Scotts Mills Falls

Next up we're checking out Scotts Mills Falls, in the small city of Scotts Mills, pop. 419 (2020), located about halfway between Molalla and Silverton and a couple of miles east of Highway 213, the most direct line between the two, if that makes any sense. It's also about five miles (as the crow flies) west of Wilhoit Springs, a once-famous place we visited in a recent post, and six from the epicenter of the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Which is one and only thing the town is semi-famous for here in faraway Portland.

The town's little downtown area is bordered to the east by Butte Creek, a large tributary of the Pudding River (no, really, that's what it's called), which meanders around and eventually joins the Willamette somewhere around Canby. The waterfall is right in town... ok, looking closely at Google Maps it looks like the city limit kind of zigzags through the falls, running right along the brink of the falls for a bit and swerving to avoid most of the decrepit low dam just upstream of it, as well as the Marion County park centered on the falls and the old mill pond. Maybe this is to dodge liability for various things, like the occasional drownings here (like one in 2021 a few weeks before I took these photos), or in case the dam collapses before the proposed dam removal finally happens. (As of February 2025 the removal is on hold due to handwringing at the county level.)

I should pause here briefly to note that there's also a Scotts Mills City Park, a few blocks further downstream along the creek, and visitors seem to endlessly confuse the two. A recent one-star Google review complained about the park being overwhelmed with drugs and crime and drinking and illegal overnight camping, which quickly got an indignant reply from an anonymous city staffer, who said the reviewer must be thinking of the nearby county park, which is not the city's problem, and the reviewer should contact the Marion County sheriff's office in case of trouble way out there (a few blocks away).

And if you're more interested in visiting waterfalls than city parks, there are a couple of others further up Butte Creek, namely Upper and Lower Butte Creek Falls. And this the part where I awkwardly point out that I've been there and have photos of both waterfalls and I have no frickin' idea when I might finish the draft posts about them.

If you go browsing around the waterfall maps attached to those pages, you might notice there's one called Bear Creek Falls in the general vicinity. I haven't been to that one, but I gather it's a bit underwhelming, and (more importantly) it has one fairly ominous-sounding one-star Google review: "Stay away would rather not have new people around". I am probably not alone in noticing that people in deep rural parts of the state seem to be a lot more hostile since the pandemic. I could be wrong here, but as I understand it, city folks and other outsiders were never exactly welcome out in the woods, but at least they were a good traditional source of meat for your family, and no pesky bag limit, either. But then COVID came along, and now the odds are pretty good you might chow down on some vaccinated folks this way and get a belly full of those gosh-dang confernal 5G nanobots for your trouble. It's not hard to see why the locals would be feeling a bit ornery after dealing with all that.

Anyway... the dam is obviously very old, but nobody seems to agree on its exact age. The county Soil & Water Conservation District says it was built by PGE for hydropower in 1917 and then abandoned in 1954 after it was damaged by a flood and judged not worth fixing. A 2019 article about the dam at OurTown Community News (a local news site) says it was built between 1860 and 1870. A 2020 Salem Statesman-Journal article says it's from the 1850s, and an article at SHINE on Salem (a history site about Marion County) notes that a mill was built here in 1846, and the dam was already in place at that point.

So who knows, really. Maybe the dam has always been there. Maybe Bigfoot built it for hydropower, countless millennia ago, back before the Ice Age floods wiped away all other traces of their highly advanced society. Or maybe it's much older than that, even, and it was built by the sentient dinosaurs from that one Voyager episode, but way back in their medieval days, long before they escaped the coming asteroid and headed off to wander the galaxy. And what if the dam was built to imprison some kind of ancient evil deep beneath the mill pond for the last 65 million years, and demolishing the dam would unleash a new plague of zombo-raptors against our unprepared world. And what if the present-day locals know all about this somehow, maybe through some kind of hidden device that still transmits occasional warning dreams of that ancient lost age. Although of course you can't say that in front of the county commissioners, or the state salmon regulators, or any of the other outsiders, people who would just laugh at you, people who have never dozed off after a picnic near the dam on a lazy afternoon and then had The Dream. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but it would certainly explain all the local opposition to removing the dam.

Naturally the city's history page mentions none of that but does relate a curious detail about the town's early days. Starting in 1888, the Oregon Land Development Co. promoted the town as a Quaker-friendly town and persuaded people to move there on that basis, and promised various modern urban amenities that never panned out. The company eventually went under in 1902, bringing financial ruin to a lot of residents. Maybe I'm just a cynic in assuming it was a scam the entire time. Fourteen years is an exceptionally long time to wait for a log con to pan out. On the other hand, if you set out planning to swindle an entire town out of their life savings, it's always safer to swindle a bunch of pacifists.

More history and related news from across the greater Scotts Mills metro area:

• The very first mention of the town in the Oregonian was back in 1877, in connection with a homicide case. In which a witness testified that he had never even heard of Scott's Mills.
  
• On a brighter note, here's a March 1893 blurb on the then-flourishing Quaker colony. We're told they were trying their hand at growing grapes. They were about a century ahead of their time, I guess.
  
• The SHINE page up above mentions that the town's boom times in the early 20th century were due to three pillars of the economy: The mills, obviously, along with prune growing, and "mining speculation". And yes, as a matter of fact I do have a bunch of old news links about what that means, exactly:
  
• July 1907, the Journal breathlessly reported that coal had been discovered somewhere near Scotts Mills, it was of the very finest quality, and the recently-formed Diamond Coal Company would have it on the Portland market soon, undercutting the other available options.
  
• the next month, news came that a branch rail line was coming soon, and this line would haul Scotts Mills coal to market and bring general commerce and progress and whatnot to town, though the actual mining would have to wait for a bit until they could find enough skilled miners, apparently.
  
• in the middle of coal fever, August 1908 saw a failed scam attempt that ended up in court. Seems that one D.C. Forbes tried to interest a couple of local businessmen in his amazing new gold-finding widget, after salting the mine in question with just enough gold to make it demo well. After a couple of days employing the device at the mine, Forbes feigned illness and left. Normally this is the point where a professional swindler would skip town with his jackpot, grow a luxurious handlebar mustache (or shave it off if he currently sports one), and then resurface in Colorado as "A.G. Williamson", inventor of a miracle gold-finding gadget. But Forbes screwed it up: The local marks were at least a little skeptical and only agreed to lease the device for 30 days to test it out properly, saying they'd buy it if they were satisfied at that point. (Note to scammers: Never agree to this, especially if your device doesn't work.) Which meant Forbes had to stick around another 30 days without their money, and somehow string the marks along and keep them thinking the device was working the whole time. Seeding the mine with a month's gold production would've been prohibitively expensive, so I'm not sure how he intended to pull this off. In any event, the unsatisfied customers declined to buy the gizmo. (Note to scammers: This would have been another good point to slink away emptyhanded and try again elsewhere, if you haven't already.) Ah, but Forbes was a very persistent man, and decided to sue his escaped prey, asking the court to make them pay up. He also accused the pair of seeding the mine themselves in order to sell it or attract unwary investors, although he had no actual evidence they had tried doing so.
• Court case had been filed a few days earlier. An article on August 26th covers the claims of the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. against the pair

• August 28th longer article summarizing (and snarking about) the case:

  Peculiarly enough the public’s only interest in this mining venture is one of morbid curiosity. The public has no equity in the company’s lands or bonanzas. It is one of the very few cases on record where everybody gets hurt except the dear old public.
  
  ...
  
  Stripping these papers of their superfluous verbiage, the public is able to get an excellent idea of the modus operandi in mining bonanzas of a certain class.

  Apparently Mr. Swift (one of the two local investors) was very eager to start touting mining stock, even though the very existence of any actual gold here was currently being argued in court. Which is another hint that their operation was not exactly above board either.

• A January 1909 item recounts the competing claims in the case.
• A ruling came the next day, essentially tossing everyone out of the courtroom emptyhanded. First, no persuasive evidence had been introduced that anyone had seeded the mine, so the mine's proprietors couldn't collect on that count. And as for the 30 day try-before-u-buy arrangement, Forbes and his firm had never actually gotten this in writing.
• Two years later in June 1909, the Oregonian finally caught wind of the still-imminent coal mine, and reported breathlessly about it. That's the last we hear of the coal scheme in the paper.
• A related gold-mining case was still ongoing in December 1911, however. This time one of the three partners in the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. was suing the other two. The judge became fed up with all parties to the dispute and dismissed the case, declaring "he was not sitting in equity for the purpose of dividing spoils among thieves". He then declared that one of the defendants in this civil case really ought to be indicted for forgery and imprisoned, and personally walked over to the DA's office to persuade him to do so. Though I couldn't find any news on how that followup case had gone.
• However there were a few appearances of a Portland-based Diamond Coal Co. in the news in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's not clear whether it was the same company. If so, they got a new delivery truck in 1920, and experienced several failed burglaries starting in 1929.
• A 1948 article related the story of Ted Mandrones, who had been quietly mining coal in the Wilhoit Springs area as a virtual one-man operation for much of the last decade, trying to convince skeptics and find investors for his operation.
• Er, meanwhile, the fish ladder here dates back all the way to 1924, or at least that was the date on the first one, which may or may not be the current one.
• A 1932 Journal article notes Scotts Mills was on the road to Moss Lake, where (we're told) aquatic plants grew in such a thick, dense layer that you could walk on it, and reportedly it could even sustain the weight of an adult bear. This layer was supported in part by swamp gas, such that a lit match would burn briefly like you were lighting a gas stove. Which seems like an unwise thing to do while standing on this aquatic plant layer, unless maybe a bear is chasing you. Google has a location for this natural wonder here, but the only visible lake on the map is here, about a mile to the SE of where Google thinks it is. It seems to fit the description -- steep sides around the lake, floating biomass seemingly on the surface, in the upper Butte Creek watershed, with a nearby road named "Moss Lane" just off Crooked Finger Road. Looks like it's had a few nearby clearcuts in recent decades, and the lake is only maybe 1/4 covered now, versus nearly entirely so in 1932.
• 1967, Clackamas County was given three acres of land constituting 1000' of frontage along Butte Creek, about four miles upstream from Scotts Mills, to be known as the "Fryberger Wayside". Which I don't see any record of on the interwebs, but that wouldn't be the first chunk of Clackamas-owned parkland they've forgotten or lost track of. Can think of a couple along the Sandy River off the top of my head that don't appear on their official list.
• 1988 story, the park was closed temporarily by the county sheriff due to fights between hispanic and anglo residents. The paper interviewed several people with Anglo names relating a variety of lurid incidents they had either seen or heard local rumors about, like people going to the park to wash laundry in the creek. In nearby Silverton the city council had recently voted to deport the town's non-citizen hispanic population, estimated at several hundred people, only to find out there was currently a federal moratorium in place on deporting agricultural workers.
• 2004 Foster Church column, just sort of wandering around Molalla and surrounding towns in the dead of winter, chatting up the locals. He did stop in Scotts Mills for a bit but look at the falls for a bit.

Wilhoit Springs

Our next obscure destination is a bit unusual and requires some background info. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth, it was widely believed that mineral spring water was something close to a miracle cure for whatever historical ailment was troubling you -- consumption, dropsy, quinsy, lycanthropy, apoplexy, dysentery, ague, gout, scrofula, anemia, neurasthenia, neurosis, halitosis, hysteria, headcrabs, catarrh, clownpox, ennui, lockjaw, jazz hands, and Vidiian phage, just to name a few.

The trick was to find the spring resort that was best aligned with your delicate constitution and many ailments and was also as fashionable as you could afford to be, and go there to take the waters and undergo the latest regimen of fanciful spa treatments while also seeing and being seen for however long the local social season ran. Eventually you would feel better and return to your teeming grey city choked with coal smoke and various miasmas, and soon be in need of further spa treatments. This business model thrived for a couple of centuries but eventually faded out as all medical fads eventually do. Like the Dr. Hasenpfeffer's Patent Tonic your great-grandparents swore by, a harmonious scientific blend of radium and opium, along with 17 secret ingredients, all of which were cocaine. Or the omega-3 'n oat bran açaí breakfast bars everybody pretended to like back in the 2000s; in retrospect it was all downhill after they deleted the carbs and packed them full of coenzyme Q10 and shark cartilage instead. But I digress.

The Pacific Northwest of the 19th century was not immune to the fads of the day, and federal land programs made it easy for ambitious businessmen to pick up promising springs for next to nothing, so for a few decades Western Oregon was awash in spring resorts. Nearly all of them had vanished without a trace by the end of the Great Depression, at the latest, but vestiges of a few of them have survived to the present day, largely by accident. With that intro, you won't be surprised to learn that we're visiting one of those vestiges in this post. Present-day Wilhoit Springs is a small and obscure county park in a remote corner of Clackamas County, but in its heyday it was one of the most popular and renowned mineral spring resorts in the West, or at least the Northwest. Today nothing survives of the old resort except the springs themselves, but a page at Offbeat Oregon has a bunch of vintage photos from the resort era, and if you look around long enough you can sort of visualize how the place was laid out.

I'm not going to to rehash the entire history of the resort since that page covers it pretty well, but a lot of the info I came across about the place falls into a rough timeline, so here's another one of those:

• One thing that really struck me was how early things got going here. I mean, by Pacific Northwest standards. Wilhoit Springs first appeared in Portland newspapers way back in 1870, when a "mineral expert" claimed that the waters closely resembled those at Saratoga Springs, NY. Which at the time was possibly the most prestigious springs district outside of Western Europe. This was less than two decades out from the peak years of the Oregon Trail, and at least some of the spa's guests must have come across that way. There were no railroad links to the outside world just yet, and the main alternative to arriving by covered wagon was still to come by sailing ship around Cape Horn, which would not have been any easier on individuals of a delicate and refined constitution. I dunno, I'm just tickled by the idea that a few of the rugged tough-as-nails pioneers of 1855 eventually figured out that the no-frills, no-fun pioneer life had been somewhat oversold, and that being fussed over by attentive spa staff was actually kind of nice.
• By 1873, Wilhoit soda water could be had, bottled, for $1.50/dozen at E.B. Hill's store at 1st & Yamhill. The ad promises the water will revive one's drooping spirits, and cure whatever general debility one might be experiencing.
• Skipping forward a bit, here's a 1917 report from a local auto dealer raving about the little-known but majestic sights at Silver Falls, described as a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads from the world-famous Wilhoit Springs. Whereas now, a bit over a century later, Wilhoit Springs is an obscure destination, which can accessed from world-famous Silver Falls by a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads.
• "The Landscapes of Hot Springs and Mineral Springs in Western Oregon" a 1973 masters thesis in geography, inventorying the scattered remnants of the taking-the-waters era. Which is more interesting than you might think.
• A 1983 Oregonian article about the place says the county would really like to find some money to revive the long-forgotten park, but it isnt mentioned again in the paper until 2009. And nothing I saw when I visited looked like it was new since 2009, so they have probably not found the money yet.
• Not about Wilhoit, but related: Here's a 2004 USGS report on the many hot springs near Mt. Hood (which is obviously a significant source of heat). One of which is the spring that once served the long-vanished burg of Swim, OR, home of Mt. Hood Mineral Springs Resort, which went under during the Depression and never came back. Apparently the actual springs are fenced off now, supposedly to protect the habitat of a rare dragonfly.
• A couple of 2010s posts from the blogosphere, including a Great Grey Owl sighting and a family hike report
• A 2023 KGW segment profiling the park's longtime caretakers

The county park itself is only around 18 acres, but it's surrounded by a larger chunk of federal BLM land. 136 acres surrounding the park are managed as the Wilhoit Springs ACEC (where ACEC stands for "Area of Critical Environmental Concern"), which in turn is included as part of the 316 acre Wilhoit Springs RMA ("Recreation Management Area"). A 2016 BLM planning doc for Salem District RMAs notes that the ACEC "protects a rare stand of low elevation old growth conifer forest in the foothills of the Cascade Range". It's at least possible that proximity to the springs is what protected the area from being logged in the era when surrounding areas were being rapidly clearcut. So even if there's no medical value to mineral water in itself, this is potentially something good that came of people believing it for a long time.

While putting this post together I also ran across pages about Wilhoit Springs at FindASpring.org and TryWater.club, and realized there's an entire internet subculture of spring water enthusiasts out there that I had no idea about, and they seem to fall along a broad spectrum. With, on one hand, people who just prefer the taste over the commercial bottled stuff or the local tap water, to people who think it has health benefits, and over on the far end are people who are convinced They (you know, aliens and lizard people and Hollywood and Monsanto and Nestle and Disney and the government and George Soros. You know, They.) are working together to poison everyone with fluoride and chlorine and dihydrogen monoxide and whatever, and they're desperate to find pure raw untainted water for their unvaccinated families to drink, which -- as you might expect -- involves a great deal of Doing Your Own Research Online. As a pre-COVID example, here's a 2013 OregonHikers forum thread where a raw water person dropped in with a few questions and a mild culture clash ensued.

Speaking of which, it turns out chlorinated tap water originated in Jersey City, NJ in 1908, and exactly how that came about is kind of an interesting story.

For what it's worth, SoakOregon also has a map covering the state, but that site is more oriented to hot spring enthusiasts, which is an adjacent (but not identical) subculture, and Wilhoit isn't listed since the springs aren't hot.

But enough of that; let's pivot to the question you were impatiently waiting to ask: Did I try the water? And if so, what's it like?

Of course I tried it. I mean, I may come across as a bit overcautious sometimes, and out of this caution I have to say that Legal says not to try the water, because it's possible you won't like it and sue me for mental anguish or something. Or you might slip and fall while filling a water bottle, and I don't want to be liable for that either. But for my part, I filled a couple of 16oz. bottles from the main spring in the park, the one with the little pavilion built around it. I keep reading there's another spring elsewhere in the park but I have no idea where it is. As I was heading to the car, I passed an elderly babushka lady who was carrying several large jugs to the spring I had just left. She didn't say anything but smiled and nodded, like she was pleased to see another person who knew about and appreciated the place.

As for the taste, imagine you've dissolved a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets (or a generic store brand, it doesn't matter) in a glass of water, and while drinking that you somehow bite your lip and it starts bleeding, and so you taste a combination of those two things. The water is somehow not quite as gross as that sounds, but it's still definitely an acquired taste. I also tried it as a mixer, based on a Reddit thread I saw in which someone else did the same. And honestly it was quite drinkable that way. I mean, it was better than drinking the water by itself, and also better than just downing a straight shot of gin by itself. Think of it as the gin-and-tonic effect, where two ingredients can be a good combo even though neither is very palatable on its own. And to take the paradox a step further, the Wilhoit Springs gin rickey is not as good as a classic G&T, but given the choice I would definitely pick the spring water over an equal-sized glass of straight tonic water. I have no idea how this sensory phenomenon works; it just does, ok?

The Copper Mountain Property

Next up we're visiting Portland's Copper Mountain Property, another really obscure city park that you probably haven't heard of. The name alone inspires thoughts of rugged wilderness adventures, doesn't it? It caught my eye on PortlandMaps or maybe MetroMap and figured I should check it out. So I packed up the Adventuremobile X-9000 with the essentials (dogsled, salt pork, hardtack, flamethrower, rocket boots, etc.) and set off to see what destiny had in store...

Ok, who am I kidding? The name sure sounds exciting, but it turns out that's just the name of the investment firm that owns the adjacent property to the east. There is no mountain to see here; it's just two skinny (and completely flat) lots just off Airport Way in industrial NE Portland, and I only burned any time on visiting because I was already in the area making a necessary Costco run.

There is also no copper here; if there had been, it would have been stolen as scrap metal years ago by the area's vast homeless population. In theory this narrow strip is home to a trail that connects this stretch of Airport Way to the Columbia Slough Trail, and that might have made it a potentially scenic and interesting place in the not-so-distant past. But not right now, and probably not in the immediate future, and I have literally no idea what to do about it, and I also don't want to devote a whole blog post to the subject, especially since I don't have any actual policy ideas to kick around.

For what it's worth, there's another similar bit of city land maybe 1/4 mile to the east, also connecting the slough to airport way, but without a trail, or (as far as I can tell) a name, and it isn't labeled as greenspace in PortlandMaps, but I think it's the same basic idea other than those details. I have no idea why the two places are treated differently, but I have a hunch that the reasons are not very interesting.

The normies at Google have no additional info about this place, and will try to steer you to Metro's Cooper Mountain Nature Park instead, because there's no possible way you could really want to come here (which I guess is fair this time around); or if you can persuade Google you really did mean "Copper" and not "Cooper" it'll push you toward a different Copper Mountain with vastly more mainstream appeal, a ski resort town in Colorado. Which, again, is fair this time around. Come to think of it, every other place on Earth that has a vaguely similar name seems to be better and more appealing, and this isn't the first time that's happened. And now I remember why I sort of lost interest in doing "obscure city park you probably haven't heard of" posts like this: There may still be a few hidden gems out there, but by and large the others are obscure for good reason and probably ought to stay that way.

South Terminus

Next up we're visiting downtown Portland's "South Terminus", the little park/plaza at the south end of the downtown transit mall, where the MAX Green Line turns around and the Yellow Line becomes the Orange Line (and vice versa). The most notable feature of the place, from a distance, is a tall curved steel structure seen in most of the photos above, which exists to hide (and keep people out of) an electrical substation. The inner workings of it are further concealed by a fence and something called "coil drapery", and (most importantly) the south-facing side of the structure is covered in solar panels, which contribute a purely symbolic amount of electricity toward running the train.

North of all that, there's the actual turnaround area, which takes up most of the block and is just utilitarian train tracks and gravel. And because MAX trains have the turning radius of, well, trains, there was a crescent of land left over inside the loop, which became a small brick plaza and landscaped garden.

All of this was originally built in 2009 for the Green Line, and then "completed" in 2012, and reworked a bit in 2015 for the Orange Line, and further redesigned in 2017 for reasons we'll get to in a moment. If you're familiar with my ongoing projects and occasional obsessions here, you'd think I would have had a post up about it the day it opened, but no. I didn't even pay very close attention as it changed repeatedly over time.

The original design firm behind the project still has a project page up bragging about it, and -- to be fair -- the project got all sorts of rave reviews when the Green Line opened, like a 2009 Architect's Newspaper article, a breathless Oregonian article from January 2010, a similar Avada article, and a 2010 issue of FORM magazine. Though I should note that all of this publicity came even though the solar energy part of the project wouldn't be ready for another two years.

One of the selling points behind their design was, we're told, that "the solar panels identify both Portland and TriMet as leaders in sustainability". Solar project finally opened in 2012 and proved to be a bit controversial. Different articles tell us it either produces around 65,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or 67,000 kilowatts per year, depending on who's reporting and how much they know about electricity. Which is not a lot of power given what they paid for the system (although it cost less than half the original projections thanks to price drops for solar gear). Projections at the time were that the system would pay for itself in about 65 years, though a TriMet spokesman insisted it would be more like 22.5 years, which would mean it's over halfway paid for at this point, which is nice, I guess.

The original plan here was a bit more ambitious and would have augmented the trickle of solar power with a trickle of wind power from 22 little fun-sized wind turbines atop the power poles. Unfortunately(?) the startup that was chosen to build these Little Windmills That Could couldn't get the job done and the whole firm cratered shortly afterward. At that point the idea was quietly dropped.

At one point there was a bench somewhere in the park/plaza area with a builtin LED display so visitors could monitor the system's power output as electricity dribbled out of it. I vaguely remember seeing it, but it's not there now. I can only guess at the timeline but I imagine it was damaged beyond repair by bored vandals shortly after it went in, and then quietly removed during the next renovation, since that's what always happens around here. Or at least it's what always happens in public spaces when you don't give "normies" any reason to spend time there.

I do have a proposal here: At whatever point they redesign the park again, my suggestion would be to divert some of the plaza's solar bounty to power a wireless charging station. To me, charging your phone from those solar panels right over there makes for a much better demonstration than just watching LED numbers tick over in electrical units almost nobody really has a feel for. You might ask why, if that's really such a great idea, why didn't they build it that way in the first place? That's actually an easy one: The project was designed prior to 2009, and wireless charging was still a wacky sci-fi idea back then, shelved next to flying cars and atomic jetpacks. By early 2012 the technology had advanced from "works in the lab" to "getting hyped at CES", but a lot of ideas get hyped at trade shows but never ship in volume, much less catch on with the public. The first phones supporting the new Qi power standard finally shipped in September of that year.

There was also an online version of that power meter, so you could watch your tax dollars at work without getting off your couch, if you were so inclined. The site continued on for years, long after its brick-and-mortar version was hauled away. But it's gone now, because if you were designing a hip, fancy, cutting-edge website in 2009-2012, chances are you built it in Adobe Flash, the powerful full-featured programming language of the future. Over time that consensus shifted to "Flash is insecure and unfixable", and it was officially discontinued in all major browsers on New Years Eve 2021, thus breaking the site. Maybe somebody who cares enough will go back fix it at some point, but I wouldn't bet money on that. Old websites that survive in the long term usually do so by being very low maintenance, like the Space Jam and Mars Pathfinder sites, both from 1996.

All in all, the solar thing was exactly the sort of project Republicans have in mind when they sneer at people for "virtue signaling". But that's a bit unfair in this case; the idea is not to radiate civic virtue directly, but to persuade rich Californians to invest in luxury real estate here, thus boosting the local tax base and (in theory) paying for future civic virtue that way.

There was also a small piece of land left over that they couldn't use for turning around, as it was inside the minimum turning radius of any MAX car, so it became sort of a public mini-garden. also I could swear there used to be public access into the landscaped area. A page at Kavanagh Transit Photos confirms my memory of this, showing what the place looked like in 2009 when it was new. No fence around the place then.

We get a hint of the issues facing the park in a September 2013 nuisance complaint, which asserted the plaza was full of tall grass and weeds and animal feces at that point, which seems accurate if memory serves.

Like a lot of people who take up gardening as a hobby, after a few years of it TriMet evidently realized it couldn't keep up with the watering and weeding and in 2017 hired another landscaping firm to rework the design into something a bit more low-maintenance. Their page says, diplomatically, that nearby construction killed a lot of the original plants here. The page says something about designing a fence to keep people out during construction, maybe it became permanent at that point. The signs around the area say "Limited Access" rather than the usual "No Trespassing" or "No Public Access". I'm not really sure what "Limited Access" means here. It's an unfamiliar bit of officialese and I'm not sure how to interpret it. Maybe it's still officially open and there just aren't any entrances anymore. Maybe you're only allowed in on group tours, which are offered once every other decade.

Oh, and before all of this, there was a circa-1900 house here. It wasn't on the National Register of Historic Places, but was on the city's historic inventory as of 2002 (mentioned in some of the paperwork around moving the Simon Benson House, a National Register property) A little searching came back with a photo of that house, from an interesting Rose City Transit page about what various MAX stations looked like before they were MAX stations.

A Park

Next up we're visiting another Portland city park, this time in SW Portland a bit off Barbur. It's your basic ballfields-and-playground arrangement; I usually don't bother with these, and to be honest with you we're only visiting this one because of its name. Or rather, the lack of a name. The official city parks website just calls it "A Park". Until December 2020 the park was known as "Custer Park" after the infamous general, but then outgoing city commissioner Amanda Fritz removed the embarrassing name by executive order.

Now, naming or renaming things in Portland is a long and complex process involving public hearings and consulting everyone who could possibly count as a stakeholder. But thanks to a quirk in city ordinances it's apparently quite trivial to un-name things. The city commissioner with Parks & Recreation in their portfolio simply announces that a name has been yoinked away, and poof, it's gone. Of course the risk with doing this on your way out the door is that the next Parks Commissioner won't necessarily put the same priority on doing the harder part, coming up with a new name for the place. Thus the park has gone without any official name for the last two years.

Some local news stories about the 2020 yoinking:

• Oregonian
• KOIN
• The Skanner
• Willamette Week
• KATU
• KEX Radio
• Hillsdale News (which also did a followup story)

This naturally showed up on the park's (non-renamed) Yelp page, and a Reddit r/Portland thread, with a few examples of the usual conservative shrieking, though this may have been more subdued than usual due to Custer's earlier work in ending the Confederacy. Still, it may please them to know Custer still has lots of stuff named after him, including a very imposing 2nd place participation trophy at the Little Bighorn battlefield itself.

Closer to home, a street nearby still goes by SW Custer Drive, and there are bits and pieces of street named SW Custer St. stretching from the river all the way west to city limits, though never more than a few blocks at a time due to the hilly terrain. None of those have been renamed yet, though the name has been preemptively removed from a future MAX station planned for the Hillsdale area, on the theory that the street will likely be renamed too before the new line opens. The first newspaper mention I found of streets named Custer was small item from 1897 about Fulton Park, so it already existed at that point. This was a brief mention in a list of recent city council actions, and the next item concerned legalizing fireworks within city limits for a couple of weeks in January for Chinese New Year. That sounds unusually progressive for 1897 Portland, so I imagine the non-Chinese population just saw it as another chance to be reckless and irresponsible with fireworks, which is always a winner here.

The lack of a name doesn't mean the city's neglecting the place, by the way; there's a proposal to give it a nature patch, one of the new commissioner's pet projects. There's also a proposed stormwater facility that would be near or possibly conflicting with the nature patch, which might explain why the stormwater project was on hold last time I checked.

So here we are at the end of 2022, and the park still doesn't have a name. Around the time of the de-naming there was a change.org petition with a specific new name in mind, but I'm reasonably sure Portland (like most major cities) has a blanket policy of not responding to change.org petitions. Although it will get you signed up for endless fundraising emails until the heat death of the universe, so there's that to consider.

I should point out that renaming things in Portland isn't always this hard. Around the same time this park was de-Custer-ified, a park in outer SE Portland was renamed from renamed from "Lynchview Park" to "Verdell Burdine Rutherford Park" without the park going nameless for years first. And it's not as if the park was ever actually a place to come and view lynchings; if I remember right, it was just named for some unremarkable midcentury developer or landowner named Lynch. But still, the name doesn't exactly sound good to contemporary ears. And before anyone goes on a rant about 21st century people being so oversensitive, there's a local precedent. Back in 1966, the city was about to get a couple of new city parks as part of the South Auditorium urban renewal project, and it was decided to name them after early pioneers who had staked out the original settler land claims in what's now downtown Portland. There were three of these guys: Asa Lovejoy, Francis Pettygrove, and Stephen Coffin. Let's see if you can guess which of the three isn't honored with a city park or anything else being named after him. Not because he was a notably bad person, but because "Coffin Park" just really, really doesn't sound good.

In any case, the very latest in the naming situation came back in August of ths year, when the city asked the public for suggestions, explaining that the kinds of names they were looking for should:

• reflect and inspire the community • honor Native and Indigenous communities • are symbolic or significant • create a sense of community and inclusion • are future facing and imagine a Portland for all

So it's possible there's already a new name in the works and they just haven't announced it yet. Or maybe voters approving a complete revamp of how city government works threw a wrench into the works, since city bureaus won't be under individual commissioners anymore. Maybe it seemed better to leave the renaming until after the revamp happens. Or maybe they just didn't get any good suggestions and aren't sure where to go from here.

Before they announced that process, I had taken a look at old county survey records to see if there were any interesting (and non-murdery) historical names associated with the area that might at least be inoffensive enough to make it through . There were a couple that might work, but nothing really stood out, and none of those would really "honor Native and Indigenous communities", and I really like that idea. So I kicked that research down to a footnote in case they do rename the streets someday, or maybe if the neighborhood gets a second park someday and it needs a name.

Or, I dunno, if the city can't come up with a good, appropriate name, maybe we should just leave it as "A Park" forever, like the old generic brand items stores used to carry in the 1970s and 1980s, the ones with the white label and black letters that just said "Lima Beans" or "Beer" or whatever was inside. (Apparently this practice still exists in Canada, except the labels are yellow, metric, and bilingual.) I mean, if it works for lima beans, why can't it work for a whole city park?

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So that's about all I've got on the name front, but I did run across a few news items and historical odds and ends along the way, so there they are mostly-chronologically:

• 1959: the city decided it maybe ought to rent some port-a-potties for this and a few other parks for Little League games, so people wouldn't have to go find a bush during the 7th inning stretch. It must have been an exceedingly slow news day. This is the first mention of the park in the newspaper, though it had existed for five years at that point.
• 1962: the city must have installed actual restrooms shortly afterward, as local residents were annoyed, though, as in the immediate wake of the Columbus Day Storm the restrooms had power restored before their houses did.
• A couple of sorta-vintage photos of the park from 1963 and 1975, looking about the same as now but with smaller trees and vintage cars.
• Things got pretty exciting here in July 1969, when the park hosted a city-sponsored "Flower Children Carnival". The blurb describes it: "Featured will be booths, rides, and tennis golf, a game created by Park Bureau staffer Neil Owens.". I can't tell if it was aimed at kids or hippies, reading that.
• A longer and snarkier item in the Journal about the same event,
  
  

  Your city has not forgotten you, flower children. Wednesday from 1 to 5 pm your very own “Flower Children Carnival” is scheduled at Custer Park, SW 21st Ave. and Capitol Hill Road. It will be sponsored by the City of Portland Bureau of Parks and Public Recreation.
  
  See, you ARE loved, after all!
  
  They’ll have booths to test your skill, to go fishing, and many others. Amusement rides will be bountiful… such as the caterpillar-covered merry-go-round, the slide tunnel and others.
  
  There will even be a putt-putt for those who get their jollies from tennis golf (a game created by Neil Owens of the Park Bureau staff).
  
  So, as the park folks say in their announcement, “all beautiful people gather and come to Custer Park” Wednesday. (Don’t take that “beautiful” part too literally — you’re all invited.)

• A crafting for kids event in 1972
• June 1973, in another city-sponsored event, the park hosted a performance by a traveling mime troupe, which would include their original adaptation of "The Red Balloon". Because 1973. I got to see the original in grade school a couple of times, I guess on the theory that kids love anything containing balloons. Watching it in 2022 as an adult, it just makes me think of all the marine life harmed by eating balloons that drifted out to sea and deflated, and the planet rapidly running out of helium.
• A 1976 letter to the editor, in which a visitor from Madras, OR complained about people not cleaning up after their dogs in the park.
• A late 1990s neighborhood conflict over a longtime unofficial right-of-way into the park from the north. It seems residents thought it was public property, but it wasn't, and the new owner closed it as part of a renovation project. A followup said he'd had a change of heart & wanted to work with the neighborhood association on restoring some sort of access, though a 2000 subdivision plat for that spot doesn't show an easement, and I didn't see a path on Street View or by walking past where I imagine it would have been if it still existed. So who knows.

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A while back I took a look at county survey records to see if maybe there were any historical names -- of the non-murdery variety this time -- associated with the area that might work as a replacement. So the first attempted subdivision of the area was in 1891, when the land around the park was platted as "Ma Belle Park". Evidently that didn't take off, and it was vacated piece by piece starting around 1916. Still, it has "Park" right there in the name, so "Ma Belle Park" might work. The same area was later re-subdivided as "Raz Hill" starting in March 1927, expanded in December 1945 mostly south and east of the park, with a smaller "Raz Estates" to the north.

Next to Raz Estates an "Alpine View" was platted in 1957. Portland doesn't have have an "Alpine View Park" so that might work too, though it sounds a bit generic, and someone ought to check on a sunny day and verify there's still is an alpine view from the park, as that could have changed in the last 65 years. "Raz Park" would make sense too; not only were they the previous landowners before suburbia got here, but were later involved in the creation of nearby Stephens Creek Nature Park. Though in general I think we're better served by not naming anything after people for a while. The oldest regular land survey I see for the area is from 1871, just the 10th survey registered with Multnomah County. It's just a brief handwritten note though, adn the handwriting is fairly illegible, so no luck there. A 1920 road survey, in which today's Capitol Hill Road was surveyed as County Road #876, called the area due south of here "Latourette", centered roughly on where the Barbur Safeway stands now. That may have just been the name for a streetcar stop and not a neighborhood; either way it was probably someone's name and again, name moratorium.

Several more survey records in connection with building the new subdivision in the early 1950s. The first, in 1952, calls the area the "Raz tract", while a 1954 revision vacated a few of the roads proposed earlier, and another tweak a few months later shows a "Proposed Park", half the size of the current park. After that, my guess would be someone realized that a park just big enough for a Little League diamond is going to result in a lot of errant fly balls through windows and made the park bigger.

Tanner Springs wildflowers, July 2022

A few recent photos from Portland's Tanner Springs Park, a sort of pseudo-natural nature park righ in the middle of the Pearl District. This place was a regular staple here for a number of years, starting in 2006 and tapering off in 2014 for no particular reason. I happened to be in the area last month and wasn't in a hurry so I stopped in and ended up with a few wildflower photos, so here they are.

(I think it's fine to call them wildflowers, even if someone technically planted them here as part of a planned garden. I'm using the term in the sense of "local native species of flowering plant" and not by how "wild" an individual plant appears to be. Just tossing that out there in case any angry internet flower pedants stumble across this post. I have never actually met an angry internet flower pedant, mind you, but generally speaking if a thing exists, someone is mad about it on the internet. So it just sort of stands to reason.)

Catkin Marsh

Here are a couple of photos from Portland's Catkin Marsh Natural Area, an obscure city park in industrial NE Portland on a branch of the Columbia Slough, east of NE 33rd and west of the airport. The park consists of a 53 acre wetland area -- surrounded on three sides by the now-defunct Broadmoor golf course, and the fourth by warehouses -- plus a long skinny strip of land along the south side of the slough connecting out to 33rd, which is the only part shown in the photos. I took these while stopped briefly along 33rd after taking the car through DEQ at the test station nearby. I didn't actually turn the car off, much less get out for a closer look, so the photoset is somewhat less than comprehensive this time around.

The city bought the land fairly recently, in December 2012 -- it was part of the golf course before that, maybe serving as a natural water hazard. It was included in the city's Natural Areas Restoration Plan when it was updated in 2015, which rated it in 'Fair' health and as a high priority for restoration, though without any specifics on what they might do about it. They did remove a couple of culverts blocking this section of slough in 2017, at least. And with that, we've covered just about everything the city's said publicly about the place.

I gather the longer-term plan is for an extension of the Columbia Slough Trail to run through here someday, which I imagine is gated on both money and acquiring land or easements further east so the trail doesn't just dead-end on an abandoned golf course or at the airport security fence. The new owners of the Broadmoor site want to build warehouse space there, so making a deal for the unbuildable wetland parts of the course seems doable, in theory.

For anyone feeling really impatient to go visit the rest of the park for some reason, on the map above you can see an unofficial boot path through this strip along the slough, and conceivably you could get there that way, on an unofficial basis. But note the chest-high tall grass in the photos, and remember it's growing on top of a muddy, slippery bank that you won't be able to see because grass. So you stand a really good chance of going for a swim, which I cannot recommend here. As a data point, the city advises not eating fish from the slough more than once a month, due to PCBs and other contaminants, and discarding most of the fish even then. The slough as a whole is not considered a Superfund site, on unspecified technical grounds, but I still think this would be a bad place to take a mud bath or see what the water tastes like. Ewww. Just ewwww.

King Kalākaua Park, Waikīkī

Next up on this humble blog's ongoing public art thing is a statue of Hawaii's King David Kalākaua, located in the half-acre King Kalākaua Park at the intersection of Kalakaua & Kuhio Avenues in Waikīkī (so it's kind of a city park post too). Visiting was pretty unremarkable, so this post is basically a big messy brain dump of all the random stuff I could find about the park and statue across the interwebs.

First some vital stats and such. The statue here was created by Hawaii artist Sean K.L. Browne, commissioned in 1985, and installed somewhere around 1989-91. Browne also did Lahui in Kaka'ako, and the Kresser Memorial in downtown Honolulu, and a few other things around Oahu, and I mention those two in particular because I also have draft posts about them that I've been meaning to finish for a while. A plaque on the base of the statue proclaims it a gift from a local nonprofit on behalf of the state's Japanese-American community, as a token of thanks for inviting their ancestors to emigrate to Hawaii. Of course (jumping ahead to the fine print) the invite wasn't motivated by pure altruism; the islands' native population was rapidly dwindling at the time due to various then-untreatable Western diseases, and the resulting labor shortage was a serious inconvenience for the all-powerful sugar industry. So the king went to work recruiting replacement workers/subjects from around the globe, because the spice sugar must flow^[1].

As a minor attraction in an area full of tourists, the statue has the usual Tripadvisor and Lonely Planet pages, and a Waymarking one, but (unlike most of the statues in Waikiki) it doesn't seem to have any Yelp reviews. Maybe giving the king anything less than maximum stars would count as lèse-majesté or something, I dunno. The park as a whole does have a Yelp page, unfortunately marred by a handful of single-star reviews from people who were trying to review a nearby parking garage instead. The park also has a Tripadvisor page under "Waikiki Gateway Park", its previous name from before the statue went in, which a few sources (including Google Maps) can't quite let go of. This original name was once shared with an adjacent hotel, which has since been renamed as well.

For whatever reason the state's public art website (and related interactive map) have no references to the statue, while the city only has a few passing mentions of it: It appears briefly on page 61 of an art inventory doc, including a dead link to a photo of it. It also gets a quick mention in a 2007 survey for the city's troubled, still-incomplete light rail system, as a cultural object that might be affeted if they ever get around to building out the whole rail system they had in mind back then. A much-shorter initial phase of the project is allegedly supposed to enter service in April 2022, a few short months from now, though this effort is already $8B over budget and 11 years behind schedule, so I'm not exactly holding my breath. As of right now there are no longer any firm plans to ever extend it into Waikiki, partly to save money and partly so it doesn't look like it's being built just for tourists.

I thought I'd found a Smithsonian art inventory page for the statue, at least, but it turned out to refer to a different, seated statue by different artists over in Hilo. At one point in this post's long existence as a draft post, I had found a page from a cleaning product company bragging about their "aqueous ozone" product being used to clean the statue in 2015; this post sat around in drafts long enough for the original to disappear, but the Wayback Machine had a copy, if you'd like to read more about cleaning products.

As for the surrounding park, the city parks department has nothing much to say about it; they have a pushpin for it on their comprehensive (?) Google map of all (?) parks on the island, but no further information is available from there. Meanwhile the state government has a 1991 environmental assessment around re-landscaping the park, because no project in the state is too small to require one. Apparently after the statue went in they decided the park needed to be redesigned, for whatever reason. The doc's only a couple of pages since the state quickly decided there was no nature or history there that needed preserving, and concluded that the re-landscaping was desirable and in the public interest. It does have a paragraph about what the park was like at that point:

The park site is almost level. Current landscaping improvements include a lawn, 14 coconut palms, 8 rainbow shower trees, and several hibiscus and mock orange hedges. Structural improvements include tile pavers along Kalākaua Avenue, a concrete sidewalk along Kuhio Avenue, a King Kalākaua Statue mounted on a circular concrete pad, and a concrete walkway and plaza enclosed by a low rock wall. (See Figure 3) The rainbow shower trees surround and shade the plaza. Within the center of the plaza there is a simulated volcano: Red bougainvillea within a gently sloping, circular rock mound.

I haven't been able to find any photos of this long-gone simulated volcano, unfortunately. Going by the description above it could've been anything from a clever bit of tasteful landscaping to full-on midcentury tiki cheese. It certainly wouldn't have measured up to the then-brand-spanking-new, all-singing, all-dancing volcano at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Which a lot of locals would have seen, Vegas being the "ninth island" and all. I did run across a 1971 photo of the intersection showing buildings where the park is now, and a comment on that page says the visible building was a rock club/bar in a former 1930s ice cream hut, and out of frame there was a local market in a former Piggly Wiggly building, all of which were demolished to make room for the park within a few years of the photo. (The county GIS system gives dates in the 1973-1978 range for the acquisition & bulldozing work.) And yes, there was an environmental assessment for the original park work too, though the only thing about it I can find is a September 1977 summary. I dunno, I actually kind of enjoy reading those things, and I realize I may be the only person who does.

Another photo from ~1965 shows a midcentury Japanese teahouse that once stood across the street from the park, which was demolished around 1991 to make room for a sleeker, more upscale... Japanese teahouse. Which went out of business a few years later, and the building has sat empty ever since, though I understand the parking garage is still open. I haven't found any old news articles to prove this but it sure looks like was a concerted (and largely unsuccessful) effort in the 90s to take this whole area of Waikiki upscale. Another big example of this is right on the other side of the park's once-eponymous hotel, where you'll find the long-vacant King Kalākaua Plaza building, a four-story upscale retail plaza that opened in 1998, anchored by Niketown and Banana Republic flagship stores and an Official All-Star Cafe. The latter was one of those inexplicable 90s theme restaurant chains, a genre that no longer exists outside of the Las Vegas Strip, Times Square, and the more cartoonish parts of Florida. The retailers all cratered within a few years, and the fourth floor office space was never occupied at all, and despite an endless series of grand plans for the site it's remained empty ever since. Though like the teahouse the parking garage remains open for business. Though I'm not sure how underground parking even works when your building is just 5-7 feet above -- and a few blocks north of -- sea level.

The park also got a brief mention in someone's 2002 masters thesis about 3D visualization in highway planning. It seems that the city wanted to spruce up the intersection back in 2000 and built some kind of early VR model of the area to help imagine what the proposed sprucing might look like. Confusingly the thesis says this work was for the intersection of Kalakaua and Kapiolani. Which is a completely different intersection over by the Convention Center, across the Ala Wai canal from Waikiki proper. Where (as you can see on Street View) there's a distinct lack of anything that looks remotely like a park. So either the paper got a minor fact wrong and nobody noticed until now, or there's a second "Waikiki Gateway Park" out there that only exists in virtual reality. Which -- if nothing else -- is bound to cut down on maintenance costs. Either way, it would be kind of funny to see what either intersection looks like in vintage 90s VRML, but this was long before source control became cool, so if a copy still exists it's probably moldering away on a forgotten Zip disk in someone's office junk drawer. Oh well.

Ok, so at this point I have to pivot awkwardly back to the statue, because there's one other detail I was saving for the end. There's another plaque on the base of the statue, this one noting it (as in, the base and pedestal) had been laid by local Masons, as the king had been an active and high ranking member for many years, as had several of his predecessors. As a result the local organization owns a lot of historical artifacts and occasionally lends some of them out for display, including a royal Knights Templar sword (whatever that is) that somehow ended up at Sotheby's in New York in 2003. As far as I know there are no magical powers associated with the sword, or any sort of curse or prophesy or anything, and finding it in a D&D campaign would likely be a big disappointment, and the whole business seems rather silly. But say what you will, you never get stories like this coming out of rectangular corn states, so there's that at least.

Based on the statue's highly visible location, and the plaque's subject matter, and the usual inclinations of the 21st century internet, search results about it quickly descend into tinfoil hat territory after the first few pages of search results, because internet. Note that those links all go to recent Wayback Machine captures and not the sites themselves, since I'm mentioning them here strictly for entertainment purposes and not to send them traffic or spread their ideas. So instead of spending any more time on that, please enjoy that one semi-related song from that one show:

By way of contrast, here's what it looks like when actual Masons have a go at the same song, after a drink or two, or three, or so.

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footnote(s)

[1]
The combo of sugar money and an ambitious king did lead to an interesting historical episode in 1886-87. It's not really relevant to the rest of this post but hey. Kalākaua had big plans for his country despite the ongoing medical tragedy; word had reached him of a civil war erupting in Samoa, with the opposing factions backed by competing Western colonial powers (the UK, USA, and Germany, in this case) contending for influence in the South Pacific as they'd previously done elsewhere around the world. This was an unwelcome development as Hawaii was in a similar position, trying to avoid being gobbled up by one Western country or another. Kalākaua had ambitions beyond his own shores, though, imagining an ocean-spanning Polynesian Confederation powerful enough to keep the region from being sliced and diced into a bunch of crown colonies and overseas territories and whatnot. With, naturally, himself as the overall head of state of this far-flung new nation. So the Hawaiian Royal Navy's first (and as it turned out, only) modern navy ship was dispatched to Samoa for a little gunboat diplomacy, and actually got as far as signing a confederation treaty with the kingdom's preferred local ruler, while almost going to war with Germany in the process. Meanwhile back home in Hawaii the sugar oligarchs decided Kalākaua had gotten too big for his britches and staged a coup, forcing the king to sign a new "Bayonet Constitution" that strictly limited his authority. This was sold to the world as introducing a modern constitutional monarchy, but the new constitution also altered voting rules such that rich foreigners could now vote, but at least 2/3 of local residents could not, thus ensuring a majority white male legislature for the remainder of the kingdom's existence. As a result of all this, the Samoa expedition was called home, and the ship was quickly sold and the navy disbanded. So yeah, the king's brief attempt at a more assertive foreign policy didn't really play out the way he'd hoped. Or at least not in our timeline. An alternate history forum thread I ran across explores some of the inevitable "What If?" and "If So, How?" questions.