Basket of Air

So next up on the grand tour we're taking a peek at Basket of Air, the sculpture in the center of the Hoyt Arboretum's new bamboo garden. The RACC description explains:

Artist Ivan McLean spent a few of years in the southern Philippines as a member of the Peace Corp and used this experience to inform his sculpture, which sits in the middle of the Hoyt Arboretum’s Bamboo Forest. The sculpture’s posts mimic the basic segmented structure of bamboo while the central sphere, a form often explored by McLean, reflects the idea of bamboo baskets he encountered during his travels.

While in the Philippines, “I built a nipa roofed house with various types of bamboo used as structural members or woven into the wall panels. During my travels I also watched in awe as workers created scaffolding rising hundreds of feet around modern buildings in Hong Kong and then a short time later hiking for days through bamboo forests in Northern Thailand and staying with families in simple homes made from the ubiquitous plant… I was constantly impressed by how skilled people were in using bamboo to build a variety of objects, including baskets.”

We've seen a couple of other McLean sculptures here previously: work previously seen here: Flying Salmon in 2014, & Rational Exuberance back in 2012. (The latter one was relocated north of the Fremont Bridge a year or two after I posted about it). I snarked a little about the salmon one, it being something of an overused motif in Pacific Northwest art. I feel I may have been unfair; undoubtedly the customer (an upscale, super-Northwesty grocery store) insisted on salmon. Salmon have the unique ability to be both an eco-feel-good regional icon and a delicious meal at the same time. Maybe not exactly the same time, but you know what I mean.

In any case, since we're more or less on the topic of bamboo forests, here's a fight scene from House of Flying Daggers (2004):

Updated 8/3/2026: The city transportation bureau classifies the little road loop containing the bamboo garden as an official traffic circle or island, believe it or not, and as such their traffic & islands GIS layer has assigned it asset number 3300-0000021, and comes to 2220.445 square feet. This isn't even the weirdest one, though; that would have to go to asset 3300-0000048, better known as the optional chicane bit at Portland International Raceway, where race organizers can either have the race go straight through or hang a sharp right and handle a few corners in close succession, which you might want to do to make the course a little more challenging, while also slowing the cars down a bit for safety.

Ladd Circle

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We're wrapping up the Ladd's Addition parks mini-tour at Ladd Circle, the traffic circle in the center of the neighborhood's goofy street grid. The circle isn't a rose garden; it's basically just a landscaped circle with bushes and a couple of benches, if I remember right, and it's somehow gone over a century without anyone plunking down any monumental art in the center of the circle.

The one commercial building facing the circle is home to the cozy Palio cafe, named after the famous Sienese horse race. Previously there was a small neighborhood grocery store here until sometime in the 1980s. There are also a couple of churches facing the circle, which I don't have photos of since I admit I'm not all that interested in churches.

A few years ago, a local cyclist/filmmaker got the idea of riding a century (100 miles) by doing 650 laps of Ladd Circle. There seems to be some disagreement about how many laps equal 100 miles; I'm not sure if they're measuring the length of the inside of the circle vs. the outside, or what the discrepancy is about, but the BikePortland article says 650 laps, while the filmmaker's video about this adventure says it's a nice even 666 laps. A big group event last summer insisted that you could hit a century in just 500 laps. So who knows? One commenter did the math and figured that anywhere between 543 and 673 laps, depending on where you ride in the circle, and how pedantic you plan on being about your 100 miles. Personally I've never been 100% convinced that the ordinary laws of physics and reality operate inside Ladd's Addition, so maybe all of these values are true, and none are true, and uncanny magic is afoot. I half expected to run across the local minotaur at the center of the circle when I visited, but no such luck. He or she must have had the afternoon off or something.

Updated 8/3/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer says Ladd Circle is also known as asset number 3350-0000030, and it totals 8815.035 square feet.

Cypress Square, Ladd's Addition

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If you've followed this humble blog for any amount of time at all, you're familiar with a few of my ongoing "projects", where a project is some sort of theme I latch onto and pursue to the point of absurdity for a while, like murals, bridges, fountains, city parks, and a few assorted other things like that. So back in 2012 I posted some roses in Orange Square, one of the four tiny rose garden parks in the Ladd's Addition neighborhood. You probably expected me to visit the other three squares and Ladd Circle in the middle of the neighborhood, because that's how these projects always go. And I actually did go and take the requisite flower photos back in 2014, but the posts went into my ginormous drafts folder and I sort of forgot about them without ever actually finishing & posting them. Which is kind of a shame since a.) the photos are mostly flowers, and I haven't had a lot of flowers here lately, and b.) the research for the first post applies to the circle & remaining three squares too, so there isn't actually that much work that needs doing on these posts.

Cypress Square is the east rose garden in Ladd's Addition, named for one of the adjoining streets. The names for individual squares were given back in 1909, but they fell out of common use at some point after that, and basically nobody uses these names anymore; the squares are usually just "east park" or "north garden" or "south square", etcetera. I rather like the proper names though, so I decided to go ahead and use them here, even if nobody else does anymore.

Updated 8/3/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer says Cypress Square is also known as asset number 3330-0000237, and it totals 8815.035 square feet.

SE 37th & Bybee

Another painted intersection, this time a fish-and-rainbow design at SE 37th & Bybee. 37th is not really a street here, rather just a stretch of unused city right-of-way. So the intersection is basically a weird wide spot in the road with an island in the middle. The 2015 City Repair guide explains they've been slowly transforming the unused stretch of 37th into a "food forest and garden" over the last few years. I didn't really notice anything that looked like a food forest or garden when I was there, but gardens are never very photogenic in late winter anyway.

For what it's worth, the city's official GIS catalog of traffic circles and islands says the bit in the middle is traffic island number 3350-0000055, with an area of 34.449 square feet.

NE Morris & 37th

One of the many ongoing projects at this humble blog involves tracking down Portland's handful of traffic circles. I started this because there aren't a lot of them here, and the ones we have often have something interesting in the center, like public art or rose gardens or a fountain. I had an old note on my giant omnibus TODO list/map that there was one more circle to track down, located at NE 37th & Morris in the middle of the Alameda neighborhood. So when I finally got around to tracking it down, I realized it was just one of the little traffic calming circles the city likes to add instead of speed bumps. I normally don't bother with those because they're not very interesting, and there's a lot of them, so I'm not sure why I put this particular one on the list. I mean, I'm sure I would have looked at it in Street View ahead of time and noticed that. There must have been some other reason why a.) I knew this was here to begin with, and b.) then thought it was worth a visit. But for the life of me I can't recall what that might have been. The only thing Google turns up is a 2008 neighborhood effort to add more traffic calming widgets along 37th south of Morris, which the city politely declined to do. And I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be enough to generate a TODO item. I really need to start including a "why" when I put things on a list, or maybe even not put them on the list if there isn't a good "why". Although a significant chunk of this blog wouldn't exist if I'd had a rule like that before now...

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic island and circle GIS layer calls this asset number 3350-0000060, with an area of 136.859 square feet.

NW Luray Circus

One of the many ongoing projects here on this humble blog involves a certain list of obscure places I found on the city archives website a few years ago. It's a list of places the city parks department had some sort of involvement with between about 1970 and the early 1990s, though most of them aren't official city parks. I just can't resist lists of obscure things, and I really can't resist patently absurd blog projects, so I've been tracking these places down now and then. Most of them turn out to be not that interesting, but you never really know ahead of time what you'll end up with.

So the next obscure place in this little project is one that's actually had a cameo here before. NW Luray Circus is a short dead-end street high in the West Hills, and it's also the top end of a flight of public stairs, up from NW Luray Terrace. You can get here from "lowland" NW Portland by taking several flights of stairs, this being the top of the fourth and last flight. I did this a few years ago for this post about stairs, and I did it again recently because of what's at the top. As I said, this street is on the list of obscure places, albeit listed as "Luray Circle" (which doesn't exist.) The list is simply a list of place names or addresses, so on arriving the question was, what exactly am I looking for? The stairs leave you off at a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, the circle/circus of the title. If you look closely at the center of the cul-de-sac, it looks like there used to be something there other than pavement. My guess is that it might have been a landscaped circle at one point, since that would explain why it's on the list. If that's what it was, it would have made for a very tight circle, and it probably would have gotten in the way of residents' ever-larger vehicles. I imagine someone phoned up city hall and called in a favor or something, and it's gone now. Or maybe the list referred to something else entirely, although I don't see anything obvious that it might be, other than the stairs. And if it's the stairs, I've already covered them elsewhere. So it's Mission Accomplished either way.

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer says the center bit at Luray Circus is also known as asset number 3320-0000010, and it totals just 57.835 square feet

Other than real estate ads, Luray Circus only appears in the library's Oregonian database in connection with the lurid 1930 Leone Bowles homicide case, which sounds like something straight out of a film noir. Bowles and her husband Nelson, a prominent local banker, married in 1920 with a big high society wedding, and moved to Luray Circus. By 1930, their marriage had broken down, and Nelson Bowles had moved in with Irma Loucks, his longtime mistress. On November 12th, 1930, Louise Bowles went to Irma Loucks's eastside apartment, and died there of multiple stab wounds. The following day's newspaper account reported it as a suicide, based on the accounts of Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks, who conveniently were the only two witnesses, as well as that of Dr. Paul B. Cooper, a doctor friend of Mr. Bowles who arrived at the scene shortly thereafter. For some reason Cooper sent the body directly to a mortuary without notifying police or the county coroner. Frankly I don't believe a word of their story, and it's strange that the paper essentially reported their accounts as undisputed facts.

Inconsistencies in the accounts of the stabbing emerged over the next few days, even as the paper went on about how distraught Bowles was, and how his wife had supposedly been suicidal for a long time. Investigators didn't buy that argument, and the inquest became a homicide investigation. Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks were arrested on December 6th, on suspicion of murder as well as "lewd cohabitation". Meanwhile, the funeral was held in Yakima, WA on December 13th, with a casket covered in flowers sent by Nelson Bowles, even though he was currently sitting in jail awaiting indictment, which is just creepy. On December 31st, a grand jury returned a sternly worded indictment against both Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks.

So the case went to trial in March 1931, and this is the part of the story where money, privilege, and connections made a world of difference. The same Dr. Cooper who tampered with evidence right after the death was somehow permitted to testify as an expert witness for the defense. Bowles's high-powered legal team won him an acquittal, after putting the victim on trial and selling the jury on the defense's suicide story. Shortly thereafter all charges were dismissed against Dr. Cooper, who'd been investigated for tampering with evidence.

Several months later, the Nelson Bowles and the new Mrs. Irma Bowles appeared in the paper again; in the intervening months the two had married and skipped town to Denver. And this is the last we hear of the pair in the Oregonian, and Google is no help either. I have no idea what became of the pair after that.

SW Terwilliger & Taylors Ferry

Some time ago, I was poking around on the city website and found a list of obscure places the city parks bureau had a role in designing or landscaping (up to some time in the early 1990s, I think), and that list evolved into one of this humble blog's various ongoing projects. Many of the recent installments haven't been very impressive, being a collection of landscaped traffic islands and diverters and whatnot, places I wouldn't give a second thought to if there wasn't a list. Today's installment, though, is going to be hard to beat in terms of unimpressiveness. We're in the West Hills, at the intersection of SW Terwilliger and Taylors Ferry, and all i see is a busy intersection with a grocery store, a Starbucks, a Shell station, various other shops, and no obvious landscaping of any kind, or anything remotely park-like for that matter. The list doesn't explain its entries at all, so I have no idea what I was supposed to be looking for here. It's entirely possible that the list refers to something that was remodeled or removed years ago, for all I know. I took a few photos just to be on the safe side, on the off-chance that the thing I was supposed to find is here somewhere and I just didn't clue in on it at the time. I've looked at the photos again, though, and wandered around the area on Street View, and looked up the adjacent properties on PortlandMaps, and for the life of me I have no idea why this intersection made the list.

At least I didn't go far out of my way for this installment of the project. These were taken from the parking lot of the Market of Choice grocery store at the intersection. I was there shopping anyway, so I figured I might as well take some photos while I was there and thinking of it. Incidentally, this store is on the site of the old Burlingame Grocery, which burned down in September 2001. The store's owner was later convicted of torching it for the insurance money, and sentenced to 7 1/2 years. Burning things down for money is always a bad plan, but this one was especially dumb considering that the city's Fire Station 10 (home of Fire Eater) is literally right behind the grocery store on Taylors Ferry, and the fire came exactly a week after 9/11. So I imagine the city's fire investigators were highly motivated to crack this particular case.

Updated 8/6/2026: I think I've figured this one out. See the triangular concrete bit between the right turn lane and the main intersection? The city's traffic circle and island GIS system calls it asset ID 3310-0000080, owned by the transportation bureau and maintained by "unknown", and topping out at a semi-whopping 92.353 square feet. I dunno, maybe it was nicer back in the 70s, somehow. Maybe it wasn't all concrete back in the day. Maybe there was a groovy 70s planter at one point, but drunk drivers kept crashing into it until it was reduced to rubble. Beats me, but it's not very impressive in its current form.

SW Nottingham Dr. Circle

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So I was looking at a map of Portland's West Hills a while ago for something or other, and (because I was being a nerd) I noticed a little traffic circle up in the hills between OHSU and Council Crest, at the end of SW Nottingham Drive. I'd done a couple of posts about traffic circles before (because it wasn't the first time I'd been a nerd), and I looked at it on PortlandMaps and noticed it's an actual tax lot owned by the city transportation bureau. So it's not really a city park, but "city-owned" was close enough for various other places that have ended up as blog posts here. So I figured it was worth a look, and it went on my ginormous todo list as somewhere to track down if I was in the area anyway. Which I was, recently, so I drove by and took a couple of photos. I didn't stay long, though. Maybe I was thinking of the recent Dosch Park Circle thing, but if I lived there I'd be puzzled if a strange car drove up and the driver started taking photos of the roundabout at the end of my street. I mean, it's a public right of way and public property, and all of this is undisputed, but "indignant taxpayer who knows his rights" speeches never seem to make much of an impression on Officer Friendly and his friendly taser.

The streets in this area all have Robin Hood names; Nottingham Drive branches off from Sherwood Drive, and there's an Arden somewhere nearby. Rich neighborhoods use Robin Hood names surprisingly often, I suppose just because they sound oh-so-refined and evoke Jolly Olde England ever so much. For some reason they never seem to play up the whole stealing-from-the-rich part of the story. Anyway, the houses along Nottingham Drive are a small 16-home subdivision just called "Nottingham", which only dates to 1969. This bit of infill came around the same time as the big apartment complex proposal that ended up as Marquam Nature Park instead. The developers here were a bit faster than the guys downhill, and the subdivision was already under construction by the time the nature park campaign got underway. The city archives include a photo of the cul-de-sac at the time it was constructed. Sadly the record is online but (as is usual with city archives photos) the photo itself is not available online. I imagine it looked like this but without all the trees.

The nature park's Marquam Trail runs just behind the backyards of some of the houses here on its way uphill to Council Crest, and the trail crosses SW Sherwood not far from the intersection with Nottingham Drive. The land the trail runs on is city-owned but doesn't show up as a park on most maps, since the city auditor's office is the owner of record. That's not uncommon, though I've never figured out why the city auditor needs to own bits of forest around the city. Maybe they're little getaway spots for those days when the spreadsheets don't look so good.

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic circle & island GIS layer calls this asset # 3300-0000031 and gives it a size of 242.048 square feet.

NE 24th & Thompson

Several years ago I ran across an obscure city document (don't bother clicking, it's been offline for months now) that listed a bunch of very obscure places the Portland city parks bureau had played a role in managing or planning. I tracked down a few that turned out to be interesting: The Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, most of the various "East Park Blocks" around Portland's eastside, a number of little mini-parks in the Alameda and Healy Heights neighborhoods, and various other things. So tracking these places down eventually became another of this humble blog's many weird little projects. In an unusual bit of foresight I included the full list in a 2011 post (which I did because I didn't have anything else interesting to say about the place), so this mini-project has kept going despite the original document falling off the interwebs.

A lot of the remaining items on the list either no longer exist, or the description's so vague I can't figure out where to look. Others are things that I passed on because they didn't seem very interesting or worthwhile at the time.

Which brings us to our next destination, the mini-roundabout at NE 24th & Thompson, in the Irvington neighborhood. Not that long ago I specifically said I wasn't going to cover these mini-roundabout things; there are dozens, maybe hundreds of them all over town, which is too many, and they aren't really individually distinctive. A couple have appeared here because they're in the center of a painted intersection, but generally this is still a solid rule. I'm making an exception for this one because it's on the aforementioned list. Or at least the intersection's on the list, and the traffic circle is the only likely candidate for something the parks bureau might have been involved in. I have no idea why this one was on the list and no others were, since it looks just like all the others. Maybe it was the first one. I don't have any documentation or any particular reason to think so, but it's the only hypothesis I have other than sheer randomness. This is the point where I shrug and say I don't write these lists, I just go where they tell me to go, and the matter is entirely out of my hands.

This little circle does have its own page (albeit a very bare-bones one) on a site called Roundabouts Now, which bills itself as "Your Exclusive Source of Modern Roundabouts Information". Which does seem to be an accurate slogan in this case. In a way I'm glad that site exists. I dunno, I guess it feels reassuring when I find something that's gone further down a nerdy rabbit hole than I have. So far.

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer has it as asset number 3350-0000037, with an area of a mere 86.364 square feet

Powell Grove Pioneer Cemetery

The intersection of NE 122nd and Sandy resembles a freeway interchange, with an overpass and cloverleaf ramps between the two streets. If you look closely, inside the curve of one of these ramps is a collection of headstones. This is the tiny one-acre Powell Grove Pioneer Cemetery, which was here first, dating all the way back to 1848. For the first century or so of its existence the surrounding area was rural, and it only appeared in the paper when a new resident arrived.

In December 1949, after a century as a privately run cemetery, relatives of people buried here asked the county to take over maintenance. Undoubtedly this seemed like a great idea at the time, but county ownership may have paved the way for a lengthy court battle that began a few years later.

In 1953, moving to suburbia was the hot new trend, and everyone's favorite downtown stores decided to follow. Fred Meyer proposed a new store at 122nd & Sandy, their first venture outside the downtown core. The intersection was already a busy one, and the announcement envisioned "modernizing" it to provide better access to the new store. The paper described the proposal as the "first decentralization by a major downtown department store", which seems to indicate there weren't any Meier & Frank stores outside downtown then, nor any branches of the other long-vanished department stores that once graced downtown.

Or it would have been the first such store if the plan had gone through quickly. However discussions dragged on for a few years as the parties tried to work out the details, including road access to the store site. In 1957 the county announced a plan to move the cemetery elsewhere, to make room for a nice modern freeway-style intersection: "Dead Asked to Move Over - Cemetery In Way of Plan to Expedite Traffic". Relatives of the deceased weren't so keen on the idea, and a courtroom battle ensued over the next few years. An August 1960 article about needed repairs at the cemetery mentions the ongoing court fight, as well as a new proposal to include the cemetery inside one of the cloverleaf ramps, which is what eventually ended up happening.

It didn't happen immediately, though. The court battle continued, and in November 1961 the county and local boosters tentatively won the fight to move the cemetery elsewhere. Several months after that, an article referred to the "present site" of the cemetery, indicating nothing had changed at that point, and then... nothing. It's as if they went to all the trouble to win the right to dig people up and move them, and then dropped the matter without actually going through with it. I can't even find any references saying they decided not to do it after all; they just stopped talking about it, and that was the end of the matter.

A few of you longtime Gentle Reader(s) might remember this photo from another post back in 2008, before I'd really gotten this blogging-about-places-and-things schtick down properly. Who am I kidding, nobody remembers trivial stuff like that. It's just that somehow it feels like I should disclose it when I reuse an old photo for a new post. I'm not sure why; it just feels more sort of integrity-esque this way.

Updated 8/3/2026: The city transportation bureau classifies the little sorta-highway ramp loop containing the cemetery as an official traffic circle or island, believe it or not, and as such their traffic & islands GIS layer has assigned it asset number 3330-0000944, and comes to 12617.596square feet, which covers both the cemetery proper and the surrounding landscaped area.

East Park Blocks: Waverleigh Boulevard Blocks

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Today's adventure takes us to the short stretch of SE Waverleigh Boulevard between 31st & 33rd Avenues, just north of Powell and east of the Cleveland High School football field. This stretch of Waverleigh Boulevard is sort of diagonal to the normal Portland street grid, and has a grassy median strip down the center. PortlandMaps (the city's public GIS system) says this median strip is actually a city park, or at least is owned by the city parks bureau. There's another stretch of Waverleigh on the other side of the football field, between 28th & 31st, but instead of a median it has a concrete divider and parking spaces down the center of the street. The whole arrangement seemed kind of unusual, since Waverleigh isn't a major street and doesn't go much of anywhere. So it was time for some research. It seems that back in 1907 this area was the shiny, new Waverleigh Heights subdivision. The first ad in the paper for it sounds both exuberant and shady, sort of reminiscent of realty ads a century later during the great condo bubble.

We take checks, certificates of deposit, clearing-house certificates, shin plasters, or old gold, in payment of lots in Waverleigh Heights.

Put your money in "dirt" and get your money's worth. No worry here. Give us your money and we will do the worrying for you.

The company behind the project, and this dubious ad, was the amusingly-named "Jno. P. Sharkey Company". A few months later they offered a free corner lot at SE 33rd & Brooklyn to the winner of a sorta-anagram contest, strangely enough. Here are the official rules, although I'm afraid the entry deadline is long past:

See how many words you can make out of the thirteen different letters in "Beautiful Waverleigh", not using the same letter more than once in any word. Therefore the letters you can use are B,T,F,U,W,A,V,R,L,E,I,G,H.

A word cannot be used more than once, even though it has different meanings.

You cannot use plurals or the names of persons or places.

Any word now in use in the English language (Webster is our authority) will be counted, but not obsolete words.

Today this would be a decent freshman computer science assignment, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

The median was originally supposed to be a central parking strip the whole length of the street, as it still is further west. Apparently this was an unusual arrangement at the time, since three years later the city was still trying to puzzle out who owned the central strip, and who was responsible for making improvements to it, the city or homeowners whose property faced it. This issue had come to a head because the the developers had left the central parking strip unfinished; the article states that in many spots it was "simply a hole in the ground, which had to be filled at considerable expense." The city faced a looming $2779.37 bill for improvements, and was wringing its hands over whether to pass the cost along to homeowners instead. I haven't run across a followup article detailing what the eventual judgment was, but we know the eastern segment eventually ended up as a city park, not as parking at all, and the western segment sure looks like something the city and not homeowners would be responsible for.

Waverleigh was originally a through street until the stretch between 31st and 33rd was vacated in 1934 to make way for the Cleveland sports field. One city commissioner objected on the grounds that Waverleigh might be a major street someday, but obviously the project went ahead anyway. A strange artifact of this remains, not visible in person, but only in PortlandMaps. Even now, the big block of school district property is broken by a 20' wide strip belonging to the Parks Bureau, directly beneath the football field's north end zone. I imagine this means the Parks Bureau became the owner of it (as well as the extant bit west of it) after 1910 and before 1934, while it was still the median of a city street.

There are a number of other streets similar to this scattered around Portland's east side, though this may be the only one that originated as a central parking strip. Several years ago I tracked down all the examples I knew of at the time and dubbed them the "East Park Blocks", to go along with downtown's North & South Park Blocks. I'm tagging this as yet another one, since I definitely would have included it in the project if only I'd known it existed.

Updated 8/6/2026: The two road-adjacent parts of this park are also included in the transportation bureau's GIS map of traffic circles and islands. The east unit has asset ID 3330-0000282, 2754.739 square feet, while the west unit is asset 3320-0000111 and comes in at just 509.887 square feet.

MLK Gateway Plaza

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Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE Grand Ave. & Hancock St, the point where two-way MLK splits into southbound MLK and northbound Grand Avenue. The traffic shift creates a couple of awkward (and unbuildable) triangles of land, which the city's tried to do various things with over the years. Most recently, it's been transformed into something the city calls the "Gateway and Heritage Markers Project" The skinny south corner of the main triangle is landscaped with some sort of tufted grass, I think to discourage people from walking through it. The triangle's divided by a curved metal mesh wall, maybe 7'-8' high, with an inspirational MLK quote facing Grand Avenue, in a font that makes it look vaguely like a Nike ad. The north side is a small concrete pedestrian plaza with displays about Oregon African-American history.

The design of the place is odd for Portland, seemingly designed for the benefit of passing motorists rather than pedestrians. The project was put together by the city's transportation bureau (it's asset # 3300-0000167 in their traffic island catalog) and this isn't technically a city park, which might explain the vehicular orientation of the place. The design drew complaints over the lack of sidewalks; apparently the city felt there were some unsafe pedestrian crossings here, and set out to discourage people from crossing the street in these spots rather than figuring out how to make them safer.

The one-way couplet of Grand Ave. and Union Ave. (the previous name of MLK) was announced in August 1957, and the change went into effect in January 1958. Initially this involved northbound drivers making two 90 degree turns, a left from Grand onto NE Hancock and then a right onto northbound MLK. In 1978 the city bought up the car lot on this block and created today's angled arrangement. This was part of the same project that created a landscaped median along the two-way portion of MLK, while eliminating much of the on-street parking along the street. This design has been widely regarded as a disaster, one that killed off many of the businesses along the street and made the street into a sort of neighborhood barrier since there were very few intersections where cars or pedestrians could cross it. They've worked to mitigate this in recent years, but it's hampered by the fact that MLK is a state highway (OR 99), and ODOT hates traffic lights and anything else that would prevent semis from barreling along city streets as fast as possible.

I ran across a pair of city planning documents from when the Transportation Bureau had to get design approval to proceed with the redesign. One mentions that the original design included additional heritage markers up and down MLK north of here, but noted there was no funding in place to actually do this.

Architects and designers love talking about places as "gateways". That often seems to be meaningless professional jargon, but this spot really is a sort of gateway, or at least historically it's been one. Before gentrification took hold in Northeast Portland, it was at least symbolically an entrance to the only majority-black neighborhood in the city. Growing up out in sheltered 1970s Portland suburbia, I can distinctly recall being cautioned to never ever go north of this spot because it "wasn't safe". Now it's more of a gateway from one trendy hipster neighborhood to another, yoga studios and artisanal coffee roasters as far as the eye can see.

Highwood Park Blocks

Our next adventure takes us to the Portland-Gresham borderlands again, to NE 162nd & Fargo St, a bit north of the Sandstone blocks I just posted about. Like that previous post, this was a reader suggestion from Gentle Reader av3ed, and we're here because of the median strip down the main street of a subdivision. This area is called "Highwood", and it's roughly contemporary to the "Sandstone" subdivision further south that we just visited in the previous post. The same year the Street of Dreams visited there, one of the houses here was part of the "1979 Tour of Homes", which I gather was a sort of rival to the Street of Dreams, except the houses were distributed around the metro area.

There's no jogging path or anything fancy here, just sort of an ivy median down a quiet dead-end street. "Park blocks" is probably not the right term to be using here. I probably wouldn't have bothered with this place at all, to be honest, except that a.) I was already in the area, and b.) it was a reader suggestion, and reader suggestions are rare here, and I feel like I ought to run with the few I get. On the theory that this might encourage more suggestions or something.

Updated 8/2/2026: The city's traffic island and circle GIS layer shows this is city-owned property, instead of belonging to some dumb HOA, so there's that. That map shows 6 pieces including two little traffic circles, for a total of 4285.956 square feet.

Sandstone Park Blocks

Today's adventure takes us out to the Portland 'burbs, to a 70's-era subdivision along NE San Rafael at 162nd. 162nd marks the border between Portland and Gresham in this area; it's not my usual part of town, and I'm fairly sure I never would've ended up here but for a tip from Gentle Reader av3ed. I imagine s/he saw my "East Park Blocks" series from a few years ago & (rightly) figured I might be interested in this place. (The same person also tipped me about the old survey marker at Peninsular & Farragut. Which in turn got a comment by someone else, leading me to the old city boundary marker in the historic Columbian Cemetery. So feel free to leave your own suggestions down in the comments & keep the chain going.)

The reason we're here is that San Rafael has a wide landscaped median between about 160th and 169th, with an asphalt path down the middle, as it passes through the "Sandstone" subdivision. I was surprised by how many runners and walkers were using it when I visited. If you look at the place in Google Street View, you'll also see a few runners using the path. This alone makes it more park-like than a lot of the places I called "park blocks" in that earlier project, so I think I"ll use the term here too, for convenience. So "Sandstone Park Blocks" is really just my description, not an official name or anything.

Dedicating this much land to recreation space instead of more houses is unthinkable in today's sardine-can-like subdivisions, and it was unusual even back in the 1970s. But this isn't just any old subdivision; a portion of it was the 1979 Street of Dreams. The Street of Dreams is an annual show by Portland-area homebuilders showcasing the latest trends (or fads) in home design. In recent years they've focused on increasingly crass and ridiculous gazillionaire houses, but the 1979 show had houses just a step or two above what the average homebuyer could afford, and the show drew record crowds.

From what I can tell, the dream houses were all located on or near NE 165th, a side street off San Rafael, and the surrounding area (including San Rafael) was largely undeveloped at the time of the Street of Dreams. If you wander along 165th on Street View, you can tell that the architecture is a bit more 70's avant-garde than usual, and no two houses are alike. The landscaped median would have made for a grand entrance into the show area, and the path was probably a big selling point for people who fancied themselves as joggers (since that was a big fad at the time).

The rest of the subdivision came along later, beginning around 1985. In the intervening years, Oregon's economy experienced one of the worst recessions in its history, as the poor national economy meant no demand for wood for construction, and in those days any shock to the timber industry had a large ripple effect on the entire regional economy. So I imagine development ground to a halt for a while here, and resumed when the economy finally began improving in the late 1980s. The Sandstone subdivision was featured in a March 1986 Oregonian article "Housing industry coming out of slump", in fact. (There was also a steady stream of real estate ads as new houses came on the market; see these from April 1985 and October 1986 for example.) The ads and article mention that the subdivision was created by a division of the Weyerhaeuser Corp., the large Seattle-based timber company, so I imagine there was a forest here at some point before the houses came.

More recently, the local neighborhood association's transportation policy advocates for a marked crosswalk at 162nd & San Rafael, which they say is needed due to all the extra foot traffic along the central path. PortlandMaps says the pathway is part of the street right-of-way, but I'm not sure whether it's maintained by the cities of Portland and Gresham, or by a local HOA, or someone else. If it was located in inner NE Portland, say, or St. Johns, instead of distant Gresham, this would be a hip, trendy street. City officials would brag about the median path as a great sustainable walkability feature, or something along those lines. Actually this could still happen; Portland home prices and the general cost of living keep going up all the time, and we may reach a point where only boring rich people can live in the central city, kind of like what's already happened to San Francisco and Manhattan and parts of Seattle. If we get to that point, I've begun to wonder which Portland suburb will become our Oakland or Williamsburg. Downtown Gresham is kind of cute, and it's convenient to the Columbia Gorge, and I think getting around is generally less of a hassle than out in Washington County, so it's probably my leading candidate if I had to guess. In this hypothetical future, I could see househunting hipster couples stumbling across this neighborhood and going nuts for it, the way their predecessors did over Portland's close-in eastside neighborhoods. Not this year, likely not this decade, even, but sooner or later.

Updated 8/7/2026: The City of Portland's traffic island and circle GIS layer has an entry for the block to the west of 162nd, labeling it as asset number 3330-0000463, with an area of 1077.805 square feet.

SW Tyrol Circle

Today's mini-adventure takes us to another place on that list I found of obscure Portland quasi-parks and greenspaces and whatnot, which I've slowly been working my way through. SW Tyrol Circle is a little cul-de-sac off SW 18th Place, up in the West Hills. For some reason the center of the cul-de-sac was done up as a sort of roundabout, I suppose because it looks fancy and European that way. In any case, the city owns this little circle and handles the landscaping and whatnot, so it showed up on the list. I went back and forth about whether this place was worth bothering with, but it looked kind of weird on Street View, and it's definitely obscure, so here we are.

This is the part where I'd tell you all sorts of fascinating stories about the place and its origins, if only these stories existed and were on the interwebs somewhere. But no, not this time. Other than pages of boring real estate stuff, one of the top hits was actually my earlier blog post that included the full list I've been working from. The library's Oregonian database just had more boring real estate stuff stretching back into the 1950s.

I did get one semi-interesting Google result that has nothing at all to do with the little circle here. The Supplement to the Imperial Gazetteer, a British tome from 1868, includes short blurbs about various towns in the mountainous region of Tyrol, in Austria, and the location descriptions often include the word "circle", so the book contains a number of entries like this:

RATTENBERG, a tn. Austrian empire, Tyrol, circle and 28 m. N.E. Innsbruck, r. bank Inn. It was a place of some strength till 17S2, when its fortifications were destroyed, and possesses a handsome parish church, with fine wood carvings, a town-school, a female industrial school, and a Servite monastery. Pop. 1100.

I'm not sure what "circle" signifies here, and this book only comes up as a hit because Google seems to ignore commas. In any event, the aforementioned town of Rattenberg now boasts a population of only 405, and is apparently the smallest incorporated town in all of Austria. So the population's fallen by nearly 2/3 since 1868, and honestly I can't blame people for leaving. It seems the town's on a north-facing slope in a deep valley in the Alps, and receives essentially zero sunlight all winter. I'm used to not seeing the sun directly in the winter, being in Portland and all, but that would be just too much. I'd leave too. Great town if you're a vampire though. Back in 2005 the town proposed a system of computer-controlled mirrors to reflect sunlight into parts of the town, but as of 2014 this remains at the blueprint stage.

Portland's wintry grimness is nowhere near that dire, but it's fun to think about what the equivalent system would be like here. The problem isn't the angle of the sun, but the unbroken layer of clouds. But of course it's nice and sunny on the other side of that pesky cloud layer. I imagine what you'd want is an enormous periscope tower, poking up through the clouds and delivering sunlight to the huddled masses below. So, sure, this would be significantly taller than any structure that currently exists anywhere on earth. And yes, I haven't done the math but I'm fairly sure this would be more expensive than just buying everyone in town a plane ticket to Vegas over the winter. Still, this is the sort of (literally) blue-sky idea that wins all sorts of architecture and design awards, and brings fame and fortune to the designer. Even if it never gets funded, or it's flat-out impossible to build. That sounds like fun, and more importantly it sounds easy. Everybody knows the software industry (my line of work) is full of vaporware, but you do have to actually ship a product at some point or people will start to make fun of you. You certainly don't win awards for Best Vaporware. If I could just show off some PowerPoint slides and score a swanky trophy or wall plaque or something, and an invite to a glitzy awards banquet, that would save a hell of a lot of time and effort. I'm starting to think I may be working in the wrong industry.

Updated 8/6/2026: The circle is included in the Portland transportation bureau's GIS map of traffic circles and islands as asset # 3320-0000021, 634.136 square feet.

SW Council Crest & Patrick

Our next adventure takes us back to the Healy Heights neighborhood in the West Hills, to the little triangle of land at the corner of Council Crest Drive & Patrick Place. This place is a sibling to the little triangle at Council Crest & Carl Place that we just visited; like Carl Place, Patrick Place is apparently named after a relative of Joseph Healy, the real estate developer behind Healy Heights. And like Carl Place, Patrick Place is the third name the street has worn. It was called SW Marquam Place until July 1940. In this case the city said the renaming was to eliminate duplicate street names, and didn't mention the naming nepotism connection.

This renaming was actually controversial at the time; the original name honored pioneer Philip Marquam, and the Daughters of Oregon Pioneers protested the name change. They and others were protesting against the elimination of pioneer names generally, so this may have been the last straw after a series of other events. I'm not entirely sure about that part. Portland's mayor tried to reassure people that they were only changing the name of 200' of one street, not renaming the whole surrounding area, and Marquam Road and Marquam Gulch would continue to bear this good, solid pioneer name. Except that we no longer have a Marquam Road here (as far as I know), and I'm not sure what street it is now. Meanwhile, much of Marquam Gulch was filled in to create Duniway Park not long after this controversy. There's still the Marquam nature park (about which a post is in the works), and the Marquam Bridge, as fugly as it is, and there's even a small Willamette Valley town named Marquam. So it's not as if the guy's been forgotten entirely.

In any event, the street had only been called Marquam Place since the previous Great Renaming, in February 1920; before that it was called Aupen Circle.

Unlike the Carl Place property, this spot isn't on the mysterious but official list of obscure places I've been working off of (though I noticed this one while looking at the map for the Carl Place triangle), and it doesn't have looming radio towers right at the end of the street, although the Stonehenge Tower and the others are certainly visible from here. So I don't have a lot in the way of exciting stories about this place to share. Some would argue I never have exciting stories to share, but hey.

Somewhat uniquely, though, I've actually found one reference to the little sorta-park here, not just the street or the intersection or something in the vague vicinity. July 31st 1952, a William Moyes "Behind the Mike" column included a brief reader note.

MIKE: Candidate for smallest park -- the triangle at Council Crest Drive and Patrick Place, on Healy Heights -- PAULINE KURZ, Portland

I suppose there must have been a previous column guessing about what the smallest one might be. Now, anyone versed in Portland trivia knows that the smallest official city park on Earth is Mill Ends Park, in the middle of Naito Parkway at SW Taylor. Although that's sort of a special case, and it isn't actually a piece of land owned by the city parks bureau. The more obscure Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, in the Hollywood District, is a piece of land owned by the parks bureau, and it's reportedly the smallest city block in the city, thanks to one of those diagonal intersections where Sandy Boulevard cuts through the regular street grid. The Patrick Place site is larger than either of those two, but neither of the smaller places existed yet in 1952, so it's possible the letter writer was on to something. It's a tax lot with a PortlandMaps entry, which says it comes to 4360 square feet, or almost exactly .1 acre. The entry mentions it's owned by the city transportation bureau, and like the Carl Place triangle it was owned by Multnomah County until 2006 when the city got a hankering to own it and asked for a transfer. Beats me why they'd bother to do that.

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer has it as asset number 3300-0000042, with a size of 1458.922 square feet

SW Council Crest & Carl

You might have noticed by now that I have a lot of weird "ongoing projects" here at this humble blog. There's bridges, city parks, public art, the painted intersections that have been popping up around Portland in recent years, and probably a few others I don't remember off the top of my head. The common thread is that I've got a list of something to work from, the obscurer the better, and I go out and take photos of an item on the list and then try to find something interesting to write about it. The subject of today's post comes from one of the weirder "ongoing projects"; some years ago I was searching for info on the nameless city park at SW 14th & Hall, and bumped into a list in the city archives of various obscure places that the Parks Bureau had had some involvement with in the 1970-1995 timeframe or thereabouts. I'm not entirely sure what being on the list signified, and the original document is actually offline now, so it's tough to go back and check again. Fortunately(?) I included the whole list in my SW 5th & Caruthers post a while back, and I have a blog tag for the lot of them, and the really important thing here is that I have a list, and most items on the list are exceedingly obscure. Most aren't on the city parks website, and several technically belong to other city departments, like the place we're visiting this time around.

This installment takes us up into the West Hills, to the Healy Heights neighborhood around Council Crest. At the intersection of SW Council Crest Drive & Carl Place is a small landscaped triangle. It may not look like much, but it was on the list, so here I am writing about it. PortlandMaps says it's owned by the city Transportation Bureau; apparently Multnomah County owned it until 2006, when the city asked them to hand over the keys for some reason. That county document calls the triangle a "traffic divider". I prefer to think I'm not writing about mere traffic dividers, though, because if I am writing about mere traffic dividers, there's just no end to that sort of thing, and I'll blaze boring new trails in internet tediousness.

I checked the library's Oregonian database on the off chance that something fascinating had happened here at some point. No luck this time around, although I did notice that "Carl Place" is the third name applied to this street. I know of at least one Gentle Reader out there who's interested in street names and whatnot, so I figured this was worth noting. The street was previously known as Villard Place until June 1941, when the city council changed the name. Before that, in February 1920, the name was changed to Villard Place from Chilion Circle, which was the original name as far as I know. A mention in Laura Foster's Portland Hill Walks explains that the current street names honor relatives of Joseph Healy, the developer behind Healy Heights. That's kind of standard practice for subdivisions. I almost had a street named after me when an uncle turned his farm into a subdivision, but he decided to go with boring nature-themed street names instead, if I remember right.

If you look in the background of the first photo, you can see the big local landmark around these parts, the ginormous tripod-shaped KGON broadcast tower, sometimes nicknamed the "Stonehenge Tower" for some reason. (A Portland radio history page insists it's named after the investment group that owns it, which if true would be a lame explanation.) It's more or less Portland's answer to San Francisco's Sutro Tower. The tower site sits behind a gate at the end of Carl Place, and another at the end of Council Crest Drive a bit further south. It's off limits to the public, but someone with NorthEast Radio Watch toured the site back in 2007 and posted a bunch of photos. The tower's officially named for KGON, a local classic rock station that used to make weird TV commercials back before radio was lame and corporate; despite the name, the tower is shared by a number of other TV and radio broadcasters. Prior to the current tower, Healy Heights site was home to a forest of transmission towers owned by individual stations, including an abandoned one for Portland's short-lived Channel 27, which went bankrupt part way through tower construction. So part of the idea behind the current tower was to consolidate transmitters on a single, more robust structure.

The broadcast industry and local residents have sometimes been uneasy neighbors. The Oregonian database records ongoing local concerns about towers possibly collapsing onto residents' homes, which is apparently something that happened to at least one tower elsewhere in town during the Columbus Day Storm. A more exotic problem concerned radio-frequency interference from transmitters located here. Neighbors reportedly dubbed the area the "electronic jungle" due to the interference. A 1986 article explained that local residents couldn't videotape TV shows or have working garage door openers due to emissions from the tower farm. Voltmeters would show readings without even being plugged in, just due to electrical fields in the air. There were even reports of residents' toasters "singing" due to the transmitters, though the paper was unable to confirm that story. The article suggests the "close proximity of homes to such a dense collection of transmitters may be unmatched anywhere in the United States".

Before it became a tower farm, the land at the end of Carl Place was home to a very different sort of structure, equally huge in its own way. During the 1920s, the Richfield oil company (now the 'R' in "ARCO") had a penchant for bold advertising. Their basic idea was to advertise their gas stations with signs saying "RICHFIELD", visible from a great distance by land and by air, on the off chance that a barnstorming aerialst might taxi by for a fill up. These Richfield Beacons were often on the roofs of buildings, and sometimes they had their own towers to hold the letters vertically. Portland's sign was a bit different, with the word RICHFIELD sitting along the Healy Heights ridge line, similar to the Hollywood Sign. The Hollywood Sign has 45' letters, and is about 350' long. Portland's Richfield sign was actually quite a bit larger than that, with 60' letters, and a length of 725'. Moreover, the sign was painted orange for daytime viewers, and lit with neon at night. It was supposedly the largest electric sign on the planet when it was built, readable 10 miles away and visible from 50 miles away. The sign went live in September 1928, and went dark in 1931 thanks to the Depression and the bankruptcy of the free-spending Richfield company. The lights came back on in 1933 but went off again in either the late 1930s or at the start of World War II, depending on who you ask. After that it pretty much vanished without a trace, which I find astonishing considering how big it was. It's hard to even find photos of it; I've seen exactly one so far, in a post about vintage neon signs at Vintage and Classic Car Blog. The photo was taken at one of the old OHSU buildings and shows the sign in the distance, so it's not a great photo but it at least proves the thing really existed at one time. The final demise of the sign and the birth of the Healy Heights subdivision happened around the same time, and I imagine the former made the latter possible. 60' high neon signs are great for selling avgas to distant Cessnas, but probably not so great for selling high-end view homes.

Updated 8/7/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer has it as asset number 3310-0000061, with a size of 904.721 square feet

Sheridan Triangle expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to the intersection at SW Naito & Sheridan, probably one of the uglier places I've ever covered here. At this intersection there's an oddly large, roughly porkchop-shaped traffic island. The city typically landscapes traffic islands this size and makes them sort of park-like (for example, Beryl Triangle, 5th & Caruthers, Regents & Alameda, etc.) This spot, though, is just a vast expanse of drab grey concrete, with a few weeds growing up through the cracks. On top of everything else it's just steps away from the noisy canyon of Interstate 405. It's a great candidate for the godawful ugliest, most brutal-looking, least urban-planned-Portlandia-looking space in the city, or at least within casual walking distance. Which is an actual award I just invented. We aren't here for the scenery, though, as ironic as that would be. And I'm not doing this to grab the top Google result for yet another thing nobody on Earth will ever search for, as rewarding as that always is. Instead we're here for an interesting bit of history that will become clear shortly.

Back in 2008, Portland's annual Pedalpalooza bike festival offered a "Worst of Portland" bike ride, and the ride started right here at Naito & Sheridan. The Portland Mercury described it as "Usually Portlanders can't stop jabbering about how awesome their city is for cyclists. This ride, however, showcases the worst and most dangerous routes. Just watch out for broken glass and 18-wheelers." At least one person survived this adventure, and posted an extensive Flickr photoset of the ride. It looks as though from here they headed across the Ross Island Bridge, then down the ramp onto McLoughlin. Then continued on McLoughlin to Holgate, out to the big railyard, over the Lafayette St. footbridge, and back under the railroad tracks on the ooky pedestrian underpass along Powell, and across the tracks again on the Brooklyn St. footbridge. Then back to McLoughlin and the (now replaced) tumbledown old viaduct near OMSI, and then up to a scramble around the Steel Bridge. That was either where the ride ended, or where the photographer stopped taking photos.

A common thread along that strange journey is that they generally followed busy streets designed in the 1920s thru 1940s, when the world was still learning how to design major roads properly. That era's vision of the high-speed traffic artery of the future did not really include bikes or pedestrians or any other ideas beyond getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

So how does this relate to the Naito & Sheridan traffic island? If you look at the overhead shot on the map above, you might notice the grey concrete comes in a few different shades, and you can sort of make out where the traffic flow used to be quite different than it is now. Look for the weedy seam up the middle of the triangle, not quite parallel with Naito. It turns out this was once the southern end of the old Harbor Drive freeway, aka Highway 99W, the 1940s highway that Portland tore out in 1973 to build Waterfront Park (which we're still bragging about, forty years later). At the intersection with Sheridan St, northbound Harbor Drive split off from Naito (then called Front Avenue) and angled downhill to where Riverplace is now, and continued through what's now Waterfront Park up to the Steel Bridge. So this ugly traffic island here is one of the last surviving relics of that long-vanished freeway.

Southbound Harbor Drive traffic actually passed under Front Avenue in a tunnel before merging onto Front at Sheridan. The aforementioned seam marks the edge of where this ramp used to be. For a better idea of what that was like, see this Vintage Portland post with a 1944 photo taken at this very spot, looking north toward the Harbor Drive interchange.

It turns out that the long-abandoned Grant Street Tunnel still exists; it was walled up after Harbor Drive was demolished, but was opened temporarily in 2011-2012 while the Water Bureau ran a new water main through it. If only I'd had the proper connections and known the right strings to pull, I would've loved to put on a hard hat and check it out, take a few photos, write a blog post about it, you know the drill.

The name "Sheridan Triangle" is something I invented just now, by the way I don't usually do that, but I figured it needed a name, and it didn't have one, and this was the obvious candidate. It turns out there are already Sheridan Triangles in Manhattan, Chicago, and Madison, WI, so one might argue that having a place by this name is the mark of a Real City. So, ok, that's kind of a silly argument. In any case, I occasionally think it would be fun to do something with the Sheridan Triangle to brighten it up a little. Maybe paint it, similar to the City Repair street graphics around town. That would be the cheapest option, anyway. A statue or a fountain or something might work here, too, but I'm not sure what it would take to de-uglify the area, short of completely tearing out this stretch of Naito and redoing it, building a cap over I-405, and probably replacing a lot of the buildings nearby. That would be a good start, albeit a very expensive good start.

Updated 8/2/2026: The city's traffic island and circle GIS layer calls this asset number 3310-0000104, clocking in at 755.764 square feet.

Anyway, here are a few items from the Oregonian database related to this forgotten and misbegotten spot:

• The original 1935 proposal for what became the Harbor Drive freeway. Presented as getting cars off of traffic-clogged Front Avenue.
• 1941 call for bids for construction of "subway structures" under Front, one at Clay and one here. I'm guessing that term refers to pedestrian tunnels like the one at Arthur St., not the aforementioned Grant St. Tunnel. If so, any pedestrian tunnel that may have existed here is long gone, either sealed up or removed when I-405 went in next door.
• A Portland street map circa 1947, while Front was being widened.
• A 1942 article stoked about shiny new Harbor Drive, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
• A minor construction accident in 1964, in the midst of South Auditorium urban renewal, with photos showing what the area looked like at that point.
• A 1951 photo of a traffic jam on Harbor Drive at the Hawthorne Bridge.

SE 16th & Ash

Here's another City Repair painted intersection, this time at SE 16th & Ash, a oouple of blocks south of East Burnside. Some of the street designs have names and others don't, and as far as I can tell this one doesn't. Their 2013 Village Builder guide just calls it SE 16th & Ash, anyway. As with most of the others, they went with a floral design, with a different flower and color for each arm of the intersection, all growing out of the central traffic circle. It's less complex than Sunnyside Piazza, for example; I imagine this is a function of how long it's been around, and how many people typically volunteer to work on it.

I should probably point out that these photos were taken in midwinter, in between paintings, so it's showing a little wear and tear right now. Part of the idea behind "intersection repairs" is that they need to be repainted every so often, thus helping people meet their neighbors, which fosters community spirit and so forth. So I guess I'm showing one part of that cycle in action, though I feel I ought to apologize for not presenting the design at its best. I did run across a blog post with a video of this intersection being painted, and a few photos of it in a less-worn state. Figured I should pass those along to give a better idea of how it's intended to look.

To go off on a tangent, while I was searching for any info about this design, I ran into an entirely different 16th & Ash in Forest Grove, a semi-rural gravel road the state film office thinks would make a fantastic filming location for some reason.

Speaking of things not having proper names, the city's traffic circle catalog informs us this is circle number 3350-0000029, with a size of 101.124 square feet. Do what you will with this information.

Montgomery Circle

Today's adventure takes us to the Riverplace neighborhood, on the Willamette at the south end of downtown Portland. If this was a normal website, we'd be here to review a restaurant, or rant about the real estate market, or maybe take up rowing or something. But no, we're here because of a traffic circle. Seriously. I'd sort of realized after the fact that I'd already done posts about several of the city's few traffic circles without it being an actual project. I don't think there's an authoritative list of them anywhere, but we don't have a lot here, and I think I may have covered most of them already without even trying. So I figured, why not do a couple of others and collect the whole set?

If you've ever watched the Tour de France, or most any European bike race, sooner or later the peloton encounters a traffic circle. Usually the riders split and take both sides around the circle, joining back together on the other side. The race usually cuts to a helicopter shot at this point because it's a cool visual. If you watch long enough, you'll notice that each circle typically has something in the center to make it unlike all the other circles in town: Art, a fountain, trees, roses, an Arc de Triomphe, that sort of thing. So there's an aesthetic component to this little undertaking, at least some of the time.

Which brings us to Montgomery Circle, at the corner of SW Montgomery St. & River Drive, next to South Waterfront Park. It's not really a busy intersection, and it's just two streets meeting at a right angle, so -- like most of the other traffic circles around town -- it's here to look decorative and upscale-European rather than to solve a genuine traffic flow problem. Visiting Europeans probably think this is hilarious, and they're just too polite to mention it.

Other traffic circles in town:

• Ladd Circle. (Not covered here yet, but I covered one of the Ladd's Addition squares a while back.)
• Collins Circle, at SW 18th & Jefferson, near the MAX station.
• Coe Circle, home to the city's Joan of Arc statue, at NE Chavez (39th) & Glisan.
• The oval not-quite-a-circle at NE Alameda & 38th
• In the 'burbs, there's Lake Oswego's circle at 1st & Evergreen, home to the Fortuna fountain.
• A couple near the airport: One at the intersection of Mt. Hood Avenue & Frontage Rd., and another at the east end of Cascades Parkway (and the Stanley Park Blocks), at the IKEA parking lot. I'm not sure the last one really counts since it's not an intersection.

This is not counting the miniature traffic circles the city likes to install as traffic calming devices. They aren't really individually distinctive and there's just way too many of them. It would be like writing about each speed bump around the city. That would be way too far down the rabbit hole, even for me.

Before anyone chimes in to try to out-pedantic me, I'm using the term "traffic circle" in a generic sense here. So long as it's a round-ish bit of road, surrounding a round-ish bit of non-road, I'm using "traffic circle" regardless of exactly how its traffic control works. Transit nerds and bike nerds get really wound up about this stuff. It seems that if there aren't yield signs for traffic entering the circle, it's actually a "roundabout", a completely different animal, and roundabouts are more European and generally the One True Way, if only our fair city would give them a try. Etcetera, etc.

Updated 8/3/2026: The city's traffic circles & islands GIS layer says this is asset number 3350-0000008, and it takes up 399.701 square feet.