Out of the Brambles

Ok, so today we're at the Lents/Foster MAX station to look at Out of the Brambles, the multicolored sculpture on the west side of the elevated train platform. (Recall that 'today' is a very flexible word here on this humble blog, this time even more than usual. We'll get to that in a bit.) This sculpture was created by Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre, who longtime Gentle Reader(s) might remember from old posts about Connections at the Multnomah County offices on Hawthorne, and Second Growth at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. His description of it, from a Wayback Machine copy of an old page about it:

A common theme during interviews of Lents community members was childhood memories of berry picking. Formidable defenses allow these fruiting vines to survive, reproduce and provide sustenance for animals and humans; berry plants also protect the earth under them, the water beside them, and the multitude of small animals and birds within their thickets. A symbol of tenacious nature, berries helped support the coming of civilization, and will remain to engulf and dismantle what we have built after our tenure on Earth. Berry vines are also a metaphor for life’s struggles: getting past the thorns to the fruits. Wild berries transcend the differences between all the cultures that have populated this area. They were revered and heavily utilized by Native populations, and have been loved, hybridized, cultivated and tended by each succeeding generation and ethnic group.

I had linked to the original page in a 2013 post about Lents Hybrids, the other art at the same MAX station. That and a post at a long-defunct neighborhood business blog were the only mentions I could find about it on the interwebs, and because 2013 was roughly a billion internet years ago -- internet years are still a thing, right? -- both links have long since gone stale. The vanished lents dot biz site went away years ago, was not archived anywhere, and the name now belongs to a shady domain squatter page, which is why I'm not linking to it. And since I didn't quote the relevant blog post of theirs at the time, I have no idea what they actually said about the art here. Oh well.

The rest of my notes for this post seemed to naturally fall into a rough timeline. Partly about the art itself, and partly the chain of events leading up to this post happening in late 2020 (which I realize might be completely uninteresting to everyone besides me):

• The MAX Green Line opened on September 12th 2009. As part of the grand opening, TriMet created public art tour guides for the I-205 and downtown parts of the new line, which I treated as sort of a "gotta catch 'em all" todo list for a while. Note that both of those links are also Wayback Machine copies, again because link rot. At least they left the pages up until sometime in 2016, which I guess is a respectable amount of time.
• Here are a few old posts from 2006-07 when they were busy building the downtown part of the new line. Not really relevant to anything in this post, but they came up in a search and 2006 is roughly 4 billion internet years ago, so I figured I'd work them in somewhere.
• I finally got around to riding the semi-new line on July 2nd 2010. I know this because I thought I'd be hip with the latest social media technology and live-tweet my semi-thrilling adventures riding the train out to a suburban mall and back during a heavy rainstorm. While taking photos with a new Blackberry -- my first phone with a camera -- and posting them to a long-defunct add-on service called "Twitpic", which is why the photo links in that thread don't work anymore.
• The page I quoted about Out of the Brambles gives a date of 2012, so it went in after the MAX line opened (and after my little 2010 snarkfest). I guess this would explain why it wasn't listed in the 2009 TriMet art guide. The other 2010 photos look dark and miserable enough that I suspect I would have skipped Out of the Brambles that day anyway, had it been there, since you can't see it without getting off the train.
• On the other hand, the entire "Lents Town Center" area has been completely transformed in the years after I took those original photos. The Portland Development Commission -- the autonomous agency tasked with doing the thing they know not to call "urban renewal" anymore -- had dreamed of gentrifying this area for decades and finally got their wish, and the mishmash of parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings has been transformed into a few square blocks of apartment buildings -- unfortunately of uniform height and fairly nondescript style. So it might have been interesting to have a few 'before' photos for comparison, but it was raining that day and I didn't realize what was coming, so I don't. Oh well.
• As for why it showed up after the line opened, my personal theory is that it wasn't part of the original plan, but when people got a look at the hulking grey concrete structure for the MAX platform, it was a lot uglier in person than in the early-2000s CGI that had sold people on the plan, and something had to be done. And Out of the Brambles does a great job in that respect, as the concrete train platform becomes just a neutral backdrop instead of the focus of attention.
• A bit later I realized I could get a few public art posts out of those poor-quality Blackberry photos, and since it's the internet (and nobody's paying me to do this) I could just make some self-deprecating remarks about the photos instead of going back again to take better ones. So I spent a bit of time in December 2013 writing them up and tagged them all with "greenline" in case anybody wants to binge (briefly) on bad photos of circa-2009 public art. The Lents Hybrids post I mentioned earlier was part of this batch, and in putting it together I found that one long-gone blog post mentioning Out of the Brambles, and it went on one of my todo lists. Not as a super high priority, but as something to track down at whatever point I was in the area again and remembered to look at the right todo list.
• Just for comparison, the Second Growth post happened around this time too. That post went from taking photos to hitting "Publish" in 5 days, which goes to show that I can sometimes get things done in a reasonable amount of time, so long as I remember not to forget, and prioritize (or misprioritize) getting them done ahead of various other professional and personal goals.
• While putting this current post together, I realized Chabre made a couple of other things at the same MAX station, with their own separate names and everything, so two more todo items just went onto another list. Obviously there's no ETA on if or when those might show up here, but they definitely won't appear before this dumb pandemic is over.
• I did check the library's database of Oregonian back issues, and found a few articles mentioning Second Growth (like this review) from around then when the MAX Yellow Line opened, or an entertaining interview from 2002. I don't see anything similar for Out of the Brambles, I think largely because the Oregonian no longer has the staff, or the spare column inches, or the inclination to publish stories about art these days.
• Earlier in 2014, the Twitpic service either went out of business or was about to, so I had to go back and replace all my embedded Twitpics with Flickr copies of the same photos. I'd apparently had the foresight to make backups of my crappy Blackberry photos, or maybe I'd been warned this was coming, I don't recall now. Anyway, I re-uploaded them to Flickr this time and updated the affected posts, in yet another episode in the long twilight struggle against bit rot. The end of Twitpic was inevitable after Twitter introduced their own builtin photo sharing feature, but I was kind of sad to see them go, since embedding those photos in blog posts involved a completely unapproved kludge I'd hacked together somehow. I have no idea how it worked anymore, but I was just a little proud of it at the time.
• Next we skip forward to July 2016, when I finally had a reason to be out in that corner of town anyway, namely to visit the new-ish Zoiglhaus brewpub just steps away from the MAX station. So if you don't care for this set of photos, I'm going to blame it on me starting to drift off into a pilsner-assisted schnitzel coma for the afternoon.
• And then the hard work of writing a blog post began, by which I mean those photos sat around in Flickr for about a year, until I created a draft post for them in June 2017, saved it, and didn't touch it again until a few days ago. By which I mean mid-October 2020, in case other stuff comes up and I forget about this post again for another few years or whatever.

Pantheon Hall Rose

Next up is another rose from a Portland Roses Tumblr post, this time outside the huge, ramshackle New Copper Penny bar/nightclub complex in Lents. A 2014 Willamette Week article described the owner's efforts to fight City Hall, particularly PDC officials who wanted, no, needed his land for upscale condos and goat yoga boutiques and so forth. The fight went the way fighting City Hall usually goes, and the land's been sold to an apartment building developer, so say goodbye to another piece of sleazy, disreputable Old Portland. The drawings for the proposed new building look entirely soulless, a carbon copy of every other new apartment building around the city, and I'm sure many other US cities too. At least central Lents may finally get its first Starbucks this way, I guess.

Lents Crossroads Plaza

Next up is another small public space on SE Foster, the Lents Crossroads Plaza at the corner of Foster & 92nd. It was built back in 2001 or so, meant to be a sort of central gathering place for a neighborhood that didn't have one. There wasn't anything going on when I was there, so I had to resort to the intergoogles to figure out what it's for. Which probably gives an entirely random and unrepresentative sense of the place, but here goes.

• The main thing that happens regularly here is the Lents Farmers Market; I haven't been to it and I'm not sure whether it's in the plaza itself or the grassy area next door.
• There was a pop-up coffee shop for a while in summer 2015, since downtown Lents somehow doesn't have a single brick-and-mortar coffee place, which is just uncivilized, if true. How is this even possible, in the year 2016, in Portland? Maybe it's just that there's, like, a Starbucks somewhere nearby, and they have the sense not to count it.
• An East PDX News article mentioned a hopefully-annual "May Day Pig Roast" held on May 1st, but neglected to mention which year it was. A 2009 Willamette Week article wringing its hands about Lents's proposed (but never built) minor league baseball stadium had a puzzling description for the place: "If Portland filmmakers ever needed a street corner that looked like the Eastern Bloc, the Lents Crossroads would be a perfect fit." I have no idea what they meant by that.

Lents Grown Story Yard

A couple of recent posts have looked at elements of the city's ongoing "redevelopment" (i.e. gentrification) effort in Portland's Lents neighborhood, centered on SE Foster just west of I-205. So far they haven't had a lot of success attracting actual new construction to the area, but they've spent a fair bit of PDC development money creating plazas and monuments and whatnot, in the hope that a new Pearl District might someday arise way out here. You might have inferred from my tone that I'm not entirely convinced this is either likely or desirable. But in all the time I've had this humble blog, the city has never once asked my opinion (or the opinion of any other random pseudonymous internet person, for that matter) before building something, and I doubt they're going to start now.

Anyway, after the initial phase of the project, the city ended up owning various bits and pieces of vacant land around central Lents, to be sold off to developers at whatever point developers take an interest in the area. Leaving them as empty lots for now wouldn't really create a sense of impending prosperity, so it was time to get creative. In August 2014, this parcel at SE 88th & Foster became Lents Grown Story Yard, a temporary art installation featuring odd wire-and-rocks outdoor furniture and large photos of local business owners. The PDC press release for the grand opening explains this is a temporary use of the land, paid for with rather small PDC and Arts Tax grants. This is basically the same model they used successfully with the former Block 47 mini-park at NE Holladay & MLK, across from the Convention Center. I've forgotten exactly what replaced the old mini-park, but the whole area north of the Convention Center has sprouted swanky new apartment buildings in the last couple of years, so it's probably part of one of those now.

Sorry about the picture quality, by the way. Everything I know about this place came from googling it after the fact; I didn't know it was there before going, and didn't realize what it was when I was visiting. While tracking down the weird "Retail Birthplace of U-Haul" marker across the street, I saw what looked like weird boxes of rocks across the street and took a couple of photos out of curiosity. If I'd known it was Art, I would have crossed the street for a better look.

Lents Town Center monuments

In a recent post I mentioned something about the big new monument doodads the city installed along SE Foster to let visitors know they'd arrived at the fabled Lents Town Center, with upscale housing and amenities to be built Real Soon Now. So here's one of the two monuments in all its glory, in case anyone was curious.

As a side note, one of this humble blog's more esoteric projects involves tracking down some obscure places from an old Parks Bureau list from the early 90s, places they'd had something to do with in the last couple of decades but generally didn't own. One of the items on the list was "Foster Woodstock Couplets", which is here, or technically was a previous incarnation of here, prior to the big monuments and so forth. I think the earlier effort was strictly for traffic flow, making Foster & Woodstock a pair of one way streets through central downtown Lents, such as it was/is. Still, I'm going to check that item off the list now, since I don't see how else it gets checked off, and checking it off is important because of reasons.

SE 91st & Foster Plaza

The next sorta-park we're visiting is a relatively new one. For years now, the Portland Development Commission has been trying -- fruitlessly so far -- to gentrify the Lents neighborhood, particularly the stretch of Foster Rd. between about SE 88th & I-205. So far they've poured close to $100M into the area, and the fickle condo tower gods have yet to appear & bestow their various blessings, so the struggle continues. A recent PDC effort here was called "Lents Streetscape Improvements", which involved redesigning a few intersections and adding a couple of large gateway monuments to let drivers know that a.) they had arrived at Lents, and b.) this fact was important. One of the intersection tweaks added a bend to SE 91st Ave. at the intersection with Foster, and the original straight bit of street was transmogrified into the semi-shiny new plaza you see here. (Note: in 2016, Google Maps still can't decide whether it wants to show you the old street grid or the new one. If you don't see a bend in the embedded map above, try clicking "View Larger Map", which will take you to a map that's both larger and newer. Don't ask me why; I don't work for Google and am at least as confused as you are.)

The little plaza doesn't seem to have an official name, and a 2014 Willamette Week article dubbed it "Cockroach Plaza", due to the pest control business housed in the building next door. That's a bit unfair, considering the building is a vintage Carnegie library that just happens to house a pest control business right now. I will grant that the plaza won't win any urban design awards. It looks like it could use a weird sculpture in the middle, or a couple of food carts. Possibly they're waiting a few years to do that, so locals can get used to the new bend in the road & won't plow right through the local fruit cart or something.

Essex Park

Ok, time for another blog post. I haven't done a city park post in a while, and honestly this probably won't be among the more memorable of them. A while ago I was out tracking down murals in SE Portland and ran across little Essex Park, on SE Center a few blocks west of 82nd. It's another of those neighborhood parks I keep saying I don't bother with; ballfields and playgrounds are fine, of course, but there's usually nothing distinctive there to justify a blog post. I took a couple of photos since I was there anyway, and eventually it occurred to me that there might be something interesting about the place in the old Oregonian newspaper database. That turned out pretty well a few years ago with Irving Park, which was previously a horse & auto racetrack where a world land speed record was set in the early 1900s.

If Essex Park has ever seen that level of excitement, it somehow didn't make the paper, unfortunately. I did come across one minor mystery, at least: The city parks website says the city acquired it in 1940, but the surrounding neighborhood was developed starting around 1906, and the developers were already calling the neighborhood "Essex Park" at that point. So either the neighborhood predated its namesake park, or someone else owned the park prior to 1940, or the city's records are off. Subsequent news items peak in the 1950s & early 60s, when the neighborhood would have been full of Boomer kids, all wanting to play Little League and enjoy wholesome group activities before heading down to the malt shop. That tapers off in the late 60s & into the 70s when the kids all headed off to college and communes and whatever, and then it's mostly crime news until the current century, when hip young couples began to realize the distant lands beyond Mt. Tabor were inhabited and surprisingly affordable. So that's our story, such as it is, and here are the assorted news items I ran across:

• Here's the first reference to "Essex Park" in 1906, which (as I mentioned) refers to an exciting new real estate development, not a city park.
• A 1909 article about the real estate boom in Lents & Mt. Scott mentions Essex Park being near "Firland station", and today's Firland Parkway is a few blocks west and south of today's Essex Park, so that was the first clue the neighborhood and the park were in the same general area.
• A 1920 "City News in Brief" item relates the tale of a couple who agreed to swap their Essex Park lot for 160 acres of Alberta farmland (meaning the Alberta in Canada, not the street in NE Portland), sight unseen, only to discover the land was mostly swamps and ravines. An indignant court case had been filed as the paper went to press.
• The first mention of the park itself in the paper came in 1954, with a brief item about the parks bureau organizing events for kids in a few parks around the city. An item just below this mentions that OMSI (Portland's science museum) would be hosting a special showing of "Rhythm of Africa", a Jean Cocteau short documentary with a screenplay by Langston Hughes. I really wonder how that was received in the white-bread Republican Portland of 1954. The short was originally filmed in 1944 and released in 1947, and a 1976 review in the Journal of American Folklore (Multnomah County Library link here) suggests the film was already seen as a bit patronizing and cringey at that point, though the footage was interesting if you completely blocked out the narration. It looks like nobody has a streamable copy of it online, but I'm going to guess it hasn't exactly aged out of cringefulness in the intervening 40+ years.
• Through the rest of the 1950s into the early 60s, the park gets mentioned a lot in connection with Little League games and wholesome organized kids activities, including one mention of the long-forgotten sport of "wicket-croquet-bowling", described as a cross between lawn bowling and cricket, played with a croquet ball.
• These news items sort of petered out in the mid-60s, I suppose as a generation of Boomer kids grew up and headed off to Woodstock or 'Nam. The annual Essex Park Pet Show was still going as of 1975, though, according to an item with photos of a cute fuzzy dog sliding down a playground slide.
• After that it's mostly real estate ads, with an occasional crime item, like a 1976 police chase ending at the park, and a 1980 clinic on avoiding bike theft. The clinic involved engraving a driver's license number (yours, or a parent's) on the frame of the bike for identification, which I suppose was reasonable back in the innocent days before modern identity theft was invented.
• The city renovated the park in 1982, replacing play equipment and benches, adding lights to the tennis courts, and adding basketball courts and an irrigation system. A beloved ex-Trailblazer was on hand as the guest of honor for the park's big re-dedication celebration.
• Less than a year later, a story in June 1983 discusses major budget cuts across the parks bureau, as Oregon's deep early-1980s recession took hold. The story mentions that the recent park improvements had come from a one-time federal grant, and at present the city couldn't afford to mow the grass in the park regularly.
• The paper starts mentioning kids activities again in the mid-90s and early 2000s, though there are still the occasional crime items, like a 2012 carjacking, and a June 2016 multiple assault
• The local neighborhood association runs a summer movies-in-the-park series, including a 2014 showing of The Goonies
• The park was a test site for a Water Bureau soil moisture sensor project in 2014, I suppose because it has an underground irrigation system (thanks to the 1982 federal grant) and a lot of city parks don't. The idea is that moisture sensors can reduce water use, instead of watering automatically at a set time every day even during a downpour. The flip side of course is that this probably means putting the irrigation system on the net where script kiddies and the Russian mafia can find it. So that could be exciting someday.
• In other assorted recent crime news, local TV news websites have alarming recent stories about discarded syringes in 2014, a prowling sex offender earlier this year, and a possibly gang-related shooting in August. I was actually working on this post literally when that shooting happened; posting it right then seemed a little crass, so I saved it to drafts & let it chill for a while. I think it's been long enough now that hopefully it won't look like I'm trying to capitalize on lurid news or anything like that.

So anyway, there's nothing really earthshaking here, but there you have it. If there's a more comprehensive history of the park (other than this post) anywhere out there on the interwebs, either Google hasn't indexed it, or my Google-fu has failed me somehow.

Working Class Acupuncture mural

Large, recent mural outside an acupuncture studio on SE 92nd north of Foster, near the Lents MAX station. Also near the Zoiglhaus brewpub, which was the primary reason I made the trip out to Lents. I'm not really in the restaurant review business, but I thought it was worth the trip.

Contemplative Place

The next stop on our ongoing public art tour is Contemplative Place by Michihiro Kosuge, located in Ed Benedict Park next to the skate park. The city's blurb about it says "A granite and basalt sculpture entitled Contemplative Place by Michihiro Kosuge was installed in 1996 at the west end of the park. Each of the four stones is placed to represent the four directions.". The RACC description has a bit more to say:

Kosuge describes “Contemplative Place” as establishing “a relationship between the stones and natural phenomena: the movement of the sun, the seasons, and an awareness of the cardinal directions, ”fostering “contemplation, spirituality, and quietude.” Each of the four stones is placed to represent the four directions.

Unfortunately the skaters next door were arguing loudly over something or other when I visited, so contemplation and quietude were not really being fostered at the time. And spirituality has never been my thing, so I have no idea whether that was being fostered or not. Your mileage may vary, obviously.

"Retail Birthplace of U-Haul" marker

For our next adventure, we're tracking down one of Portland's more unusual historical markers. In front of the U-Haul dealership at SE 88th & Foster is a sign proclaiming the spot as the "Retail Birthplace of U-Haul". The 'Retail' qualifier is there because the company itself was founded in Ridgefield, WA (a small town north of Vancouver) in 1945. But this location was the first actual dealership, apparently. The company's history page goes on in more detail, if you're curious; there's even an official book, if you're that curious. In any case, corporate headquarters moved to Phoenix many years ago in search of a more favorable regulatory environment.

In the unlikely event you've been following this humble blog since the mid-2000s, you might remember I mentioned this marker once before, in a post from September 2006. Which in turn points to a Roadside America page that describes the marker, and I have no idea where I found that page anymore. Probably on the late, lamented ORBlogs aggregator, or in someone's RSS feed, because 2006. I never actually promised I was going to go find this marker, but it did spend close to 9 years at the bottom of various todo lists before I got around to it, which might be a record (so far). But then again, I've never once claimed to be in the breaking news business.

Lents Hybrids

The next stop along the Green Line is the Lents Town Center / Foster MAX station, home to Lents Hybrids:

Brian Borrello's Lents Hybrids is a series of spiraling plant forms with "buds" that generate energy through a hybrid system of wind and solar generators. The pieces are evocative of the native long grasses that may have once grown near the station area, while the buds are symbolic of the unfolding beauty and potential for the Lents neighborhood.

I only managed to capture one of the sets of hybrids while riding by on the train. There's at least one more at the station, with four spiraling stems instead of two. And I didn't do the two-stem one justice either, this being yet another crappy Blackberry photo taken from a moving MAX train.

Borrello also created People's Bike Library of Portland in downtown Portland, Silicon Forest on the MAX Yellow Line, the blue ox feet at the Kenton MAX station, and apparently much, much more, including some giant filberts he's creating for the City of Tigard. Like Lents Hybrids, Silicon Forest is a collection of tall, skinny solar-powered tree structures. Add in More Everyday Sunshine and Nepenthes, and it starts to look like solar-powered art is a hot local trend right now. Or at least it will probably look that way to art historians a century from now.

Neighborhood Notes has a few construction photos. East PDX News has a few more, plus one of the finished product glowing blue at night, which looks kind of cool in a Lothlorien/Vegas sort of way. Lents Grown mentions a second artwork at the MAX station, Out of the Brambles by Wayne Chabre (who also created Connections at the Multnomah County building on Hawthorne). It looks like I would've needed to get off the train in order to see it, though, and even if I'd been in the mood to get off at each stop and look around, TriMet's website neglects to even mention that it's there.

As with Sky to Earth elsewhere on the Green Line, Lents Hybrids was created with help from a local pipe bending company. That sounds kind of esoteric, but their photo galleries showcasing their work are actually pretty interesting. Go take a look if you don't believe me.