Ochoco St. Bridge

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The next installment in the ongoing bridge project is yet another really obscure one. SE Ochoco St. runs right along the Sellwood-Milwaukie border, and it crosses Johnson Creek on the little bridge you see here. This isn't something that I would normally care about, but it got a mention in the state's 2013 historic bridge inventory, so I figured it might be worth a quick peek. Here's what they had to say about it:

Bridge Number	25B58
Year Built	1947
Location:	Near 21st Street in southeast Portland
Lat/Long:	45 27 31, -122 38 31
Description:	One 40-ft reinforced concrete rigid frame span
Designer:	Geary Kimbrell for Portland City Engineer Ben S. Morrow
Builder:	Johnson-Sterner Corporation
Significance:	This bridge is significant as an intact example of a slabtype rigid frame structure, which is a rare type in Oregon. Designed by the city, it improved access to the Kellogg Park Housing Project, which had housed soldiers during WWII. As is common with Portland structures, the bridge features an unusual railing that adds to the appeal of the visually simple structure.
Character Defining Features:	Decorative railing, Structure type

The only other photos I've found of this little bridge are in a big Word document full of photos of the area, focusing on the grounds of the giant Oregon Liquor Control Commission warehouse just east & south of here. Apparently they were involved in a late 1990s watershed restoration project for the bit of Johnson Creek that fronts on their property. I suppose pasting images into a Word document was the convenient way to share photos back then. Truly, it was a dark and primitive time.

Westmoreland Park

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Here's a photoset from Westmoreland Park in SE Portland. The usual formula for a blog post here states that I should also do some semi-extensive research and write something interesting about the place, to go along with the photos. I'm not sure I need to do that this time around, though. Westmoreland Park is one of the highlights of Portland's city park system, so it's not exactly obscure. The city's page about the park (see previous link) includes a few paragraphs about the history of the place, which is unusual. I did a cursory search of the library's Oregonian database to see if I could find anything else of interest; nearly all of the search results are about baseball and softball at the park's Sckavone Stadium. There's probably a book to be written about the long history of baseball in Portland. It would have to be written by someone who knows and cares more about baseball than I do, though. It's possible this book or article already exists; I haven't really checked extensively.

I did run across a fun 1909 real estate ad for land in Westmoreland, promising 10% off any lot in the neighborhood, first 50 customers, limited time only. That's over at pdx tales, this humble blog's local history Tumblr sibling, if you're interested. Every time I see early 20th Century real estate ads, I'm reminded of early 21st Century (pre-2008) real estate ads, exhorting people to get in now while the bubble's still inflating, and property can be flipped for an easy quick buck. There's just nothing like a land rush to bring out the baser aspects of human nature.

These photos were taken on a cold November day several years ago, a time of year when the park's Crystal Springs Creek tends to flood. Much of Westmoreland was a wetland area before developers and park planners laid their hands on it, so the area's natural inclination is still to fill up with water in the winter. Depression-era flood control efforts in the Johnson Creek watershed not only didn't prevent flooding, but also made the "improved" creeks very bad places to be a fish. I wrote about this a while back in a post about nearby Tideman Johnson Park, so I'm not going to rehash the whole situation here. The short version is that people screwed the area up, the city's on the hook to unscrew it somehow, and it'll probably be expensive. The city's 2004 Master Plan for the park talks about addressing the park's water problems, and a current project aims to restore Crystal Springs Creek to something resembling a natural state, to be completed some time in 2014. So we'll see in a few years whether the current plan works any better than the previous ones did. The surprising thing in all this is that, back in 1909, someone had the foresight or good fortune to leave the area as open space, and not build houses here. Now that would be an expensive mitigation project.

Johnson Creek Park expedition

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's tiny little Johnson Creek Park, out on the far edge of Sellwood, where it bumps up against Milwaukie.

The somewhat glib, pop-sociological notion at the heart of this post is that this is a spot where the upscale and working class sides of Portland collide. Or at least abut each other. Sellwood is your prototypical gentrified inner SE neighborhood, with twee little boutiques and a Starbucks on every corner. Milwaukie has auto body shops, car dealerships, and the state's vast OLCC distribution warehouse, among other things. That's the usual public perception, anyway. The reality's more complex than that, of course, which is why I said this is a somewhat glib, pop-sociological notion.

Continuing with the notion, this is the spot where Crystal Springs Creek flows into Johnson Creek (see top photo). Just upstream of here on Crystal Springs Creek (i.e. the Sellwood side) are the Rhododendron Garden, Westmoreland Park, and the Eastmoreland golf course. Just upstream on Johnson Creek, meanwhile, is the Acropolis, uh, gentlemen's club.

Furthermore, Johnson Creek bisects the park. The western half is reachable from Sellwood neighborhood streets. It features playground equipment, picnic tables, and guardrails to keep people from messing up the creeks' delicate riparian ecosystem. There's a cute little bridge over Crystal Springs Creek. I think I saw a few interpretive signs, which is always a sure sign you're in a gentrified area.

To get to the eastern side of the park, on the other side of Johnson Creek, you actually have to leave the park, go get on McLoughlin and turn off on SE Clatsop street, a short semi-paved street between two industrial shops. At the end of the street there's a gravel parking area, and no signs indicating this is a park. The park boundary is also Portland city limit, I think, so you actually have to detour through Milwaukie to get there. No playground equipment, no picnic tables or other services, and no guardrails.

The obvious question here is "why isn't there a bridge over the creek?". There's one over Crystal Springs Creek, after all, why not Johnson Creek? Well, it seems there used to be just such a bridge, many moons ago (and I haven't been able to determine exactly how many moons that was). You can still see the foundations of the old bridge, but it seems there hasn't been a functioning bridge here for quite some time, and I haven't come across any indication that there's a new one in the works anytime soon.

This is probably a metaphor for the larger class-divide thing, and it probably says something deep about how the two sides of Portland relate, or fail to relate, to each other. I'm not entirely sure what the message is, but it's bound to mean something...

Even if you don't buy my thesis, and you don't think the park really illustrates much of anything, it's still a pleasant little spot. It's got trees, flowers, burbling creeks, etc., the usual.

Anyway, a quick few links about the place:

• The city's vegetation survey page about the park.
• This post at Urban Adventure League mentions the "lost" east side of the park. Yeah, I know, yet again they were here before me. Oh, well.
• A couple of Sellwood Bee articles about conservation volunteers and a student eco-project.
• A Yelp page with people discussing the place.

Tideman Johnson foray

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Here are a few photos from a quick trip out to Tideman Johnson Natural Area, a little park on Johnson Creek over near Reed College. I dropped a week ago, on a sunny Friday afternoon, and found the place busier than I expected. Plenty of bike commuters along the Springwater corridor, of course, but also a lot of people just out for a walk. So the place isn't exactly obscure, although I'd never been there before.



I found it an exceptionally pleasant spot, although that might have been the place, or it might have been the time, or both, perhaps. You can't really disentangle the two. Warm(ish) sunny afternoons in November are uncommon in this part of the world, and unexpected when they do occur, and there was a sort of giddy, yet determined feel about the place. It was as if people knew this was bound to be the very last hurrah, for real this time, and they weren't going to let a moment of it go to waste. I know that's how I felt, at least.



It had already been an unusual day. I'd spent the morning packing up and moving out of the office where I'd worked for the last eight years. Not changing jobs, just the company moving to new offices a few blocks away, and it'd be back to business in the new digs, with the same coworkers, come Monday. Still, although nothing really changed, I spent the day boxing up books and taking things down off walls and taking a photos of the place for "posterity". It felt like the last day of school. (I understand the usual word for this feeling is "valedictory", but I was never a valedictorian and can't say for certain exactly what that feels like. I suspect a morbid fear of public speaking is a large part of it, though, or at least it would've been for me. But I digress.)

When I finished packing and went home, I knew I needed to get outside. Immediately. I already knew I was going to be sore from all the packing and moving, and going for a hike after that wasn't the obvious logical choice, but it's what I felt like doing, and it's what I did. So I picked a spot off my to-visit list, grabbed the camera and map, and set out on another foray. If not the last foray of the season, probably the last sunny one of the season, at least. This time I obviously, very obviously, picked the right place at the right time.



Tideman Johnson is not a very big place, just 7 acres in a long skinny strip between the Springwater trail and Johnson Creek, along the bottom of a sort of gully. So if you visit and want to make it last a while, slow down, or you'll run out of park.

As it turns out, a lot of the park is fenced off because they're trying to restore this stretch of the creek to something resembling a natural state. There's a walkway through the park, and you're expected to stay on it.

(Note: The next few paragraphs are full of earnest earth-saving do-good-ness. I usually try to avoid lecturing people about Important Issues Of The Day -- no, really, I do -- but the environmental stuff is really the core story of the place this time. I'd feel irresponsible if I wrote about the park without at least mentioning it, and when I write about something I try to do a reasonably thorough job. If this isn't really your thing, feel free to just scroll down and look at the photos. You probably ought to care, but I won't be offended (and won't know) if you don't.)



Restoring the creek is going to be tough. I'd never heard about this before, but back during the Depression Johnson Creek was "improved" as part of a major WPA public works project. The creek's always been prone to flooding, and the thinking was that it wouldn't flood so often if it drained its watershed more efficiently. The idea was that if the rain all flowed to the willamette as quickly as possible, it wouldn't pool up and back into people's basements and so forth. So they straightened the creek and lined the entire creekbed with stone, from the vicinity of Powell Butte basically all the way to the Willamette. Naively, that sounds like a fantastic idea, but in practice it turns out not to work very well. The creek, reportedly, floods just as much as it ever did. They may have moved the flooding around a bit, but they didn't solve it. They may have even made it worse.



And this being the Northwest, you can't tinker with local waterways even a little without running into salmon trouble, as we've repeatedly discovered. They're very picky and fragile fish, it seems, and an engineer simply looking at a river or stream here is apparently enough to trigger a Salmon Apocalypse. So, in short, the ultimate goal is to put the creek back to something like it was before people started improving it, and hope the fish are appeased, the tasty little bastards.

(For more on the salmon situation, check out a doc from the city, "Where are salmon in the City of Portland?" Which, I should point out, was not written with fishermen in mind.)



Anyway, that's a long stretch of creek they're talking about, and a lot of rocks to pull up, and a lot of habitat to restore. It would only be fair to get a massive federal grant and take care of it all at once, after all, since the problem was originally caused by a previous massive federal grant. But in the absence of that, it looks like the work proceeds a bit at a time, in fits and starts. I find it interesting that this particular part of the creek runs through a relatively nice area, at least by Johnson Creek standards. Further east, the creek flows through the heart of an area commonly, and unkindly, known as "Felony Flats". Maybe the city cares more about upscale-ish parts of town (and it wouldn't be the first time). Maybe they're simply afraid to venture out into Tonya Harding country. I don't know. Less cynically, I'm sure it doesn't hurt if your local neighborhood association takes an interest in the local park's eco-troubles, and I suppose that's more likely to happen the more upscale-ish an area happens to be.





One complication is that you can see the old WPA stonework in a few places, and (as WPA work tends to be) it's well done, attractive, and historically significant. So what do you do when you have what turned out to be a really bad idea, implemented in a beautiful way? Especially now, at a point in history where a lot of us (myself included) are kind of nostalgic for programs like the WPA, and all things FDR?





There's one bit in the park where the creek goes over a sort of man-made waterfall, with stone railings on both sides. It looks to have been restored in recent years, so I imagine this part is a keeper, at least for now. While I was taking photos, a guy mentioned he'd just seen a fish trying to jump the waterfall. I missed that, unfortunately, or that would be the photo I'd lead with. Anyway, if the falls turn out to be a barrier to salmon, they may have to go too, historic or not.



Salmon aren't the only wildlife here. At one point I passed a group of older people out for a stroll, and a younger woman was telling them about the park's family of beavers. I didn't see any of those either, unfortunately, but there are a few photos of them in someone's extensive photoset about the park up on Pbase. Not that the presence of beavers is really all that rare or surprising. I'll grant that they're kind of unusual animals. As far as large rodents go, though, porcupines are much cuter.



There isn't all that much on the interwebs about the area, but I've come across a few things worth reading.

You really want to read "Pilgrim at Johnson Creek". The author tries paddling the length of the creek, and talks with the locals in some of the more Appalachian parts of the Johnson Creek area. I'm not sure which is braver. Either way, that, my friends, is true urban exploration. Me showing up with a camera and wandering around for an hour or so, not so much, really. I do have photos, though. Have I pointed out yet that I have photos? Because I do. Which is something.



The area also figures in a weirdly fascinating Mercury article: "The Accidental Exorcist".

And a post on Derivations titled "I kid you not", which I really don't think I can describe. Intriguing, though.

Cedar Crossing Bridge

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Here are a few photos of Portland's Cedar Crossing covered bridge, over Johnson Creek out in east Multnomah County. It's just south of Foster Road -- turn south at 134th Avenue, which turns into Deardorff Road, which crosses the bridge.

Despite how it looks, it's not actually very old. It was only built in 1982, replacing a non-covered predecessor, because a local politician thought it'd be cool to have a covered bridge somewhere in Multnomah County.

The state's page about the bridge asserts that it isn't really a "true" covered bridge. Apparently there's far more to it than just being a bridge with a cover over it. At least if you're a purist, I mean, which I'm not. I'm not even a covered bridge fan, really. My mother is, however, so as a kid I was dragged here and there all around the state to visit the silly things. At one point she had a guidebook to all of the covered bridges around the state, and the Cedar Crossing bridge was relegated to an appendix. So I gather that true purists think it's an impostor and scoff at it. I can sort of see their point, in a way, since it's more or less a small standard-issue bridge with a wooden canopy tacked on top. Purists want their covered bridges made entirely of wood, like in the old-timey olden days of yore. And really, I'm not sure any new bridge would measure up in their eyes, since covered bridge fandom is all about sentimental nostalgia for rustic old-fashioned stuff. Covered bridges are cultural touchstones for some people, so being a fan isn't strictly about the bridges, sort of like how NASCAR isn't just about auto racing. And I suppose how Grateful Dead concerts weren't really about the music, to pick a blue-state example. Or the way British people get worked up over crappy oil paintings of hunting dogs, come to think of it. If the underlying cultural stuff doesn't resonate with you, you're bound to be confused and wonder what all the fuss is about.

But regardless, the fact remains that it's a bridge and it's covered. So there.

So, for whatever reason, I never actually saw the thing until much later. My wife and I had just moved back to Portland after being away for a few years, and we almost rented a house just a stone's throw from the bridge. We decided against it partly because I was working in Tigard at the time, which would've been a hell of a commute, and partly because the Foster Road area just north of here has, uh, persistent issues with poverty and crime. So I'm sure that was the right decision, but still, it would've been kind of interesting to have something like this in the neighborhood.

I was in the area looking for something else, and I remembered this was here, and since I've been on something of a (non-covered) bridge bender in the last few months, I thought I'd go check it out and take a few photos.

Some links, mostly of interest to any diehard fans who stumble across this post (in which case you've probably seen them all already):

• ODOT's Oregon Covered Bridges page.
• A small photo of the Cedar Crossing bridge at in the county library's Branches and Byways guide.
• The Oregon Covered Bridges Directory.
• Covered Bridge Society of Oregon
• Wikipedia: List of Oregon covered bridges
• Photos of many of them at Worldisround.