Untitled, NE 9th & Halsey

Lately this humble blog has spent a surprising amount of time hanging out at inner NE Portland's Lloyd Center Mall. Not for the shopping, and not for the food court, but because I've been doing this silly public art project lately, and the Smithsonian's art database has half a dozen entries right around the mall. I've already covered five of them, so I figured I might as well track down the sixth and complete the set. At the northwest corner of the mall, on the side of a multistory parking garage, is a large painted aluminum screen with a picture of a floral-print handbag. The database says this is Untitled, by Elizabeth Mapelli, circa 1991 (i.e. it went in as part of the mall's big remodel that year). The database entry is pretty terse so initially I wasn't sure what to look for, but a PDC "Wayfinding and Public Art Handbook" for the area includes a small photo, and it wasn't hard to figure out from there. The photo must be fairly old, given the lack of trees in front of the garage, and the junky early 1980s car in the foreground.

Today's inevitable end-of-post tangent: Apparently the artist once owned a vintage Pullman railcar, converted into a residential private railroad car and parked on a rail siding near OMSI. She put it up for sale in 2012, after realizing the spent much of her time traveling outside the country & wasn't really using the railcar. A fun 2011 Washington Post article peeks at the world of private railcars; it seems like the sort of hobby one gets into if one has money to burn, but yachting is too mainstream, and one cannot quite afford a private zeppelin. Monocle optional.

Consumer Reliquaries

Today's adventure takes us back to Lloyd Center again (honestly, I'm not taking kickbacks from them or anything), this time to the parking garage on the south side of the mall. If you go to the ground floor and look closely, you'll eventually run across Consumer Reliquaries, a series of small birdhouse-shaped metal boxes, each containing a common consumer object or two, showcased as if they're precious objects or holy relics on display. That Smithsonian inventory entry (link above) is pretty terse:

SCULPTOR: Bourdette, Christine 1952-
MEDIUM:   bronze, glass, steel, found objects, electric lights

Like the nearby In the Tree Tops and the Capitalism fountain, Consumer Reliquaries arrived in 1991 as part of the Lloyd Center remodel. During the Reagan-Bush era, there was a hot genre of art like this about consumerism, kitsch, and pop culture. Sometimes celebrating it, other times satirizing it, and often a bit of both. This one seems to be a bit of both. The last time I posted a photo of one of the boxes was back in 2006, after someone had slightly vandalized it, pushing the needle further to the satire end of the dial.

(Apologies for the scatterbrained 2006 blog post, by the way. I was home sick with a cold that day and cobbled together a post with some random photos I had lying around, followed by some random links from my RSS feed. Those would all go to Twitter or Tumblr now, but back then neither had been invented yet, and every day we blogged six miles through the snow, uphill, both ways. I like to think I've gotten better at this blog business since 2006, or at least I've found a sorta-interesting niche to stick to.)

Anyway, Bourdette also created Snails in Fields Park, and Cairns at the north end of the downtown Transit Mall. Neither have anything to do with consumer culture, as far as I know; the art world's moved on since 1991, or at least the city's public art buyers have.

Flight of Birds

Today's art foray takes us to Lloyd Center again. This is Flight of Birds, another Tom Hardy bird sculpture, which hangs over the escalators at the mall food court. I'd never really paid much attention to it until now, but it turns out Flight of Birds is one of the few remaining vestiges of the original groovy 1960 open-air mall.

A July 31st 1960 Oregonian article describes Flight of Birds along with the other (now vanished) examples of then-avant-garde art the mall had commissioned:

A flight of steel birds will soar over the east end of the Lloyd Center skating rink as one of the market's principal objects d'art.

Constructed by Oregon artist Tom Hardy, the 30-foot long assembly of metal-winged birds will be suspended from a barrel vaulted ceiling.

Some 70 feet above the rink, the "Flight of Birds" was made of 10 and 16 gauge steel and painted gold to show up against a white overhead.

Hardy, artist in residence at Reed College, cut sheet steel and welded it together for many weeks before the aerial sculpture was completed.

Commerce promoted art at Lloyd Center back then, and art returned the favor. The long-vanished Sieberts home furnishing store in the mall held a show of Hardy sculptures to coincide with the unveiling of Flight of Birds:

Sieberts at Lloyd Center is presenting a one-man show for Tom Hardy using the artist's huge "Birds in Flight" done for the Ice Arena as inspiration for the exhibition of smaller Hardy works.

Since Hardy's welded metal sculptures are becoming increasingly popular for home interiors and patios the store has arranged this showing in conjunction with furniture arrangements indicating the most effective use of the sculpture for enjoyment in the home.

Both large and small scaled sculptures are in this most recent Hardy showing. Smaller sculptures include fox heads done in copper, a small horned toad, bird studies and bison. A larger version of the bison theme is done in steel on silver leaf platform. A handsome metal screen, turquoise banded, features a giraffe motif. A number of pieces are birds poised on pedestals rather than being shown in flight. Drawings augment the showing.

A brief 1964 item mentions a showing of a color film of Hardy creating Flight of Birds. I imagine that film would be an interesting period piece if it still exists somewhere.

If you're curious about what the rest of the mall used to look like (before it was renovated & enclosed around 1991), check out these photo-filled posts at MidCentury Modern League, Malls of America, and Vintage Portland.

I grew up in westside suburbia so we didn't go to Lloyd Center very often. Mostly I remember being cold there because it was an open-air mall in the Pacific Northwest. I still kind of looked forward to going there though, because it had what I was convinced was the world's greatest candy and nut store. Childhood memories about candy stores are notoriously unreliable, but I recall window displays overflowing with red and green pistachios, which were especially tantalizing because mom wouldn't buy them due to the artificial colors. Once I talked mom into getting some old fashioned rock candy, because it looked cool, and she'd talked about having it when she was little, but I didn't care for it. Another time I ended up with a bag of hot salted pine nuts (and I'm kind of amazed they had pine nuts back then, in retrospect), and I didn't really care for those either. Come to think of it I'm not really sure why I thought it was the world's awesomest candy store, because I can't think of a single thing I got there that I have fond memories of now. I'm sure it must have been visually stunning, though. If there are any vintage photos of the store out there, I probably don't want to see them and realize how ordinary it actually was.

In the Tree Tops

Some photos of In the Tree Tops, the pair of bright red figures at NE 12th & Broadway, at an outdoor portion of Lloyd Center Mall. Walking Portland mentions that this was one of the artworks selected by the mall's owners when Lloyd Center was reconstructed in 1990, along with the Capitalism fountain at the mall's SW corner; the Free Flow fountain in the south-side parking garage; the house-shaped display boxes of consumer goods in the same garage; and probably a few others here and there that I'm not aware of. The artist's website just mentions In the Tree Tops in passing in her bio.

Some time in the 1990s (I'm not sure which year), Willamette Week's annual Best of Portland issue proclaimed it "Best Public Sculpture":

In a breezeway between Northeast Weidler Street and Broadway, in what was once part of the Lloyd Center back before its open-air corridors were enclosed by cheap siding, right outside the last Newberry's in town, stands one of the weirdest sculptures in Portland, a city rotten with weird public art.IN THE TREETOPS, or The Radish People, as it's affectionately known, consists of two humanoid figures standing side by side, their red, semi-glossy skin innocently unadorned. On top of their bony, elongated bodies perch gentle, Modigliani-style heads that gaze down tenderly at a house-shaped stone cradled in their long, extraterrestrial fingers. Out of their downturned heads grow lobster-red branches sprouting bright green leaves, and both pairs of skinny legs end in a single, tangled rootball. Are they emissaries from an underground kingdom? Mascots of a vanished Oregon industry? Like some misbegotten gene-splice between Will Vinton and Giacometti, the radish people are at once crude and empathetic, cutesy and mysterious, adorable and horrifying. Mostly adorable, though.

I've never heard anyone call it "The Radish People". Maybe that was a short-lived fad. I was about to say "The Radish People" was also a cheap 50s Sci-Fi movie, but I was probably thinking of "Attack of the Mushroom People". An honest mistake on my part.

This is about all the info I've got for you, but I did come across a fair number photos other people have taken of In the Tree Tops. It seems to attract passing cyclists a lot, for whatever reason. Here's a selection:

• 365 Project
• Lakewood Observer (in Ohio, believe it or not)
• Portland Oregon Daily Photo
• A Travelers Log
• blipfoto
• Worldisround

Ideals

The Oregon state office building near Lloyd Center is home to Ideals, an odd and spooky little statue at the corner of NE 7th Avenue and Oregon St. Its Smithsonian art inventory entry describes it as:

Standing female-like figure in the form of a hooded drapery garment with no visible figure inside. The proper left arm is raised.

The sculptor, Muriel Castanis, was known for this sort of figure. Her technique involved draping resin-coated fabric over store mannequins, and removing the mannequin once the resin had hardened. The finished product was typically a bronze duplicate of the original form. A search for other works of hers in the Smithsonian database shows that many of the others look quite similar to Ideals. The Portland Public Art blog griped about this some years ago. I don't entirely buy that argument. It's not that rare for an artist to stick with a technique that's led to a steady stream of commissions and sales in the past. This may be more notable here because Castanis's style is so distinctive. Generally whenever you're doing bronze castings of something, there's a possibility of making more than one copy of the same design. You can either call that "commercial" and sneer, or accept it as part of the nature of the medium. I guess I don't feel particularly harmed by other cities having their own draped-fabric, invisible-figure sculptures, and I don't see how one is devalued by the existence of others, either identical or similar, unless we're talking in a purely monetary, supply-and-demand sense. And in that case, if the local one isn't for sale, who really cares whether the others are sufficiently rare and expensive? I'm just not seeing the point there.

Her 2006 New York Times obit points out that Castanis was self-taught (which the art world generally sees as a Bad Thing), and only took up art in earnest after raising a family (which I understand is also a Bad Thing, at least in the more traditionalist, male-dominated parts of the art world). The gatekeepers seem a bit puzzled how someone like this managed to sneak into their clubhouse, and, moreover, make a living at it.

Her most famous works are probably the "corporate goddesses" atop a Philip Johnson skyscraper in San Francisco. At one point these and other works of hers were hailed (or derided) as major works of postmodernism, full of Classical references emptied of their traditional meanings. Standing outside a government office building, it looks like it's been put there to make some sort of statement, like the blindfolded Justice statues of old, but there's no specific meaning intended here; that's the whole point. By buying Ideals, the state was tracking the cutting edge (or at least the current fad) in the contemporary art world, which is something that we almost never do here. This is especially surprising so soon after the city's unhappy experience with the Portland Building. Art movements and trends come and go, of course, and postmodernism is no longer the irresistible shiny object it was twenty years ago. Back then, I once took an entire college class dedicated to the notion that postmodernity was going to overturn everything we knew about the social sciences as well as the arts. Nobody really talks about that anymore. It's probably just as well, although I did get an 'A' in the class and it would be nice to think I went to all that trouble for an idea with a longer shelf life. (Although at the time I was sure those PoliSci classes on the politics of the USSR and Warsaw Pact would be valuable too.) In any case, Ideals isn't contemporary anymore, and it's not yet old enough to be interesting from an art history standpoint. Maybe in another generation or so, the people who decide what's officially important will stumble across the weird buildings and paintings and statues of the late 80s and early 90s, and someone will write the definitive book, and suddenly major museums and collectors will be crazy for the stuff. That's what usually happens, anyway, and I don't see why it would be any different for a movement that proudly embraced the idea of art as commodity.

But do I like Ideals? Yes, I think I do. I posted an Instagram photo a while back calling it the "Ringwraith Statue of Liberty". That sounds kind of pejorative, but I didn't really mean it that way. The strange thing is that it seems a lot less spooky in person than it does in photos. That might be because it's sort of hobbit-sized in real life and doesn't seem all that ominous at that scale.

Street Twig

Today's obscure public art adventure takes us outside of downtown Portland for a change. Street Twig is at the corner of NE 16th & Weidler, a few blocks north and east of the Lloyd Center mall, next to a mid-2000s condo complex. CultureNOW describes it briefly:

The Big Leaf Maple tree, Acer macrophyllum, is represented here as a single branch with abundant seedpods. There are some impressive specimens of this Northwest native in the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood. Big Leaf Maples have great breadth and support a quantity of life forms within their branches. These tree-born gardens are suggestive of the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood, which is evolving organically, layer upon layer.

The RACC page for Street Twig leaves out the melodramatic, booster-ish last sentence of that description. That last sentence is key, though, as it gives a little insight into how a public artwork ended up outside the I-405 loop. Over roughly the last 20 years, the neighborhood around NE Broadway & Weidler has been promoted on and off as the Next Big Thing, but it's never really taken off the way places like the Pearl District and Mississippi Avenue have. They keep adding urban amenities that did the trick elsewhere, but this area is somewhat more immune than other parts of the city. It's kind of an odd and interesting part of town, with wide busy streets, the Lloyd Center shopping mall, and a number of big national chain restaurants. There are a lot of small local businesses too, but the area still feels like an island of quasi-suburbia planted in the middle of the city.

Portland has a reliable formula for gentrifying old industrial areas, and a similar formula for gentrifying working class and minority neighborhoods. Taking an area that's already somewhat upscale -- but upscale of the wrong sort -- and making it more "urban" is something they've had less success with, not only here but in areas like SW Macadam south of downtown, or the Gateway area around the I-84 & I-205 interchange. Thanks to these ongoing efforts, at this point the Broadway / Lloyd / Sullivan's Gulch / Irvington area now has condo buildings, public art, and a shiny new streetcar, but still has a Toyota dealer, a very suburban-style McMenamins, a Taco Bell drive thru, and the only Red Robin & Applebees outlets anywhere near downtown. (The next closest locations of both chains are at, you guessed it, Gateway.) And you typically get to all of these places by driving. I actually think this is great; it would be terrible if every business district in town was hip and trendy in exactly the same way. I don't often get a hankering for a platter of chain restaurant mozzarella sticks and a Coors Lite. Ok, that pretty much never happens. But it's somehow reassuring that the option still exists.

Before the condo building went in, this block was home to the original Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour. Farrell's, which later grew into a national chain, traded in 1890s nostalgia, kid-friendliness, and noise, and several generations of Portlanders have nostalgic fond memories of the place. We went to the Washington Square location a few times when I was a kid, but never for a birthday that I can recall. The ice cream was ok (though strictly of the vanilla-or-chocolate-with-wacky-toppings variety). The noise and commotion maybe not so much. After the demise of the national chain, the original location stayed in business as The Original Portland Ice Cream Parlor, but was eventually sold to developers in 2001; in 2009 the new owners of the Farrell's trademark announced a new restaurant was coming to town, but this doesn't seem to have happened yet.

The bigleaf maple turns out to be an interesting sort of tree. I admit I've never paid a lot of attention to the local maple trees. Growing up in the Northwest, one is sort of conditioned to think of forests as a mix of commercially valuable conifers and "everything else", aka "junk", and maple trees are obviously in the latter category. If you can believe this, I did not even realize there was a distinct species of maple tree endemic to the West Coast, much less that it has (supposedly) the largest leaves of any maple variety.

The really surprising thing is that bigleaf maple trees can be used to make maple syrup. We don't have a commercial maple syrup industry here, even a small artisanal one, and (according to Google) the only Portland business with "sugar shack" in the name is a notorious strip club. Wikipedia says that bigleaf syrup has a somewhat different flavor than the classic East Coast maple syrup everyone's used to. That might explain why you never see it in stores, but it just piques my curiosity./p>

There's an annual Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival on Vancouver Island, BC; I guess it's logical that the country with a maple leaf on its flag pays a bit closer attention to this sort of thing. The US Forest Service published a detailed article about syrup production back in 1972, and I've come across a couple of personal accounts (both dated 2013) of people trying their hand at making syrup. The latter reports that the finished product was "superb". So I'm going to add this to my list of native Northwest foods that I'd like to try but can't find, along with camas root (which is supposedly fermentable too), wapato root, and lamprey. (Yes, I'd totally eat lamprey. They look like they have it coming.)

Three Figures

I was walking near Lloyd Center the other day, and noticed this collection of large metal figures at NE 13th & Holladay, across the MAX tracks from the Lloyd Center cinemas. I'd never noticed them before, so I snapped a few quick phone photos to see if I could figure out what they were. Turns out the three figures are called, collectively, Three Figures, and RACC has this to say about them:

Mark Bulwinkle’s figures were a gift to Portland from AVIA. Originally sited at AVIA’s Corporate Headquarters, they were re-sited at their current location to appear to be enjoying the green space. Bulwinkle lives in Oakland, CA and is known for his whimsical welded sculptures.

The photos on the RACC page -- as well as the ones at Public Art Archive & CultureNow -- are probably from just after the figures were relocated. The surrounding trees are a lot bigger now, and the figures don't so much enjoy the green space as lurk within it. It doesn't help that the site is a little wedge of land between MAX tracks and an I-84 freeway ramp, with a vast empty parking lot on the other side of the tracks. There are probably other sites around town where the figures would be even more obscure than they are now, but locating them would take a bit of research.

If you started with a copy of the Travel Portland public art map as your guide, you'd be out of luck too. The 2007 edition puts Three Figures in the wrong place, a few blocks west at 11th & Lloyd, while the current map just drops it entirely, along with a number of other artworks around the Lloyd District area. Beats me why they'd do that. Maybe to save space on the print version, I dunno.

As for why the relocation happened, I imagine it's because there's no Avia headquarters in Portland anymore. The company was founded here in 1979, but was absorbed by the Reebok empire in 1987. Which I remember because I ran HS cross country at the time, and I think I wore Avias exclusively. I should point out that I wasn't actually very fast, although I can't really blame the shoes for that. In recent years the brand's bounced around among successive owners, changing hands again just a few months ago. A recent Portland Business Journal article notes that it's become a low-priced shoe brand featured at Walmart. Alas, how the mighty have fallen...

12th Avenue Viaduct

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge thing takes us to another unlikely spot, the 12th Avenue viaduct over Sullivan's Gulch and Interstate 84, just south of Lloyd Center. I am not, generally speaking, interested in freeway overpasses as part of this project, but this is a somewhat interesting exception. The key thing here is that this bridge, and the ones further east for MLK and Grand Avenues, are much older than I-84, and were built when Sullivan's Gulch was just a ravine with a railroad running through it.

Even that, by itself, probably wouldn't be enough to merit a blog post, but it turns out this humble overpass is a minor design by the famed Waddell & Harrington engineering firm. They're better known for designing the Hawthorne Bridge, the Steel Bridge, and the Interstate Bridge here in Portland, the Sandy River Bridge in Troutdale, the Union Street Bridge in Salem, and (according to Bridgehunter.com) the OR-99 bridge on the Columbia Slough, and a railroad bridge over the Willamette south of Harrisburg. So this is a very obscure cousin of all those well-known local bridges, and many others across the country. It's not particularly photogenic, but the bridge railing does look a lot like the one on the Hawthorne, so there's at least a little family resemblance. And more importantly, it's very, very obscure. Gentle Reader(s) (yes, both of you) out there probably realize how much I gravitate to obscure stuff.

I was reminded of this structure recently when working on a post about the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Bridge #463 in Cleveland, oddly enough. I came across a blurb by J.A.L. Waddell about his dislike of the "jackknife bascule" design used by said bridge. I started reading his Wikipedia bio (which insists his firm also designed Cleveland's Detroit-Superior Bridge, which I'm not sure is true), and then wandered off on a tangent to see what else around Portland Waddell's firm might be responsible for. No sources I've seen actually mention the one pictured here, but I vaguely remembered seeing their name on a plaque on one of the Sullivan's Gulch overpasses, so I went back recently to figure out which overpass it was, and take a few photos of it.

As you might imagine, there isn't much about this one on the interwebs, and frankly I suspect there aren't a lot of interesting facts about it out there to be discovered. It has no Bridgehunter page, but it does have a page on UglyBridges.com, which mentions it has a sufficiency rating of 58.5 out of 100 (which is better than a lot of bridges around town), and (for some reason) it isn't eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, despite its advanced age. I did find one vintage mention of the viaduct while it was in the planning stage, in which Waddell & Harrington advertised in Municipal Journal and Engineer, Vol. 28, seeking a contractor to do the construction work. The project was described as:

Furn. material and bldg. steel viaduct for city over Sullivan's Gulch, E. 12th st.: six 32-ft and two 64-ft deck plate girder spans on steel bents, concrete pedestals and abuts; 40-ft. roadway; two 10-ft. walks.

Free Flow

A few photos of the salmon fountain tucked away inside a parking garage at Lloyd Center, a couple of which were previously seen here. After a bit of Google-fu, I think I've finally come up with a title and artist for it: The Smithsonian's art inventory says there's a fountain at Lloyd Center called "Free Flow", by Al Goldsby, and the fountain looks a lot like other works of his (see "Leaping Bronze 5" at Eastern Oregon University in LaGrande, for example.) That's the most convincing info I've been able to find so far, so I'm going to out on a limb and claim that's what it is, and cross my fingers and hope I'm not wrong.

I was going to go ahead and post the photos without knowing a title or artist for the fountain, and instead I was going to link to some vintage circa-1962 photos of Lloyd Center, including a few of long-vanished fountains from before the mall was enclosed. They're still kind of interesting, so check out the photos at Mid-Century Modern and Vintage Portland.

from the archives: digital photo #1

Was looking through old photos last night and thought, hey, I know, I'll post the boring first digital photo from my first digital camera. And then explain that it's merely the first surviving digital photo, since Canon's instructions said to take a photo and then delete it so you learn how. Which was a useless exercise, in retrospect, since I pretty much never delete photos. So the original original photo, now lost to posterity, was an amateurish unboxing photo taken inside the long-vanished BJ's brewpub near Lloyd Center.

Meanwhile the photo you see here shows a cold, rainy November day at the 7th Avenue MAX stop. Little did I know how many photos of cold, rainy weather I'd be taking in the coming years. Speaking of which, right now it's a cold, potentially rainy day in August, which is just wrong.

bronze daisies, holladay park

A small sculpture of flowers located in Holladay Park, near the fountain and the Neighborhood Gardener statue.

Holladay Park Fountain

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A few photos of the fountain in Holladay Park, in NE Portland next to Lloyd Center. The park dates back to 1870, but this fountain has only been here since the park renovation in 2000 (the same time the Neighborhood Gardener statue went in.)

The city's page about the park mentions this replaced a 1964 concrete fountain that played music. I vaguely recall something about this, but I don't remember what it looked like, and I haven't been able to find any photos of it. I seem to recall it had become rather decrepit and hadn't worked for years by the time they removed it. I could probably go to the Multnomah County library's online Oregonian database and come up with more info about the old fountain, but unfortunately that database doesn't include photos, which is the thing I'm really interested in.

I'd also be interested in recordings of the music the old fountain used to play, or video of it doing its thing. I have a mental image of it as a small and cheesy 60's version of the Bellagio Fountain, but that may just be because that's the only contemporary musical fountain that I've seen in person.

So I don't have a lot of interesting stuff to pass along about the current fountain, or about the park for that matter. The park's namesake, the, uh, "colorful" Ben Holladay is another matter. Portland has so few really entertaining historical figures, so we really ought to enjoy/exploit the few we've got. Some selected reading, from across the interwebs:

• Ben Holladay: The Man and his Whiskey
• "Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King"
• Suit against Ben Holladay, New York Times, May 12, 1884.
• Holladay v. Daily, US Supreme Court, 1873
• "Ben Holladay , Cherokeee Trailblazers, Jack Slade and Virginia Dale"
• "The Holladay Cases"
• Cafe Unknown: "Forgotten Portland"

Capitalism (the fountain)

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A few photos of the Capitalism fountain at the Lloyd Center mall, near the corner of NE 9th & Multnomah, just outside the Nordstrom store. The Smithsonian's art inventory page for it is here, and the artist who created it has a website here, although it doesn't seem to mention this fountain anywhere.

The fountain / sculpture was installed in 1991 when the mall was completely renovated, but in spirit it couldn't be more 80's, all postmodern and money-mad and pompous and giddy all at once. It's a real period piece, in its own way similar to the groovy 70's abstract whatzits scattered around the downtown transit mall. If you stare at it too long, music starts to run through your head: "Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world, Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world", and so on. Or maybe that was just my iPod. Sometimes it can be hard to tell. Here's the song, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm finding it hard to do my usual schtick and play amateur art critic about the fountain, since it's such an utterly 80's artifact. It would be like debating whether Nagel prints are good or bad art. The fountain just isn't amenable to this sort of question.

The Lloyd Center mall first opened in 1960 as an open-air shopping center (which has always puzzled me, since I've never heard that the climate was better here back then). It's hard to tell by looking at it now, due to all the renovations and updates over the years, but Lloyd Center was one of the nation's very first modern shopping malls, and when it opened it was the world's largest. Yes, the world's biggest mall, right here in little old Stumptown. In September 1960, the mall's ice rink hosted a campaign stop by then-VP Richard Nixon, who supposedly proclaimed the mall "America's answer to communism". Golly. I suppose that would be the flip side of how Moscow's vast GUM department store was supposed to be communism's answer to the West's decadent, bourgeois consumerism.

Although these excerpted remarks from Nixon's speech don't seem to include that claim, so it may or may not be precisely accurate. Either way, it makes for an interesting bit of local trivia.

And as an extra fun twist, many of the hits that come up when you search for "lloyd center" and "capitalism" are mentions of the recent Michael Moore film, which screened at one of the Lloyd Center theaters earlier this year.

A Neighborhood Gardener

A few photos of a small statue in Holladay Park, across the street from Lloyd Center. It's simply titled "A Neighborhood Gardener". I hadn't looked at it that closely, but I knew it was a statue of someone gardening. That seemed like a silly idea, and I arrived figuring I'd make fun of it and have a few cheap shots at its expense, but I decided I actually kind of like it. It's one of a trio of works by Tad Savinar that were installed when the park was renovated a few years ago. Somehow the statue makes a lot more sense as part of a series rather than as a standalone object. And the series seems to be a meditation on domestic coziness. I just can't manage to get very snarky and disagreeable about coziness.



If the Neighborhood Gardener had been here back when I was in college and thought I knew everything, I'd have sneered at it and probably called it bourgeois. Well, of course it's bourgeois, that's the whole point, isn't it? It's not exactly a heroic Soviet peasant tilling the soil, is it? Although, amusingly, the facial expression is similar across economic classes: Determined, mildly pleased, and mildly annoyed. Trying to convince plants to live and grow will do that to you. I've discovered this recently.



I'm not alone in being unable to rant about the statue. If anyone could pull it off, it would be the nameless proprietor(s) of the Portland Public Art blog. He/she/it has no doubt forgotten more about art than I will ever know, and manages to be even snarkier than I am when talking about it. And yet, the piece about the Neighborhood Gardener is gentle, even sweet, and expounds a bit on the theme of coziness.



My only complaint, if you can call it one, is that none of the pieces in Holladay Park include cats, even though cats add coziness to everything. I suppose that would just be too easy, and would verge on cheating. I dunno. Like I always say, I've never claimed to be an art critic.

mysterypark

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If you're like me, which you aren't, and you ride MAX through the Lloyd Center area, which you probably don't, you might've noticed this little park-like area on Holladay St. between 6th & 7th Avenues. It's relentlessly geometric and full of signs forbidding pets and smokers, but there's no obvious sign of who's doing all the forbidding.

As usual, PortlandMaps rides to the rescue, letting us know the place is actually not public property. It doesn't give the official name for the place, because that's not what PortlandMaps does, but we do learn that it's property ID R182211, owned by "KAISER FOUNDATION HEALTH PLAN ATTN: PROPERTY ACCOUNTING".

So this is a little taste of what the world looks like when huge health insurance conglomerates run the show. No pets allowed, smoking anywhere strictly forbidden, even if you're outdoors with nobody around to breathe your secondhand smoke, etcetera, etcetera. If it's bad for you, or there's any chance of anyone suing anyone else (like over dog bites), it's banned, and if it's good for you, it's mandatory. No doubt the blue metal chairs here are designed to enforce correct posture.

I'm tempted to call them up and say I want to set up a hot dog cart in their little park, just to see what they say. Although cynical and rebellious thoughts are probably another form of unhealthiness, and therefore forbidden as well, and they'll be sending Salvatore the, uh, Legitimate Sicilian Chiropractor by to readjust my kneecaps, even though I'm not even a customer of theirs. It all stands to reason, anyway.