Untitled, NW 1st & Davis

These aren't the best neon photos you'll ever see. They're taken in daylight, for one thing. The neon isn't even lit. As far as I can tell the city never turns it on anymore, so these photos are probably the best I'm going to do. This is the public parking garage at NW 1st & Davis, and the neon art on it is simply called Untitled. That RACC page doesn't even have a description; it basically just says "David Kerner, Untitled, neon, 1990". But it does have a couple of night photos from back in the day, so to speak, so you can see how it was intended to look. If the page hadn't listed the date, 1990 would be the obvious guess anyway thanks to all the exciting festive triangles. If you, like me, are of a certain age, it's tough to look at all the triangles and not get "Pump up the Jam" stuck in your head:

One could argue that possibly the triangles look a little, I dunno, dated, and maybe that makes them a lower maintenance priority than they otherwise would be. I'm not arguing that myself, mind you, because if the triangles are dated, so am I. But it's an argument I could imagine someone making.

Updated 2/6/23:A few weeks ago I updated this post to lead with a slideshow, and so I remembered this 'rad' neon art when I saw it last night after drinks with coworkers. It was even on and fully illuminated (which still seems to be a hit-and-miss thing 9 years later) and I remembered I had no photos of that, so I took some and added them to the photoset. They aren't all winners, honestly, largely due to the aforementioned drinks with coworkers, but hey. Also fixed the RACC link above, which they broke in a recent site redesign, and added a map to give a better look at the building. You can even zoom in a bit more and kind of see the art if you squint just right.

The artist is apparently from Wisconsin originally. I ran across a Milwaukee (WI) Journal article from 1985 about a show at the city's art museum, "Technology in Art". Being 1985, technology in art seems to have involved primitive computer graphics and lots of creative Xeroxing. The creator of our Untitled gets a mention for his neon work in the show:

David Kerner skilfully captures our era's formal power and theoretical fragmentation in "Elegant Chaos", a controlled explosion of neon tubing that makes brilliant use of the inherent power of negative space.

That's the only description I've run across of anything created by him, and I don't think it tells us anything about our Untitled here. I was kind of hoping there would be more of a story here, something beyond "Random 1990 decorative item, but funded through 1% For Art so it's in the public art database". It would be cooler if it was illustrating various theorems of Euclidean geometry, say. It doesn't quite look like it is, but I've only worked through the first couple of books of Euclid so I could be wrong. It could also be an ironic Kasimir Malevich reference, timely due to the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. I can dream up of lots of interesting stories; I just kind of doubt any of them are true, though.

I did find one link where he (or a different upper Midwest artist by the same name) is credited as a former assistant to a well-known Wisconsin glass artist, whose work was showcased in a 2012 retrospective. Which is kind of a tangent, but there's some interesting (and quite varied) work at that link if you're interested in modern glass art.

The SmartPark garage here was built around the same time the neon went in; construction was delayed because of extensive pollution at the site. Before the present-day garage, this block was home to a Broadway Cab taxi facility with underground gasoline tanks. And before the taxi garage, it was home to a gas lighting facility around the turn of the 20th Century, which left the soil full of coal tar. Yecch. Maybe it's for the best that a parking garage went here rather than apartments or condos.

The garage's roof is home to the Portland Downtown Heliport, which has the FAA designation "61J". It opened along with the building but was not immediately successful; the expected flood of busy and important executives never really arrived. Helicopters as a mode of fast VIP transportation doesn't seem to have caught on here among people who could afford it. One problem being that there aren't a lot of other heliports in the area, so you're limited in where you could go from here no matter how big of a hurry you're in. Unless you're willing to land in a parking lot or a field or something, and there are probably FAA rules about that, and anyway it lacks glamor that way. The city website doesn't offer any info about our municipal heliport as far as I can tell, and these days it seems to cater exclusively to TV news helicopters. If you see a helicopter taking off from the garage here, and it isn't time for the morning or evening commute, there's probably a police chase in progress, or there's a protest downtown, or another missing hiker out in the Gorge.

Roses, Orange Square

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A few rose photos from Orange Square, one of the five tiny parks in Ladd's Addition that the city collectively calls "Ladd Circle Park and Rose Gardens". Ladd Circle is the traffic circle at the heart of the neighborhood; it turns out the four squares have individual names too, although they've fallen out of common use: Orange Square, Maple Square, Cypress Square, and Mulberry Square, all named after adjacent streets. Or at least this was the naming scheme the city proposed in February 1909. It's not clear whether this was ever officially adopted, as a number of the other names in the proposal weren't, like "Jefferson Park" for what we now know as Washington Park, and "Pennoyer Park" for Governors Park.

The whole neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, and the official registration document refers to the parks by both these names and generic location-based terms ("South Park", "West Park", etc.), which aren't so much names as a way to tell the squares apart since the actual names never really caught on with the general public The neighborhood organization that maintains the gardens is probably the only group that needs to refer to the parks individually very often, and I have no idea what names they use for the squares. In any case, here's what the city told the National Park Service about this square in 1988:

Description: South Park is a diamond-shaped parallelogram, measuring 100 feet on each side, bounded by S.E. 16th Avenue, S.E. Orange, and S.E. Tamarack. The major organizing scheme, which adheres to the original plan, is a pair of wide turf paths bisecting the parallelogram. They meet in the middle, forming a small parallelogram. Diamond-shaped rose beds are located between the paths; these each have been subdivided by eight narrow turf paths meeting in a circle at the center of the bed. The varieties have been updated over the years, consistent with the intent of the designer, E.T. Mische, who, in 1912, reported to the park board that "...so rapidly as the newly introduced varieties ...may be propagated in sufficient quantities...they will find a location here in a representative mass. After they have grown here several years they are to give way to later or better introductions." At present, the park has over thirty varieties of hybrid tea roses, ranging from Etoile de Hollande, introduced in 1919, to American Pride, introduced in 1974. Cultural Data: Park superintendent E.T. Mische designed the planting scheme for the secondary parks, of which this is one, in the fall of 1909. In 1910 water systems were installed, turf walks laid, and roses planted. The parks have served, since 1910, to display various varieties of roses.

Bull Run Powerhouse

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Today's adventure takes us back to the Bull Run River, last seen in our visit to the Bull Run River Bridge. I made the trek out to this old bridge because it was built with recycled parts of the original Burnside Bridge. And now this post will help explain why, a century ago, the city of Portland saw a need for a bridge way out here in the middle of nowhere. The key is this derelict building just downstream from the bridge. This is the historic Bull Run Powerhouse, a remnant of PGE's now-defunct Bull Run Hydroelectric Project. You might note there's no actual dam here; the dam was on an entirely different river, and water from it was piped underground to the powerhouse here. Meanwhile much of the Bull Run River's original water was, and still is, diverted away to be Portland's drinking water supply. Give solid practical reasons all you like, but I'm still going to believe civil engineers were just showing off when they designed that arrangement.

The photoset would probably be far more exciting if I'd managed to get inside somehow, but I didn't. I wasn't quite interested enough to try sneaking past the barbed wire fence around the place and the security cameras that might still be working. Plus it's been a while since my last tetanus shot. Plus I was there to see the bridge, and the powerhouse

What to do with the building? I haven't seen anyone propose this, but I can't possibly be the first person to see this building and think "McMenamins". They've become the default answer for preserving historic buildings, particularly weird and unwieldy ones. And they've already done at least one other power plant somewhere on their Edgefield campus, so clearly they're the experts on this sort of thing. I mean, beerwise I'd be happier if some other brewery took it over instead. A hotel of the non-brewing variety would be acceptable as well, in a pinch.

This post has been floating around in the drafts folder for a while, primarily because I ended up with a big batch of varied and interesting links to pass along. Taking a pile of raw sources and building a semi-coherent blog post around them is always the hardest part, and I've been procrastinating about that for months and months now. So I think what I'm going to do this time is just sort the links into categories and let you, the Gentle Reader, explore as you see fit.

History

• PDXHistory: "Bull Run - The Town That Time Forgot"
• OpenSpaces: "Going, Going Gone: Reflections on the Retirement of the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project"
• Oregon Historical Society: Bull Run Dam Construction
• PGE's Bull Run Little Sandy Flume Railroad

Preservation

• SaveBullRun.org: SaveBullRun.org
• OregonLive: "98-year-old Bull Run Powerhouse set for preservation"
• OregonLive: "Bull Run River A tour for creatives leads to a new exhibit", in which several painters had a look at the old powerhouse.

Environment

• "The Bull Run River-Reservoir System Model", a paper by a civil engineering professor at Portland State that discusses ways to better manage the old hydroelectric system to improve salmon habitat short of removing dams. Which is kind of a moot point now.
• PGE: Salmon and Steelhead Runs and Related Events on the Sandy River Basin — A Historical Perspective
• Oregon Magazine: "The Old 'Bull' of Bull Run", profiling a longtime Bull Run conservation activist.
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Bull Run dam removal poses engineering challenges"

Photos

• Wikimedia photo showing the powerhouse from the bridge.
• two photos of the river, much better than the ones you see here.

Other

• USGS: "Virtual Inspection of Cableway, Bull Run River near Bull Run, OR"

Chimney Fountain

This post probably counts as overkill. I've got a Flickr slideshow, an embedded Google map, and a Twitvid clip in this post, just to tell you about a small fountain in an obscure spot on the edge of downtown Portland. The Chimney Fountain is, as the name suggests, shaped more or less like an old brick chimney, with water bubbling up from the center and spilling down its sides. It's located next to SW Lincoln St., along the pedestrian-only 2nd Avenue walkway, in the 60's-era South Auditorium urban renewal district.

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It doesn't look particularly special or important if you don't know the backstory behind it. The chimney shape supposedly symbolizes the area before the urban renewal bulldozers arrived, a working class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants, with small houses, family businesses (including the deli with reputedly the best bagels in town), several synagogues, etc. For more about the old neighborhood, there's a Portland Jewish Review story and a Daily Kos essay you might be interested in. I wish I had a more concrete reference for the fountain-as-historical-marker part. I know I've read that before, but I haven't found a link to share yet. I'll update the post if I can document that, but until then don't cite this notion as a fact in your term paper, or wager large sums of money on it or anything.

The fountain does double symbolic duty, in fact, since it also serves as the "Source Fountain" in the Halprin plan for the area. The idea is that water bubbles up at a little spring here. Then, flowing north, it becomes a rushing mountain stream at Lovejoy Fountain, and finally a majestic waterfall at Keller Fountain. Symbolically, I mean. The water actually recirculates separately at each fountain, but no matter.

The fountain occasionally does triple duty, as a sort of jetted bathtub for the homeless. I'm sure that wasn't a design goal behind the fountain, but it appears to do the job. I didn't actually go and ask for a user review, I mean, if I was taking a bath and minding my own business, and a stranger came up and wanted to interview me, I'd take it rather badly. Wouldn't you?

New Frontier / Las Vegas Plaza

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Just south of the Echelon site, across Desert Inn Road, is another huge vacant lot. This one was once home to the New Frontier casino, which was imploded to make way for a super-sized Vegas edition of New York's famous Plaza Hotel. No, seriously. This seemed like a fabulous idea during the real estate bubble years, but the dream never got off the drawing board. Now, instead of an aging, down-market -- but profitable -- casino, they've got a nice big patch of empty desert. Which reminds me of a certain famous poem.

Vermont Street Park Blocks

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Today's fun expedition takes us to Southwest Portland, in the area around SW 45th Avenue & Vermont Street. Given that intro you might assume we're headed to Gabriel Park, but we're not. Gabriel Park isn't quite obscure enough for this humble blog, I think. And besides, I saw quite enough of the place back in high school, mumble-mumble years ago, since our home cross country course was located there. Come to think of it, I haven't been back since. I doubt that nostalgia alone can trigger psychosomatic shin splints, but why risk it?

In any case, thanks to a very obscure document from the city, I ran across a much more obscure spot in the vicinity of Gabriel Park: A three block span of park blocks -- or more accurately, a very long and skinny single park block, about three blocks long -- runs along the north side of Vermont St. between SW Idaho Drive and 50th Avenue. Instead of separating east and westbound traffic, the south side has busy through traffic going both directions, and the north side is basically a residential side street, and both sides are named Vermont St. Maybe that was the plan all along. Or maybe Vermont Street was supposed to have a grassy center strip with trees the whole way, and the plan didn't pan out for some reason, and this is the only remnant of that design. So far I haven't found any explanation anywhere on the interwebs. Or for that matter any mention of the place at all other than that one list in the city archives.

PortlandMaps says it's not a tax lot, which usually means the city's transporation bureau owns the place, similar to most of the East Park Blocks. That's not always the same thing as who mows the grass and trims the trees. Which again, I've been unable to find any info at all about.

Sandy River Bridge, Troutdale

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This somewhat delayed installment of the long-running bridge project takes us back to Troutdale for another Sandy River bridge. This one carries the Historic Columbia River Highway over the river, and doesn't seem to have an agreed-on name of its own. I've seen "Troutdale Bridge" and "Sandy River Bridge", but there are other bridges in Troutdale, and others over the Sandy outside of Troutdale, so those aren't overly specific names.

The bridge dates back to 1912, making it the oldest extant part of the Gorge Highway. It looks it, too. I think they built it just barely big and strong enough to carry the occasional Model T, but today it gets ginormous luxury RVs towing ginormous luxury SUVs piled high with bikes and kayaks and sailboards and such. I mean, it's not actually falling down as far as I know, but I kind of feel sorry for the poor little thing. Except when I have to drive across it and there's oncoming traffic larger than a Vespa, in which case I'd curse its name if only it had one.

Walking across isn't so bad. There's a separate walkway on the south (upstream) side of the bridge. Granted it's made with extremely old wooden slats, and here and there you get glimpses of the river through gaps in the slats. So that part isn't so fabulous, really. But I've never heard of the slats actually giving way and dumping people into the river, although I suppose there's a first time for everything. In any event, once you're across there's no sidewalk along the Gorge Highway, and you'll need to walk on the shoulder to get anywhere, while avoiding the aforementioned ginormous luxury SUVs, so I don't think the bridge gets much pedestrian use. Bikes maybe, but not pedestrians.

It does, however, attract daredevils who jump into the river from here, on purpose, for fun, although getting back out of the river in once piece (or being found at all) is not exactly guaranteed. I won't spend a lot of time on this point, because a.) I've gone on about it before and already feel like I'm being a tedious scold and a founding member of the anti-fun police for doing so. And b.) I've found that when I write about places that get a lot of newsworthy, untimely demises (High Rocks and the Vista Bridge, for example), sooner or later there's going to be another one. Then the post gets a sudden flood of search hits, and I have to hurry and check it to see if it's reasonably tasteful under the present somber circumstances, which it quite often isn't.

Info about the bridge, from sources spanning the interwebs:

• Structurae
  
• Bridgehunter
  
• ColumbiaRiverHighway.com has an extensive history page about the bridge. It notes that the bridge was considered to be obsolete (and far too narrow) as early as 1930, and the bride deck system was replaced in the 1950s. Which I read as saying it's not really that special and historic, and could be replaced if money was available. They could always move it somewhere else, and/or turn it into a bike-only bridge, if people are really that attached to the thing.
  
• Two Waymarking pages
  
• City of Troutdale
  
• A moody Holga photo
  
• Wikimedia images
  
• Via Google Books, the April 4, 1912 issue of Municipal Journal and Engineer, with a line indicating Multnomah County was asking for bids on the project at that time. The line just above it, incidentally, is for the famous and historic Colorado St. Bridge over Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, California.
  
• Via the Washington State University library, a set of vintage photos (not online, sadly) with a reference to an "Auto Club Bridge" in Troutdale. Which may be a historical name for this bridge. Or it's some other bridge near Troutdale, past or present, in which case never mind.
  
• Intel's code names for upcoming products and technologies borrow heavily from Oregon geography. For example, the microarchitecture used in many of their current CPU lines is called "Nehalem", and its successor is codenamed "Sandy Bridge". But like everyone else, they don't specify which Sandy bridge they have in mind.
  

Whitaker Ponds expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to Whitaker Ponds Natural Area, on the Columbia Slough just south and west of the Portland Airport. The park is essentially two large ponds connected to the slough, surrounded by a fringe of low-lying land, which in turn is surrounded by assorted industrial businesses. The "Natural Area" designation isn't misleading, exactly, but it's only true up to the park boundary.

I don't know the full story of how this spot ended up as a park and the surrounding properties ended up as machine shops and such. I suspect it was just too expensive to bring in fill dirt to fill in the ponds. Many of the other ponds and side channels along the Columbia Slough ended up as golf course water hazards, so maybe this area just got overlooked. I suppose I could have gotten the full story if I'd gone into the visitor's center and asked, since unlike almost all Portland parks it does have one of those.

The Columbia Slough as a whole has been abused, neglected, and maligned since roughly the moment urban development reached its shores. People who think about it at all tend to assume it's hopelessly polluted now, an environmental lost cause. I've seen enough of it to suspect that isn't completely true, but I'm still not signing up to go swim in it.

There are more facilities than you'd expect at a city-designated Natural Area, and the facilities are even well maintained:

• There's a parking lot off of NE 47th Avenue, with a fairly easy to find sign.
• A couple of docks, presumably for canoes or kayaks.
• A well-marked trail between the slough and the west pond, with a couple of educational exhibits along the way.
• An old house converted into the headquarters of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council. Which may explain why the park has all these trails and docks and such.
• The standard set of environmental education facilities, including a gazebo with a grassy ecoroof.
• Oh, and if you follow the trail to the far end, there's a baseball diamond sandwiched in between the Columbia Slough and the east and west ponds. A baseball diamond surrounded by water on all sides is not the ideal place to hit a really powerful home run, or any sort of foul ball.

Assorted links and tidbits:

• The Master Plan for the park.
• Amanda Fritz's blog: Response to Field of Schemes, relating to said master plan.
  
• Various fall photos
• OregonLive: "A walk in nature the best way for kids -- or any of us -- to learn"
• Center for Columbia River History: "The Future of the Columbia Slough"
• Portland Monthly: "Behold, an Oasis"

Updated: This post is now linked to by PortlandParks on Facebook. Yay!

Pics: Wells Fargo Center

A few photos of Portland's Wells Fargo Center, the tallest building in town, and one that tends not to inspire strong opinions either way. Everyone recognizes it, sure, but I've yet to meet anyone who's told me they particularly love or hate it. Although I admit that's a question I tend not to ask very often. There's a comments section below, so feel free to chime in if you do happen to have an opinion of some sort.


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So you might be wondering how I came to have a big photoset about the Tower of Meh. It was kind of a retroactive thing, actually. I started wondering how many photos I had where the Wells Fargo building made at least a cameo appearance, and the pile grew and grew and eventually I figured there might be a blog post in it. Which was true, apparently, if this blog post is any indication.

In the unlikely event you're a longtime Gentle Reader of this humblest of humble blogs, some of these photos might seem vaguely familiar. For the purposes of this post, ignore the feelings of deja vu and the flowers or whatever in the foreground and just note the presence of the building. It'll be almost like seeing the photo for the first time, sort of.

big pink

A few -- ok, more than a few -- photos of downtown Portland's US Bancorp Tower, semi-universally known (here in town) as "Big Pink". It's ended up in a lot of photos of mine over the years, but I've never devoted a post to it, probably because I don't devote a lot of time to office buildings here. It's not my favorite building in town, but I had to venture an opinion about it, I suppose it would be a generally favorable one. It makes for interesting photos at times, and I've fetched many a quick office drone lunch from the restaurants on the ground floor. And I once watched Mt. St. Helens erupt while having a tasty local beer at the Portland City Grill on the 30th floor. There may be other cities where you can do something like that, but the list has to be rather short. On the other hand, the building is #37 at Things About Portland That Suck.


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In any case, the collected pics make for a rather interesting photoset, so here they are as a slideshow. Assuming you have Flash, I mean. If you're visiting from an iPad, or a Blackberry, or you disabled Flash for whatever reason, or you're running Chrome and Flash up and crashed on you, the plain old Flickr photoset is here. If you use Lynx and your browser doesn't support images of any kind, I'm not sure what to say except that I admire your eccentricity and stubbornness. Sort of.

Wapato Greenway, Sauvie Island

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Today's adventure takes us to Sauvie Island, just north of Portland, and an obscure spot variously known as "Wapato State Park", "Wapato Access Greenway", "Wapato State Access Area" and probably other variants I haven't encountered yet. The park, whatever it's called, surrounds marshy Virginia Lake, on the Multnomah Channel side of the island. Apparently it's a great birdwatching spot, so naturally I dropped by in July. Nothing's migrating now, and the lake's close to drying up, and there are mosquitoes all over the place, but at least the weather's better. And more to the point, I had a bit of free time to check the place out right now. Even if I'd been inclined to brave the cold and rain and mud over the winter and early spring, there were meetings to attend and there was code to write and it simply wasn't possible.

If you'd like a bit more comprehensive, and seasonally-appropriate treatment of the place, you might want to check here. Plenty of photos (grey skies and all), GPS waypoints if you need 'em, the whole works.

The park also has a boat dock, which I didn't run across while I was there. Obviously you can only launch boats here that you're able to lug from the parking lot. Maybe you can also dock larger boats here coming from somewhere else. I didn't see the dock, so I'm just guessing about that part.



If (like me) you aren't a boater or an avid birdwatcher, the list of what else there is to do here seems rather slim. The park's on an official list of state parks where metal detecting is allowed, I suppose if you aren't cool or sociable enough for birdwatching. The only hitch is that you can only do it in "developed" areas, which I think means the parking lot, the boat dock, the picnic area, and maybe the viewing platform at the lake. And if you find anything of archeological, historical, or substantial monetary value, you can't keep it. So I didn't see anyone taking the state up on these generous terms while I was there. Which is fine with me. Metal detector guys and their creepy white vans and molesty little moustaches always make me nervous for some reason.



If you'd rather do something useful and non-skeezy, there's always pulling invasive weeds. The local Soil & Water Conservation District organizes volunteer parties to do this in various places, including here. I like to imagine these things are total meat markets, full of earnest, do-gooding, highly attractive single folk, evenly mixed between genders. I have no evidence for this, so you may just want to sign up and check it out for yourself, assuming you meet the aforementioned criteria (so as to not lower the tone). And pull some nasty invasive weeds while you're at it, that being the ostensible point of the whole thing. Oh, and tell them I sent you. Maybe if they get enough volunteers they'll finally forgive me for voting against their tax base measure back in October '06. (It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.)



Fireworks are strictly verboten here, although judging by the size and prominence of the no-fireworks signs, it's possible not everyone plays strictly by the rules. So there's that, I guess, but fireworks aren't going on the list we're putting together. My attitude about fireworks varies: Sometimes I want to tell people to leave it to the pros, who have vastly better fireworks anyway. Other times I want to encourage them to be as reckless as they can, maybe play a fireworks drinking game or something, and to generally just hurry up and blow their hands off already. I think it just depends on what sort of mood I'm in at the time.



There seems to be at least one other thing to do here. When I arrived, there were a surprising number of cars in the parking lot. Two more arrived just after I did -- one of them a VW bus -- and the passengers looked roughly college age. While I wandered around the park I didn't encounter a single soul anywhere, and when I got back to the car the college kids were gone... somewhere, doing... something. I have no idea where they went or what they were up to. And even if I did know, I don't think I'd rat them out anyway.

I-84 Bridges, Sandy River

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On a trip out to the Columbia Gorge today, I stopped briefly and snapped a few photos of the I-84 bridges over the Sandy River. This was pretty much for the sake of completeness in the ongoing bridge project. There's nothing especially distinctive or exciting about them, and they don't have sidewalks or bike lanes to enable the walking across part. I understand that, technically, you can take bikes on the bridge. Apparently you can bike I-84 for its entire length through the Gorge, according to this map & guide from ODOT. But, like several other freeway bridges I've covered (Boone Bridge, Abernethy Bridge, I-205 Clackamas River bridge), that's outside the scope of the project. Because, well, because I just don't want to, and I don't think it's worth it. So there.

The situation's about to change, though. ODOT is in the early stages of a project to replace both bridges with shiny new ones. We're told they'll be nicer to look at than the current pair, which is an easily achieved goal. During a recent redesign they added a dedicated pedestrian & bike crossing to the bridge plans. So that's nice and everything, although the project won't be done until 2013. Still, assuming I haven't departed for warmer climes by then, and I still have any interest at all in bridges at that point, I'll probably drop by for a look. The ongoing bridge project would be incomplete if I didn't, and we can't have that, can we?

Bull Run River Bridge

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Today's adventure takes us to the Bull Run River Bridge, which spans the Bull Run River north of Sandy. If the bridge looks familiar at all, you win extra credit points. This, like the nearby Lusted Road Bridge, is a recycled segment of the original Burnside Bridge in downtown Portland. That's the main reason I tracked this one down; I'm not sure I'd have bothered with something this small and remote otherwise, although it turns out the setting is rather attractive.

Despite the remote location, this area has several ties to Portland. Besides the bridge, the river itself is the source of much of Portland's drinking water. If the name sounds familiar, that's probably why. And directly downstream of the bridge is the old, abandoned Bull Run Powerhouse that once supplied electricity to the Portland area. There's a separate post in the works about the powerhouse and its history, but I've already uploaded the photos, so you can see them here if you're interested.

A traditional part of the ongoing bridge project involves walking over the bridge, taking a few photos, and maybe going on about whether it's safe or pleasant to do so. Unlike its sibling, the Bull Run bridge doesn't have a separate pedestrian walkway, so officially there's no way to get across without wheels. As a practical matter, the bridge isn't very long or very busy, so you'll probably be ok. Or at least that's what I did to snap a few quick photos looking down at the river, while keeping a close watch for approaching traffic. Your luck may vary widely, of course, so caveat ambulator ("let the walker beware").

The Simon Building

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A few soft-focusy photos of the Simon Building, on NW 3rd near Couch St. in Portland's Old Town. As you can see, only the building's brick facade survives. Seems that the rest of the building burned in a fire some decades ago. So they left the facade standing and put a surface parking lot behind it, rather than tearing out the facade and just going with the parking lot. In that era, this was apparently considered a rather daring act of historic preservation.



Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• More photos in this post at kodakula.
  
• A passing mention in a longer post about historic preservation at Cafe Unknown.
  
• A Portland Preservation post about the adjoining Sinnott House. One commenter briefly mentions that plans exist to put up a new (and controversially tall) building on the spot, perhaps incorporating the existing facade. That would be an interesting development. Whatever they end up doing would have to be less Detroit-like than the current arrangement, which would be a plus. Although this is just a comment to a blog post, so make of it what you will.
  

Lusted Road Bridge

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The ongoing bridge project takes us out to the Lusted Road Bridge over the Sandy River, wayyy out in rural Clackamas County.

I wouldn't normally cover something this far afield, but this one's a Portland bridge, in a couple of ways. It's a recycled segment of the original Burnside bridge, moved from downtown Portland to this spot when the current Burnside Bridge was constructed. The city of Portland also owns much of the surrounding land. A Water Bureau facility sits at one end of the bridge, and a large water main crosses a second bridge parallel to the road bridge. On the other side of Lusted Rd. is Dodge Park, complete with an old-style Portland Parks sign out front, although the Water Bureau runs it these days.

The view you see in these photos will soon be just a memory, as the city's in the middle of a project to replace the above-ground water conduit with a tunnel deep beneath the river. As part of the project, the conduit bridge will be removed. In fact, the plan is to move the bridge to a new location, spanning the Columbia Slough at Kelley Point Park. And instead of carrying a big water pipe, it'll carry bikes and pedestrians. That's the current plan, anyway. I like the idea of things going full circle, in any case: One (or part of one) bridge is moved out to the Sandy River, and a century later its neighbor gets moved back to Portland, albeit the far end of town. Ok, so it's not precisely full circle, but reasonably close.

The ongoing bridge project does involve walking across whenever possible. Those being the rules, I parked at Dodge Park, walked across, and walked back. There's only a sidewalk one one side of the bridge, namely the side opposite the conduit bridge. It's kind of spindly and narrow, but the bridge truss is between you and traffic, and there really isn't all that much traffic, so it's fine, although there really isn't anywhere to go once you've crossed the bridge. The other part of the bridge project involves dreaming up increasingly fanciful ways of possibly dying on various bridges, which I present as important safety tips. It's not a very good gimmick, but I've done it enough that I'm kind of stuck with it now. So today's important safety tip is to not hang out on the bridge if Mt. Hood erupts, sending an enormous mudflow down the Sandy River, destroying everything in its path. The possibility of this happening is one of the reasons the water conduit's being relocated, so this one's somewhat more likely than, say, Confederate zombies on the Burnside Bridge, or swooning over all the Art Deco Gothicness on the St. Johns, for example.

I didn't come across too many references to this bridge; although it got here in an unusual way, it's not overly distinctive, plus it's remote and not heavily travelled. Couple of random items, though: I ran across a painting of the bridge, along with paintings of various other local bridges. I also ran across the city's rules on residents of this area directly connecting to the Portland water system. Apparently this was something the city agreed to early on in order to secure easements and so forth for the big water mains into Portland proper. But they've tightened up the rules over the years, with a grandfather clause for existing connections. I realize I may be alone in this, but sometimes I find it kind of interesting to look at rules and regulations and wonder how they got this way -- was the system being abused prior to 1974? And if so, how? Or did some unnamed party stand to make money off the rule change, raking in cash somehow as locals were forced to form local water districts and build their own distribution systems? How much of a political issue was this back in the day? If old Oregonian issues were online prior to 1988 it would be simple to go back and check, but I'm not quite enough of a Real Historian to go rifle through old newspapers on microfiche just to answer a question, or at least to answer this particular question. If you know more about this than I do, feel free to leave a comment below.

I can't declare Mission Accomplished on Sandy River bridges just yet. So far I've done posts on the Revenue Bridge further upstream, and the Sandy River Railroad Bridge at Troutdale. I've still got as-yet-unposted photos of two more, and of another bridge over the Bull Run River (which flows into the Sandy at Dodge Park). I took most of those photos the same day as the photos you see here. Which was almost a year ago now, and only now am I managing to get a few things posted. Come to think of it, I still don't have any photos of the I-84 bridge over the Sandy, although I seem to recall it's an ugly concrete bridge you can't walk across, so that's not exactly my top priority. In any case, I'll try to get the other bridge photos posted before we hit the first anniversary of me taking them, because that would be embarrassing.

Dodge Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us out to Dodge Park, at the confluence of the Sandy and Bull Run Rivers somewhat north of the town of Sandy. It's right across the street from a Portland Water Bureau facility (part of the Bull Run water system), and the Water Bureau runs the park too. The Parks Bureau used to co-manage the place, and there's still a classic-style Portland park sign out front, with the Parks Bureau logo painted over.

When I visited the park last summer, my main project that day was taking photos of Sandy River bridges, including a pair right next to the park. I actually took too many photos, and I still haven't sorted through them all and picked out ones to post yet. I did have a manageable number of the park itself, which makes the job a lot easier.

There's been a park here for almost as long as there's been a Bull Run water system. The Water Bureau's history page for the park doesn't give an exact date for its creation and just says it's nearly a century old. They have a few historic photos showing the park's heyday in the early 20th century, when an excursion train carried city dwellers out here for a sunny day by the river. One Yelp reviewer proposes reviving the train. It's kind of a neat idea, if only so we can watch Bojack and friends blow a gasket over it. And sure, it would probably lose buckets of money, and it's hard to argue that a picnic train would be strictly necessary, and it would tend to attract a lot of those weird old guys who have a thing for trains. So I'm not sure it's necessarily a practical idea. I just always try to keep in mind that practical ideas and good ideas aren't always the same thing.

Perhaps more useful than a picnic train would be a shuttle bus connecting the popular parks along the river.  Rafting is a big deal on the Sandy, as is kayaking, and just floating the river on an old inner tube.  Whatever your means of going downstream, it'd be handy to have a way of getting back upstream to your car when you're done.  Or, for that matter, a shuttle into Gresham so you can hop on MAX from there.

The city's trying to promote the park as a bike destination.  Which sounds nice, in theory, and it's bound to poll well among likely voters.  In practice, I'm not sure that the surrounding roads are all that bike-friendly.  Lots of blind corners and so forth, although people who are likely to ride here are probably used to that sort of thing.

The park's also a popular fishing spot, if you're into that.  I don't have enough patience, or tolerance for disappointment, plus I'm fairly certain I'd end up with a fish hook through the eyelid at some point, which I'm not too big on.

Oh, and here's the Water Bureau's index of their pages about the park, in case I've missed anything.

If you're thinking about visiting in the near future, be aware there's ongoing construction in the vicinity, and you may want to check current conditions to see whether the bridge is currently open or not.  The Water Bureau is relocating a major water pipe from an above-ground bridge (which you'll see in a later post about bridges) to a tunnel deep underground, and apparently that involves tearing up all sorts of things in the process.  The Water Bureau's also been renovating the park itself in recent years (generously funded by our rapidly increasing water rates).  A news story from 2008 lists a number of proposed enhancements, including adding a number of overnight camping spots (at present the park is strictly a day use area).  The overnight facilities aren't in place yet, but according to a comment on this post the city's already looking for park hosts for the 2011 opening, where a "park host" is essentially a resident caretaker, except (hopefully) with people skills.

The usual reason given for the tunnel project is to protect us from the Evildoers, since the above-ground pipe could be potentially vulnerable.  Assuming the Evildoers have ever heard of Oregon, that is, and have lowered their sights to causing major but temporary inconvenience on a regional scale.  So I'm thinking the whole Evildoer thing is mostly there to help get the project funded.  Which is not to say it's not a valid project; the Sandy River lies in the shadow of Mt. Hood, which -- let's not forget -- is a dormant volcano, not an extinct one.  It last had a major eruption in the late 1700's, and a minor one as recently as 1907.  And even the 1700's are less than a heartbeat in geological time.  As this study on the geology of the area notes, the Sandy River area is prone to lahars, basically flash floods of mud and rocks that are often volcanic in origin.  When Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, debris flowed down river channels and destroyed everything in its path, including a number of important bridges.  So if Mt. Hood ever went off in a big way, our puny little water main bridges would be goners.

The June 1973 issue of The Ore Bin, a journal published by the Oregon Department of Geology & Mineral Industries, carried a piece speculating what would happen "If Mount Hood Erupts". The bridges here get taken out, and that's just one of many very bad things that happen. Other than the choice of volcano, the story's scenario is eerily similar to the Mt. St. Helens eruption just seven years later, right down to occurring in mid-May.

The area around Dodge Park has been the subject of at least one bigfoot search, presumably an unsuccessful one, otherwise I assume we'd have heard more about this. So yeah, I'm a skeptic. My attitude towards cryptozoology is basically "DNA, or it didn't happen". But so long as they aren't looking to shoot bigfoot and make a rug out of him, or send his body parts to China for use as an aphrodisiac, I suppose believing in bigfoot is mostly harmless.

I'm not so sure about this business of looking for bigfoot in city parks and near populated areas. I mean, on one hand it's close by and easy to get to, and if you're going to spend a lot of time not finding bigfoot, you may as well not find him somewhere convenient. On the other hand, suppose you do find bigfoot in a city park. Chances are he'll be scavenging half-eaten Big Macs out of trash cans and getting plastered on abandoned cans of Busch Lite and Old English 800. And nobody really wants to see that sad spectacle, do they?

While searching for info about the park, I ran across a number of large planning documents that mention it in passing, as a convenient landmark on the Sandy River. So these won't tell you a lot about the park itself, but if you want to go all policy wonk about the Sandy River area,

• Multnomah County's East of Sandy River Rural Area Plan (similar to nw rural area plan, see Mason Hill Park post) The park is only mentioned briefly here, because it's in Clackamas, not Multnomah county.
• Sandy River Basin Integrated Management Plan - US Department of the Interior and others. This doc mentions that river from here downstream to Dabney State Park is federally designated as a Wild & Scenic River.
• BLM Western Oregon Resource Management Plan. When I hear "BLM", I tend to think "sagebrush", and it always surprises me that they also own random bits of land here and there west of the Cascades. They seem to own a little land along the Sandy, in fact, so Dodge Park gets another brief mention in passing.

Elsewhere on the Interwebs:

• A short blog post at "southeast main" w/ photo taken around the same time as these.
• Videos of radio controlled trucks driving over rocks here. Apparently this is a hobby. The video I watched was rather well put together, though.
• Flickr photos from ocean yamaha, Mhicheil, Jeremiah Leipold, loloboho, proffittshollow, PappaSmurfPro, and SamDrevo, plus a historical photo from Jason McHuff, and a painting from Leonard Collins.

Echelon Place, Las Vegas

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A few photos of the unfinished -- perhaps never to be finished -- Echelon Place complex, on the north end of the Strip in Las Vegas. The Echelon was designed to compete with MGM's ginormous CityCenter complex further down the Strip, and the architectural renderings suggest it would be quite the modern ultra-swanky place, if only the nearly $5 billion price tag (and the end of the real estate bubble) hadn't interfered with the grand dream. Shame about the dumb name though; the complex was supposed to consist of a central casino-hotel surrounded by an "echelon" of trendy luxury boutique hotels (although Las Vegas is probably the only city on Earth where a 500 room hotel counts as "boutique"). This was more or less a clone of the CityCenter concept, except without the deep pockets and first mover's advantage. CityCenter opened in December 2009 and is the glitzy newest new thing in Vegas right now, but it's also saddled with a ridiculous amount of construction debt to pay off. So maybe it'll turn out to have been a good bet, and maybe it won't. It appears there was room for somewhere between zero and one CityCenter-style complexes, and Echelon was the second.



This site was previously occupied by the Stardust Casino, which was imploded in 2007 to make way for the Echelon. Construction began, but halted in August 2008 when the developer (Boyd Gaming Corp.) "delayed" the project. Construction was supposed to resume around the end of 2009. Then, last November, they announced a further 3 year delay, to no earlier than 2012. The very latest info I've seen is that the owners are profitable again, but their earnings release neglects to mention anything about the (mumble, mumble) Echelon. Meanwhile, rumor has it that the also mothballed, but much more complete Fontainebleau Las Vegas just north of here won't open until around 2015. So the Echelon may sit abandoned like this for a very long time.

On the other hand the Echelon's website is still up, so you can still go check out how sleek and fancy things might have been, if only the irrational exuberance had continued for another year or two...