Stoll Plaza

Ok, I accidentally deleted a blog post just now, for the first time ever. I posted it, then it looked like I had a copy in Drafts as well as a published one (which is a bug I've seen a lot lately with Blogger), so I deleted the "Draft" one, and the published one vanished too. Luckily it wasn't a very long blog post, and I think I can recreate it, more or less.

So the post was about Stoll Plaza, a sorta-park in the Hollywood District. The park was created out of a former stretch of NE 41st between Broadway & Sandy, just west of the historic Hollywood Theater; when the adjacent blocks were redeveloped, it was convenient to close the very short bit of 41st here, as the city didn't think it was needed for traffic purposes. But there was a utility easement down the middle, so it couldn't be built upon, so a shiny new public plaza was born. It's named after local boosters (and dance studio owners) Norm & Helen Stoll, & was dedicated in 2013 (gaining the inevitable skateboard stops in 2014). This is the latest in a number of odd public spaces caused by diagonal NE Sandy cutting through the Portland street grid, resulting in too-small city blocks here, and too-short city streets there. Harold Kelley Plaza (a former too-short street, named for another local booster), and Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial (the city's smallest legal city block, supposedly) are two examples just within the Hollywood District.

William "Bill" Potts Rose

The next Weston rose mural on our occasional tour is the William "Bill" Potts Rose, next to a gas station at NE 33rd & Broadway. Like a lot of the other roses this also includes a big US flag, plus ads for the self-storage and property management arms of the Weston real estate empire. There's also a little "Under God" beneath the flag, which most of them don't have. A 2008 Stumptown Stumper in the Tribune mentions that this rose honors one of Joe Weston's close friends. To be honest I'm kind of surprised more people in commercial real estate don't do stuff like this, I mean, not rose murals per se, but little nods to close friends and family. Maybe the sort of people who prosper in commercial real estate don't often have close friends and family. I dunno.

Aquatic Maintenance mural

Here's a small mural outside an aquarium shop on NE 42nd, in the Hollywood District. If you look closely, it's signed "Jade" and dated "9-00".

Grant Park

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Here are a couple of photos from NE Portland's Grant Park, which sort of wraps around the sides of Grant High School. I stopped by there a while ago to track down a fountain & statues based on Beverly Cleary's Ramona books. The statues are actually kind of creepy, which is a near-universal problem when people try to do sculptures of kids. I can't put my finger on why, exactly, but I call it the "Chucky Effect". Anyway, since I was at the park already, I took a couple of photos of the general vicinity too, on the theory that there might be a city park post in it. I'm not going to claim that these photos are particularly attractive, or representative of the park as a whole. The city parks page for the place has a brief history section:

The park is named after Ulysses S. Grant who visited Portland three times, a rare thing for a president to do in the days before air travel - or even before standardized rail travel! Grant was first assigned to Fort Vancouver where he made friends with many of Portland's politicians.

Grant Park was the setting for many scenes in children's books by Beverly Cleary. In 1991, a group of teachers, librarians, and business people formed the Friends of Henry & Ramona, and began to raise funds for the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden for Children. Portland artist Lee Hunt created life-sized bronze statues of three of Cleary's best-loved characters - Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Henry's dog Ribsy. Scattered around the concrete slab are granite plaques engraved with the titles of the Cleary books that take place in Portland - and a map of the neighborhood showing where events in the books "really happened." The Sculpture Garden was dedicated on October 13, 1995.

Other than the Chucky Effect plaza, it's your basic neighborhood park, and it has generally positive Yelp reviews, for whatever that's worth.

It's not entirely clear where the school ends and the park begins, and I'm not sure whether things like the pool and the running track are open to the general public, or are reserved exclusively for school use, or reserved for the school only while school's in session, or exactly what the arrangement is. The library's Oregonian database suggests this has been a source of confusion from the very beginning. The original deal was that the city parks bureau would buy the land and hand a portion over to the school district for a new school, and the two parties would share the park somehow. This quickly became contentious; by November 1922, before either park or school had opened, the parties were already arguing about details, such as who was responsible for heating the park's swimming pool. And when not fighting with the school district, city bureaus fought among themselves. In May 1923, the parks bureau was fighting with the City Engineer over proper grading of streets around the school, the parks bureau wanting a 6% grade and the city engineer wanting only a 5% grade.

Controversies around the park and the school multiplied as planning and construction dragged on. In December 1923, people realized the new school was 11 whole blocks from the nearest streetcar line, as nobody had put any thought into how students would get to the new school. This resulted in calls to put in a new streetcar line to serve the school, as the modern school bus had not yet been invented. In June 1924, as the school was under construction, the contractor in charge of building it was forced to replace 500 window sections in the school after the district accused him of using cheap, shoddy window glass. The article states the original glass "was declared to distort the view and to be hard on the eyes of the children", whatever that means. The city and school district were still fighting over who was responsible for what in July 1924, with the parks commissioner insisting he had no authority to do any grading or improvements around the new school unless the school grounds were included in the city park, under his jurisdiction.

I haven't gone through subsequent decades' newspapers to see whether the bureaucratic infighting continued or not. I would assume it probably did, though, right up to the present day. Contemporary thinking about schools is that they need to be maximum security facilities, full of ID badges and metal detectors and security cameras and all that, and this doesn't mesh well with having an open campus that sort of segues into a regular city park. In other places like SE Portland's Sunnyside School Park, they've resolved this tension by making the park school-use-only during school hours. They haven't taken this step with Grant Park, and there would be a neighborhood uproar if they tried it, but I imagine the school district has at least considered the idea.

Harold Kelley Plaza

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Here are a few photos of Harold Kelley Plaza, the little brick mini-park at NE 42nd & Sandy. It was created in 1984 when the city closed off a short stretch of Hancock St. This was intended as a traffic improvement, to help sort out one of the many awkward intersections caused by Sandy's uneven diagonal course through the Portland street grid. The city decided to create a public plaza here instead of just vacating the right of way for real estate development; at the time the central Hollywood District had no public open space at all, and even now this tiny plaza is the only one. And even this isn't really a city park; it's still legally the Hancock St. right-of-way, so I'm not sure who's in charge of trimming the trees and emptying the trash cans.

The plaza was soon named in honor of Harold Kelley, longtime owner of a nearby appliance store, head of the local booster association, and unofficial "Mayor of the Hollywood District".

The triangular mini-block between the plaza and Sandy Boulevard is home to one tiny building, the historic Hollywood Burger Bar. I've never been there, but a post at Portland Hamburgers says it's been there since the 1950s, and the building was originally built as a streetcar ticket kiosk.

The plaza features a gold star design on the 42nd side of the plaza, because of the whole Hollywood thing. Strangely enough, the neighborhood apparently takes its name from the nearby historic rococo movie palace. It used the name first, and the neighborhood around the Hollywood Theater eventually became known as the Hollywood District. It's an unusual way to name a neighborhood, but hey.

Beverly Cleary Fountain & Sculpture Garden

In NE Portland's Grant Park, there's a small plaza with trio of statues of characters from Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, which were set in the surrounding neighborhood. In the summer months there's also a small fountain here, I guess for kids to play in; it wasn't running when I stopped by, but someone posted a YouTube video of it taken last summer. The whole assemblage was created by Lee Hunt, who also created the Human Comedy terra-cotta faces on a building at 3rd & Yamhill downtown.

I admit I never read any of the Ramona books as a kid, and it's a bit late to do so now, but I understand they're a fond childhood memory for a lot of people. So I can't speak to what scene from which book this is, or whether the characters look the way the books describe them.

The problem here (which is one I've discussed before) is that statues of kids are always creepy. Or at least they always look creepy in photos. I think it might be the facial expressions; Statues of presidents, generals, prominent local businessmen, etc., can pose their subjects gazing nobly into the middle distance, boldly leading us into the future or something. With kids you can't really do that, so they're often pictured laughing and smiling, and that doesn't translate into bronze as well. Whatever the cause, statues of kids always seem to evoke the "uncanny valley" effect, the same reason creepy clowns and ventriloquist dummies are so unsettling. I swear they didn't look this creepy in person, maybe because you can see they're child-sized and nonthreatening and not at all Chucky-like. Or at least not Chucky-like during daytime. At night it's anyone's guess.

Hooray for Hollywood

I was wandering through the Hollywood District recently, taking photos of a few items on my todo list, which you'll see here sooner or later. Since I was in the area anyway, the public art map on PortlandMaps listed something called Hooray for Hollywood nearby, and it turns out to be a set of stained glass windows at the Hollywood public library. Generally speaking I'm not sure that stained glass is in scope for this little project of mine, but it was on the way, so I figured I'd walk past and take a couple of quick photos. The RACC page for it includes a brief description from Peter Mollica, the artist:

"I think of these windows as colored glass companions to the books. I hope that during visits to the library, patrons will begin to see forms in the windows that remind them of things they have seen or thought about in the rest of their lives."

His page about Hooray for Hollywood has a few more photos of parts I missed. Apparently he's rather well known in the stained glass world. He has a Wikipedia bio (which includes photos of other works of his), and Amazon carries his textbooks teaching stained glass techniques. I didn't know any of this, which just goes to show how little I know about contemporary stained glass, I guess.

Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial

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At the corner of NE Sandy, Thompson, and 48th Avenue, out in the Hollywood District, is Portland's Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, a small monument with a very tall flagpole. I'd never heard of it until I ran across a brief mention of it in this brief document from the Parks Bureau, in which we learn when they did maintenance of some sort on various obscure spots around town. I was actually looking for info on the park at Hall & 14th, and the doc didn't tell me anything useful about that place, but it's full of other places I haven't covered yet. When I saw there was some sort of obscure memorial in town that I'd never heard of, I knew I had to track it down.

Or at least I started out by assuming it was obscure, since I'd never heard of it before. But as it turns out, it has a fairly prominent role once a year. Every year, Portland's Veterans Day parade winds through the Hollywood District and ends up right here, and the flagpole serves as the backdrop for speeches by various dignitaries and elected officials, generally including the mayor. This year marked the 35th edition of Portland's parade, the first coming in 1974 -- coincidentally when the Vernon Ross memorial was dedicated. As for the identity of Mr. Ross, the plaque here indicates he was the instigator of the memorial, rather than its subject as I originally assumed. The memorial itself doesn't explain who Vernon E. Ross was or why he was involved, but right across the street is the Ross Hollywood Chapel funeral home, which happens to be the longtime primary sponsor of the Veterans Day Parade. So I think that answers that question.

Updated 3/29/11: Thanks to the magic of the library's Oregonian historical archives, there are a few more details to relay. A July 12, 1974 article is titled Smallest block in city location for memorial. No, really, this spot is legally a platted city block, and it's our smallest, or at least it was in 1974. 48 square feet. The article says Ross bought the plot in part to prevent signs from being erected there. Ross also states that the plot is dedicated to the memory of Louis M. Heinrichs, a fellow World War I veteran.

A followup article on September 18, 1975 covers the donation:

Ross ... said he purchased the 7-by-15-foot piece of land for $3,200 and paid $19,000 to erect the flag memorial.

"The patriotism of our country has gone to the lowest level that it's been in our history," he told the City Council Wednesday.

Mayor Neil Goldschmidt praised Ross' efforts to improve the land as being "in the best tradition" of the city.

Ross died in November 1983. His obituary says he suffered a heart attack during the Hollywood Veterans Day Parade.

For a time the memorial was referred to by name as either "Ross Veterans Memorial" or "Ross Memorial Park", but both had fallen out of use (at least by the Oregonian) by the mid 1980s.

KATU has a short video clip of this year's parade, and there's an article with a photo slideshow at Salem-news.com, although neither piece shows the memorial.

One of the questions I often try to answer about various places is "Who owns it, and who runs it?" Ok, maybe that counts as two questions. Anyway, a few references around the net (like this one) refer to the place as the "Ross Hollywood Chapel Veterans Memorial Flag Pole", but the tiny triangle of land actually belongs to the city. Although my guess is that someone comes over from next door rather than from city hall when it's time to raise or lower the flag here, or tend to the roses. That might explain why the city barely mentions it anywhere on their website. The Parks Bureau doesn't list it in their inventory, for one thing. Also, a few years ago there was a proposal to erect a new war memorial on Mt. Tabor, and as part of the process the city compiled an extensive list of existing veterans memorials across Oregon. It mentions small monuments in the far corners of the state, but fails to mention this one. So we can assume the place isn't exactly on everyone's radar at city hall. Not that veterans monuments are the city's cup of tea, really. The monument, you may note, went up in 1974, at the tail end of Vietnam, and I wonder if it went up in part as a way of shaking a fist at the dirty hippies or something. And then the dirty hippies went on to take over the city and they've been running it ever since. Also, since January we've had a mayor who'd be quickly booted out of the military on account of being gay, and despite that it's still part of his job to put in appearances at events like this. His official blog doesn't mention the event at all, so I don't know how he felt about it, but it must've been deeply weird.

In any case, PortlandMaps knows the place as R259400, 48 square feet of land officially owned by the City Auditor's office. (Although I think that's just a way of saying it's general city-owned land not belonging to any particular department, or they just haven't bothered to record which department it belongs to.) In any case, 48 square feet is pretty tiny, but it still comes to 6912 square inches, compared to 452 square inches of Mill Ends Park. That's 15.3 times bigger. FWIW.