Dekum Court Triangle

Today's mystery spot comes to us via a reader suggestion. Back in December 2012, Gentle Reader av3ed left a comment about a strange bit of open space in NE Portland, in the triangle formed by NE Saratoga, Dekum St. & 27th Avenue. The triangle is ringed by regular 1970s suburban houses, and then in the center there's a parcel of empty land (the comment called it a "triangular park-like green space"), with a pair of narrow access corridors between the houses. I'd never heard of the place before, so I looked up its PortlandMaps entry and noticed something very peculiar. It doesn't list an owner, and doesn't list any taxes being paid on the place. I've never seen that before. So I had a mystery on my hands.

So I drove by and took a photo of the "main entrance" corridor on Saratoga, which looks like a narrow weedy vacant lot between two houses, with a gap in the sidewalk where the corridor meets the street. I didn't stop and go in, since a.) I had no idea who owned the place, and b.) going in would have involved bushwhacking through tall grass and blackberries and mud and probably random garbage and whatnot. It didn't look promising. And really, the mystery is the interesting part here anyway, not the place itself in its current form.

Thanks to the library's Oregonian database, I was able to tease out the unusual backstory behind the place. Just north of here is the Portland Housing Authority's Dekum Court project, which began as WWII emergency housing, as part of the same effort that build other public housing projects around the city, notably the large project at Vanport City. Dekum Court was originally built as housing for NCOs stationed at the nearby Portland Air Base, which is today's Air National Guard base at the Portland Airport. The project was also significantly larger at the time, and included the area now built up with 1970s houses. This detail will become important shortly. After the war, residents of the surrounding neighborhood feared the complex would be turned into low-income housing and fought against it for years. The project was declared surplus after the Korean War and, as expected, was handed over to the Portland Housing Authority. Neighbors were angry, but could do nothing to stop it.

The buildings at Dekum Court had only been designed with a five year lifetime in mind, so by 1970 the complex was showing its age and the housing authority began a project to demolish and rebuild it in several phases. The housing authority director labeled the project a "slum" in 1971, while lobbying for funding for the second and third reconstruction phases. The authority then accelerated the process of boarding up and demolishing up to 75 existing units, with a pledge to build new units once funding became available.

But just then the Nixon administration placed an 18 month moratorium on construction of new public housing, leaving the site as vacant land for an extended period of time. The surrounding neighborhood had never come to terms with low-income housing in their midst, and the delay gave neighbors time to organize against the proposed replacement. By 1976, the rebuilding proposal was stalemated, as the housing authority fought with the Concordia neighborhood association about the future of the land. The association wanted either a park or low-density, single-family private homes, basically anything but new public housing. Neighbors worried about crime, noise, traffic, and most of all they feared upsetting the "racial balance" of the neighborhood, which was a semi-respectable way of saying they didn't want any more black neighbors. The authority insisted its hands were tied, as the 1955 purchase deal with the federal government bound them to use the area as public housing for at least 40 years. The director hinted darkly that if they did get permission to use the land for something else, they'd choose the biggest revenue-generating option, which would be high-density apartments. And then there would be over three times as many people here as there would under the public housing proposal. Nevertheless, the article suggested the association would likely win the battle eventually.

Despite its previous warning about the deed, the authority quickly got approval to sell the land, and started courting apartment developers. This triggered a second fight with the neighborhood association, as neighbors lobbied to rezone the land for single-family homes instead. The association prevailed in December 1977, and the land was officially "downzoned" by the city planning commission. The land was sold to J.W. Brayson, a homebuilding firm, in April 1978.

After yet another neighborhood battle, the homebuilder sold five lots back to the housing authority for use as a playground, but other than that the area was developed as a typical 1970s subdivision. Which looks a bit strange here in the middle of inner NE Portland, surrounded by century-old bungalow homes. The developers did a couple of odd things here. First, the subdivision was just called "Dekum Court", same as the controversial housing project that had been all over the news the past few years. If they'd talked to anyone who'd passed Marketing 101, they would have been told to choose a different name, any name other than Dekum Court.

Second, the subdivision's street layout formed a large triangle bordered by 27th, Dekum, and Saratoga. The developers built houses around the perimeter of the triangle and left a big unbuildable "donut hole" in the middle, i.e. the mystery spot this post is all about. Through all of the years of discussion and handwringing, this unused chunk of land never came up once in the discussion, at least not in the newspaper. I do know it isn't the isn't the playground space that the neighborhood argued over; the playground lots are on the north side of Saratoga, next to the present-day Head Start center. Although at present there is no playground there.

As for who owns this remnant land, a clue comes from a March 2012 meeting of the Concordia neighborhood association, with a brief item that appears to concern the mystery triangle here:

Further discussion Dekum Court/Housing Authority request: Who does the land belong to in that area? The housing authority owns 5 lots in 54 subdivision lot. It is a “planned unit development” and includes a 54 unit subdivision. Each of the owners of the subdivision own a divided interest in this parcel of land that was intended as common open space in the original plan. Dekum Court HOA (to be reconstituted) and housing authority are going to take look at property and come back and look into ideas on what to do with the land. In future could come to us and CU to help with area.

So this tells us the Dekum Court subdivision was supposed to have its own HOA, complete with a private community park (albeit one the city owns a ~9% stake in via the housing authority). The subdivision I grew up in out in Aloha had a similar HOA-and-parks arrangement, on a larger scale, and it seemed to work out pretty well. But here, the HOA fell apart at some point long ago, and the park never happened at all. And now, four decades later, today's residents aren't sure what to do with the place. I couldn't find a follow-up item indicating they'd come up with a plan, so I suppose it just stays a weedy lot for now.

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.

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.

Old City Boundary Marker

Here's an odd little object. Along the east edge of NE Portland's Columbian Cemetery, next to a tree and buried in underbrush, is a small stone that isn't a headstone. Its northern and southern faces are inscribed "CITY BOUNDARY", with a scratch mark along the east and west faces that (presumably) indicates the exact line of what was once Portland's northern city limit. I don't have even a rough date for it; I'd guess early 20th century, maybe 1910-1920 going by the typeface, and the fact that it's concrete and sort of shaped like Columbia River Highway mile markers, not the older milestones along Stark St. I don't think there is anything particularly special about this spot, so I assume there are (or were) other boundary stones like this. But I have no idea where any of them might be. The city has a handy Annexations by Decade map, which tells us that this became the city limit between 1891-1900, and stopped being the city limit some time in 1971-1980 when the city annexed up to the Columbia River. So the map's interesting, but it doesn't really give us a narrow date window. It might be a guide to where other city boundary markers are (or were), though. Vintage Portland has a 1915 annexation map with a note that the exact boundary ran "150' N. of and parallel to NL of Columbia Slough Boulevard", and further that it had been annexed in 1891 by the erstwhile City of Albina, the same year Albina and East Portland merged with the City of Portland.

When I visited, I knew precisely two things about this marker: A blog comment from Gentle Reader Aimee Wade alerting me to its existence (thanks!), and someone else's Panoramio photo showing what it looks like. That photo was crucial, and I never would have found the marker otherwise. I sort of wandered around the cemetery for a while, looking for a spot that matched the photo. The surrounding brush was taller than in the photo, partially obscuring the marker, which complicated the search a bit, but I eventually found it. For anyone who's interested in this sort of thing, it's right on the eastern edge of the cemetery. The blank wall of a giant warehouse is just inches away; I think they built it right up to the property line. I found the marker by going to the SE corner of the cemetery, near the entrance, and following the wall north, looking around the base of each tree until I found it. I'd say the marker's about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way back along the wall, on the south side of a small tree. (Alternately you could just measure out 150' from the north edge of Columbia Blvd. and look there, although I assume the street's been widened since 1915.) The marker was shorter than I'd expected, and I had to rummage around in the bushes to get these photos. As I was doing this, an elderly volunteer wandered over and we chatted a bit. He didn't seem know anything more about the marker than I did. He had some other trivia to share about sorta-famous, uh, residents of the place, but I'll save that for another post.

Nepenthes

I don't get a lot of reader suggestions here on this humble blog. I do try to follow up on them when I get them (the stone marker at N. Peninsular & Farragut, for example), although I can't guarantee exactly when I'll get to take photos, much less put a post together. A couple of months ago, Gentle Reader @howrad took an Instagram photo captioned "new art for 5th/Davis corner, hanging out in PDC basement for staging.", and mentioned me so I'd be alerted to it. So I knew something was on the way, for a change. Then I just had to wait for it to be installed, and then wait for a chance to take some photos, and then I had to figure out what it was called so I could google it. Still, by my usual standards of timeliness here, this post counts as lightning-fast breaking news. Don't get too used to it.

Anyway, this is Nepenthes, which RACC describes as:

Artist Dan Corson and RACC are currently installing Nepenthes, a series of four illuminated sculptures along NW Davis Street. These glowing sculptural elements are inspired by the carnivorous plants called Nepenthes, which are named after the magical Greek potion that eliminates sorrow and suffering. By referencing the patterns of native Oregon native and other carnivorous plants and inserting a quirky expression of nature into an urban environment, these sculptures celebrate Old Town Chinatown neighborhood's unique and diverse community.

This project represents the fulfillment of an opportunity that developed during the Portland Mall Project to increase pedestrian connectivity between Old Town/China Town Festival Streets and the Pearl District. In conjunction with Old Town/Chinatown stakeholders, the Mall design team created a pathway along NW Davis Street, via a sculptural lighting design, which links the music and cultural activities of Old Town/Chinatown to the activities in the Pearl District, also along Davis Street, such as galleries, the Museum of Contemporary Craft and Portland Center Stage, and vice versa.

I always roll my eyes when design people talk about creating corridors or gateways or what have you. This particular corridor is supposed to connect the Pearl District to one of the city's previous attempts to gentrify Old Town. "Festival streets" were a huge urban design buzzword circa 2006, and the city decided Old Town ought to have a couple of them. So they repaved NW Davis & Flanders in concrete between 3rd & 4th, planted some palm trees there, and added some ill-fated Chinese dragons that didn't stick around long. It's been about five years now, and so far the hoped-for upscale real estate boom hasn't yet arrived in Old Town. The city's development people must find this really frustrating. The super-swanky Pearl District, one of their great successes, sits just a few blocks west. But try as they might, they just can't seem to lure the gentrification gods to the other side of Broadway. Hence, I suppose, this corridor of giant lighted pitcher plants.

Don't get me wrong, I think the pitcher plants themselves are pretty cool, although I do sort of wonder how durable they'll be over time. Now that they're lighted I'll need to go back at some point and take some night photos. It's strictly the location that I'm being snarky about. And I could be wrong about that. This may finally be the tipping point, the thing that finally makes Old Town safe for rich Californian retirees, and unaffordable for all the ooky poor and homeless people who live there now. But the city's been trying to make Old Town respectable and family-friendly since roughly 1850, and it hasn't happened yet. I have to say I'm skeptical this time will be any different.

Updated: Apparently these pitcher plants were weird and Portlandy enough to momentarily catch the eye of the Big Serious National Interweb Media, and both Gizmodo and The Atlantic have stories about them now. Still, you (yes, both of you) read it here first, for once. Don't get used to that happening.

Maybe-Milestone @ Peninsular & Farragut

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Today's episode of the ongoing milestone quest takes us to North Portland, where the stone pictured here sits along Peninsular Avenue, near the intersection with Farragut St. This one was spotted by keen-eyed Gentle Reader av3ed, who sent me a tip about it (along with a few other interesting spots you'll probably see here sooner or later).



Like a couple of the other recent finds (the big tilted one at 23rd & Hawthorne, and the one marked '5' on SW Spring Garden Road), we have something of a mystery on our hands. As with the one on Hawthorne, I don't absolutely know for a fact that this is a milestone; it doesn't have any numbers visible on it, and neither Peninsular nor Farragut are major streets that you'd think would require a hefty marker like this. What's more, so far I haven't been able to learn anything at all about the thing. Nothing on PortlandMaps, nothing in the old Oregonian database, nothing anywhere on the net that I've been able to find.



So unless new information turns up somehow, we're left to guess at what this stone might be. One possibility is that someone hoped Peninsular would be more of a major street than it turned out to be. It's kind of a grand name for a quiet residential street, so I think this isn't a totally unreasonable guess. As for the time period, it looks newer than the Stark St. milestones, but it's still stone and not concrete like the ones along the Gorge Highway, or the Spring Garden one. The house it sits next to dates to 1894, and the design of the stone does look a bit Victorian, so I'm going to guess a few years on either side of when the house went in.

The stone has a couple of round markings on its sides, as if something was attached there at one point. If this was a milestone, that may be where its key informational bit was once located, and everything would suddenly make sense if only that item hadn't been misplaced at some point.

Another possibility that just occurred to me is that this might be an ornate stone hitching post, and not a milestone at all. I'm not aware of any examples of fancy hitching posts around town -- in downtown Portland people relied on metal rings fixed into the sidewalk -- but it's one other possible explanation I can think of. Maybe the circular parts are where the metal rings were once attached, although I don't see holes that would indicate something had once been bolted there. So I dunno. I'm going to go ahead and tag this under 'milestone' for the time being, since it does look very much like one. If it turns out I'm totally off base here and it's something completely different, I'll fix it later and we can all have a hearty laugh at my expense. Trust me, it wouldn't be the first time.

Arleta Triangle expedition

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I don't usually get visitor-contributed ideas here at this humble blog. I can barely get people to visit at all, much less help me out with suggestions. And on the flip side, when I do get a suggestion I don't always jump right on it. Today's adventure stems from a comment I got on a post of mine from way back in July 2008, about the weird little triangular park at SW Broadway, Broadway, & Grant.

And thus I ventured out to SE 72nd & Woodstock, home to the Arleta Triangle. It's a little triangle of land in the middle of the intersection, which was recently upgraded with a few plants and a sort of wall structure with a couple of benches, and a canopy on top. And like so many recent community projects in Portland, it's made of "cob", a rustic mixture of mud and straw.

So, I don't want to be a downer here. I think it's great that the neighborhood's come together to look after an otherwise-forlorn chunk of PDOT land. And I also realize that the triangle is a perpetual work in progress and a labor of love for a lot of people. It's just that I've never been sold on the whole mud and straw thing. I realize it's cheap, and building with it is so easy that casual volunteers, kids, and even hippies can do it. And it looks all rustic and hobbitty and unmistakably made by hippies, which I think is also part of the appeal. And, we're told, it also saves the world somehow. And presumably if you replace the straw with hemp, it saves the world even more.

So this is the second cob structure I've taken a good look at (there's one at PSU as well), and unfortunately they've both been falling apart rather rapidly. There may be other structures I haven't seen that are holding up better, so I'll be charitable and say they have a mixed record when it comes to durability. So, and this is probably going to sound really snarky, but for anyone who hasn't kept up on the technological advances of the last 10,000 years or so, there are these things called "bricks" that might do really well here. Basically the same thing as cob, but fired in a kiln so that they don't dissolve when it rains, and you can probably run the kiln on biodiesel if you have carbon footprint concerns. And even if you don't personally think bricks look better, they make your project look like a real structure and people will finally take you seriously.

I say this as someone whose grandma was born in a sod house in Indian Territory (which wouldn't be Oklahoma for a few more years). She was not nostalgic about living in a house made of dirt, to put it mildly.

Now, I can see one counter-argument here - If your primary goal is to build community, maybe it's a good thing if your structure requires fairly constant maintenance, to keep volunteers engaged and coming to work parties and meeting their neighbors and such. Where a brick structure, or one of concrete / stainless steel / carbon fiber / etc. may only need work every few decades, but then it's accomplished by corporate sponsors and grant writers and professional contractors, and where's the community in that? So yeah, I can see a reasonable argument here. I haven't seen anyone actually make this argument, but hey, you can't fault me for not trying to see both sides, I guess.

Hawthorne Milestone P2 (?!)

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I don't get a lot of reader suggestions here at this humble blog. And when I do, I don't always follow up on them in anything resembling a timely manner, if I get around to them at all. But just yesterday morning, a keen-eyed Gentle Reader pointed out a possible milestone sighting that I just had to check out:

To go back to the milepost saga, I was on a walk last night and noticed a milepost-looking stone embedded in the parking strip on SE 23rd, just south of Hawthorne behind Grand Central Bakery. Looks like the top of it might be broken off. I wonder if it's one of the missing stones, relocated? Haven't had a chance to investigate further, though

That sounded intriguing, and I had a spare hour to burn, so despite the awful weather I set out for the corner of 23rd & Hawthorne. There I found the stubby, off-kilter, moss-encrusted stone you see here.



As a sign of my very, uh, selective powers of observation, I've been to the adjacent Grand Central Baking a couple of times in the last month or so, and I'm certain I walked right past the stone here without noticing it. This was after the recent milestone project, and I think I was even chatting to someone about said project on a recent stop here. But I wasn't looking for milestones at the time, so the thing just didn't register.

Now, in my defense, everyone knows the milestones are on Stark St., some blocks north of here, and not on Hawthorne. Also, the stone here looks similar but not quite identical to the the Stark St. stones. And it's not like it has a big neon sign attached. Although sometimes I wonder whether I'd miss that as well, if I wasn't specifically looking for neon signs.



In any case, I'm not entirely sure what we're looking at here. It was pouring rain on me at the time, so I didn't go over it as meticulously as I could have looking for any signs of writing. There are marks here and there that look deliberately chiseled, but I couldn't really tell if they're supposed to say anything or not. Maybe it would help to peel some of the moss off of it, but I'm not sure you're supposed to do that if it's a protected historical object, which it may or may not be.

I see 3 basic possibilities here:

1. It's something else entirely, and merely bears a striking resemblance to a milestone. Possibly a bit of historical research would dig up what sort of structures have been here over the years. I do know that across the street, where the outdoor produce market currently stands, there was a gas station at one time. And before the real estate bubble burst, there was a monstrous 50 unit upscale condo project slated for the site. On this side of the street, I dunno. It's been a Grand Central as long as I can remember. Which, I'll have you know, is really not that long at all, historically speaking. Maybe we're seeing the base of a column of a long-lost building, or the base of an old lamppost, or the only remaining piece of Hawthorne Stonehenge, or who knows what.
   
2. As suggested above, it's a rescued milestone from elsewhere, either Stark St., Capitol Highway, St. Helens Road, or somewhere else entirely. If there was a readable inscription on the stone, that could help prove this hypothesis. But it would raise another question: Why here? It's in an obscure spot down a narrow side street, at the back of a commercial building, without any sign or marker explaining what it is. The crazy tilt of the stone seems to argue against the rescue theory. It just really looks like it's been at this spot, unmaintained, for a very long time. It also looks wider than the Stark St. stones, and seems to be more trapezoidal than square, so if it's a refugee, my guess is that it's from somewhere other than Stark.
   
3. Which leads me to an even more intriguing possibility: What if this is a survivor, perhaps the sole survivor, of a series of Hawthorne milestones parallel to those on Stark? The key argument in favor here is the location. It seems like an obscure and nondescript little place, but 23rd Avenue places it exactly due south of Stark St. Milestone P2. P2, as you might recall, is in the 2300 block of Stark, embedded in the north wall of the Lone Fir Cemetery, and it signifies being two miles from a point in downtown Portland somewhere near the Galleria MAX stop. If this is a 2-mile marker, technically it would be two miles from a different "P0" point parallel to and south of the original. My rough guesstimate would place this point somewhere in the area of Keller Fountain, more or less. I could be wrong.
   
   In any case, for now and for lack of a better name I'm going to refer to the rock here as "Hawthorne Milestone P2", since it does actually mark distance, whether that was the original intent behind it or not.
   

So, assuming we've got one milestone on Hawthorne due south of one on Stark, the obvious question is are there any others out there? I haven't gone searching in person (so far), but based on a little poking around in Google Street View I don't think there are.

• P1 would be around MLK & Hawthorne, but Hawthorne is still on the bridge viaduct at that point. So it would either be on the Hawthorne Bridge, or under it, or stuck somewhere in the freeway-style interchange with MLK.
  
  
• P2 is what you see here.
  
  
• P3 would be around 42nd & Hawthorne, but I don't see any sign of it. It's a shame. There's an antique store next door where I bought an old camera a while back. It would seem sort of fitting to put a roll of film in it and take some pics of the milestone nearby, if it existed.
  
  
• P4 would be at about 61st & Hawthorne, which is to say it would be at the bottom of Reservoir #6 at Mt. Tabor. Hawthorne has sort of petered out at this point, although it picks up on the other side of Mt. Tabor.
  
  
• P5 would be around 78th & Hawthorne, but it's not there either. Although Hawthorne continues again east of Mt. Tabor, it's just a quiet residential street at this point, and unlike Stark it only continues in fits and starts.
  
  
• P6 would be at 98th & Hawthorne, if that intersection existed, but it doesn't. Instead, the P6 point is somewhere on the campus of Portland Adventist Academy, just east of I-205.
  
  
• P7, 117th & Hawthorne: The intersection exists, with another stretch of Hawthorne ending at 117th. It's a little residential street here, again with no sign of any milestones.
  
  
• P8, 138th & Hawthorne: No Hawthorne here, where "here" is just east of David Douglas High School.
  
  
• P9, 158th & Hawthorne: There's a short one block stretch of SE Hawthorne Ct. here, but no stones in sight.
  
  
• P10, 178th & Hawthorne: No Hawthorne here. The P10 point would be in the Greater Portland Christian Academy parking lot.
  
  
• P11, 197th & Hawthorne: Again, no Hawthorne. It's an industrial area next to a huge quarry pit. The closest street is 199th, also called 11 Mile Ave.
  
  
• P12 & P13 would be in the middle of Gresham suburbia. The Portland street grid basically doesn't exist at this point, and I haven't bothered taking a straightedge to a map to figure out exactly where these two would be. If there's no Hawthorne, there are almost certainly no milestones, in any event.
  
  
• P14 would be around the SW corner of the MHCC campus, where the Stark P14 is at the NW corner.
  
  
• P15 would probably be on Stark, actually. After its own (missing) P15, Stark departs from the street grid and winds down the hill to the Stark St. Bridge over the Sandy River. In the process, it intersects where Hawthorne would be if it existed at this point. Except that Hawthorne would need to drop straight down a steep bluff to get here.
  
  

So, if there was a series of Hawthorne milestones, my guess is that they didn't extend past Mt. Tabor, and this is the only surviving one. I'd say there's an off chance there was a P5 too, but it's not there now either. It's a shame. If there was at least one more, it would nail the case for milestones on Hawthorne. As it is, I could be making all this fuss over absolutely nothing. Although it's still a very old rock, and it would be interesting to learn what it is and how it got here, regardless.