Chimney Fountain

This post probably counts as overkill. I've got a Flickr slideshow, an embedded Google map, and a Twitvid clip in this post, just to tell you about a small fountain in an obscure spot on the edge of downtown Portland. The Chimney Fountain is, as the name suggests, shaped more or less like an old brick chimney, with water bubbling up from the center and spilling down its sides. It's located next to SW Lincoln St., along the pedestrian-only 2nd Avenue walkway, in the 60's-era South Auditorium urban renewal district.

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It doesn't look particularly special or important if you don't know the backstory behind it. The chimney shape supposedly symbolizes the area before the urban renewal bulldozers arrived, a working class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants, with small houses, family businesses (including the deli with reputedly the best bagels in town), several synagogues, etc. For more about the old neighborhood, there's a Portland Jewish Review story and a Daily Kos essay you might be interested in. I wish I had a more concrete reference for the fountain-as-historical-marker part. I know I've read that before, but I haven't found a link to share yet. I'll update the post if I can document that, but until then don't cite this notion as a fact in your term paper, or wager large sums of money on it or anything.

The fountain does double symbolic duty, in fact, since it also serves as the "Source Fountain" in the Halprin plan for the area. The idea is that water bubbles up at a little spring here. Then, flowing north, it becomes a rushing mountain stream at Lovejoy Fountain, and finally a majestic waterfall at Keller Fountain. Symbolically, I mean. The water actually recirculates separately at each fountain, but no matter.

The fountain occasionally does triple duty, as a sort of jetted bathtub for the homeless. I'm sure that wasn't a design goal behind the fountain, but it appears to do the job. I didn't actually go and ask for a user review, I mean, if I was taking a bath and minding my own business, and a stranger came up and wanted to interview me, I'd take it rather badly. Wouldn't you?

Carwash Fountain

A couple of video clips of downtown Portland's "Carwash Fountain", on the transit mall at SW 5th & Burnside. The city water bureau's page on downtown fountains describes it thusly:

Popularly known as "The Car Wash" (Officially Untitled)
Located at SW 5th and Ankeny Street.

This tubular fountain designed by Carter, Hull, Nishita, McCulley and Baxter was installed in 1977. A wind gauge shuts off its water on gusty days to prevent hazards for motorists.

There isn't a lot on the net about this architectural firm except for references to this fountain, but an intriguing detail emerges from a thesis titled "The Fate of Lawrence Halprin's Public Spaces: Three Case Studies", in reference to a park project in Fort Worth, TX:

The park was conceptualized by Halprin, but primarily designed and planned by associate Satoru Nishita, as indicated by the office documents. Therefore, when Lawrence Halprin and Associates disbanded in 1976, much of the correspondence reveals confusion regarding with whom Fort Worth officials should consult. The newly formed Carter Hull Nishita McCulley Baxter (CHNMB) seems to have been the primary contact after the Halprin and Associates breakup. Perhaps due to this final confusion, very little reference to this design exists.

Halprin and Associates, you may recall, was the firm behind Portland's Keller Fountain and Lovejoy Fountain, among other things. The Wikipedia bio for Halprin's associate Satoru Nishita indicates he worked on both of those projects, and apparently was the Nishita in the name of the subsequent firm. So this fountain has an interesting ancestry. And an unexpected one, since "Untitled" here looks nothing at all like the earlier two.

You might be curious why I posted a couple of video clips rather than the usual overly large set of fair-to-middlin' photos. For some reason I don't have a lot of photos of the thing, despite having an office a couple of blocks away for over 5 years. And of the few I've taken, none really seemed worth posting here. Part of the problem is that the wind sensor everyone goes on about also seems to detect me waving a camera around nearby, and the fountain has an uncanny way of shutting off as I'm framing a shot. Not really sure how that would be possible, but it's happened at least twice that I can recall. The once exception to that rule seems to be the shooting of brief yet boring video clips, so I have two of those, and here they are.

The YouTube video was previously seen here by the elite few people who visited that particular 2006 post. At the time I said:

It's often called the "Car Wash", but don't be fooled. If you try to wash your car in it, a nice policeman will drop by and shoot you full of holes. I mean, not to detract from the relaxing(?) tone of this post or anything, but the fuzz really will do it. Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me. [Legal Disclaimer: Don't!]

If I'd written this a couple of years later, it would have contained a waterboarding joke instead. Ah 2006, you were such an innocent bygone year... Anyway, what will actually happen is that you'll get a misdemeanor citation with a small fine and maybe some community service, plus the entire internet will make fun of you for a few days, especially if there's video, and forever after strangers will approach you on the street demanding to know if you're that carwash fountain guy/gal. Maybe you'll eventually get a cheesy reality show gag out of it, if you're lucky.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• Here is someone else's video, which is better than either of mine, not that that would be very difficult.


• Photos by Artnchicken, UnrulyJulie, & an overhead view by JAFO09


• Blog posts at Portland (OR) Daily Photo, EnzymePDX, Edward Blank, & The Travel Gal.

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Updated: This little post here has been lifted -- naturally without attribution or anything, by what looks like a spamblog. As far as I can tell, it's nothing but randomly swiped content about car washes, posted anonymously without any credits or bylines, and with hyperlinks stripped out for some reason. They don't appear to be selling anything, and there aren't even any ads there, so it's not clear what the point of it all is. There's surprisingly little one can do about content thieves on the interwebs if you aren't a ginormo-monstrous record company or movie studio. Google suggests you try a DMCA takedown. I still might do that, but I'm not a huge DMCA fan and I'd hate to seem hypocritical by using it to my advantage. What makes this doubly annoying is that the Portland Water Bureau posted links to the swiped post -- rather than the original -- on both Facebook and Twitter this morning, and the either haven't clued in on the mistake or haven't bothered to fix it. I mean, I'm not selling anything either, and I don't have any ads, so purloined content and waylaid traffic doesn't translate into lost revenue or anything. I'd have to say it's purely an ego or vanity thing: I just don't like to see people making off with my stuff, even if they don't benefit and I'm not harmed in any concrete way. And besides, the videos themselves are still getting hits from the copied post, even if the original post isn't. The fact that it was done anonymously is puzzling; I'd probably be even more aggravated if there was a name attached, someone falsely claiming to have written this post. As it is, it's merely incomprehensible. I just don't see what their angle is. Maybe they're trying to boost a search engine ranking for some reason. I didn't see anything weird in the page source, so if they're trying to give you malware, they're doing so very subtly. Or it's a fresh attempt to figure out (or confuse) Blogger's spamblog-detection algorithm. Or someone's being paid to blog about washing cars, and they're lazy/greedy and are taking the shortest of shortcuts. Honestly, I can't come up with very many plausible hypotheses as to what might be going on here. I'll update this again if I decide to try to anything about it, which I may or may not do.

Lumia Fountain at the Aria

So-so camera phone video of the Lumia fountain in front of the shiny new Aria casino in Las Vegas. It's a fun piece of engineering wizardry, although you'll need to watch a better video to get the full effect. I recommend this one.

Video: A look around Rowena Crest

Taken at the far end of the Tom McCall Preserve on Rowena Crest. This was taken on my Blackberry & uploaded to TwitVid while I was still there (although it took about 10 minutes, since they apparently don't have 3G out there yet). This would've been crazy blue-sky sci-fi technology back in 2007, the last time I was out there. It still feels like magic, although it's reasonably mundane magic by 2010 standards. I mean, ZOMFG, it's not even HD video, and it's certainly not 3D or anything. And it was merely recorded & uploaded, not Ustreamed live or anything. So, try as I might, I just can't seem to get with the program. On the other hand, I also Tweeted that I was uploading a video, and got a reply from the East Coast. And also picked up a couple of followbots that clued in on me saying "GPS", which apparently is a lucrative keyword. So, other than studiously avoiding Facebook, I think I have the "social media" side of things covered reasonably well.

And to think that when I started this humble blog, I didn't have a mobile phone of any kind yet, and still had dialup interwebs at home.

Oh, and in case you were wondering -- in between uploading videos, and swapping lenses on the ol' DSLR (which doesn't take video, sadly), I took a few minutes to just stop and sit and watch the river and listen to the wind in the grass and relax and unplug a little. That was while this video was uploading, btw.

Kelly Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Portland's "Kelly Fountain", at 6th & Pine on the once and future transit mall. These were taken back in August, while the fountain was still running. Like most public fountains, the city shuts it off for the winter in case we get a spot of freezing weather (and probably to save money, too). This is kind of hampering the nascent fountain project I recently semi-embarked on. There can't be any new photos of fountains in operation until next spring, so I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I've already got lurking in the archives. It's like the old saying goes, you have to blog with the fountain photos you have, not the fountain photos you wish you had. That may not be exactly how the old saying goes. It's been a long time, or at least it feels like it's been a long time, thankfully.

I put "Kelly Fountain" in quotes because it isn't quite the official name. The water bureau page linked to above says its true name is "Untitled Fountain", one of several untitled fountains here in town. Which is dumb. The Smithsonian's public art inventory has a page about the fountain too, and they insist it's actually called "Anchor". Which is the first time I've ever heard that name. Why is this so complicated?

The "Kelly" in the name is actually the fountain's creator, local sculptor Lee Kelly. He happens to be the auteur behind the notorious Leland 1, or as I always call it, "Rusting Chunks #5". He's the auteur behind a lot of cheesy public art around town, actually -- besides this fountain and the Chunks, there's the fountain up at the rose garden in Washington Park, the tall spindly stainless steel thing in Waterfront Park next to the Steel Bridge, and a few assorted stainless steel bits at the new "Howard's Way" plaza, between a couple of new residential buildings next to PGE Park, as well as smaller gallery works.

As you might have gathered from the last paragraph, I'm not a huge fan of Kelly's work. In fairness, though, the fountain is better than Rusting Chunks #5 in a number of important ways.

1. It's a fountain. The running water helps a lot. Without running water, it's just another big inexplicable hunk of metal looming over the sidewalk. Although that's exactly what it is when the fountain's not running, which is most of the year, actually.
   
2. Stainless steel is always better than rusty steel. This is inarguable. The 70's fondness for rusty metal is yet another example of that decade's pathological aesthetics, just like macrame and blue ruffled tuxedos.
   
3. It's further away from home, so I don't see it all the time. As much as I like fountains, I'd probably tire of this one rather quickly if I had to look at it every day.
   

So, ok, it's not a very long list, and it's kind of a glib list, but my point remains. The fountain's fine, I guess. It can stay, as far as I'm concerned.

Going by the dates on Mr. Kelly's public artworks, it looks like the 70's were his heyday, but his stuff at "Howard's Way" is less than a year old, so clearly he's still got a few eager customers out there. I find it remarkable that, in all this time, he really hasn't changed his style all that significantly. At some point in the late 70's he switched from rusty Cor-Ten steel to stainless, and then recently he started welding inane Zen-esque affirmations to his creations (about which, see this First Thursday post of mine from August '06). That seems to be the sum total of his creative evolution over the last 30 years. Despite that, the local art-world Powers That Be seemingly can't get enough of his stuff. I've never seen the point, really. While trying to get a handle on how this public art racket works, I ran across a few articles about Mr. Kelly. A Willamette Week article mostly fawns over him, but it contains a telling passage:

The type of work he makes belongs to a past not much revered these days. Steel sculpture has gone the way of innocuous corporate decoration. You see it now and again in public parks, plopped there by some now-defunct committee. "Clearly, I'm old hat," muses Kelly. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether I fit in. I'd like to stay around long enough to see how this all pans out. I am curious to see if we'll come back to appreciate some sort of object that's more or less permanent."

An Art in America piece about a 1995 show of his insists that "Kelly's structures radiate an appealing warmth and sense of humor, qualities not usually associated with large-scale metal sculpture". I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. A PNCA profile contains what may be the secret of his success:

When asked what advice he could give to young artists, Kelly jokes, “Maybe I can come up with a half of an advice: If you’re trying to do it as a livelihood, it’s really tough. I’ve just worn the bastards down after all these years.”

As shown in the above photo, there's a sort of low beveled lip around the base of the fountain, I suppose to help keep the water in. It's only a couple of inches, but for some reason skateboarders seem to find it irresistible. I always see skaters hanging out around the fountain, and I just can't figure out the attraction. It seems like they just sort of mill around, as if they all have a gut feeling the fountain's got to be good for something, but they can't work out what it might be. Kind of like the opening bit with the apes in 2001. Occasionally you see someone try out a move, but it's never anything very impressive. Maybe the fountain is the beginners area or something. Beats me. I actually searched to see if I could find any mentions of the fountain in a skate context, but I couldn't find anything on the net. Maybe they call it by a different name or something. On what I'm sure is a completely unrelated note, the RACC's page on public art conservation has a photo of someone removing graffiti from the fountain.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, the Waymarking page for the fountain comes with a bunch of photos. There's at least one photo of the fountain on Picasa, and on Pbase there's a very cool detail shot of part of the thing. But all in all, there's less stuff on the net about it than I would have expected. Which, in all likelihood, means that once this post goes live, if someone searches the net for useful/interesting info about the fountain, they're likely to end up at this humble blog instead. That's the interwebs for you, I guess.