the mass starvation of almost everyone. In short, trying to put this into practice would win you an express ticket to a courtroom in The Hague, and the word "madman" next to your name in all the history books.

St. Francis Park expedition

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Some photos from St. Francis Park, in inner SE Portland, on Stark between 11th & 12th. It's an unusual spot in that, although it looks a lot like a city park, it's actually owned and operated by the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic church next door. The church also operates the St. Francis Dining Hall, which serves meals to the city's homeless population, so there tend to be a few homeless people hanging around the park at any given time, and big crowds around mealtime. As a result the park's gained a long-term reputation for drug and alcohol problems. This has repeatedly put the church at odds with the surrounding neighborhood, at one point leading to a city-mediated six month closure of the park.

At some point, I'm guessing during the 1970s, a great deal of money was spent on the park. A big fountain and wading pools were installed, as well as a brightly painted wagon wheel drinking fountain, and a lot of landscaping work was done. But the church seems to have an even lower maintenance budget than the city parks bureau does, and everything's fallen into serious disrepair over the years. I'm sure they prioritize feeding people ahead of repairing fountains, and fundamentally I can't really disagree with that. I can't imagine the creepy, decrepit state of the park helps mend fences with the neighbors, though. The Catholic Church probably isn't interested in unsolicited advice from a nonbeliever such as myself, but it seems like they could send word around the local archdiocese and guilt-trip people into donating or volunteering or something. It's been done at least once before; an article in the May 23rd, 1977 Oregonian is titled "St. Francis Park - once eyesore, now pride of Buckman neighborhood", detailing the then-current efforts to revitalize the place. Since it was 1977, we're told that one of the park's trees is named Beverly, and the article includes part of a fifth grader's poem about the tree.

A post over at Portland Public Art had a similar take on the place several years ago. That post points at a Picasa gallery of the park, with more photos along the same lines as the ones here.

line.plane.object

The ongoing public art tour visits the east side again, with a stop at line.plane.object, a temporary art installation at East Burnside & MLK, on the odd-shaped chunk of land created by the Burnside-Couch Couplet a few years ago. The project's Wordpress blog (where the previous link goes) explains the project a bit more, and shows additional objects that were either gone when I dropped by (due to the whole temporary thing) or were there and I just didn't notice them (which happens to me a lot).

It wasn't so long ago that this part of town resembled Detroit from the Robocop movies. You just didn't want to go there at any time, day or night. East Burnside's become a hip (though still a bit edgy) neighborhood in recent years, and this spot is supposed to be part of the long-delayed Burnside Bridgehead project someday. In the meantime, the Portland Development Commission is sponsoring art projects like the one you see here, similar to what they did at Block 47 across from the Convention Center. This is the point where I make a not-terribly-original observation about artists and hipsters serving as the vanguard of gentrification, raising the tone of the area and making it safe for upscale condo buyers.

That said, I do like the pieces here, taken on their own merits. Whoever selects art projects at the PDC seems to know what they're doing, or at least they have a feel for what the Right Sort of Art is. Tasteful abstraction is a good thing; a giant gold animatronic statue of Rush Limbaugh would probably be a bad thing, and would almost certainly attract the wrong sort of condo buyer to the neighborhood. Sorry, I honestly thought I was done being snarky, but talk about the PDC just sort of inspires that reaction in me. So in conclusion let me just say the area's interesting right now; nice, but not too nice. But in a few years it'll be crawling with retired Boomers from the Bay Area, people who care about aligning their chakras and finding the perfect $500 cabernet to the exclusion of just about everything else. At which point the neighborhood will be perfectly safe and pleasant and terribly boring. You might as well go and have a look around before that happens.

Portland Avenue Bridge

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A few photos of the long-abandoned Portland Avenue Bridge, which crosses the Clackamas River down in Gladstone. Built in 1893 or so, the bridge was once part of a rail line between Portland and Oregon City, which was abandoned in 1968 and subsequently removed. Seems the line was abandoned in part due to the deteriorating condition of the bridge, and since then the bridge has just sat there, unmaintained and fenced off, for over four decades now. So I can only imagine what sort of shape it's in these days. You might need a tetanus shot just from looking at it.

Updated: This bridge was severely damaged by a winter storm in March 2014, and was demolished shortly afterward. So there's no longer anything to see at this spot, and this post is now sort of a historical artifact. Feel free to still visit cosmopolitan downtown Gladstone if you like, though.

I realize that, as part of this ongoing bridge series, really I'm supposed to try to walk across these things if at all possible. But I wasn't tempted this time, not even a little, not even for a moment. There was, technically, a hole in the fence, and technically I suppose I could've ventured out onto it, and I suppose people actually do that from time to time. I think mostly to jump in the river, not to cross it. The Clackamas River looks cool and clean and refreshing on a hot day, and people just can't resist jumping in. That description is accurate, if by "cool" you mean "slightly above freezing", and by "refreshing" you mean "except when fatal". Follow the news any given summer, and take one look at the bridge, and the "not dying" angle for this bridge should be immediately obvious.

I've only found two current photo links to share, and they're actually both the same photo. I also ran across one historical photo from atop the bridge, looking north along Portland Avenue.

Portland Avenue, which dead-ends at the bridge, is apparently Gladstone's historic main street. The city of Gladstone recently (2008) put together a plan to revitalize the Portland Ave. corridor, and the plan envisions restoring the bridge for pedestrians and bikes, similar to the 82nd Drive bridge further upstream. The document notes that the bridge is still railroad-owned, even though there haven't been tracks on either side in decades, and the railroad's opposed to anyone doing anything with the bridge. Don't ask me why. You'd think they'd go, "Hey, that's a nice plan, we'll sell you the bridge for a dollar, as is", just to unload the potential liabilities on someone else. But apparently that's not how they see things. Beats me.

I'd never figured Gladstone as a very interesting place -- I guess I'd assumed that McLoughlin was its main street, and the whole town was basically just car lots and fast food outlets. The city and the local historical society would like us to know that, in fact, they have a long and somewhat unusual history, featuring a long-running Chautauqua Festival (which the streetcar was apparently built in part to serve), traveling evangelists, vaudeville, and similar thrills of a bygone era. Said bygone era seems to have ended around 1929, and if anything notable has occurred since then, the city and the historical society are keeping it to themselves. More photos from around Gladstone here and here.

The streetcar line, as it turns out, is the same one that once served Elk Rock Island and its somewhat, um, earthier delights. So you could tell everyone you were catching the streetcar down to Gladstone for a nice uplifting day of educational lectures and Sousa marches, but hop off at Elk Rock Island instead for some drinkin' and dancin' and carryin' on. At least, that's probably what I would've done.

More streetcar stuff at Cafe Unknown and Tin Zeroes -- the Tin Zeroes page refers to a different defunct streetcar line, I think, but it's an interesting story anyway. If you're into this sort of thing, I mean, and I realize you probably aren't, even if you read this humble, geeky, all-too-pedantic blog regularly. In which case I'll probably have another batch of flower photos soon, if you prefer those. And maybe some pics of the cat too, if I can get him to hold still, the little bastard...

Block 47

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I learned exactly two things today, and this is one of them. Right across the street from the convention center, at MLK and Holladay, there's a weird little half-block, landscaped as if it was a park, but unmarked, so you can't be sure whether you're visiting a city park, or trespassing.

I took these photos way back in December, but I've only just now figured out what the deal is with the place. So here's the dirt. It's owned by the PDC, and although it sure looks like a regular park, it's (supposedly) only temporary. As soon as the PDC finds a sufficiently well-heeled crony who wants to build here, poof, no more "park". That's the plan, at least.

Updated 9/8/2022: If you look at the map above, and try as you might you don't see anything resembling the park in the photos, I'm afraid things eventually played out as planned, and a gigantic Hyatt Regency now sits where Block 47 used to be. It opened in December 2019 just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up. The opening was also right in the middle of a wave of local hotel openings and rebrandings, and even before the pandemic I was convinced we were seeing a bubble in hotel construction, too many beds chasing not enough tourist dollars, since tourism was bound to fade as people forgot about Portlandia and we stopped being the hot, trendy-yet-undiscovered capitol of hip quirkiness and quirky hipsterdom and everything you probably haven't heard if. And sure enough, a few days ago it was reported that three of the older-but-renovated hotels are on the brink of foreclosure. The article quotes various angry industry people who want the city to do something about it. Where the only thing that would actually help would be to travel back in time a short distance, not even a decade, grab their previous selves by the lapel (or hoodie ties, or whatever), and somehow convince them not to approve quite so many new hotels. At least I get to say "I told you so" now, for all the good that ever does anyone.

Until the PDC took an interest in the place a few years back, this plot was just another ugly parking lot, a blight on the landscape and (more importantly) a drag on local property values.

The PDC put out a pair of press releases about the project, and the Daily Journal of Commerce also ran an article about it. From the first release:

"The challenge for us was to think about making an immediate impact on the site that will last for five to ten years," said Kurt Lango, principal of Lango Hansen. "As landscape architects, we tend to envision landscapes in terms of how they'll mature in 20 years or more."

Lango Hansen explored historical information on the site and collapsed the patterns of plat maps and building footprints since 1889 into one frame as the geometry for their site design. Different materials will recall site uses over time. For example, brick will be used in the corner where a barbershop and restaurant used to be. A stone mound with grasses growing out of it will signify debris mounds that once collected on the vacant lot.

While the initial design formalizes past site uses, it will evolve over time. The varieties of plant materials will be allowed to overgrow their boundaries and form new patterns.

Given the temporary nature of the project, the landscape will incorporate recycled materials into the design wherever possible. PDC is currently reviewing their other properties for materials and pieces that can be used on Block 47.

As the recycled materials are temporary and not meant to endure decades of weather, the open space will highlight a unique approach to detailing. Timber for benches will be sanded down to reveal historic patina, and concrete for the seat wall is being sheared to show aggregate patterns. Places for art are also an integral part of the design.

So it's intended to be temporary, and it's supposed to "evolve" over time. In other words, they didn't spend a lot to build it, and they aren't going to spend much to maintain it, either, and the hope is that it'll at least decay gracefully over its lifespan. The basalt mound you see here actually evoke the piles of garbage that used to accumulate here back in the day, except that the new mound is much more sophisticated & artistic than the original, plus it stays put when the wind blows. It's kind of remarkable having art inspired by heaps of trash, but hey. I actually kind of like the thing. Even if you don't happen to agree, you still have to admit it's a step up from the genuine article. You're all with me on that part, right?

There's an old DJC profile of the designers here. The Hansen half of the firm describes the project thusly:

Block 47 (an urban garden on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Holladay Street) is a good example of that, where we were looking at actual maps of what had happened at that site over its history and expressed them through the landscape. We also built in a way of allowing everything to outgrow its boundaries over time so the pattern does break down over time, knowing that eventually a hotel is going to go there. That whole evolution is built into the project.

So if you can think of a way to really enjoy the place, you ought to hurry up and do it now, before the threatened hotel goes in. Although at last word (September '09) the hotel's on indefinite hold due to the bad economy. So you do still have time to visit, if you're so inclined.

The designers can talk all they like about historical plats, and rubble mounds and whatnot, but when I see the place I always think of my mom's chocolate crinkle cookies. If I ever manage to drop by on a light snow day, the analogy will be perfect.

And yes, I do realize Mom knows how to access the interwebs (sort of), and might be offended if she knew I was comparing her cookies to chunks of basalt. That's one of the great things about using a pseudonym. Sure, she might still be offended, but she'll probably assume I'm a total stranger. Or at least she can't prove it was me. Which is the key thing, you know.