Ladd Circle

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

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

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

NE Morris & 37th

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

NW Luray Circus

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

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

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

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

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

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

SW Nottingham Dr. Circle

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

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

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

SW Dosch Park Circle

While I was trying to take photos of the little sorta-park at SW Dosch & Boundary, I turned onto a side street (SW Dosch Park Lane) to get some photos from another angle. The road continued into the Dosch Estates subdivision, and I ended up turning around at a small traffic circle. I took a couple of photos of it since it was kind of cute in a twee sort of way, and I had my phone out anyway, so here they are.

In retrospect I'm not sure I was supposed to be there; on the way out I noticed a "Private Road" sign, and PortlandMaps shows the road being part of a couple of weird gerrymander-y tax lots owned by the local HOA. The map still seems to show the street as a public right-of-way, although I might be misreading it.

So... in case Officer Friendly is reading this, these photos were created in Photoshop using advanced skills I've since forgotten and can't demonstrate to you; the place(s) that may (or may not) be depicted in these photos may (or may not) actually exist, as far as I know, or don't know. Also it's possible the post about the sorta-park nearby may (or may not) have ever happened. That one might be Photoshop too, as far as I know, or don't know.

NE 24th & Thompson

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

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

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

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

SW Tyrol Circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montgomery Circle

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

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

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

Other traffic circles in town:

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

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

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

Fortuna

Here are a couple of photos of Fortuna, the fountain in a traffic circle next to Lake Oswego's Millennium Plaza Park. The city arts council's current walking tour brochure describes it:

Fortuna
Simon Toparovsky
The Greek myth of Icarus is used to celebrate the importance of daring and living courageously. (Part of a suite of sculptures throughout Millennium Park.)
simontoparovsky.com
bronze, basalt

Toparovsky is best known for his work on the new cathedral in Los Angeles. Locally, this is one of at least nineteen works of his in or around Millennium Plaza Park. It's not clear if they all went in at the same time or have been added over the years; if it's the latter, a steady stream of return business like that has got to be any artist's ideal arrangement.

Other than the official arts commission site, I haven't found a lot of mentions of Fortuna around the net. I would've thought there'd be at least one blog out there about Lake Oswego arts and the joys of upscale life by the lake, but apparently not. I've seen a number of (possibly auto-generated) mentions of the fountain on Lake Oswego-oriented real estate sites, which is somehow fitting, it being Lake Oswego and all. I did come across a few posts about Fortuna and related pieces at PDXCept, with some decent photos of each of them, so that's worth checking out at least.

Big Edge

More art from CityCenter in Las Vegas. This is "Big Edge", by Nancy Rubins, in the traffic circle between the Aria & Vdara hotels. It's huge and made of canoes; you can't miss it.

So why all the canoes, here, in the middle of the desert? An LA Times profile of the artist explains what's going on here. (It's complicated.) And from across the interwebs, here are photos of other similar works, in La Jolla, CA and a temporary one at Lincoln Center in New York, and various others.

Alameda & 38th

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Today's fascinating adventure takes us to the Alameda neighborhood and the 3-way intersection of NE Alameda, 38th Ave., and Klickitat St. There's a little triangle of land here that isn't quite a traffic circle (since it's not a circle) and not quite a city park. I'm not sure it really merits a post here, but I have a couple of photos and a couple of links to share, and bits are cheap on the interwebs, so I figure I might as well. The photos aren't that great because they were taken from a moving car; I hit this and a couple of other minor spots after tracking down the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, and I was short on time, and I didn't see any compelling reasons to stop.

The "park" made it onto the lower rungs of my TODO list after I saw a mention of it in this Urban Adventure League post from 2006, documenting one of their usual bike tour and hip-n-healthy vegan potluck thingys. Alameda is a fairly genteel neighborhood, and you'd think residents would be alarmed about their little park being invaded by a pack of hummus-guzzling hipsters. The post doesn't mention anything about people getting tasered by Officer Friendly, though. Maybe they just left that part out. I dunno.

There's one other brief mention of the place out on the net, in this doc from the city archives, where the parks bureau lists various esoteric locations it's done maintenance work on over the years. In other words, this isn't the last time I'll be linking to that list. Because if there's one common theme in this blog, it's chasing down obscure and esoteric crap that nobody except me cares about ( as proven by my usual readership numbers ). Half of the time, I barely care about it, or at least I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I do.

This time around, the excursion was partly an excuse to wander around the Alameda area a bit. It's a part of town I don't know very well. Apparently I'm even less familiar with it than I thought I was, because nothing looked at all familiar. Fortunately, the interwebs ride to the rescue once again: Check out Alameda Old House History, about the history of the neighborhood. From which I gather it's pretty much been quiet and respectable from day one.

A few semi-related pop culture tidbits to pass along: Klickitat St. features in the Ramona series of children's books by Beverly Cleary. I don't think I ever read any of those as a kid, but basically everyone else has. So this is the general area to make a pilgrimage to, if you're so inclined. Meanwhile, Alameda St. sort of figures in an Elliott Smith song of the same name. And nearby Alameda Brewing has a tasty Klickitat Pale Ale.

If there's any pop culture miscellany about NE 38th out there, I've yet to uncover it. So if I haven't linked to your epic poem about life, love, and death on 38th Avenue, or your gallery of watercolor streetscapes of same, or edgy indie documentary about same, I'm not ignoring you, I simply haven't found you yet. So feel free to post a link in the comments or whatever.

Thx. Mgmt.

Joan of Arc & Her Sisters

So here are a few photos of Portland's very own Joan of Arc statue, located in the traffic circle at NE 39th & Glisan up in Laurelhurst. I don't get over to Laurelhurst too often, so I vaguely knew it existed, and I vaguely recalled that she'd been restored a few years ago, but that's about it. Then in July, during this year's Tour de France, I noticed the riders passing a statue that looked exactly like ours, so I made a mental note to investigate further. (The riders themselves were probably too wigged out on EPO and steroids to notice the statue, but that's neither here nor there.)

So I made a special trip to go find the statue, on behalf of this humble blog's nano-horde of Gentle Reader(s), and took a few photos. I'd intended to use a bunch of photos taken with my "new" antique store film camera, but that was one of the rolls I trashed early on, so I've only got these two pics to show for all my trouble. There are plenty of better photos of Joan out there on the interwebs if you don't like mine: Portland Ground, Portland Bridges, Waymarking, and Dreamstime.

Updated 7/29/09: It always bugged me that the two photos attached to this post were fairly substandard, since it really is a very cool statue. So I went back and took a new batch, and I like to think they're a step up from the originals. I also added the now-obligatory embedded Google Map, just to keep things modern and all. I punted the original photos to the end instead of deleting them, I guess so you can make up your own mind about the "step up" thing, if you care to. I took some infrared photos too; they didn't seem to fit here, so they got their own post.

In any case, it turns out that our Joan has eight sisters scattered around the globe. The one in Paris, four others in France, including one in Nancy and another somewhere in the Vosges region, near the Swiss border; ours; two others in the US, in Philadelphia & New Orleans; and another in Melbourne, Australia. I'm not sure where all the French ones are located. The Musee d'Orsay has an ungilded statue that might be stone or plaster. I'm not sure if it counts as one of the four or not.

It might be a fun project to travel the globe and visit all of the statues. But a word of warning, it seems that the Paris statue is revered by the French far right, and they make regular pilgrimages to it and do whatever it is that French right-wingers do. If you see a bunch of disreputable thugs (or whatever French right-wingers look like -- I really have no idea) hanging around the place, it's probably best to steer clear. Or at least bite your tongue and not mention the fact that the guy who donated the statue was Jewish. Explaining this inconvenient fact to them will just make them irritable and stabby, if they're anything like our right-wingers.

Our own statue has no unsavory associations, at least not that I'm aware of. If you want to know more about it, and how it got here, there are a few good starting points OurLaurelhurst.org, Portland Public Art, and jejune meanderings. Or if you just want the executive summary, a local businessman donated it to our fair city as a World War I memorial. The same conflict also brought us our very own Stonehenge, out in the Columbia Gorge. In contrast, our official World War II memorial is Memorial Coliseum. It's certainly much larger than Joan of Arc or Stonehenge, but the Coliseum's gone a bit shabby over the years, and these days it mostly plays host to Winter Hawks games. Meanwhile both Joan and Stonehenge have been extensively restored within the last decade or so. It's odd how these things work out.

The traffic circle is a city park ("Coe Circle Park"), although as usual the city parks department's website doesn't list it. It does show up in assorted city documents such as this one, which is also one of the only mentions of cute little Jewett Park and the Talbot Property anywhere on the interwebs. Other than this humble blog, of course. For whatever that's worth. Said document also manages to misspell "Glisan" as "Gilsen", which I understand is a deportable offense, or at least one where everyone else in the office gets to make fun of you. Since it's a park, you can technically go and wander around, or have a picnic, or at least get a closer look at the statue. I didn't, as you can tell from my two photos, because crossing the street looked dangerous, and I didn't think it'd be worth it. But here's a report at Urban Adventure League about a gaggle of cyclists riding to the park and having a picnic there en masse. So it's obviously possible to do that with nonzero odds of survival, at least if you believe stuff you read on the net. Sometimes I think this blog would be more interesting if I was just a little bit braver, and/or less antisocial. But the thought passes quickly, and I go back to my usual photos of flowers and acorns and whatnot. So it goes.

Updated 7/29/09: For the new batch of photos, I did cross the street and get a closer look. Does that mean I'm braver, or at least more determined, than I used to be? It's fun to think so, although getting across to the statue wasn't actually a big deal. I just used the old "wait for a gap in traffic" trick, and voila. Yay for me, or whatever.

Collins Circle

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A few photos of Collins Circle, the weird traffic circle at 18th & Jefferson in downtown Portland, next to the Goose Hollow MAX stop. We are not, generally speaking, a city of grand traffic circles. There's Coe Circle in Laurelhurst, with the famous Joan of Arc statue. There's Ladd Circle in the heart of Ladd's Addition, with a nice little garden full of roses, if you go in season and can find your way around Ladd's Addition. (But hey, wandering around lost there is half the fun.) Here and there around town you'll find a number of mini-circles, which exist to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods. And then there's Collins Circle, which contains the large and rather puzzling stone sculpture you see here.



People generally don't even notice the thing, which may be just as well. I'm not a big fan of it myself, although you can get some (mildly) interesting photos out of it, and it might be fun spending a few minutes speculating about what it's supposed to be, or what it's supposed to evoke. It looks sort of like an old, forgotten stone wall, sort of like an arid talus slope, and I'm not sure what the shape of it is supposed to indicate. (You can get a better idea of the shape from this overhead view) Is it supposed to shaped like a pizza missing a slice, due to the nearby student housing for PSU? Is it Pac-Man? To me, it gives the strong sense that something's missing here. There really ought to be a fountain, with water running over the rocks, or at least a reflecting pool around it. Or it's a sundial without the bits that tell time. Or it's the base of a missing statue. Or there's a door on one side, leading to the fabulous underground tomb of a cruel pagan king of yore. It could be lots of things, but sadly isn't any of them.



If you want to see more (and better) photos of the thing, Art on File has a few here. The University of Oregon has a fairly large collection of photos, but they are apparently Classified and not to be seen by mere mortals. So if you happen not to be a mere mortal, you might check those photos out as well.

The Oregonian's Randy Gragg was a friend of the circle's architect/designer, the late Robert Murase. When Murase died in 2005, Gragg wrote an article about his life and career, and mentioned Collins Circle in passing:

Like most architects, who deal with clients and budgets out of their control, Murase's projects weren't always successful. Maybe most tragic was the truly excellent work he did in setting the stage for architecture that ultimately failed to rise to the challenge his landscapes made. Chief among these works is one of the most assertive works Murase ever did: the stout, basalt Japanese infinity design he created for TriMet to fill Collins Circle at the Southwest 18th and Jefferson Westside MAX station.
The piece only "met its context halfway," according to Greg Baldwin, a prominent local architect with ZGF Partnership. The subsequent designs around it have failed to hold up their side of the bargain in the form, materials and ideas.
"I look at his work in a lot of places, and I wish the architects had done more -- that I had done more," Baldwin said. "There's an intellectual contribution he made with his work that is more profound than its aesthetic contribution. There are deep polemics, but he never imposed them. It's up to the observer to discover them."

It's nice to speak well of the dead, of course, and it's nice to speak well of one's friends, certainly. But that passage is just rich. It really is. Admit the thing is unsuccessful, but lay all the blame on subsequent nearby buildings that didn't measure up to the "challenge". At the time the article was written, the only subsequent nearby building was the adjacent Collins Circle Apartments, so I figure this is what they have in mind. And it's true, the building is a fairly generic, inoffensive affair, a six story red brick apartment building with retail on the bottom. It's not the work of internationally renowned architects, but perhaps because of that, it's also affordable enough that university students can live there. That's not a point to be dismissed out of hand.



Gragg once referred to the circle as "one of the boldest pieces of public art since [Lawrence Halprin's] Lovejoy Fountain.". Which, again, is rich. Longtime readers know I'm a big fan of Lovejoy Fountain, and photos of it show up here all the time. Collins Circle, you're no Lovejoy Fountain.

A 1998 piece about the then-new westside MAX line's public art describes the circle:

Collins Circle, across the street from Goose Hollow Station, was designed as "a gateway to the city." Murase sees the stone-studded traffic circle as a representation of ancient, evolving Oregon landscapes, the boxy stones reminiscent of burial mounds and symbolic of volcanic activity that shaped Eastern Oregon.

"It's a thoughtful place," he said. "It will cause a lot of questions. I like to have people think about it."

In a 1997 overview of the year's "interesting" architecture of the year, the Graggmeister wrote:

The gateway as art
Thought we were just talking about architecture here? Well, an architect wins this category, hands down: Robert Murase for his bracing design of Collins Circle at the crossroads of Southwest 18th Avenue and Jefferson Street and the westside light-rail line. Rendering a spiraling Japanese brush-painting symbol called enso in fractured chunks of basalt, the circle has enough spirituality to lure New Age worshipers on summer mornings. But it has the scale to function as a gateway to the city -- the one of the future rather than the present.

Call me deficient in New Age spirituality if you like (and you'd be right), but a mound of mute stones just doesn't stir my soul much. I look at it, and what I see is a missed opportunity. Somewhere near here, during westside MAX construction, workers uncovered a huge pulley that was once part of Portland's short-lived cable car line. Cable cars once ran from this very spot up into the West Hills, on a long and very steep trestle. The pulley operated a turntable to rotate cars for their next trip up the hill. I wonder if the circle was the site of the turntable, way back when? The story doesn't say exactly, but it seems like a reasonable guess. So some sort of historical, transit-related theme would've been a good fit here.

If you just can't get enough of Gragg's design-junkie blather, he also wrote a whole feature article about the circle back in '97, "The Power of the Graceful Contrast". Towards the bottom, he discloses a controversy about the place:

No less controversial for some was Murase's design for Collins Circle, which had been planted with trees and rhododendrons paid for by local benefactor Mary Beth Collins. Like many recent changes in the city, it was not greeted warmly by many longtime locals.

``The old circle was a nice landscape that Tri Met just scraped away without any public talking to anyone in the neighborhood,'' Portland planner Richard Brainard says. ``You used to come down Canyon Road and the circle marked the beginning of downtown with something green. Now it's just rocks. Bob is a great landscape architect, but the way this was done and the result is just not right.''

Read enough of this and you'll conclude what I concluded a long time ago, that architecture is nothing but the art of creative BS. Master that, and people will let you build anything. You want to sculpt a centaur that looks like Elvis, made out of pure, glowing plutonium? Just memorize a few stock art-world phrases, schmooze with the right movers and shakers, and you'll be good to go. You'll have to design an addition to your house just to hold all the awards your fellow architects will bestow on you. If possible, you'll want to work in a self-conscious small city like Portland, where everyone's been taught that only ignorant Bible-thumping rubes criticize capital-A Art. But I digress.



People who noticed the circle were calling BS on it from the beginning, as you can tell from a 1995 article titled "That Sloping Basalt Feature Will Come Full Circle . . . Eventually". The piece pleaded for patience, at least until MAX construction was completed:

Some people who have glimpsed the sloping basalt feature in the intersection are puzzled: What is it? What is a fortress doing in the middle of the street?

Patience, friends.

When the roadwork is done and the design completed, the image may be more evocative.

The article says the previous landscaping at the circle had been paid for by the Collins Foundation, a local nonprofit, hence the name.

The article also mentions that the sculpture is Not For Climbing. Pedestrians are not wanted here. Or more to the point, I've seen homeless people sleeping among the landscaping in both Ladd Circle and Coe Circle, but not here. Skateboarders are out of luck here, too, come to think of it. You never even see kids playing on it, using it as a play fort or anything. It's entirely uninviting for all of these purposes. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but either way it does a heckuva job.

In fairness, traffic circles are a tough nut, designwise. They tend to be surrounded by a snarl of traffic, so you can't really create them for pedestrians. The Joan of Arc in Coe Circle works - you can see it at a distance, and tell what it is with a glance as you drive by. Likewise with the roses in Ladd Circle. Ladd Circle isn't quite so busy, so you could also walk over to it and look at the roses if you wanted to.

At Collins Circle, half of the circle is busy and half isn't. It wasn't designed for people, but people cut across it all the time anyway, since it's the shortest path between the MAX stop and the sidewalk on SW Jefferson St. You're not really supposed to, but it seems everyone does, and I did when I was taking the photos. It doesn't really catch the eye when you drive past, or ride by on the train. I used to ride right past the thing on the train every day for years and never gave it a second thought. I really never thought about until a week or two ago, while I was searching for anything convenient to add to my ongoing city parks series. It kind of pushes the definition a little, but at least it's conveniently located.

Art people look at the thing and wonder, is it a park, or a sculpture? There's just no end to the art-theory fun you could get out of that question, if you're that sort of person. I wonder the same thing, actually, but for a more mundane, PoliSci-geek reason: Who's in charge of the thing? If some punk kid tags it, which bureaucracy's budget pays to fix it? Some maps, like the city's SW Walking Map, list it as a "Jefferson Street Park", but there's no sign and it's not on the parks bureau's website. The Regional Arts & Culture Council normally takes care of public art, but it's not on their website either. Likewise, TriMet and the city's transportation department also don't claim it.

I tend to focus on parks, historic places and things, local urban legends, social conventions and mores, and such because I'm interested in the shared fabric of the city, the things that make Portland what it is. Why we're not just like L.A. or Atlanta, for instance. I'm not that interested in the official, approved history of the place, and I also shy away from boosterism, whether of the Visitors' Center or "Keep Portland Weird" varieties. I'll make up my own mind, thanks. I occasionally get visitors who freak out when I call BS on some local institution or make snide remarks about the Pearl District or something. But really, how can people say they care about the place but refuse to acknowledge the warts when they crop up? You ignore the warts, you get more warts, and the city you care about loses a little more of what makes it special.

When I see a bungled opportunity like this, it offends me because we really don't have that much common space here, places you can sit and read a book without having to buy a crappy $5 latte, or go for a walk without paying admission. On the very rare occasion that we're creating a park close to the downtown core, the effort ought to be taken a little more seriously than this one was. You don't just pick a well-connected architect and let them have a wank at taxpayer expense, which is basically what the circle is, if you ask me. Somehow we keep ending up with one perplexing conceptual piece after another, while pretending it's all so very sophisticated. As if mystifying the general public was somehow difficult or something. To make it worse, one of the core tenets of the design/architecture world is that once something like this is in place, you can never, ever change anything about it. It's literally set in stone, forever. If you think it'd look better with a reflecting pool at the base, too bad. It wasn't part of the holy original vision, so you're out of luck. Forever. In practice, things do get changed around sometimes, but it's often a long and arduous process. So what you really want to do is get it right the first time. This time we didn't, and now we're stuck with it. Blechhhh.