Denver Ave. Bridge

[View Larger Map]

The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the one that carries N. Denver Ave. over the slough. Like the MLK and N. Portland Road bridges, this is an ODOT-owned bridge, since this stretch of Denver Ave. doubles as a chunk of highway OR 99W. At one time, 99W (a.k.a. the "West Side Highway") continued through downtown Portland, from SW Barbur to Front Avenue, then along Harbor Drive to the Steel Bridge, then up Interstate Avenue to Kenton, where it jogged over to become Denver Avenue, and then headed across the Columbia Slough north to the Interstate Bridge. Most of that stretch is no longer a state highway, but the stretch of Denver Ave. north of Argyle St. still is for some reason.

The Portland stretch of 99W was a late addition to the state highway system. At the time the Interstate Bridge went in, there was a great deal of infighting about which street would be the main approach to the bridge: Union Avenue (now MLK) or Vancouver Avenue, which Union Ave. finally won after a few years of rival booster clubs duking it out. Interstate (then known as Patton Avenue) wasn't in the running, because a steep bluff at the south end meant it didn't actually connect directly to downtown back then. It was a major local street, and was platted out as a wide street in case it became a major arterial later (which was a huge help when the MAX Yellow Line went in), but in 1916 it dead ended somewhere around today's Overlook Park. So a small wooden bridge was built, giving local traffic access to the Interstate Bridge.

A decade later, a major roadcut project finally connected Patton Avenue to the Steel Bridge and downtown Portland, and the widened street was rededicated as Interstate Avenue in September 1928, though a lot of references I've seen give 1929 as the actual project completion date. The bridge over the Columbia Slough was reconstructed at that point to handle the additional traffic. The Oregonian's "Year in Review" article on Jan 1. 1930 portrayed the Interstate Ave. project as one of the year's major news stories. A 1947 aerial photo shows the bridge here, along with an area of commercial development along the Kenton stretch of Interstate, but you can see that parts of the surrounding area were still semi-rural even then. A couple of interesting Cafe Unknown posts have more about the history of Interstate Avenue, with all its ups and downs, from potholed neighborhood street to neon wonderland, to blighted backwater after I-5 opened, and now to a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with its own MAX line.

ODOT's 2012 bridge condition report says the slough bridge dates to 1916, while the adjacent viaduct over Columbia Blvd and the Union Pacific railroad is circa 1929. So it's possible there was a surface level intersection and railroad crossing here until the bridge upgrade project, in which case the original slough bridge was probably lower than the current one. That's my guess, anyway.

The 2013 state historic bridge inventory describes the bridge and viaduct:

In the late 1920s, increased traffic on the West Side Highway led to a major revision in how the highway approached the Interstate Bridge, then the only Portland area crossing into Washington State. Prior to this redesignation, the West Side Highway ended at downtown Portland, with only the Pacific Highway continuing over the bridge. These new bridges were designed to match those on the Pacific Highway, and continued to be a major part of the approach until the construction of I-5. They both feature a unique baluster railing, which is now mostly hidden behind protective wooden paneling.

Unfortunately I don't think you can see the unique bridge railing very well in any of these photos. The inventory PDF has a better photo, showing it really doesn't look all that different from other ODOT bridges of that era. The inventory goes on to mention that the slough bridge consists of "Three 78-ft steel girder and floorbeam system spans with reinforced concrete deck girder approach spans", while the viaduct is "Thirteen 71-ft reinforced concrete girder and floorbeam system spans with curved haunches.. ODOT researched the history of the Denver Ave viaduct over the railroad for the MAX Yellow Line project. The study determined it was ineligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and mentioned the slough bridge as similarly utilitarian & ineligible. The city's historical research for the Vancouver Ave. bridge replacement also mentions the Denver Ave. bridge briefly, but doesn't have much to say about it.

No discussion I've seen of the bridge mentions who designed it, and they usually do if a bridge is by someone well-known or historically important. The Union Ave./MLK, N. Portland Road, BNSF railroad, and (original) Vancouver Ave. bridges turned out to be minor designs by rather famous bridge engineers, but as far as I can tell that's not the case here. Perhaps as a result, it doesn't have a BridgeHunter or Structurae page of its own, but it does at least have an UglyBriges.com entry. That page tells us the bridge has an ODOT sufficiency rating of 51.7 out of 100 (as of April 2013), and it's described as being in "fair" condition and "functionally obsolete". It received an underwater inspection in 2011, which noted that the underwater portion of the bridge pilings are not entirely steel and concrete, which is a little surprising: "The part of this structure across the slough consists of 3 steel girder spans of 78 ft. each. Each pier is supported on two concrete columns with a webwall in between, that are supported by two individual concrete footings founded on untreated timber piling."

An upcoming ODOT project will redesign the intersection of Denver Ave. & Schmeer Road, directly north of the bridge. At present the north end of the bridge crosses an underpass that routes southbound traffic onto Schmeer Rd. The redesign will move the intersection north, and turn the underpass into a stretch of the Columbia Slough Trail instead. In Spring 2015 they'll also start work on the bridge and viaduct, resurfacing them and replacing the current bridge railings and adding crash barriers. Schematics of the new design indicate there will be a crash barrier separating the sidewalk from street traffic, and the redesigned bridge will include separate bike lanes, which it doesn't currently have. It will still only have a sidewalk on one side of the bridge, I suppose because extending the bridge out to add one on the other side would be too expensive. Still, it seems like a positive step, in an area that's only going to have more bike and pedestrian traffic as the Columbia Slough Trail keeps being extended.

Kenton Art Benches

The next stop in the ongoing public art tour is conveniently just down the street from the previous stop, Poder de la Mano, the giant hands-n-book thing on Denver Avenue in the Kenton neighborhood. The Kenton Art Benches are by the same guy, are also on Denver Ave. near McClellan St., and they elaborate on themes from the "main" sculpture. From the RACC page:

Designed in collaboration with Greenworks PC, artist and third-generation stone carver Mauricio Saldaña created seven Art Benches located on street corners along Denver Avenue. Each bench features a carved image derived from the nearby sculpture Poder de la Mano, also by the artist. Each image highlights unique elements of the neighborhood both past and present.

Saldaña also created Rico Pasado, the cute bear sculpture in Jamison Square, as well as Vida y Esperanza, the squirrel & tree stump at Mt. Talbert Nature Park near Clackamas Town Center. If I had to rank them (and I do realize that's kind of a gauche thing to do), I'd say bear, then squirrel, then benches, finally hands. The hands kind of creep me out, to be honest.

Poder de la Mano

Our next item on the ongoing public art tour isPoder de la Mano ("Power of the Hand", I think) by Mauicio Saldaña, in the Kenton neighborhood at N. Denver Avenue & Kilpatrick St. The inevitable RACC description:

Poder de la Mano was created as a tribute to the Kenton neighborhood. A hand holds an open book which is carved with images depicting the history of the area and its people. It includes well known building facades such as the Kenton Firehouse, the Masonic Temple, and the Kenton Hotel, as well as whimsical and imaginative details that showcase the uniqueness of neighborhood. The images were inspired by community and neighborhood meetings and can also be found on nearby benches also carved by the artist.

So the subject matter this time around is "local neighborhood landmarks". Neighborhoods usually just do a mural if they want to celebrate the local old buildings and whatnot (see the one in Buckman for example), but Kenton went for something a bit more permanent. Or the city did on the neighborhood's behalf. When this went in, the city's then-mayor lived somewhere nearby, and gentrifying the area became a high municipal priority during his term in office. Hence the giant stone hands holding a giant book illustrated with a few of Kenton's mildly interesting old buildings.

The curious thing here is that the sculpture looks to be of sturdier construction than the buildings it depicts. It's entirely possible that it will outlast its subject. I'd be willing to bet money it survives at least one of the buildings shown. It's just that none of us are likely to be around when it's time to settle this bet. The main natural predators of stone sculptures are acid rain, vandals, art thieves, and fashionable good taste, and the latter is probably the main threat here. I could see the city, circa 2034, deciding it's just too cheesy to keep (by 2034's exacting standards) and consigning it to a dusty warehouse, or trading it to the aliens as a native handicraft in exchange for some sort of advanced technology. It could happen.

Kenton Park

[View Larger Map]

Photo of N. Portland's Kenton Park, a few blocks west of the Kenton MAX station. This was sort of an afterthought when I went to take photos of the (locally) famous Paul Bunyan statue; it's the usual neighborhood park, big grassy area with sports fields. I imagine many fond childhood memories have been created here, but Google hasn't figured out how to index those yet, which I'm sure is for the best.

I figured I'd check the Oregonian database for interesting items, in case there was anything to make up for the park's lack of visual uniqueness. Nothing earthshaking here either, but I did put together a short list of miscellaneous news items:

• The North Portland Commercial Club Women's Auxillary decided to work in favor of a park in 1913. The story reports that they usually focused on rose shows and "eugenic contests" whatever those were. I'm fairly sure I would be horrified if I knew what those were.
• It was only designated an official city park in 1954; the article notes unofficial names had been in use for quite some time.
• The Oregon Centennial Wagon Train made a stop here in 1959. The trip began far away in Independence, MO, retraced the Oregon Trail west from there, and ended at the Expo Center, home of the centennial exposition. The leg from Independence OR to Kenton was made with the wagons on the backs of trucks, but at Kenton Park they saddled back up and made the final leg of the journey the traditional way. The story notes that of the 26 people who set out on the journey, only 19 stuck with it to the end. It doesn't explain what happened to the others, so I'm just going to assume they died of dysentery, like in the game.
• In July 1977, the park was home to an honest-to-goodness organized Hacky Sack tournament. Feel free to roll your eyes at the 70s if you want. I know I am.
• As I've noted in previous posts about the Kenton area, the 1980s were not a kind decade to the neighborhood. The real estate ads tail off, replaced with stories about petty crime and transients. A December 1985 story chronicled local anxiety about an influx of strip clubs to the neighborhood, with one person saying it wasn't safe for kids to go to the park anymore.
• A January 2008 story about gentrification mentions the park in passing; the neighborhood had been trying to attract a new Multnomah County Library branch, and a couple of proposals would have sited new library buildings near the park, in a mixed use development with condos on top, similar to libraries in the Sellwood and Hollywood neighborhoods. Then the global economy crashed later that year, and the condo market with it. Kenton ultimately did get a new library, but it opened in an existing storefront on Denver Avenue instead.

Fenwick Pocket Park

A couple of photos of tiny Fenwick Pocket Park, at N. Interstate Avenue & Fenwick Avenue, not far from the Kenton MAX station. This was yet another piece of the public art project around the MAX station, other parts being Paul Bunyan, the blue ox hooves nearby, and some cattle designs at the station platform. The main event here is a set of architectural elements salvaged from the old Portland Union Stockyards building, once located just north of the Kenton neighborhood until it was demolished in 1998. The Yellow Line art guide says:

Fenwick Pocket Park

• Terracotta fragments came from the Portland Union Stockyards building.
• A mosaic medallion from the building's entryway was restored and embellished with a border.

I suppose they had to create a separate nano-park for the stockyard stuff; siting it in the same place as the Babe the Blue Ox hooves would have been in poor taste.

The stockyards were once a huge regional operation, the largest stockyard in the Northwest, and the major employer in this part of the city, and now they've entirely vanished, gone the way of the old Forestry Center building, the cable car ramp in Goose Hollow, and the giant Richfield sign in the West Hills. A 1956 Oregon State University agricultural bulletin, "The Portland Union Stock Yards, A Case Study in Livestock Marketing" explained how the stockyards operated, toward the tail end of their heyday.

The essential points of the Chicago Stockyards system that have been followed so closely by the other 65 stockyards markets of the United States are: (1) one corporation owns all the pens, scales, and feeding and loading facilities; (2) anyone is permitted to buy or sell but sellers usually employ a commission man who is familiar with the market to do his selling; (3) anyone with proper financial and moral responsibility may engage in the commission business, subject to approval by the United States Packers and Stockyards Division.

In addition to providing a trading place, al of these stockyards still perform their original functions of loading, unloading, feeding, and watering all animals arriving or leaving regardless of whether they are offered for sale. At some stockyards, such as Ogden and SaltLake, more than half of the animals arriving are merely stopped for feed, water, and rest and are then reloaded for other destinations, al without being offered for sale. In contrast, at Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, very few animals are reloaded for other destinations.

A PSU history project about the Kenton neighborhood (in connection with the MAX Yellow Line) explains that the decline and eventual closure came as the industry no longer needed a centralized middleman. The effect on the surrounding neighborhood was predictable.

By mid-century, however, the industry began to change. Centralized stockyards declined in popularity and the businesses that had long defined the landscape and lives of Kenton began to close. In 1966 the Swift Meat Company closed its doors. Just a few short years later, the Portland Stockyards closed after suffering years of declining sales. The once solidly working-class neighborhood fell into decline. Crime increased as businesses shut their doors, and long-time residents moved in search of jobs.

The paper then moves on to some wide-eyed enthusiasm about the coming renaissance of Kenton with mass transit and gentrification for all. Whatever. Anyway, elsewhere I ran across a couple of vintage stockyards photos if you're curious at all. Though obviously photos can't convey what it must have smelled like.

I realize I'm pointing out this fact about cows at my peril; the last time I pointed out that cows don't smell so great, a bunch of angry Facebook people showed up to complain about the fancy city slicker who doesn't know where food comes from. Trust me, my uncle had cows when I was a kid. I know where cheeseburgers come from. Doesn't mean I'm going to pretend cows smell like expensive cologne or fresh cookies baking or something. I mean, go ahead and complain anyway, I won't stop you. I'll even refund every cent you paid me to read this, if it makes you feel any better. Deal?

North Denver Plaza

In yesterday's Paul Bunyan post, I mentioned that the rival Paul Bunyan statue at the Trees of Mystery has a Babe, the Blue Ox at his side, and ours doesn't. This is basically true, but when the MAX Yellow Line went in they added a sort of reference to Paul's bovine companion, in another little plaza right across Denver Ave. from Bunyan himself. TriMet's MAX yellow line art guide just says this:

N Denver Plaza
Brian Borrello's seating sculpture was inspired by Babe the Blue Ox.

The "seating sculpture" being four sorta-benches that look like blue hooves. This terse blurb at least names the mini-park and tells us who created the hooves. Turns out he's created several other things that have appeared here before: People's Bike Library of Portland on Burnside, downtown; Lents Hybrids at the Foster Rd. MAX station on the Green Line, and Silicon Forest at the MAX Yellow Line's Rose Quarter station.

So the question remains why we didn't get a blue ox in the first place. The Trees of Mystery has one, and it turns out a shorter Bunyan in Bemidji, Minnesota has a blue ox as well. The Oregonian database never mentions the idea, as far as I can tell, so we're left trying to guess. Obviously the expense and finding a place to put it would've been factors, but the other key thing is that the longtime largest employer in Kenton wasn't the timber industry, but the old Union Stockyards just to the north of here. If beef is what's for dinner, maybe you don't want to go portraying a giant ox as an intelligent, friendly and loyal companion. I can't prove that's the reason, but it makes a much better story than if it just cost too much, or there wasn't room for it, or that building an ox just didn't occur to anyone.

Paul Bunyan Plaza

Here are a few photos of Portland's famous Paul Bunyan statue, and the plaza he stands in. He was created for the city's mostly-forgotten 1959 Centennial Exposition, and stood at the corner of N. Interstate & Argyle for over half a century. He was moved a block south to the present location as part of the MAX Yellow Line project, and later received a "makeover" in 2009, restoring details that had faded over time. I've always thought the statue is kind of, I dunno, derpy-looking. And strangely bashful, despite being 31 feet tall and wielding a giant axe. The expression makes his current location kind of hilarious though; he stands looking north, gazing across the street at the Dancin' Bare strip club with a shy, hopeful look on his face. At least this scenario makes a kind of sense. Someday, once the city fully gentrifies the Kenton neighborhood, there will be a condo tower across the street, and the ground floor will have a doggie day spa, an upscale yoga studio, and a hot restaurant by the indie chef du jour. And Paul Bunyan will still be standing there with the same dopey look on his face, and it just won't add up. Even if he did have a mighty hankerin' for some Icelandic fusion banh mi, he'd never make it past the building concierge, giant axe or no.

I was originally going to compare our Bunyan unfavorably with the taller one down at the Trees of Mystery in Northern California. I seemed to remember (from seeing him years ago) that he was rougher and tougher and more manly-looking than ours, but a quick image search reveals that he's actually kind of crudely put together. Derpy or not, our guy still beats their guy in the looks department. Their guy comes out ahead in height (which admittedly is a big deal in the Bunyan universe), and having an actual blue ox, and being slightly animatronic, and having a guy inside who cracks jokes and joshes with visitors, and featuring in a This American Life episode about the guys who have this unusual job. We come out ahead in the department of not wiring a bumper sticker onto your car while you're in the gift shop, although supposedly they don't do that anymore either.

The Bunyan statue was announced on February 1st, 1959, a couple of weeks before the state's official 100th birthday. On May 20th, a construction photo showed the statue nearly completed. By early July, Portland was already feuding with Bangor, Maine, which had inaugurated a Bunyan of its own earlier the same year. It seems that Portland's was (allegedly) taller by a few scant inches, but the Bangor Bunyan stood upon a six-foot pedestal, and the Bunyans' backers bickered over whether the pedestal counted toward a statue's stature. The paper dubbed this the Battle of the Bunyans. The battle was settled decisively in 1961 when the obviously taller California Bunyan came along. It seems everyone was building a backyard Bunyan; It wasn't so much a Battle of the Bunyans as a Bunyan bubble. Which inevitably went the way of all bubbles, and the Trees of Mystery one remains the world's tallest to this day.

In any event, the statue remained Kenton's big local landmark through the ups and (primarily) downs of the following decades. He showed up in a 1976 article profiling the neighborhood as it was then. A few years later he made another appearance in a 1983 article about a study of the Kenton area, which described the prospects of revitalizing the neighborhood as "bleak, but not hopeless", whatever that means. A Bunyan photo ran in a 1985 article about Oregon roadside attractions. The MAX line sped either revitalization or gentrification, whatever you prefer to call it, but it's still not a place you'd ever confuse with the Pearl District or trendier parts of Inner NE closer to downtown.

As for the little plaza where our Bunyan now stands, I've found at least one city document using the "Paul Bunyan Plaza" name, and I'm not sure what else you'd call if if not that. It's not a city park strictly speaking; PortlandMaps says it's a piece of unused street right-of-way, I suppose left over from MAX construction, meaning the city Transportation Bureau owns the land. I don't know who empties the trash cans and so forth; I imagine it would be either TriMet or possibly neighborhood volunteers.

photo friday: northern edition

View Larger Map

If you dropped by here yesterday (and don't feel bad if you didn't; nobody else did either), you might recall that I hopped the Yellow Line north to the Kenton neighborhood to play "weird guy wandering around with a camera" for a bit. Don't worry, we're done with roses for the moment. Here are a few other neighborhood attractions, starting with the, uh, famous Paul Bunyan statue. They just don't make roadside kitsch like this anymore, monumental in size but brightly colored, and with a big goofy grin. This makes him kind of hard to work with, camera-wise. You can either just take the stock photo above, or you can try to get a little creative:



But here's the best angle available, in which we learn exactly why Mr. Bunyan sports that goofy grin:



Perhaps you were wondering about the absent Blue Ox. This particular Bunyan never had one, even before they moved him to the current location (officially known as "Paul Bunyan Plaza") when MAX went in. Here's a 2002 Trib story about the move. The story notes:

Across Denver Avenue, a sculptor will install small statues in the shape of hooves representing Paul’s pal, Babe the Blue Ox. They will serve as seats.

So here are those hooves, which sit across Denver Ave. from Bunyan. We didn't get the full ox, and probably not for budgetary reasons, either. No self-respecting artist in this modern era would be caught dead building something that would go with the Bunyan statue. And doing just the hooves gives you a great opportunity to spout art jargon, too, stuff like "subverting the dominant paradigm". Which I suppose the hooves do, in a way.



TriMet's public art info for the Yellow Line says the mini-park with the hooves is called "N. Denver Plaza", not to be confused with Paul Bunyan Plaza across the street. So now you know.

---

Next stop, a few blocks to the east at the corner of Fenwick & Interstate, is what TriMet calls Fenwick Pocket Park, featuring a few salvaged architectural elements from the old Portland Union Stockyards building that used to be around here somewhere. Kenton started out as a company town, which explains the distinctive architecture in the business district along Denver Avenue. No, I don't have any photos of the business district. I ought to have taken some, but I was a bit overly narrowly-focused yesterday and just sort of didn't.

Suffice it to say that the business district still has a lot of its blue-collar, "old Portland" character... for now. Like downtown St. Johns, it's just too cute and too close in to avoid the gentrifiers for much longer. Like St. Johns, the process has already started. If you're curious, you may want to go have a look now. You'll be able to say you saw the place before it was all upscale coffee chains, swanky martini bars, and doggie day spas, like the rest of 21st century Portland.

When the city brings in artists to build monuments to your neighborhood's vanished working-class glory, you can be absolutely sure that you won't be a working-class neighborhood for too much longer. At least not if the city can help it.





>



The bovine theme continues at the Kenton MAX station:

---

A couple of blocks west of Bunyan is Kenton Park, which has your usual collection of sports fields, playgrounds, etc., nice enough but nothing to go out of your way to see. I understand the city's thinking about siting a skate park here. From the neighborhood association's board minutes: Tom reports that Dreamland will be sure to design a facility so that kids will be drawn to it and not to other areas of Downtown Kenton. It will be a small enough facility that it will not attract kids from all over the city.".

Which is an interesting and rather defensive way to put it. You could probably write a whole book about how and why communities decide to provide certain sports or recreational facilities and not others. Nearly every neighborhood park in the city provides a baseball diamond or two, and these get used maybe once in a blue moon. Meanwhile, we've heard for years about the Portland area's critical shortage of soccer fields. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to convert a few baseball diamonds around town into soccer fields, but apparently it isn't quite that simple.

Conventional wisdom seems to go something like this: If you build basketball courts, you attract inner city gangs. If you build soccer fields, you get Hispanic folks, and skate parks pull in the teenagers, and we all know teenagers are nothing but trouble. Baseball fields, however, attract only wholesome, Midwestern, field-of-dreams types. Yes, even the screaming Little League dads are 100% pure and wholesome; what could be more American than erupting in a violent psychotic rage over whether the last pitch was a ball or a strike? Just thinking about that makes me want some apple pie. So even if your baseball field just sits there empty 99% of the time, it still elevates the neighborhood's moral character simply by existing. Or that's the theory, anyway.

Society's been willing to make a few concessions to the city's skateboarders in recent years. I suppose the thinking is that, unlike being an ethnic minority, being a teenager is something one grows out of eventually. If kids' anarchic impulses can just be channeled constructively for a few years, they may yet become productive, respectable, taxpaying members of society. Sure, older generations think it's a weird activity, and wonder why kids do it if nobody's even keeping score and don't have a coach screaming at them from the sidelines. But hey, teenagers are mysterious and inscrutable like that.

rose overload

View Larger Map

Gentle Reader(s), it occurred to me today that you might -- just might -- not be sick and tired of rose photos just yet, so I thought I'd go take a few more.

I figured going up to the main rose garden in Washington Park would almost be cheating, plus the place is probably thick with tourists right now, so instead I wandered up to one of the city's other rose gardens, the small and rather obscure Kenton Neighborhood Rose Garden. More info about the place at OregonLive, Waymarking.com, and the Kenton neighborhood association. Seems all the upkeep is done by local volunteers, not the city. Maybe I'm biased, since I can't even grow mold on stale bread, but they've done a pretty impressive job if you ask me.