Path of Bliss

Next up we have another -- yes, another -- street mural at an intersection in inner SE Portland. This one's at SE 19th & Clinton St., and I had no idea it existed until I stumbled across it literally yesterday. (To clarify, for fellow pedants: Encountering it for the first time yesterday is literal; the part about stumbling is strictly figurative.). This one is supposed be sort of a mandala design, and the intersection where it's located is right outside the New Day School, an alternative grade school based on the ideas of P.R. Sarkar, 20th century Indian philosopher.

I think I missed this one until now because it was first painted in 2017 (per this blog post), after I had finished most of the street mural posts here and moved on to other things. It was repainted in June 2019, the summer before COVID-19 arrived. Street murals going un-repainted since then seems to be very common, whether out of an abundance of residual caution, or lack of volunteers, or maybe people are just tired of performing civility and pretending to like their neighbors. Who knows.

Montgomery Pride

In a post back in January I mentioned something about there being another City Repair street mural on a closed section of SW Montgomery St., on the Portland State campus, which I was bound to do a post about sooner or later. So here are a few photos of Montgomery Pride, on the block of Montgomery between 6th & Broadway. The blurb for it on the City Repair project map describes it as "a design pattern that celebrates LGBTQ Pride, the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and Marsha P. Johnson" and the 2019 painting of it as "an event that would bring together the LGBTQ community, Urban Planning community, and the PSU community to turn an unattractive street into an enriching temporary public event space."

The street closure happened as part of the university's major renovations to the business school building next door. The business school was the newest and swankiest building on campus when I was a student circa 1990 -- a student environmental group I was involved with tried to schedule meetings there, strictly for the nice cushy chairs -- but it couldn't compete with the new engineering school buildings, facilities-wise, and that simply wouldn't do. But there's always donor money available for re-swank-ifying business schools, and the one at PSU has reclaimed its rightful place as the newest, shiniest, swankiest, most blindingly metallic edifice on campus. Across Montgomery, for contrast, is the brutalist University Services Building, built in 1970 and seemingly unchanged since then (except for some late-2000s public art on the east side of the building).

SE 6th & Stark street mural

Next up, here are a few photos of the other Green Loop street mural on the eastside, after the one at SE 2nd & Caruthers that we just visited. This one's at SE 6th & Stark St. and has sort of a Hispanic / Central American theme to it. The theme comes from being right outside the Milagro Theatre, the Northwest's only Hispanic live theater company. Which staged La Bici -- an original play with a bike safety theme -- in fall 2021, I guess in conjunction with the mural and the whole Green Loop PR effort.

I didn't really have a lot of material for this post, or any other super-genius startup ideas to share with you, so I put the intersection into the library's Oregonian database to see if anything interesting had ever happened here. It turns out that way back in 1924 there was actually a bike shop here, or (strictly speaking) a motorcycle dealer that also sold bikes. The classified ads read "BICYCLES, $10 DOWN, $1 PER WK., Tricycles, coasters, scooters, etc., EAST SIDE MOTORCYCLE CO., Cor. E 6th-Stark. EA 1000". More ads of theirs appeared starting in 1933, now advertising that they sold new Harleys as well as used motorcycles of all types. An assortment of other industrial-type businesses followed, which I won't bore you with since it's just not very interesting.

I also tried searching on the theater's street address, which also wasn't very interesting until around 1948 when the current building went in. The new building was originally home to the shiny, new House of Fong Chinese restaurant & nightclub. Which in that era would have naturally had space for a live band and dancing after a dinner of inauthentic Chinese food. I'm imagining something along the lines of Club Obi-Wan in the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, though perhaps without the huge Hollywood song-and-dance production numbers. This space also doubled as banquet space so your large business or fraternal group could have a big party here, and the papers listed lots of these events over the next couple of years. These notices stopped abruptly in October 1950, so the place may have gone out of business right around then. One of the last mentions of the club came in May when a safecracker (who was arrested elsewhere in town) was found with plans to the House of Fong building, and a receipt for buying a gun.

The empty building was advertised for sale occasionally for a few years, eventually becoming the Backstage Coffee House sometime before 1961. This was obviously long before my time, but the name and the date make me think beatniks, free jazz, and improv poetry, maybe some avant-garde theater or interpretive dance, that sort of thing. And sure enough, the first mention of the place in the paper was when it became the venue for a new local repertory theater company. It seems the coffee house stayed open rather late and segued into the Backstage Club (featuring live music again) at some point in the evening, and later that year it saw a police raid for violating the city's new after-hours dancing ordinance, with several arrests including the club's 71 year old co-owner. The news story explained that Portlanders of 1961 were not permitted to dance in public after 1:30am, unless the club had a liquor license in which case patrons could keep dancing until 2:30am. I'm not sure of the subsequent details of that particular legal drama, but by December of that year the club was advertising that it opened at 2:30am, 7 nights a week, featuring a gentleman named Wally Dee at the piano bar. The aforementioned co-owner passed away in 1962, and her obit mentioned that she had once had her own jazz orchestra that performed regularly at the Crystal Ballroom (yes, that Crystal Ballroom). In 1963 the club or some part of it was known as the Downstage nightclub, which saw another police raid, this time for various liquor law violations, with six arrests for various severe offenses such as drinking liquor from a plastic container.

That may have been curtains for the club, as the next time the street address appeared in the paper was in 1967 when it became home to Eagles Lodge No. 3256, and various fraternal activities ensued for the next decade or so. 1975 saw yet another police raid, this time for operating an illegal bingo game. Five people were arrested, one on felony charges, although all charges were dropped soon afterward when it turned out the police had not gotten a warrant first before barging in.

The Eagles migrated elswhere around 1977, and after that the building was briefly home to a craft mall in 1978, and an Asian-style furniture store in the 1980s, before becoming the present-day theater in the early 90s.

So that's what I've got for this particular location, but if you're still interested in history and are up for a longer bike ride, might I suggest continuing east on Stark to see the old Stark St. Milestones, a series of stone distance markers that continue east along Stark all the way to Mt. Hood Community College, with one marker per mile minus a few that have been misplaced since the mid-19th century. Milestone P2 is the first you'll encounter, embedded in the north wall of Lone Fir Cemetery. If you get to MHCC and you're still up for a longer ride, the same milestone numbering continues east as part of the Columbia River Highway, with mile 31 putting you west of Multnomah Falls, and mile 35 is around the Ainsworth freeway exit. The HCRH bike trail will (largely) get you as far as The Dalles, and fragments of the old road continue east as far as Pendleton. At which point it becomes the Old Oregon Trail Highway and continues eastward to Idaho and points unknown. If you're feeling ambitious, I mean.

SE 2nd & Caruthers street mural

Next up is another of the city's four(?) new-ish Green Loop murals, this time on the eastside where SE Caruthers deadends west of 2nd Ave., between the Portland Opera building and the docks for the Portland Spirit fleet, hence the musical theme on this one. This is a quiet dead-end street for cars, but as a bike route it's a major intersection between the Springwater Trail, the Tilikum Bridge, the Eastbank Esplanade, people headed to or from OMSI & the Hawthorne Bridge, and I guess now for people doing the Green Loop thing too. Meaning if you're a mere pedestrian and you're here taking photos of the mural, you really need to watch out for traffic and not just stand in the street like a drunk Tour de France spectator.

Unlike the two westside plazas, I don't think this one was meant to host food trucks even seasonally. But given the level of bike traffic through here, it might be a good site for a super-genius idea I had a while back. So here's the startup pitch: If you're commuting by bike and are hungry on the go, right now you need to stop somewhere, get off the bike, and order something, and wait. Meanwhile SUV Steve, your office archnemesis, can just roll through the nearest drive-thru. (Which means SUV Steve consistently gets to the office before you, lands that big promotion, and gets an even bigger SUV, destroying the world even faster, just to be clear on what's at stake here.) The pro cycling world has solved this problem already: Riders roll through a feed zone partway through the race, grab a musette bag from a team soigneur, and continue on their way without stopping or even slowing down very much. Imagine that crossed with a Portland food cart: You'd order and pay through the app ahead of time, and give a rough ETA for when you might be there, and then just roll through and snag your breakfast burrito and keep going, and be at work on time for that one crucial meeting. There'd be an RFID tag scheme or something along those lines to match the right bag to the correct rider, and a newbie lane for people who aren't good at the bag-grabbing part of the arrangement, and some way for people to return the reusable bags, and a really solid EULA so nobody can sue you if they crash after a bungled handoff or something. But overall I think this could totally work, given the right location, at least on a seasonal basis.

The reason I'm telling you all of this instead of pitching it to VCs is that I don't actually want to be in the food service business again, personally, and especially not in a way that involves getting up at zero-dark-thirty to make the breakfast burritos. Don't want to deal with Portland customers again, or constantly hiring and training new food-cart soigneurs (who are bound to get sick of being rained on before long). And before any of that, navigating the city's kafkaesque permit system. And at some point doing a few weeks of crisis PR when it turns out some of your customers are egregious litterbugs. So if any of that sounds more appealing to you than it does to me, feel free to go ahead and have at it, be my guest, and remember that I have absolutely zero liability if things don't work out in practice.

Madison Street Plaza mural

Ok, here are some photos of yet another painted intersection, once again in downtown Portland. If you aren't familiar with this mildly weird local thing, the previous one of these that I covered back in January tries to explain a bit. The current one we've visiting is another twist on the usual theme in that it's an official city government project by the Bureau of Transportation and painted by hired artists, not at all a community volunteer thing. Madison St. Plaza here (which is just across from the Portland Art Museum) is one of at least four new 'plazas', all painted as part of a wider effort the city calls "The Green Loop", which is a bit hard to explain. It's sort of an official bike loop around the central city -- that's downtown plus the central eastside -- enhanced with things that are either trendy here right now, or were trendy before Covid, or at least were cool sometime in the last 15 years or so. So, occasional "everybody ride the Green Loop today" events, complete with obscure local bands you probably haven't heard of playing along the route; food cart pods; street paintings like the one here; that sort of thing. I was all ready to snark about this; I figured the city was trying to create a Disney-fied version of the real things, aimed at tourists and rich developers and conveniently close to upscale hotels downtown and around the Convention Center, and routed past the front doors of sponsoring businesses.

Eventually I realized what the city was really up to. Despite our heavily cultivated reputation around being the perfect bike & pedestrian city, we still have a really high rate of traffic fatalities and serious injuries here, and the numbers keep increasing, which leads to people asking the city how they're going to fix it. The city seems to think that one quick and easy, if partial, mitigation would be if people would stick to side streets more and avoid riding in heavy traffic and darting around 18-wheelers and gigantic SUVs from the 'burbs. You can even put together a network of these safer routes around town and give out maps. The city's done that for years now, and some people pay attention to that sort of thing religiously and others... don't. A lot of other people respond badly to safety-based appeals; they see it as victim blaming, or at least being told to eat their vegetables instead of just gobbling glucose gel packs all the time. So the plan, as I understand it, is to take the existing safer routes and make them look cool and trendy, so people will sort of gravitate to them of their own accord without any safety lectures. At least I think that's what the plan is, unless I'm giving them too much credit.

Whether the execution on the street murals and the curation of food carts and so forth is good enough to pull this off is a whole other question, obviously. And of course there will be cynics out there who see right through what the city's trying to do and reject it out of hand, and if too many people start thinking that way the city will have to come up with an alternative (but still safe) route that isn't 'corporate', but without anyone clueing in that it's another safety campaign. But hey, that's why city bureaucrats make the big bucks. Or at least why they have a good pension plan. I mean, I assume they still have a good pension plan, I dunno.

Angry Pigeon Perch

Back in 2014-2016, I did a little project around tracking down Portland's assortment of painted intersections, like the semi-famous sunflower one just off Belmont. If you aren't familiar with this local phenomenon, these usually come about as neighborhood volunteer efforts, typically aided by the City Repair Project, a local nonprofit. The idea is that you and your neighbors choose a nice, quiet, residential intersection, come up with an original design, and convince the city to give you a permit. Then you pick out a weekend, put up some traffic cones, and have a big summer block party. You and your neighbors pitch in to paint your design on the street, which obviously involves meeting your neighbors if you haven't already done so.

One crucial detail is that you just use regular latex paint for this, not the fancy high-durability traffic paint the city uses for crosswalks and lane dividers and so forth. That stuff's expensive, with a very limited color palette, and more importantly, you kind of want the design to look nice thru the end of summer and the nice part of fall, and then get increasingly shabby over the winter due to traffic and the elements. Then, once the weather finally improves again, it's just about time for another neighborhood block party, and before you know it you have a traditional neighborhood event that people look forward to every year.

Or at least that's the idea. I haven't gone back to check on the places I visited earlier, and it just stands to reason that a few of them were one-and-done affairs, for all the usual reasons that volunteer efforts peter out. Key people moving out of the area; heated arguments over creative vision; someone forgetting to renew the right permits or arrange for the paint; a salmonella outbreak due to last year's potluck; or people meeting their neighbors and simply not wanting to repeat the experience. That sort of thing.

I do know that some projects have continued, despite the chaos of the last few years. In particular, the big sunflower design was wiped out in 2019 by a city sewer project, and then it wasn't repainted in 2020 because pandemic, and almost wasn't in 2021 for reasons I'm not clear on. It finally reappeared last October, with a new, more angular design that I gather not everyone likes.

Beyond that, there are even a few new street paintings that didn't exist the last time I was paying attention, like the one we're visiting now (in case you were wondering when I'd finally bumble around to the actual subject of this post). I stumbled across this one in January 2020, at the very tail end of the Before Times. Right off the bat you can tell it's different from the others we've visited so far: It's painted largely on the sidewalk, spilling over into the adjacent bike lane. But not into the traffic lanes, much less the intersection nearby. And it's surrounded by low and mid-rise urban buildings instead of twee 1920s bungalows. This is in downtown Portland, at intersection of SW 12th & Main St., right outside the front door of Northwest Academy, a small private school for the arts. In fact the painting was created in September 2019 as a back-to-school event, giving kids a misleadingly fun start to the ill-fated 2019-2020 school year.

A City Repair item about the painting says it's called Angry Pigeon Perch, although if there's a pigeon in the design I'm just not seeing it. I had a long tangent all ready to go here about the school maybe teaching kids about surrealism, which pivoted to contemporary AI-generated art, and how we still understand almost nothing about why AI models work as well as they do. From there, a claim that a lot of 20th century surrealist art kinda looks like the present-day AI-created stuff if you squint just right, followed by some half and quarter-baked speculation about why that might be. I don't think I was actually on to anything interesting (much less true) there, so I won't bore you with that whole argument. In any case, while I was kicking that around for a few days, I ran across the school's Instagram account. Which points out, right in the account bio, that the school's official nickname is "The Angry Pigeons", so there's our super-mundane answer regarding the title. I am honestly kind of disappointed about this.

Until quite recently this was the only painted intersection downtown, and the city only granted the permit because the school agreed not to paint anything that cars drive on. I suppose because downtown streets are real streets, for the use of serious people engaged in important business. As a serious major city, we can't risk having serious people bump into whimsical stuff that has no obvious business model, or they might freak out and take their important business elsewhere, like Texas maybe. (I'm just guessing here.) The City Repair folks have a Google map of past and present projects, and it shows about five items in the intersection category across the entire westside. There's one on the PSU campus on a closed section of SW Montgomery, which I apparently don't have any photos of yet. I'm about 75% sure that the other three listed downtown are either miscategorized, or don't exist anymore, or never existed in the first place. There now are a couple of others downtown (as of summer 2021) that aren't on this map because they weren't City Repair projects, but we'll get to those in their own separate posts.

The remaining one on the map -- the one and only example on the entire westside outside of downtown, if the map is to be believed -- is wayyy out in Hillsboro, behind a church in an industrial park near the Cornelius Pass exit off Sunset, and I have no idea what sort of project it actually is, or was. This seems odd to me; Portland's westside does have a few neighborhoods that you'd think might be open to the idea, places like Northwest/Nob Hill, Multnomah Village, Hillsdale, Burlingame, Lair Hill, Corbett/Johns Landing, Homestead (the weird little neighborhood up in the West Hills behind OHSU), probably a few others I'm forgetting. Now, some of these neighborhoods are hilly and maybe don't have a lot of suitable intersections that are flat enough to be paintable, but zero? More likely the idea just sort of never caught on. Or at least it hasn't caught on yet, but might after somebody goes out on a limb and does the first one.

SE 130th Place & Ramona

Yet another painted intersection, this one wayyyy out at SE 130th Place & Ramona, a bit west of Powell Butte. Unfortunately this one's a bit worse for wear, so I only took this one photo. An artist involved in the project has a page up about it, with photos from when the book-and-butterfly design was first painted in May 2013.

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.

SE 86th & Glenwood

Painted intersection with a flowers-and-bees pattern at SE 86th & Glenwood, a couple of blocks south of Duke St. This is another new painted intersection, first painted in June 2015, sponsored by a couple of local community groups.

SE 28th Pl. & Pardee

Painted intersection at SE 28th Place & Pardee, next to a small private school. This one looks quite old and beat up, but apparently it was just painted in July 2015. So I suppose the winter hasn't been kind to it. The link goes to the neighborhood association's painting project & shows what the design is supposed to be: A woman riding a bike, with buildings and trees in the background.

NE 30th & Killingsworth

Ok, the next painted intersection we're visiting is a bit different from the last few; rather than placing a big design in the middle of the intersection, the one at NE 30th & Killingsworth has designs on the four streetcorners instead. A circa-2006 City Repair description of the then-new progject (via archive.org) indicates that the intersection was too busy for the traditional sort of street design, and the city wouldn't let them close it off for a day of painting:

This community project will include painting creative crosswalks and building kiosk-type structures along Killingsworth approaching the intersection from both directions to catch driver’s eyes and slow traffic, transforming a dangerous intersection into an attractive expression of community co-creation and safe space. Despite the flood warnings and evacuation routes that must be kept unperturbed, the residents are tired of it all passing by unnoticed. Can’t we just close the street for one day to paint? Many thanks to this community for braving the “higher ups” and doing something anyway. Keep the dream alive and keep the designs a’comin. Strong community prevails.

Compass Junction

The next painted intersection we're visiting is "Compass Junction", in St. Johns at N. Edison & St. Louis. This one was first painted in 2011; a recent City Repair project guide describes it:

Compass Junction, three berry-lined blocks from Cathedral Park, was first painted in 2009. Our Mariner's Mandala is a navigational aid, directing our gaze outward from the central compass to an Escher-like outer ring from which we see the Baltimore Woods Connectivity Corridor, the sparkling river that separates us from Forest Park, the titanic vessels that ply the working waters of the Willamette's North Reach, and the iconic green gothic arches of our beloved St. Johns Bridge, from which we can glimpse downtown, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens on a clear day. This is The Crossroads.

We are on the Edge of Everything, and the edge is where the action is. Come look through our special window on the world for the day!

That description really captures why I have a soft spot for the whole painted intersection phenomenon. I'm an inveterate cynic (in case you hadn't noticed already), but there's a sense of goofy unironic optimism about the whole business that I just can't bring myself to sneer at; it would be like sneering at a box of puppies or something.

Jarrett Grove

Next up on the painted intersection tour is "Jarrett Grove", at NE 28th & Jarrett. Like a number of the others I'm posting today, this is a recent one, first painted in summer 2015. The project description:

The Jarrett Grove intersection painting is the first of many natural building projects planned by the neighborhood. The community named the project Jarrett Grove as it is a celebration to pay homage to the amazing Douglas Fir trees, among many other evergreens, that fill the neighborhood. The trees are pointed in four different directions with faith houses at each base. The trees all stem from the same potent, lovely, and sacred geometry.

I'm no expert on "sacred geometry", but this design does look kind of familiar, as if we've seen a very similar design at some other intersection. I can't put my finger on which one, but it definitely rings a bell. In an early post in this series, I offered a few free ideas for intersection paintings, and I'd just like to toss them back out there for anyone who's got a city permit but needs a design. It's been almost 2 years and as far as I know nobody's used any of them so far, so you -- yes, you -- could be the first:

It's a shame there's nowhere to put one in my downtown neighborhood. All the streets around here are way too busy, and most of them have MAX or streetcar tracks running through them. It's a shame because I think I'd be pretty good at brainstorming designs. The moon, maybe, or a giant octopus, or a Deep Space Nine wormhole, or Pac-Man, or a crop circle, or maybe a Sarlacc pit, or a surreal Escher design to confuse passing motorists. Some of these might be a bit tough for amateur street painters to pull off in a weekend, though, and others might have trademark issues. Feel free to swipe any of these notions for your local intersection if you like though.

Rainbow Dragon

The next painted intersection on our tour is the Rainbow Dragon at NE 32nd & Sumner. This is another new one, first painted in summer 2015. The brief project description:

Dragons symbolize strength in many cultures. Slide down the Rainbow Dragon and feel the force of neighborhood community. Rainbow Dragon honors the strength of our friend and neighbor, Brook Irwin, who lost a five-year battle to cancer. Rainbow Dragon infuses a playfulness into the intersection. Forget the crosswalk, just skip across the street on the stepping stones and admire the brook below.

The design kind of takes me back to junior high in the early 1980s, when roughly half of all school supplies were plastered with some combination of rainbows, unicorns, and dragons. I say half because anything with a rainbow was strictly a girls' item for whatever reason, and I recall a lot of my school supplies having an epic space battle theme instead. I didn't mind that at the time, but in retrospect it's weird that I missed out on a lot of dragons because of a few rainbows and the anxieties of a strange decade.

Community Blooming, NE 85th & Beech

Some time ago, I did a post about the "Community Blooming" painted intersection at NE 85th & Milton, near Rocky Butte. While putting the post together I discovered it was the southern half of a pair of intersections, so I put an item on my big todo list to visit the one at 85th & Beech the next time I was in the area. So I finally got around to it, but ended up with a couple of subpar photos. Someone was having a house party right next to the intersection, and people kept arriving, and I didn't want to be mistaken for an uninvited guest and either confronted or (maybe even worse) invited in. It sounds silly now as I try to explain it, but it felt like a reasonable concern at the time. It's an introvert thing, I guess.

Jade's Jewel

The next painted intersection on our tour is "Jade's Jewel", at NE 61st & Tillamook. The project description has a weirdly downbeat tone:

Jade's Jewel reinvigorated the vibrant community around NE Tillamook and 61st Ave. The neighborhood used to have block parties, Christmas parties, Easter egg hunts, and a plethora of gatherings annually. However, the community has dwindled in the past few years and there have been illnesses and deaths impeding upon community building. So, the community was brought back together by painting the streets rockin' colors! The drawing is Sponge Bob Squarepants inspired!

Identifying the SpongeBob Squarepants connection is left as an exercise for the reader. Mostly because I don't see it. I've watched an embarrassingly large number of SpongeBob episodes thanks to the magic of Netflix, and I don't recall seeing this in any of them.

North Tabor Mandala

Ok, it's been a while since we've visited any of Portland's ever-increasing number of artsy painted intersections. I have a few more in Drafts, though, so I think I'll run through those and post them as a change of pace from all the murals. I suppose it's not a huge change of pace, but at least we'll be looking at horizontal painted surfaces instead of vertical ones for the next few posts.

Anyway, the next stop on the ongoing "intersection repair" tour is the North Tabor Mandala at NE 53rd & Everett. This is one of the newest ones, first painted in summer 2015. The City Repair page about it describes it:

North Tabor Neighborhood Association in conjunction with South East Uplift was overjoyed to bring an intersection mandala into the heart of the neighborhood. In the spirit of their long term goals to bring life, culture, and vibrancy to the community, they worked with the local Portland Montessori School, whose upper elementary school children produced a design of geometric shapes, angles, and patterns. With the help of a generous grant from South East Uplift, partnerships with neighborhood icons Folktime and Community of Christ Church, and - most importantly - the help of volunteers who call North Tabor home, something unique and beautiful was created to be enjoyed and celebrated by all for years to come.

For what it's worth, I tend to quote from City Repair pages instead of just linking because these pages have a nasty habit of vanishing when the next year's crop of projects rolls around.

SE 9th & Yamhill

Every June-or-so, a few more City Repair painted intersections pop up here and there around Portland. To be honest I haven't put a lot of effort into locating this year's crop of new ones; given the size of my Drafts folder right now, I wouldn't say I'm in desperate need of new material, and Real Job stuff keeps absorbing what would otherwise be free time to pursue this. In short, I've found precisely one of them so far, and only because I stumbled across it. So with that intro out of the way, we're at freshly painted SE 9th & Yamhill, where a big hops-and-barley design graces the intersection. This intersection's kind of an unusual case in that we're in a light industrial area, not a residential neighborhood. One corner of the intersection is home to Rogue's Green Dragon Pub, while diagonally across is a large Rogue warehouse. So the relevance of the design to its surroundings is kind of obvious here. (And yes, I noticed the thing when I came by for lunch and a beer or two or so.) So this is the bit where I tell you I told you so: A year ago, in a ranty bit in a post about the NE 12th & Beech intersection, I predicted that companies would eventually get in on the act, and the painted intersection thing would evolve away from being a community volunteer effort. I figured tech companies would do it eventually. I didn't figure it would happen the very next year or be arranged by a local brewery, although that kind of makes sense in retrospect. Still, when it comes to predicting the future, when you have a chance to take partial credit, take it.

Speaking of hops, this summer I tried my hand at growing a hop vine for the first time. You can assume by the lack of gardening photos here that it's not going that well. I don't believe I've ever seen that many bugs on a single plant before. Tiny little pinhead-sized bugs, clinging to stems and the bottoms of leaves, sucking the life out of the poor vine. After investing in this plant, I came across a Michigan State extension document about "Hop Insects and Diseases", which begins with an old Kentish proverb about hop growing: "First the flea, then the fly, then the mould, then they die". The remainder of the document is equally encouraging. Still, hops are a perennial (assuming they survive), so maybe I'll have better luck next year.

Share-It Square

The next painted intersection on our ongoing tour is Share-It Square, at SE 9th & Sherrett in Sellwood. (The name's a pun, see?) This is Portland's first and oldest painted intersection, dating all the way back to the late '90s. I described a bit of its history in my first post on City Repair intersections, about the one at SE 15th & Alder. Here's the relevant passage, so I don't have to repeat myself:

The first one was Share-It Square, the intersection of SE 9th & Sherrett (hence the name), down in the Sellwood neighborhood. As this was a strange new thing back in 1997, the neighborhood first had to convince the city that painting a lightly used residential intersection wouldn't be the apocalypse. The apocalypse didn't happen, and street graphics have multiplied since then.

Piazza di Wilbur

The next painted intersection we're visiting is Piazza di Wilbur, at N. Holman St. & Wilbur Ave. This one was created in 2012, sponsored by the Overlook neighborhood association. This was around the same time Overlook Feng Shui went in at the N. Concord/Failing/Melrose/Overlook intersection. A May 2012 Oregonian article mentions both intersections, and includes a short video clip about Piazza di Wilbur.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I found what seems to be a project website, though it's private and members-only, for whatever reason. The piazza is also listed on "World-Wide Labyrinth Locator", thanks to the little maze in the middle. And someone's Prezi presentation about City Repair intersections describes the design as "some kind of vortex". Cryptic private website, mysterious maze/vortex in the middle of an intersection, suspiciously foreign-sounding name... Obviously there's some sort of fnord intricate conspiracy going on. Aliens and bigfoot and fluoride are almost certainly involved, if you ask me.