Emerson School mural

The next mural we're visiting is at the Emerson School on Portland's North Park Blocks, where a cartoon mural version of the park blocks faces the school's parking lot. This was painted in 2012 by Mofee123. I've seen it called Elephant in the Park before but I don't know if that's an official or not. One fun thing about this mural is that the lot's "reserved parking" signs were integrated into the design. There's a closeup in the slideshow that shows this a lot better than the first photo does. (You did know my posts always have slideshows, right?)

In any case, the elephant in the maybe-title is the Da Tung sculpture, which a Chinese businessman donated to the city back in the early 2000s. My post about the elephant went up in 2008, and looking at it now I think my photos were better back then. I'd just gotten a swanky DSLR and I took it everywhere and used it all the time, whereas in 2015 the vast majority of my posts are just Samsung phone photos, mostly because the convenience of Flickr auto-upload is hard to beat. The rest of the post is pretty much just a link dump, though. I posted it in November, so I suspect I was trying to get a bunch of posts done in bulk to get to zero drafts by year's end. Zero drafts on New Years is my goal again this year, but I have so many of them right now I have no idea whether I'll be able to hit that goal. You probably don't believe me. If I could show you my Drafts folder you probably still wouldn't believe me. It's not just murals, either; they're just the low hanging fruit, so I've been doing a lot of them, and saving the others for later.

DeSoto Building Mural

Here's a slideshow of the new mural on NW Portland's DeSoto Building, on the North Park Blocks between Couch & Davis. Portland's Contemporary Craft Museum, moved here in 2007, triggering a financial crisis that led to the museum's absorption by the local art college. Meanwhile the first floor has housed a series of short-lived fancy restaurants. The building's in a strange spot, neither Pearl District nor Old Town, and doesn't seem to get the foot traffic it would need for businesses to survive here. Apparently the building was originally a DeSoto car dealership. DeSoto was a division of Chrysler, defunct since 1960, and it in turn was named for the notorious Spanish conquistador pictured in the mural.

The mural was painted for this year's Forest for the Trees festival by Gage Hamilton, who's also director of the festival. I'm not sure what the other component of the mural is; to me it looks sort of like a black feather boa, but I'm not sure whether that was the intent or not.

Portland Dog Bowl

Taking a break from Milestone Madness for a moment, here's an entirely different (and even tinier) object to talk about. This little guy is the "Portland Dog Bowl", a tiny fountain in the North Park Blocks. It's supposed to be a sort of Benson Bubbler drinking fountain for dogs, designed to look like a regular dog bowl. You will not be completely surprised to learn it was created by William Wegman, the Weimaraner guy, for the short-lived Pearl Arts Foundation.

Btw, I'm not even going to bother with a Google map this time. The Dog Bowl is just way too small to even show up on satellite photos.



I've always thought it was kind of cute and clever. I tend to get annoyed at our fair city's obsession with all things canine, but I still think this is kind of cool. Portland Public Art dismisses it as "silly", and you can't really argue that it isn't silly. But still, "silly" is better than a lot of the stuff that gets funded and built here.

Also worth passing along is this 2002 WSJ story about the then-new fountain. You might note the page lives at the University of Oklahoma rather than the WSJ. It seems this story was one of several pieces that inspired a university benefactor to endow a literary prize to reward quality writing. So go, read it.



I guess I ought to point out that a number of other fountains around town have facilities for horses and dogs; the Skidmore, the Thompson Elk, and the Horse Trough Fountain all come to mind immediately. And you don't have to wander around downtown for long before you see someone's pit bull drinking from a Benson Bubbler. Which isn't technically allowed, but go ahead, you tell them to stop.

Da Tung, the Park Blocks Elephant

This is "Da Tung", the elephant statue in the North Park Blocks. An Oregonian article explains how it got here.

When I took these photos, I thought I'd do a sort of blind men meet elephant thing, and get close up enough to the statue that you can't immediately tell what it is from any one photo.

Incidentally, most versions of the story don't mention this, but eventually the elephant got annoyed and trampled all the wise men.

Elsewhere on the net, "Concelebratory Shoehorn Review" has a nice post all about the elephant, and "Portland (OR) Daily Photo" has a post about the north park blocks that mentions the elephant but has no photos of it. And for a really mind-blowing thing, check out this Etch-A-Sketch picture of the elephant. Wow. I can't even draw a straight line with one of those. Actually I'm not that great at drawing straight lines with pencil and paper, come to think of it. But I digress.

The elephant also appears in the Smithsonian's inventory of local public art, FWIW.

Other photos from around the intertubes:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Portland Twilight Criterium

[This post is about the 2007 race. For the 2008 criterium, you want to go here.]

A few photos and a video clip from last Friday's Portland Twilight Criterium, a pro cycling event held this year in the North Park Blocks. We'd never been to a criterium race before, and it was really fun to watch. 80 or so guys on bikes careening around a half-mile course at 30mph for 40 or 60 minutes, trying not to crash into anything -- and not always succeeding There's a pace motorcycle leading the pack, and when it catches up to stragglers, poof, they're out of the race. They've failed to meet the minimum criterium to stay in, hence the name of the event, I suppose.

Results of the evening's two races here. As you can see, in both races only about half the starting field made it to the finish. The others abandoned, were eliminated, or crashed. Now that's what I call racing.

As a bonus, over the weekend Versus carried some highlights of the shiny new Tour of Ireland. It doesn't exactly make up for Le Tour's ugly meltdown this year, but I never complain when there's cycling on TV.

Another bit of excitement was watching idiot spectators scurry back and forth across the course whenever they thought (often mistakenly) that there weren't any bikes coming. Sometimes they even jogged across after the motorbike, just in front of the race leaders. I don't know what was so important on the other side of the street that couldn't wait until the race was over, but it must've been awfully serious the way they put themselves on the line like that. And the ones pushing strollers... I don't know where to begin about them. And since this is Portland, nobody will really run across the street top speed. It's always this self-conscious slacker-ironic bouncy half-jog, like they'd rather be hit by a pack of 30mph bicycles than have a few perfect strangers think they were trying too hard at something. I guess that's one way to achieve glorious hipster martyrdom, if you're into that sort of thing.

In fairness, it's true you see people doing the same thing during the Tour de France too, often right on the edge of a thousand foot cliff, and the people doing it are wearing chicken costumes, and they're roaring drunk. And despite all that, they're still better at it than people are here.



One fun sociological bit was observing the gap between bike racing culture and our local bike scene where you're supposed to do it for ideological reasons. I don't think the motorcycles or any of the team vans ran on biodiesel, organic or otherwise. If anyone who scored a podium finish was a proper Portland raw-food vegan fundamentalist, it would surprise me greatly. I also don't expect your typical racer spends a lot of time torching Starbucks stores (although I'm sure they could get away quickly if they did), and if you spend all your waking hours training for the next race, I doubt you have any spare time to play in a few shoegazing indierock bands nobody's ever heard of. I suppose that, for all I know, the occasional rider might go home to one of those super-sustainable "cob" (i.e. mud and straw) hovels we're all supposed to want to live in, the way our medieval ancestors did. But I'd be willing to bet it's the exception to the rule. There were a few activist types at the race, some with booths, some just wandering around, and they looked a bit mystified, as if it had never occurred to them that one can go really fast on a bike, and some people get extremely competitive, even -- gasp -- macho about it. Deep down they probably found it a little troubling, although they wouldn't admit to it in a million years, of course. So that was kind of entertaining to see.



In a couple of recent posts I was complaining that my dinky little camera isn't ideally suited to wildlife photos. Seems it's also not that great at sports photos either. It's not because of the zoom, this time, or the shutter speed, or even noise at low light / high ISO levels. It's just that it takes too freakin' long after you take a shot before it's ready to take another. By the time it feels up to taking another photo, the entire peloton's whizzed past by then. At least they're on a closed course, so you can wait another minute and catch them on the next lap. So I'm carping, but really, I don't do a lot of sports photos. Almost never, in fact. Besides, I noticed a good number of people walking around with chunky pro dSLRs, and they all looked like dorks. I don't mean that as an insult, exactly; I'm a tech geek, and I've spent way more than my fair share of time over the years walking around looking like a total dork. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you I wouldn't go around looking like a dork in the future, if I had a good reason to. I'm just saying there are certain image quality vs. dorkage tradeoffs to consider. It's a complicated issue, I guess is the point I'm trying to make here.

a good day for infrared

Since we're in day two of what the media insists is a Killer Heat Wave of Doom, I figured it was a good time to post some more infrared photos. I'd just like to point out I only learned how to do this about a week ago, so any non-constructive criticism will be cheerfully ignored.

If you really want to split hairs about it, the near-IR light digital cameras can see is not the same thing as thermal infrared, which requires a dedicated and vastly more expensive camera. So the "heat wave" hook is sort of tenuous, I admit. I should also point out that the colors you see here aren't "real", and are just the result of the camera trying valiantly to interpret the bizarro light it's detecting as a color photo. If I was going to be a purist about it, I ought to be taking the photos in B+W mode, but I rather like the effect here.

Top photo's from 10th & Burnside, downtown, showing the sculpture everyone calls "Satan's Testicle". It's actual name is "Pod", and it's by the sculptor Pete Beeman. FYI.

Below, a couple of shots from SW Ankeny near Broadway. Big Pink is very pink, just like everything else.

Above, looking west on Ankeny. The tree you see is part of Ankeny Park, just around the corner up ahead. That sun looks unbearably hot, doesn't it? Luckily I was standing right outside the door of Tugboat Brewing when I took this. Mmmm..... Beeeeer.....

This one's from about a block west of the last one, looking east this time. Trees around Burnside, the North Park Blocks, and Ankeny Park.

IR photos work best if you use a tripod, since you've filtered out most of the light and you need to go with longer exposures. But honestly, who wants to carry a freakin' tripod around all the time, just in case? Not me. At least usually not.

Oh, well. Like I said, this is all experimental so far as I'm concerned. And I kind of like the blur of passing cars in the photo. Everyone knows blurry passing cars are Art with a capital A.

More from the North Park Blocks. You've got to love the way foliage practically glows in IR.

urban parks imagedump

The elephant sculpture in the North Park Blocks. Ok, sure, there's a front side to it as well, but where's the fun in that? Besides, this angle matches my mood today. What sort of person schedules a meeting from 11am to 1:45pm, without a break for lunch? On what planet is that a common and accepted practice?

I started out with the idea this would be just a random Friday imagedump, and then I realized most of the pics I picked were related to city parks. So I figured I'd go with the theme that presented itself, and save the other pics for later. I tend to try not include more than six photos in a post anyway, and even that number can be a bit taxing for dialup users.





Got out of the office briefly yesterday and ventured over to Ankeny Park again, since those nighttime photos turned out a bit on the dark-ish side. While I was there, a bicycle cop rode up and shooed a homeless guy out of the one functioning restroom in the park. Still, for the second time in a row, nobody killed me while I was there. I think I have a streak going, which seems like a good sign.






Two more pics from Lovejoy Fountain Plaza. I realize I post an inordinate number of pics of the place, mostly because I pass through the area a lot. I realize longtime readers of this blog might be sick of all my Lovejoy Fountain photos, and I apologize, humbly and sincerely, but I can't promise there won't be any more.



Canada Geese next to a mysterious rusty barrel, in Waterfront Park near Riverplace. This was taken a while ago, and since then the barrel has mysteriously vanished.

Ankeny Park

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Here are a few nighttime photos of tiny Ankeny Park, in downtown Portland. As I mentioned in the previous post, Ankeny Park is sort of a misfit mini-North Park Block, marooned all by itself on the south side of Burnside, along the line where the true-north and magnetic-north parts of the city's street grid collide.

There's an unfortunate naming collision between this spot and the better-known Ankeny Plaza (a.k.a. "Ankeny Square"). The latter is the triangular wedge between 1st & Front next to the Skidmore Fountain. If you've been to Saturday Market, you've been there. Both parks border Ankeny St., so the name fits both places, but it's kind of confusing that they both got the name. Oh, well.

The place isn't obscure in the same way that, say, Frank L. Knight Park is obscure. It's more the kind of place everyone walks past and nobody takes notice of. In truth there really isn't a lot to take notice of, either; the park's main feature is a pair of very old and ornate public restrooms, with a bit of greenspace and a small fountain (nonfunctional) between them. The top photo is a detail of the fountain; there's a picture of the whole thing further down the page, and another pic showing the mini-fountain on the back of the main fountain.

The city has high(ish) hopes for the place, though. In an effort to make the upcoming Park Block 5 look like it's part of some kind of master plan, the city's come up with what it calls the Three Downtown Parks project. They've got to design the new park, obviously, and they've scrounged up some money to tinker with O'Bryant Square, too. Ankeny Park gets the short end of the stick under the plan; the city's quite happy to generate reams of paper about how the place could be rearranged, but there's no money in the budget to actually do anything about it. There aren't any adjacent lots where the PDC could plunk down another tower full of taxpayer-subsidized million dollar condos, so what would be the point of renovating the park?

Call me a cynic, but I suspect a big reason the city generally ignores the place is the restrooms. Public restrooms have been out of favor in this country for several decades now, because the wrong people (the poor, the homeless, junkies, etc.) use them. Doing something about the underlying conditions of poverty isn't an option; we as a society threw in the towel on that way back in the 70's or so, and we're not likely to have another go at it any time soon. Still, we're well-meaning people with consciences, and seeing poor people in our midst pains us occasionally, so the logical answer is to shoo them away, and make our public spaces hostile to their presence. That way we don't have to look at stuff that might disturb our inner calm and whatnot. But we'll only go so far in that direction, since as Portlanders we like to avoid confrontation. Actually closing or tearing out the restrooms would outrage the activist community, and make us look cold-hearted and uncaring. So instead we take the passive-aggressive route, the path of least resistance (and expense), and simply let the facilities decay until they become inoperable. Problem solved.

Note that I have no photos of the inside of the restrooms, because I didn't go inside. I've said on numerous occasions that I go to the mat for you, my loyal Gentle Reader(s), but there are things one does, and things one simply doesn't do, and it's good to know the difference. I will point out, however, that I visited the park after nightfall and nobody killed me. I have to take that as a sign the bad rap the area gets in some quarters is not entirely deserved.

I honestly didn't start out with the idea of writing a post that's primarily about restrooms. Sure, it's lots of fun in a grade-school sort of way, and we can all have a nice giggle about it, but this really was unplanned. I'm merely being guided by the available material on the place, and the toilets are basically the only things of note here. If the fountain actually worked, the Water Bureau might have a fun, quirky information page up about it, but it hasn't worked for as long as I can remember, so no dice. If anything historic had happened here, I'd write about that, but in the 150+ years the city's been settled, there was a bit of toilet construction in the 1920s, and a steady stream of unremembered petty crime, but as far as I know nothing important has ever happened here. And I can't really see any nature, or wildlife, or scenery angle, either. There aren't even any squirrels The North Park Blocks are full of squirrels, but they don't seem to ever venture across Burnside, at least not successfully.

Additional resources:

• Status update from the PDC
  
• The city has a diagram & notes about Ankeny Park. Among other things, they note the place is "dark, damp, and shady", and is too small to host events or activities. Also, there's a map of the park, and the other two "Downtown Parks" here.
• Apparently the park did get a bit of maintenance back in 1983, due to a grant from the National Park Service.
• An Oregonian article about the park plan.
  

  
  Ankeny Park. This small block at Southwest Park and Burnside Street houses two small brick buildings (one closed) for public restrooms amid grass and trees. There is no money for immediate improvements, but it's a key link to the North Park Blocks across Burnside.
  
  "It didn't make sense not to consider it," Rouse says. The buildings could be converted to other uses, although many people recognize a need for comfort stations downtown.
  

• The Tribune has an article as well. Seems that the city received a number of whimsical suggestions about what to do with the place, among them a putting green, a tango dance floor, and a butterfly garden.
• A post about the project at the Portland Transport blog. Several commenters puzzle over what to do about Ankeny Park. One proposes giving it the Tanner Springs treatment, as if that would be a good thing. Another reader suggests planting a new Church of Elvis here, which is at least kind of intriguing.
• Actually the Church of Elvis idea would be kind of ironic. Back in the old days, the original C. of E. site on Ankeny between 2nd & 3rd (now part of Berbati's Pan) was right in the middle of the city's main open-air tar heroin market, and church proprietor Stephanie Pierce was quite vocal in encouraging the dealers to move elsewhere, anywhere but in front of her establishment. The restrooms pictured here were one of her proposed alternatives: "Privacy for big deals!!'' is how she put it, as quoted in a Phil Stanford piece in the Oregonian, way back on August 27th, 1990. A number of the other places she proposed weren't happy about the attention, and US Bank's lawyers sent her a nastygram about it. Hence the piece's title, "IF THEY SUE, THEY'LL HAVE TO SUE ELVIS". You gotta love the Multnomah County Library's searchable Oregonian database. You never know when it might come in handy.
• An entertaining Willamette Week article that mentions the park's "comfort stations", and others like them around town.
• The recent Oregonian piece profiling Laurie Olin, the designer for the "Three Downtown Parks" project. Of his plans for Ankeny Park, he says "Ankeny Park is straightforward. We won't do much." No doubt the absence of money is a factor here. If I was redoing the place, at minimum I'd take out that silly balustrade between the two buildings. I realize it's original and "historic" and all, but it serves no purpose and it's an obstacle, and it's falling apart. I'd leave the fountain, of course. The buildings themselves, I'm not sure about. They're kind of white elephants: Recent history demonstrates they're unsuitable for their original purpose, at least in this location, but they're also too small to put to much of any other use. It wouldn't be right to just demolish them, but maybe they could be disassembled and moved elsewhere in the city park system, or something. You'd have to provide replacement facilities, either here or nearby, but you could probably do that in a safer, and less obtrusive way than the current arrangement.
• Ankeny Park is mentioned in a recent report from the mayor's office titled "Going Public" [PDF] regarding the state of the city's public restroom facilities. (Your tax dollars at work!) The report isn't gross, and the graphics on the title page are actually kind of funny. There are several photos of the park both in the present day, and when the facilities were built back in the 1920's. There are also "then" and "now" interior shots, and the "now" one looks even worse than I imagined. So now we know, I guess. Yeechhhh!!!
  
  The document includes an appendix giving an inventory of the city's public restroom facilities. Clearly, someone was very, very brave, or had an armed police escort.