N. Polk & Crawford

Here are a few photos of Portland's new-ish city park at N. Polk & Crawford in St. Johns, just north of the railroad bridge. The city bough the land in June 2015, but the parks bureau says they aren't planning on developing it or even naming it any time soon. Which generally means they don't have any money to spare on a new park. Still, that's essentially what they've done with the Skidmore Bluffs for the past couple of decades, and that seems to have worked out pretty well so far.

Peninsula Station mural

The ongoing mural tour visits St. Johns again, for a peek at the Peninsula Station mural at N. Lombard & Charleston, outside the shipping & printing shop of the same name. The RACC description:

The Peninsula Station mural is a colorful celebration of life in the St. Johns neighborhood. It commemorates residents, both young and old, doing what makes St. Johns great—talking, playing, laughing, eating, dancing, cycling, and being with one another.

This was created in 2010 by Bruce Orr, who also did the Scrap Mural on Williams Avenue.

N. Syracuse & St. Johns

Here's another painted intersection, this time out toward the far end of St. Johns, at N. Syracuse St. & St. Johns Avenue. The big City Repair project map says it's called "Syracuse St. Rockstars", while the project page says that's the name of the group that created it. Whatever it's called, the description says it "represents how through the changing of the seasons our relationships with each other transforms and deepen with the St Johns bridge intersecting the four seasons." Because you can't make art in St. Johns without including the St. Johns Bridge somehow; I'm fairly certain there's a municipal ordinance to that effect.

I like to check the library's Oregonian database for these intersection posts, just to see whether anything exciting ever happened at this spot. I only have one item to pass along this time. A brief item in the March 30th, 1943 paper noted that two young police patrolmen had been suspended, and were awaiting a disciplinary hearing, due to their involvement in a brawl with two other men right here at this intersection. Apparently the two off-duty officers went to a dance elsewhere in St. Johns, then stopped by a residence around here, where they ran into two guys they'd arrested earlier. A fistfight ensued, unsurprisingly. The article says the men "made up and shook hands" afterward and everyone left, but one of the cops later went to the hospital for an injured kidney, which seems to be how their bosses found out about the altercation. Oops.

So maybe, the next time they repaint this intersection, they should consider adding a bunch of fistfighting cops to the design. I'm not sure that would mesh with the existing design very well, but it would certainly liven things up a bit.

Sedro-Gilbert Intersection

Our next City Repair painted intersection is at N. Sedro & Gilbert, near Lombard & the St. Johns railroad gulch. A description of the design, from the project page:

Come join our diverse neighborhood as we build community and transform our intersection into a beautiful graphic of the Tree of Life. In helping us plant this graphic seed of life you will be part of a much larger movement that is transforming our neighborhoods into diverse, rich sources of connection and support.
...
Our street graphic is inspired by the Tree of Life which stands for many things but definitely includes Love, Hope, Dreams, Smiles, Laughter, Family, Memories, Community...

I'm sorry to say that once again most of the photos are upside down. I hadn't seen the description before tracking it down, and honestly I thought it was supposed to be a nature-themed peace symbol-ish sort of design. The design makes a lot more sense as a Tree of Life though.

Drawing on the River

In Cathedral Park, next to one of the St. Johns bridge supports, a mysterious steel wall stands in the middle of a grassy lawn. This is Drawing on the River, a relatively recent (2008) addition to the park. Its RACC page has this to say:

This sculpture was conceived as a tribute to industrial ingenuity in the St. Johns area. Like the Saint Johns bridge above, it is a suspension structure anchored at each end. The hull-like end pieces allude to the shipbuilding that went on nearby and were constructed using standard steel shipbuilding techniques by Peninsula Iron Works, a third generation firm adjacent to the park. “Drawing on the River” reflects back on a century of industry in St. Johns and is an homage to both the mills and the workers who ran them. The piece also invokes the river itself, which powered the mills and is the reason the workers settled here.

What the description doesn't tell you, and what I didn't realize while I was visiting, is that the wall has a variety of interactive features too. (If you can get close to it; it seems like the lawn sprinklers around it are always going full blast whenever I visit Cathedral Park.) The artist's website explains:

Also within the sculpture’s end forms are a looking and a music box listening device, designed with longtime [Donald] Fels collaborators Rob Millis and Ed Mannery. To listen, a button is pushed winding a spring that turns a music box. One of the music boxes plays Hoagy Carmichael’s “Up a Lazy River”, which topped the hit-parade in 1931, the year the bridge was dedicated.

The other music box plays “Amazing Grace”, a tune played by fiddlers who accompanied Lewis and Clark, who camped there in 1805. The explorers used music to communicate with the natives they encountered on their journey. The viewers in the sculpture feature historic photos, one of a hot air balloon that was featured in the Lewis and Clark Expo in 1905, the other of the world’s first plywood mill, also once on the site.

One of the music box collaborators has a few close up photos on his website. The music boxes were mentioned in a November 2013 OPB article about RACC art maintenance & conservation, as they were experiencing a bit of rust. There could be other reasons behind the rust, but I'm inclined to blame the sprinklers. The wall's also needed pressure washing for graffiti at least once so far. The pressure washing company's Facebook page is actually kind of interesting. More than I would have expected anyway.

Another fun detail is how Drawing on the River was funded. Since the 1970s, the city's "1% For Art" program has mandated that publicly funded construction projects should devote one percent of the total cost toward public art. The wall here is no exception, but looking around you won't see any circa-2008 public buildings nearby. In fact, it was created with surplus 1% For Art funds from the still-unopened Wapato Jail, in the far corner of industrial North Portland. It turns out that the rules only say how much project money goes for art, and they don't specify exactly where the art has to be. The jail cost $58 million, and 1% of that is still a big chunk of money, and the then-sheriff felt it was a waste to spend it all at the jail where law abiding citizens would never see it. So some of the money went here, and (as a snarky Portland Public Art post points out), some also went to nature-themed stuff around Smith & Bybee Lakes, and a sort of river piling-themed piece at the jail itself. Naturally the whole thing got the talk radio crowd all riled up about the gol-durned commie gummint spending money on highfalutin' art. Even though the rest of the money went to an enormous jail, which you'd think they'd be pretty stoked about. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

Water, Please

The Water, Please sculpture sits along the Willamette River at Portland's Water Pollution Control Laboratory, just south of the St. Johns Bridge. Despite the name, it's actually kind of a swanky looking building, and I wouldn't mind having an office there, at least if I was in the water pollution business. The sculpture, naturally, has a water theme. RACC describes it thusly:

This piece frames the essential and eternal relationship between man and water. The sculpture establishes a parity between a drop of water and a human being, both of which emanate ripples of effect and consequences on each other.

This sounds incredibly groovy, but I admit I'm not really seeing it, myself. Maybe you're supposed to bring your preferred mind-altering substance along, in order to really dig the whole parity between people and drops of water thing. In any case, the sculptor also created Drivers Seat, which appeared here way back in 2007.

The half-raindrop part of the sculpture appears to double as a picnic table, with the inner ripples serving as seats. They're just curved pipes though, so it's not exactly the world's most comfy picnic spot. I guess it's an opportunity to suffer for art, if you're into that sort of thing.

Chimney Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us north again, to remote little Chimney Park, just off Columbia Boulevard up toward the top end of North Portland. This is pretty much the far edge, or slightly past the far edge of "inhabited" North Portland; everything north of here on the peninsula is either industrial or wetland, and just across Columbia Boulevard is the former site of, well, I'll get to that in a moment.



I've been meaning to do a post about this park for a while now, because the place a fairly curious history. Or more precisely, the weird building in the middle of the park has a fairly curious history. The sign out front calls it the Stanley Parr Archives Center. Until next year, this remote, obscure location is home to the city government's central archives. It's a fairly sturdy-looking building, but surprisingly it wasn't built for this purpose. Some years ago, right across Columbia Boulevard was the old St. Johns Landfill, and the archives building was once the city garbage incinerator. Seriously. I am not making this up. Ironic! The jokes basically write themselves. Insert yours here, if you like.



Up until a few years ago, the building used to have a tall chimney (hence the name of the park) left over from its career as an incinerator. Eventually the powers that be decided the thing wasn't safe and tore it down. So no actual chimney in Chimney Park. Doubly ironic! Or at least kind of peculiar, or something.

A while back the Tribune ran a Stumptown Stumper explaining the name, so naturally they included a photo with the old chimney, if you're curious what it looked like. The book Vanishing Portland includes an aerial photo of the incinerator, circa 1940.

The Center for Columbia River History has a few pages about the history of the landfill, starting here. And here's an Oregon DEQ page about the park, detailing what they know about chemical contaminants at the site, presumably holdovers from the incinerator days. If I'm reading it correctly, it sounds as though the area really hasn't been tested that extensively. Which is surprising considering the whole incinerator thing. Maybe people figured it was better not to know. Knowing this sort of thing tends to get very expensive.



The place originally got on my radar for a separate and unrelated reason, though. Many maps of Portland show the park being home to something called the "Portland Public Astronomy Center". I'd never heard anything else about the place other than seeing it on maps, so naturally I was curious. It seems that back in the 70's there was a serious proposal to put telescopes here for public use, but it never actually happened. So it's curious that it continues to show up on new maps all these decades later.

Haven't been able to find out very much about this "public astronomy center" thing, which I guess is understandable since it never actually existed. I did run across a 2004 Rose City Astronomers newsletter that includes an obit for a guy who spearheaded the effort. And references to two documents the city has about the proposal -- the documents aren't online, but they are available in... wait for it... the city archives. Ironic!



I probably ought to mention the one thing that actually brings visitors to the park, the one thing that interests the general (i.e. non-geeky, non-pedantic) public, which is that much of the park is a designated off-leash dog area. I'm not really into the whole large dog thing, myself, but I understand that a lot of people are, so I figured I ought to mention it. The city has a PDF map of the off-leash area, and there are pages about it at Portland Pooch and BringFido, plus a post on Javafoto. So there you have it.



I mentioned earlier that the archives are moving soon. In fact they'll be moving downtown to PSU next year some time. While we're on the subject, which we sort of are, here's a rather fascinating interview with the City Archivist, and a photo inside the archives with an assistant archivist.

No word yet on what's next for the building after the archives hit the road. This being Portland, the obvious answer -- to the point of being a cliche -- is to turn it into a McMenamins. Which isn't a terrible idea, although considering it's in the middle of an off-leash dog area, maybe a Lucky Lab would be more appropriate (plus I like their beer better). Mmmmm..... beeeeeer.....

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But wait, there's more! While I was meandering around taking the photos you see above, I realized that the lawn was full of dandelions, and I thought I'd try to take some ultraviolet photos of them. They didn't really turn out all that well, and I didn't think they merited a post of their own. But I figured I might as well tack a couple onto the end here. Consider them an intermediate result in an ongoing effort to maybe-someday get a result I'm happy with. As for what they're supposed to look like, check out here and here. Clearly, I have a way to go yet. I suspect I may have to abandon any notion of doing this without a tripod, for starters.

Kelley Point expedition

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So here's a big batch of photos from Kelley Point Park, way up at the far northwest tip of the city, where the Willamette flows into the Columbia. The city describes the place like this:

New Englander Hall Jackson Kelley (1790-1874) was one of the most vocal advocates for Oregon in the first half of the 19th century. In 1828 he published Settlement on the Oregon River, and nine more pamphlets on a similar theme over the next 40 years. A bit deranged, he spent most of his life bitterly trying to win notice - and payment - for having sparked American interest in the Pacific Northwest.

Kelley visited Oregon briefly in 1834. During that time, Sellwood, Milwaukie, and Oregon City were all vying with Portland to be the main city at the north end of the Willamette. Among these was Kelley's unsuccessful attempt to establish a city at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. In 1926 this site was named Kelley Point.

Kelley Point Park was originally owned by the Port of Portland which covered the flood-prone peninsula with tons of river dredgings. The site that was once envisioned as a city is now a park on an isolated tip of land.

You'd think that the spot where the city's two rivers join would be a central location, but it's really quite remote, or at least it feels that way. Apparently the closest residence is about four miles from here. Closer by, it's nothing but shipping terminals, steel mills, warehouses, protected wetlands, the old St. Johns Landfill, the mothballed Wapato jail, and, well, probably a lot of other stuff I don't know about because I'm hardly ever up that way.



I've been out to Kelley Point a couple of times before, and it's been on my blog todo list for a while now, but it takes what seems like freakin' forever to get there. People don't often realize this, because on everyone's mental map of the city the Willamette is ruler-straight north-south, and the Columbia east-west, but Kelley Point is further north than downtown Vancouver, and about as far west as Washington Square. Seriously. Look carefully at a map and see for yourself.



So it feels remote, and it doesn't help that the secluded parking lot has big signs warning you to lock your car and not leave anything valuable in it, like the signs you see out in the Gorge. The remoteness is both true and illusory. True, for obvious reasons. It's surrounded by water on three sides -- besides the two rivers, the park's southern border is the much-maligned Columbia Slough. Directly across the Columbia it's nothing but trees, with a few barges parked here and there for storage. Across the Willamette is rural Sauvie Island. There's even wildlife. When I was there, I saw a beaver swimming in the Columbia. I figured it was just a nutria until it saw me and slapped its tail to warn the others. There probably are others -- I later ran across a chunk of wood on the beach that had obviously been gnawed by beavers. I also saw a couple of great blue herons, not that they're terribly uncommon. One was standing in the Columbia Slough, unwisely looking for something to eat there. The only thing you're going to catch in the Columbia Slough is cooties. The beach on the Willamette side is littered with shells that look like clamshells. I don't know if they're freshwater mussels, or some sort of invasive species off one of the cargo ships, or what. And then there were a few animal tracks I didn't recognize. Not a dog, clearly. I kind of hope it's an otter, because I always hope for otters. But it's industrial North Portland, so it's probably just some kind of horribly mutated rat or something.

Apparently they also get sea lions here occasionally, at least dead ones, for whatever that's worth.



The remoteness of Kelley Point is also illusory, because immediately to the east of the parking lot, behind a razor-wire fence, is another parking lot, a monumentally vast one, full of shiny new Toyotas just off the boat from Japan. And immediately to the south, across the Columbia Slough from the park, is a gigantic grain terminal that usually has a couple of huge ships docked and loading up on wheat, destined for distant ports of call far across the Pacific Rim. When a ship goes by, the wake causes big waves along the beach, sort of a freshwater sneaker wave if you somehow happened to not notice the ship going by.





People do use the place -- it's got a big group picnic area, and restrooms, and there's evidence people like to hang out on the beach with a nice, cool, and technically illegal premium malt beverage. There's always someone walking a dog, because this is Portland. Oh, and apparently it's also popular in some quarters for, well, anonymous hookups in the underbrush. I suppose that's a step up from airport bathrooms.





So, uh, apparently this is the point where I provide the bullet-point list of "assorted items from around the interwebs" relating somehow to Kelley Point. That's the usual formula, and I'd so hate to disappoint.

• Columbia River Images
  
• Photos in at least two posts at "The Narrative Image"
  
• A post at 8 second block. Incidentally, this humblest of humble blogs is actually blogrolled there, which is the mark of an uncommonly discerning mind, so I wholeheartedly encourage you to go pay a visit.
  
• PDX Family Adventures says the big ships going by will amaze your kids. I don't know about your kids, and I have none of my own, but it certainly would've amazed me if I'd come here as a kid. Not that I've ever been representative of the larger population or anything.
  
• travisezell, describes the park as "a sludgy industrial riverbed for fishermen and rubbish (old boat parts, the ruins of docks, plus your typical human folderol like tennis shoes, liquor bottles and computer parts)". I didn't see any computer parts, but I can see how that might happen, and he's got a cool photo of some kind of circuit board half-buried in the sand.
  
• Kelley Point is Day 65 at "365 Days [and learning'"
  
• A few photos of the park, and other spots around town, in this post on "Passing Perception".
  
• madeofmeat: "Temporal fuckup and Kelley Point"
  
• A post about ship spotting at More Hockey Less War.
  
• A 2007 column at the Asian Reporter "Talking Story", involves the columnist wandering around the park, asking various people if they know the history of the place. Nobody does. But really, why should they?
  
• The Zinester's Guide has a short piece about the park, just history, no photos.
  
• An interesting comment to a post at Land Use Watch. Honestly, the presence of paved paths here is way down my list of local environmental & livability concerns. If the paths weren't paved, they'd probably just be impassable, soupy, probably contaminated mud most of the year.
  
• A couple of posts about riding there at BikePortland.
  
• The Urban Adventure League, or at least the main guy behind it, tried to bike there three different times and never quite got there. So, uh, I win! Yay!
  
• A forum thread about fishing for sturgeon here. Yes, fishing for long-lived, bottom-feeding, heavy-metal-and-PCB-accumulating sturgeon, just downstream of the Portland Harbor superfund site. Yeah, good luck with that.
  
• 1992 and 2007 Oregonian articles with much handwringing about low-income and immigrant people insisting on fishing here, despite the cooties and other environmental hazards.
  
• A couple of posts that mention making pottery with soil from Kelley Point
  
• Video of a party here on YouTube.
  
• Back in 2002, the park figured in a gruesome homicide - the body, or parts of it, were found in the Columbia Slough here, in a duffelbag.
  
• Oh, and Kelley Point was even the epicenter of an earthquake a while back.
  

Like most parks in town, Kelley Point is a popular spot to let your dog run around, and maybe blog about it afterward. A few selected examples:

• Realigned Rain says the park is "not all that interesting", although the dog seemed to like it.
  
• "For the Love of Water" calls it Dog Paradise
  
• "Bella the Boxer" reports on "My date with Norman", with a video and everything. I didn't realize boxers were so tech-savvy. You learn something every day, I guess.
  
• GoodStuffNW calls it Doggie Nirvana
  

Assorted Flickr photos, again from "around the interwebs" (i.e. from Flickr):

• a shell photo
  
• a cool driftwood photo
  
• the confluence of the rivers
  
• a long exposure at night, shot on 4x5 film, I think by one of the Blue Moon guys.
  
• a great night photo
  
• a b&w pinhole image, again at the river confluence
  
• a colorful sunset
  
• another sunset at the confluence, with a Sigma ultra wide-angle lens. I asked Santa for an ultra wide this year, but it didn't show. Some sort of nonsense about mortgage payments and so forth.
  
• a still from a short horror film filmed here.
  

river traffic, st. johns bridge

A tugboat pushing a barge downstream, from the St. Johns Bridge. I didn't use these in my mega-post about walking the bridge, so here they are now...

fog, st. johns bridge