McCoy Fountain

Here are a couple of video clips of the fountain in North Portland's McCoy Park, near the corner of Trenton St. & Newman Avenue, once again showing why I won't be winning any Oscars anytime soon. It's your basic fun-for-the-kids water jet fountain, which is an increasingly popular thing now that the state health authorities frown on public wading pools. A fountain guide from the Parks Bureau (which took over the city's fountains from the Water Bureau a few years ago) has a brief description of it:

Built in 2006, McCoy Fountain was designed by Murase Associates. It is the first decorative municipal fountain in north Portland. The playful water feature sits at the south end of McCoy Park in the New Columbia neighborhood. The Housing Authority of Portland, master developer of New Columbia and McCoy Park, commissioned the fountain for people of all ages to enjoy. McCoy Fountain is located across from housing for seniors and adjacent to the neighborhood grocery store and coffee house.

It recirculates nearly 8,000 gallons of water. Water spouts at random intervals at heights of up to 6 feet from 35 jets. It's a "guessing" fountain - people guess which spouts will erupt next in the 710-sq-ft oval area bounded by seating ledges.

Les AuCoin Plaza

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Photos of Les AuCoin Plaza, the landscaped surface portion of the Washington Park MAX station. There's a big sign giving the name, but I've never heard anyone call it that. I've never heard anyone call it anything, honestly. Despite all the paths and terraces, there's not really a good reason to come and hang out here, unless maybe you're waiting for an elevator to the underground MAX platform. And the only time you might have to wait for an elevator would be if a zoo concert just let out, or maybe right after the zoo closed on an especially busy day. So it's a nice space, but a little-used one.

When the westide MAX Blue Line opened in 1998, an architecture writer for the Oregonian talked up the virtues of the place

Farther west on the line, Washington Park Station finds the romance in a mechanical process. The station sits at the midpoint of a 3-mile tunnel, drilled from both directions through 16-million-year-old basalt 260 feet underground. The two granite wheels that ground the tunnel met in a "kiss" at the station.

The kiss, explains Murase, caused an allegorical "emotional explosion," symbolized by a circle of basalt slabs at the station.

More stone columns landed in the Les Aucoin Plaza just up the steps from "the kiss." Landscaping in the plaza and below took its cue from the zoo and followed a dry, upland theme. Katsura trees flutter their heart-shaped leaves and ornamental grasses dance softly with lavender, juniper, yarrow, spirea, rosemary and cotoneaster.

The plaza's named for Rep. Les AuCoin, who represented Oregon's 1st congressional district (including much of the westside MAX route) from 1978-1993. He played a big role in getting federal funding for the project, and so they named part of one of the stations after him. Likewise, the last station on the line, out in Hillsboro, was named in honor of Sen. Mark Hatfield, who had recently retired in 1996 after nearly half a century in Oregon politics. AuCoin is very much alive and blogging; I met him once when I was a young Cub Scout, and I always thought he was a decent guy. I'm pretty sure I voted for him in 1990 (the first time I was old enough to vote), and then in 1992 when he ran against now-infamous Senator Bob Packwood and should have won. In that election, it turned out The Oregonian (our local newspaper) knew all about Packwood's shenanigans well before the election, but sat on the story to avoid "ruining his career". The public only found out later -- after the election -- when the Washington Post broke the story. And then Packwood managed to stay in office another three years before finally resigning.

Oregon had a spate of naming things after living politicians during the 1990s and early 2000s, but that seems to have cooled in recent years, after we learned Neil Goldschmidt's dirty little secret. I always thought this was a bad idea, and I'm still amazed that we avoided naming anything important after Goldschmidt (and thus avoided having to rename it hastily, especially if it was a school or something). Either that was sheer luck, or the people in charge of naming things had heard the rumors about him. TriMet seems to have dodged a bullet by naming things for Hatfield and AuCoin (and not, say, Packwood, or Goldschmidt, or David Wu, or...). I still think it would've been better to wait for future historians to weigh in, though.

Vera Katz Park

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A few photos of our fair city's shiny (& tiny) new Vera Katz Park, the Pearl District's very latest high-concept amenity. It's an odd sort of park (or will be -- the official dedication won't be until May 29th.) It's basically just a wide sidewalk on SW Davis St. between 10th & 11th, next to the Gerding Theater (the old Armory building). There's a water feature running the length of the block, and a sort of bioswale-like arrangement with a few native(?) plants, grasses and horsetails, mostly. In short, if you go, don't bring the softball team along. Unless you're headed to the new Deschutes Brewpub across the street, I mean -- but that's a topic for another post, as soon as I get around to visiting the thing. There's also nothing here to satisfy the off-leash dog mafia. As much as your darling little pug might want to take a crap in the bioswale, it's a safe bet it's Not Allowed. Violate the rule, and the Proper Authorities will either taser you, or buy you $30 fruity drinks at Bluehour at taxpayer expense, depending entirely on who you are and who you know at city hall.

Ok, that's not entirely fair. There's something about the place that brings out my snarky and irritable side. Or more to the point, it's something about the idea of the place, not so much the place itself.

Case in point: I mentioned the park in an earlier post, where I described it as:

The future site of "Vera Katz Park", a fancy name for the little strip of land on the north side of the Armory Theater. It's a fitting name in many ways. It's a minor adjunct to the grand dreams of a well-connected developer, and it's been delayed greatly due to cost overruns and general mismanagement.

Yikes! That wasn't very nice at all. I must've been in a bad mood, even so more than normal. This time around I'll try to just talk about the park itself, and I'll strive to be fair and balanced about it. No, really, I will.

I took a few photos of the park. A few are in this post, and more are in my inevitable Flickr photoset. At least those are fair and balanced, I think, probably.

Ok, so a few links about the place:

• A piece on the design of the park. Same people who were behind Collins Circle -- which I'm very much not a fan of. Vera Katz Park is an improvement; it's fine, I guess, but I'm still not entirely sold on it. I do like the idea of turning awkward little bits into parks, but I'm ambivalent about the execution on this one. The black stone echoes the basalt of the armory building -- I think that works for the most part. It might've fit even better if they'd used actual local basalt for the job. Perhaps there's some technical reason that wouldn't work, I dunno. The overall effect is excessively austere, to my taste. All that polished black stone makes it look a bit like a war memorial. A few strategically placed flowers might cheer it up a bit... or it might look even more like a war memorial that way. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with war memorials (other than war, obviously) -- it's just that there's nothing about it that seems very Vera-like at all. Jamison Square would fit the bill a lot better, if it wasn't already named in honor of someone else.
  
  William Morris advocated the notion that if you're going to have something around, it ought to be either beautiful or useful. So I'm trying to figure out which it's supposed to be here. It's a little of each, but not really either. I suppose the bioswale is useful. It had better be, because I wouldn't call it beautiful. Unless we're making a fetish of austerity, I mean.
• The park cost us $250,000 (see here). So to give the whole city the Vera Katz Park treatment, it'd be $1M per block times a jaw-dropping number of blocks. Hmm. This doesn't sound like a concept we can easily put into practice citywide. If you can get away with not making each sidewalk an art installation, just a strictly utilitarian water-quality feature, I'm sure it'd knock the price down a bit. Suppose you can do the basic bioswale part for $50k (a figure I just dreamed up), that's still $200k per block times the same jaw-dropping number of city blocks. And if you use the same design as here, you lose on-street parking for the length of the block. While that may please bike and streetcar activists and the city's parking garage operators, I'm not so sure the general public or retailers would be quite as enthusiastic. So I think it's safe to say that if we do build more of these, we won't build a huge number of them. Therefore -- assuming these really do work to protect water quality and keep icky stuff out of the river -- naturally we'd want to target them to problem areas around town. Is the Pearl District really a problem area? I don't know. I suppose it might be.
  
  Speaking of parking, it's probably worth pointing out that the Brewery Blocks development, of which the park is a very small component, includes a vast multistory, multiblock underground parking garage. I imagine we'll be told that taking out the parking spots on one side of the street is a step toward the coming Glorious Car-Free Future. That may be true of the park itself, but the project taken as a whole sends a very different message. The message, as far as I can tell, is that it's ok to drive a monstrous earth-crushing SUV and not feel guilty, so long as you hide it underground when you aren't using it. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that.
• Some architectural blathering about the park, on the Portland Center Stage website, PCS being the new tenant next door in the theater. So of course they like the thing. I don't know if it technically belongs to them, but they seem to have been the driving force behind it. The post tries to explain why the park is great, for those of us who don't grok it immediately.
  
  I've become convinced that contemporary architecture is roughly 98% marketing, 1% marketing, and 1% engineering. The latest buzzwords just so happen to be "green" and "sustainable". Not, I think, because the industry actually cares about these things, but simply because they sell. It's the usual handwaving, with a double helping of guilt. The results are much more expensive than "normal" buildings, and ugly too, but anyone who questions the dogma is accused of being a earth-destroying, kitten-eating, Bush-voting philistine. I just want to know how on earth we're going to save the world when the only things we're creating are by and for the richest 0.001 percent of the world's population, and nobody else. And at what point do we move past the endless "awareness-raising" symbolic acts and do something that actually matters? Have we just given up on that? Are we just going to build a sort of hermetically sealed bio-dome over the Pearl District so the wealthy can survive the coming apocalypse, and to hell with everyone else? Is that how this goes down?
  
  The apocalyptic form of environmentalism has always made me uncomfortable. It's always struck me as a sort of quasi-religious mindset, and as a happily non-religious person, even quasi-religions and their believers make me nervous. Even when the facts indicate that something bad lies ahead (as is the case with climate change, and the ozone layer before that), I always get the impression that certain people are enjoying the idea of a coming apocalypse rather too much. In the coming apocalypse, the unbelievers will be laid low, and somehow the faithful will be spared the worst of it, sort of a New Age version of the fundies' "Rapture". As a member of the faithful, one must constantly engage in extravagant and highly visible displays of personal virtue -- driving a Prius, wringing one's hands endlessly about paper vs. plastic, buying a 5000 square foot LEED-certified vacation home, and so forth. This way, whoever or whatever unspecified entity that's doing the sparing during the apocalypse will take notice, I guess.
  
  Sometimes I wonder how many of these people had a strict religious upbringing, and ended up rebelling against it in substance but not in style. In a way, I do kind of see what makes the religious right so angry about the environmental movement as a whole: They see it as a competitor, an alternate end of the world. They're wrong, of course, like they are about everything else, but I can see how the notion would occur to them.
• Anyway, here's a post at Portland Architecture while the park was under construction. Which process took freakin' forever due to interminable delays in materials and whatnot. One commenter mentions the stone came from China. How's that for sustainable, eh?
  
  The post mentions that the rough edges to the stone help ward off skateboarders. I guess that fits. I seem to recall that Vera never liked skateboarders very much.
• There's a bit about the upcoming dedication party here.
  

  
  On May 29th Portland Center Stage will host a community dedication to celebrate the completion of the Vera Katz Park, truly the final crown jewel of the Brewery Blocks rehabilitation. Festivities will include a tribal blessing, theater, dance, conversation, food, beverage, bioswales and Vera. The event is from 5:00 pm until 7:00 pm and is open to the public
  

  
  
  A "tribal blessing"? WTF?! Am I the only person who sees church & state issues with this? Why is it that tribal blessings are OK, and it's not OK to also invite a pastor from some warmongering, Bush-worshiping suburban megachurch? People will probably argue it's not the same thing. And that's precisely what the whole Establishment Clause thing is all about: If the government starts drawing distinctions between "religions we like" and "religions we don't", and granting the former a bunch of privileges unavailable to the latter, well, how can you really criticize Texas or Alabama when they do the same thing, reversing who's in the two categories?
  
  Oh, and what's with listing Vera after the bioswales?
• A bit about the stone used in the park. Interesting note, the armory itself seems to be a brick and basalt structure. Basalt being the local volcanic rock that doesn't need to be trucked in from afar, burning a ton of fossil fuels in the process. Just sayin'.
• The armory project was financed in part with something called a "New Markets Tax Credit", a federal program intended to spur "community development". Organizations wanting to qualify for the program must do a variety of things, including (allegedly):
  

  
  # demonstrate a primary a mission of serving, or providing investment capital for, low-income communities or low-income persons; and
  # maintain accountability to residents of low-income communities through representation on a governing board of or advisory board to the entity.
  

  
  
  If I recall correctly, the armory project qualified because, technically speaking, it's geographically close to Old Town, which unlike the Pearl is a bona-fide low income area. So next time you drive down Burnside and see people sleeping in doorways or waiting in line at one of the soup kitchens, remember that the Gerding Theater exists for their benefit. At least on paper. In reality, not so much.
  
  In any case, program participants are required to produce a "Community Impacts Report", spinning, er, explaining how the world is a better place because they got a juicy tax break. The armory's report describes the park thusly:
  

  
  • A New Park In an effort to provide community benefit outside the Armory
  walls, Vera Katz Park “greens” the existing sidewalk and eliminates the parking
  spaces. The park will serve as a water filter for rainfall, and as the only
  green park in the immediate area (except for numerous green roofs), a shady
  resting place.
  

  
  
  There's a bit more about the tax credit here. Now, I realize that arts funding is an unending struggle, and sometimes you have to be extremely creative and take a "the end justifies the means" attitude to get anything accomplished, and the New Markets program requirements were so written vaguely and broadly that the armory managed to qualify. I realize all that. But I can't help but think about all the real low-income projects that weren't funded because the tax credits went to the armory instead. It's probably pointless to wish the city would stop ripping off the poor so the richest 1% of the population can have more goodies. But I kind of wish they'd at least not flaunt it quite so much.
• All of that said, it seems the grand opening bash will feature free beer. Free beer! Yay! I'll forgive nearly anything if there's free beer involved. I mean, sure, I expect the offer of free beer doesn't extend to the aforementioned denizens of Old Town, but really, who can quibble and complain and carp when there's free beer to be had? Not I! Yay, free beer!

There was a strange incident while I was taking the last few photos of the place. Some random guy wandered by while I was busy focusing, and said something to the effect that I wasn't allowed to take photos of the park because it was copyrighted or something. Which isn't entirely absurd -- ok, it is absurd, but it's not unusual. Consider the case of "the Bean" in Chicago, for example. Although I think even that only refers to for-profit photography, and this humble blog remains proudly noncommercial. (Although if the price was right, and there were no provisions involving my "immortal soul", and the proposer wasn't evil, and the proposal was at least somewhat interesting, I just might consider selling out to The Man.) Anyway, I wasn't entirely sure how to take that. I looked up and scowled at the guy because he was interrupting my concentration and artistic vibe and whatever, but I didn't say anything. It was pretty clear he wasn't a security guard or anything, so I went back to what I was doing. He kept walking, swearing at me a few times and then flipping me off. For the life of me, I can't imagine what he was on about. Was it economic resentment, maybe? Was I on the receiving end of the age-old class struggle? Or was it just National Hassle-The-Nerd-With-The-Expensive-Camera Day? Or maybe he'd just gone off his meds. I suppose that's possible -- I imagine your average crazy person doesn't know about the whole public art vs. copyright issue, but then the Pearl probably attracts a better class of crazy person. Or maybe he's just one of those people who wander around angry all the time, looking for targets to take it out on. I dunno. It was awfully peculiar, whatever the reason was.

I do object to naming things after living people, whoever they happen to be. It seems to be a relatively recent practice in Oregon, as far as I can tell only going back to the late 1980's. We started naming things after Sen. Mark Hatfield in gratitude for his bringing home piles of congressional pork. It's fortunate we never got around to naming anything after Neil Goldschmidt or Bob Packwood, or we'd have had to chisel their names off and pretend it never happened. I don't mean to go off on a huge tangent, but here's a short list of things I came up with of various things around town named after Portland mayors, living and otherwise.

• Vera Katz Park
• O'Bryant Square, named for Hugh O'Bryant, Portland's first mayor, who by all accounts was a complete failure in office. The park itself has no historical links to the guy, that I'm aware of. The Park Blocks were probably still howling wilderness at that point.
• Terry Schrunk Plaza, plus a housing project named for Mayor Schrunk somewhere up in St. Johns.
• Pennoyer St., and indirectly Governors Park
• A small and unobtrusive plaque of Bud Clark at Saturday Market location
• Failing St., pedestrian bridge, and school (now home to the Natural Medicine college)
• Ladd's Addition, and Ladd Acres school out in Aloha
• David Thompson fountain (the elk)
• Chapman Square (and old Chapman Ave., now 18th or 19th)

I don't suppose they'll be naming any parks after Tom Potter anytime soon -- unless it's a sort of sunny veranda where you can rent a rocking chair for an hour or two and take a nap, or daydream, or have a "visioning process", whatever the hell that is.

Collins Circle

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A few photos of Collins Circle, the weird traffic circle at 18th & Jefferson in downtown Portland, next to the Goose Hollow MAX stop. We are not, generally speaking, a city of grand traffic circles. There's Coe Circle in Laurelhurst, with the famous Joan of Arc statue. There's Ladd Circle in the heart of Ladd's Addition, with a nice little garden full of roses, if you go in season and can find your way around Ladd's Addition. (But hey, wandering around lost there is half the fun.) Here and there around town you'll find a number of mini-circles, which exist to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods. And then there's Collins Circle, which contains the large and rather puzzling stone sculpture you see here.



People generally don't even notice the thing, which may be just as well. I'm not a big fan of it myself, although you can get some (mildly) interesting photos out of it, and it might be fun spending a few minutes speculating about what it's supposed to be, or what it's supposed to evoke. It looks sort of like an old, forgotten stone wall, sort of like an arid talus slope, and I'm not sure what the shape of it is supposed to indicate. (You can get a better idea of the shape from this overhead view) Is it supposed to shaped like a pizza missing a slice, due to the nearby student housing for PSU? Is it Pac-Man? To me, it gives the strong sense that something's missing here. There really ought to be a fountain, with water running over the rocks, or at least a reflecting pool around it. Or it's a sundial without the bits that tell time. Or it's the base of a missing statue. Or there's a door on one side, leading to the fabulous underground tomb of a cruel pagan king of yore. It could be lots of things, but sadly isn't any of them.



If you want to see more (and better) photos of the thing, Art on File has a few here. The University of Oregon has a fairly large collection of photos, but they are apparently Classified and not to be seen by mere mortals. So if you happen not to be a mere mortal, you might check those photos out as well.

The Oregonian's Randy Gragg was a friend of the circle's architect/designer, the late Robert Murase. When Murase died in 2005, Gragg wrote an article about his life and career, and mentioned Collins Circle in passing:

Like most architects, who deal with clients and budgets out of their control, Murase's projects weren't always successful. Maybe most tragic was the truly excellent work he did in setting the stage for architecture that ultimately failed to rise to the challenge his landscapes made. Chief among these works is one of the most assertive works Murase ever did: the stout, basalt Japanese infinity design he created for TriMet to fill Collins Circle at the Southwest 18th and Jefferson Westside MAX station.
The piece only "met its context halfway," according to Greg Baldwin, a prominent local architect with ZGF Partnership. The subsequent designs around it have failed to hold up their side of the bargain in the form, materials and ideas.
"I look at his work in a lot of places, and I wish the architects had done more -- that I had done more," Baldwin said. "There's an intellectual contribution he made with his work that is more profound than its aesthetic contribution. There are deep polemics, but he never imposed them. It's up to the observer to discover them."

It's nice to speak well of the dead, of course, and it's nice to speak well of one's friends, certainly. But that passage is just rich. It really is. Admit the thing is unsuccessful, but lay all the blame on subsequent nearby buildings that didn't measure up to the "challenge". At the time the article was written, the only subsequent nearby building was the adjacent Collins Circle Apartments, so I figure this is what they have in mind. And it's true, the building is a fairly generic, inoffensive affair, a six story red brick apartment building with retail on the bottom. It's not the work of internationally renowned architects, but perhaps because of that, it's also affordable enough that university students can live there. That's not a point to be dismissed out of hand.



Gragg once referred to the circle as "one of the boldest pieces of public art since [Lawrence Halprin's] Lovejoy Fountain.". Which, again, is rich. Longtime readers know I'm a big fan of Lovejoy Fountain, and photos of it show up here all the time. Collins Circle, you're no Lovejoy Fountain.

A 1998 piece about the then-new westside MAX line's public art describes the circle:

Collins Circle, across the street from Goose Hollow Station, was designed as "a gateway to the city." Murase sees the stone-studded traffic circle as a representation of ancient, evolving Oregon landscapes, the boxy stones reminiscent of burial mounds and symbolic of volcanic activity that shaped Eastern Oregon.

"It's a thoughtful place," he said. "It will cause a lot of questions. I like to have people think about it."

In a 1997 overview of the year's "interesting" architecture of the year, the Graggmeister wrote:

The gateway as art
Thought we were just talking about architecture here? Well, an architect wins this category, hands down: Robert Murase for his bracing design of Collins Circle at the crossroads of Southwest 18th Avenue and Jefferson Street and the westside light-rail line. Rendering a spiraling Japanese brush-painting symbol called enso in fractured chunks of basalt, the circle has enough spirituality to lure New Age worshipers on summer mornings. But it has the scale to function as a gateway to the city -- the one of the future rather than the present.

Call me deficient in New Age spirituality if you like (and you'd be right), but a mound of mute stones just doesn't stir my soul much. I look at it, and what I see is a missed opportunity. Somewhere near here, during westside MAX construction, workers uncovered a huge pulley that was once part of Portland's short-lived cable car line. Cable cars once ran from this very spot up into the West Hills, on a long and very steep trestle. The pulley operated a turntable to rotate cars for their next trip up the hill. I wonder if the circle was the site of the turntable, way back when? The story doesn't say exactly, but it seems like a reasonable guess. So some sort of historical, transit-related theme would've been a good fit here.

If you just can't get enough of Gragg's design-junkie blather, he also wrote a whole feature article about the circle back in '97, "The Power of the Graceful Contrast". Towards the bottom, he discloses a controversy about the place:

No less controversial for some was Murase's design for Collins Circle, which had been planted with trees and rhododendrons paid for by local benefactor Mary Beth Collins. Like many recent changes in the city, it was not greeted warmly by many longtime locals.

``The old circle was a nice landscape that Tri Met just scraped away without any public talking to anyone in the neighborhood,'' Portland planner Richard Brainard says. ``You used to come down Canyon Road and the circle marked the beginning of downtown with something green. Now it's just rocks. Bob is a great landscape architect, but the way this was done and the result is just not right.''

Read enough of this and you'll conclude what I concluded a long time ago, that architecture is nothing but the art of creative BS. Master that, and people will let you build anything. You want to sculpt a centaur that looks like Elvis, made out of pure, glowing plutonium? Just memorize a few stock art-world phrases, schmooze with the right movers and shakers, and you'll be good to go. You'll have to design an addition to your house just to hold all the awards your fellow architects will bestow on you. If possible, you'll want to work in a self-conscious small city like Portland, where everyone's been taught that only ignorant Bible-thumping rubes criticize capital-A Art. But I digress.



People who noticed the circle were calling BS on it from the beginning, as you can tell from a 1995 article titled "That Sloping Basalt Feature Will Come Full Circle . . . Eventually". The piece pleaded for patience, at least until MAX construction was completed:

Some people who have glimpsed the sloping basalt feature in the intersection are puzzled: What is it? What is a fortress doing in the middle of the street?

Patience, friends.

When the roadwork is done and the design completed, the image may be more evocative.

The article says the previous landscaping at the circle had been paid for by the Collins Foundation, a local nonprofit, hence the name.

The article also mentions that the sculpture is Not For Climbing. Pedestrians are not wanted here. Or more to the point, I've seen homeless people sleeping among the landscaping in both Ladd Circle and Coe Circle, but not here. Skateboarders are out of luck here, too, come to think of it. You never even see kids playing on it, using it as a play fort or anything. It's entirely uninviting for all of these purposes. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but either way it does a heckuva job.

In fairness, traffic circles are a tough nut, designwise. They tend to be surrounded by a snarl of traffic, so you can't really create them for pedestrians. The Joan of Arc in Coe Circle works - you can see it at a distance, and tell what it is with a glance as you drive by. Likewise with the roses in Ladd Circle. Ladd Circle isn't quite so busy, so you could also walk over to it and look at the roses if you wanted to.

At Collins Circle, half of the circle is busy and half isn't. It wasn't designed for people, but people cut across it all the time anyway, since it's the shortest path between the MAX stop and the sidewalk on SW Jefferson St. You're not really supposed to, but it seems everyone does, and I did when I was taking the photos. It doesn't really catch the eye when you drive past, or ride by on the train. I used to ride right past the thing on the train every day for years and never gave it a second thought. I really never thought about until a week or two ago, while I was searching for anything convenient to add to my ongoing city parks series. It kind of pushes the definition a little, but at least it's conveniently located.

Art people look at the thing and wonder, is it a park, or a sculpture? There's just no end to the art-theory fun you could get out of that question, if you're that sort of person. I wonder the same thing, actually, but for a more mundane, PoliSci-geek reason: Who's in charge of the thing? If some punk kid tags it, which bureaucracy's budget pays to fix it? Some maps, like the city's SW Walking Map, list it as a "Jefferson Street Park", but there's no sign and it's not on the parks bureau's website. The Regional Arts & Culture Council normally takes care of public art, but it's not on their website either. Likewise, TriMet and the city's transportation department also don't claim it.

I tend to focus on parks, historic places and things, local urban legends, social conventions and mores, and such because I'm interested in the shared fabric of the city, the things that make Portland what it is. Why we're not just like L.A. or Atlanta, for instance. I'm not that interested in the official, approved history of the place, and I also shy away from boosterism, whether of the Visitors' Center or "Keep Portland Weird" varieties. I'll make up my own mind, thanks. I occasionally get visitors who freak out when I call BS on some local institution or make snide remarks about the Pearl District or something. But really, how can people say they care about the place but refuse to acknowledge the warts when they crop up? You ignore the warts, you get more warts, and the city you care about loses a little more of what makes it special.

When I see a bungled opportunity like this, it offends me because we really don't have that much common space here, places you can sit and read a book without having to buy a crappy $5 latte, or go for a walk without paying admission. On the very rare occasion that we're creating a park close to the downtown core, the effort ought to be taken a little more seriously than this one was. You don't just pick a well-connected architect and let them have a wank at taxpayer expense, which is basically what the circle is, if you ask me. Somehow we keep ending up with one perplexing conceptual piece after another, while pretending it's all so very sophisticated. As if mystifying the general public was somehow difficult or something. To make it worse, one of the core tenets of the design/architecture world is that once something like this is in place, you can never, ever change anything about it. It's literally set in stone, forever. If you think it'd look better with a reflecting pool at the base, too bad. It wasn't part of the holy original vision, so you're out of luck. Forever. In practice, things do get changed around sometimes, but it's often a long and arduous process. So what you really want to do is get it right the first time. This time we didn't, and now we're stuck with it. Blechhhh.