NE 33rd & Clackamas

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So here are a couple of photos of the sorta-but-not-really city park at NE 33rd & Clackamas, just south of I-84. The city's full of tiny, unmarked, sorta-nondescript city parks -- they're sort of this humble blog's stock in trade, in fact -- but this area's owned by ODOT (the state transportation department). I imagine it was probably acquired as part of a freeway expansion many years ago, and PortlandMaps shows that even now it's still platted out into several house-sized tax lots. If the city owned it there might at least be some swings or a rose garden or something here, but ODOT really isn't into that sort of thing.

In case you're wondering how I even knew this place existed, it was once the subject of an Urban Adventure League picnic (and subsequent blog post) way back in 2007. I didn't actually participate in that, but I ran across it on the net later and figured the place sounded extremely obscure and therefore blog-worthy, and it went on the TODO list, albeit nowhere near the top. And, well, I'm reminded yet again that lots of obscure places and things are obscure for good reason. But hey, this place is finally off my TODO list now. So, mission accomplished and all that.

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.

Marine Drive Trail

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Here are a few photos from along Portland's Marine Drive Trail, on the south shore of the Columbia next to, well, Marine Drive. The trail extends along the river from just west of the airport all the way out to the area of Blue Lake Park, with a couple of gaps here and there. So it surprises me how little info there is about it on the interwebs. Part of this may be due to who owns it: Most of the stretch belongs to the Port of Portland (due I guess to being next to the airport), making it part of their hyper-obscure little park system (see also McCarthy Park and Stanley Park Blocks). The eastern stretch is the "Phiippi Property", another of the assorted park-like bits Metro inherited when they took over the Multnomah County park system back in the 90's. As far as I can tell, neither agency mentions the trail anywhere on their respective websites.

(I later realized there's third stretch of trail further west from these two, extending between the Expo Center and the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge. Most of this stretch is privately owned, though Metro owns the piece closest to the Expo Center.)

There is an upside to this, though. Walking along the trail, you might note it really is just a trail. If the city had put it together, there'd be tedious interpretive signs and fair-to-middlin' quality public art every few feet, and the project would've been vastly more expensive. So it's a nice break, if you aren't in the mood to be lectured again about our collective mystical-yet-gastronomical love of salmon or some such thing.

One downside is that it also feels oddly remote, even though Marine Drive is right next door, on top of the levee. Maybe not the ideal place to be a lone jogger at night. I can't put my finger on why; that's just the vibe I got.

A few links, photos, etc., from across the series of tubes:

• A page including a map at Off-Street Paved Bike Paths in Oregon
• "marine drive bike path" at Mary Anne's Portland Oregon Travel Blog
• "Marine Drive Bike Ride", WierHere Blog
• "The Little List To the Right", Felt Up Tees
• "Sunset Clamshell, Sky Pano" on Flickr
• Apparently there's a Women's Triathlon every year that uses part of the trail.
• Oh, and the inevitable Urban Adventure League post, a few steps ahead of me as always. Bah, humbug.

Johnson Creek Park expedition

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's tiny little Johnson Creek Park, out on the far edge of Sellwood, where it bumps up against Milwaukie.

The somewhat glib, pop-sociological notion at the heart of this post is that this is a spot where the upscale and working class sides of Portland collide. Or at least abut each other. Sellwood is your prototypical gentrified inner SE neighborhood, with twee little boutiques and a Starbucks on every corner. Milwaukie has auto body shops, car dealerships, and the state's vast OLCC distribution warehouse, among other things. That's the usual public perception, anyway. The reality's more complex than that, of course, which is why I said this is a somewhat glib, pop-sociological notion.

Continuing with the notion, this is the spot where Crystal Springs Creek flows into Johnson Creek (see top photo). Just upstream of here on Crystal Springs Creek (i.e. the Sellwood side) are the Rhododendron Garden, Westmoreland Park, and the Eastmoreland golf course. Just upstream on Johnson Creek, meanwhile, is the Acropolis, uh, gentlemen's club.

Furthermore, Johnson Creek bisects the park. The western half is reachable from Sellwood neighborhood streets. It features playground equipment, picnic tables, and guardrails to keep people from messing up the creeks' delicate riparian ecosystem. There's a cute little bridge over Crystal Springs Creek. I think I saw a few interpretive signs, which is always a sure sign you're in a gentrified area.

To get to the eastern side of the park, on the other side of Johnson Creek, you actually have to leave the park, go get on McLoughlin and turn off on SE Clatsop street, a short semi-paved street between two industrial shops. At the end of the street there's a gravel parking area, and no signs indicating this is a park. The park boundary is also Portland city limit, I think, so you actually have to detour through Milwaukie to get there. No playground equipment, no picnic tables or other services, and no guardrails.

The obvious question here is "why isn't there a bridge over the creek?". There's one over Crystal Springs Creek, after all, why not Johnson Creek? Well, it seems there used to be just such a bridge, many moons ago (and I haven't been able to determine exactly how many moons that was). You can still see the foundations of the old bridge, but it seems there hasn't been a functioning bridge here for quite some time, and I haven't come across any indication that there's a new one in the works anytime soon.

This is probably a metaphor for the larger class-divide thing, and it probably says something deep about how the two sides of Portland relate, or fail to relate, to each other. I'm not entirely sure what the message is, but it's bound to mean something...

Even if you don't buy my thesis, and you don't think the park really illustrates much of anything, it's still a pleasant little spot. It's got trees, flowers, burbling creeks, etc., the usual.

Anyway, a quick few links about the place:

• The city's vegetation survey page about the park.
• This post at Urban Adventure League mentions the "lost" east side of the park. Yeah, I know, yet again they were here before me. Oh, well.
• A couple of Sellwood Bee articles about conservation volunteers and a student eco-project.
• A Yelp page with people discussing the place.

Kelley Point expedition

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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



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





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





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

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

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

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

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

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