unflashed

So one of the less fun things about having a blog -- or really any sort of website -- for almost 15 years is having to deal with bit rot periodically, which I just did again over the weekend. You might have seen that Adobe Flash will be officially dead, really most sincerely dead, on December 31st, unsupported by both Adobe and all major browsers. I absolutly approve of this given that Flash was a truly endless source of CVEs over the years; the problem was that there was stil a bunch of old Flash here for me to deal with. Back in the early years of this humble blog, if you needed to embed anything beyond a simple <img>, Flash was almost unavoidable. HTML5 didn't exist, Javascript wasn't up to the job yet, and building it with a Java applet or ActiveX control would have been even worse.

I've always tended to take more photos than will fit comfortably in a blog post, so it was a huge step forward when Flickr added an embeddable slideshow widget; I could just paste that in at the top of a post, embed a map below it, and voila, a long-running formula was born. And of course this new widget was Flash-based. They later replaced that widget with an iframe-based one in 2014, after Flash became nonessential and unpopular, and a couple of years after that they switched to a JS solution for better mobile support. Over time, Chrome and other browsers started turning Flash off by default, in anticipation of killing it off entirely someday, but I never quite got around to going back and un-Flash-ifying all my old Flickr slideshows. I had updated a few when I bumped into them, but were still about 200 of them left on posts in the 2006-2014 timeframe, and it just seemed like a huge hassle and I never got around to it. But like I said, Flash goes away entirely at the end of the year, and I gave myself a TODO item a few months ago to go rescue my poor decaying vintage content before then. I finally made some time over a much-needed staycation that wrapped up last weekend, so I think this long-running corner of the interwebs is now 100% Flash-free.

I figured I needed a way to at least semi-automate this update process so it wouldn't be quite as tedious, and I remembered a little tool I put together some years ago to help generate an embeddable Google map with placemarks for geotagged blog posts. The Map page for this humble log explains in more detail how that process works, which is still sadly not automatic after all these years. Speaking of which, I should probably update that map again while I'm thinking of it. Anyway, since I already had a tool that spoke Blogger's GeoRSS dialect, I figured I'd just adapt it to my new problem. The fastest & most automated way would have been to emit an updated GeoRSS file that I could just re-import over top of the existing blog. I couldn't quite persuade myself to trust that, though, so instead I just had it create a CSV file listing the posts with offending slideshows, along with some generated html for a non-flash replacement slideshow. So at least I only had to open each offending post, paste the new html onto the old slideshow, save, wash, rinse, repeat.

While I was doing that over the course of a few hours, it occurred to me that a lot of those old posts were kind of fun to go back and read, so I added an "unflashed" tag to all those posts I updated, as an easy way to go back and look at a bunch of them at a time. I dunno, I kind of like reminders from thatt distant pre-pandemic era when you could just go outside whenever you wanted, unmasked, and the president was not a malignant orange lunatic who still might kill us all sometime between now and Inauguration Day next year. I also figured this update was worth a blog post, partly due to the trouble I'd gone to, but mostly just to pat myself on the back for finally fixing something I'd been procrastinating over for years. Anyway, have fun & enjoy the old posts if you're interested, or morbidly curious, or whatever.

Pics: Multnomah Falls

About a year ago, I did a post about Shady Creek Falls, the smaller waterfall along the trail up to the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls. I realized at that point that I'd never actually done a dedicated post here about Multnomah Falls, and I semi-promised I'd do one at some point. So I duly created a draft post, added a photoset of all my Multnomah Falls photos (though I had fewer of those than I thought), and... nothing. The falls are one of the state's iconic tourist attractions, and I've had a year to come up with a fresh and interesting perspective on them, and I haven't come up with anything. I'm usually better at dealing with obscure stuff, and I hope that's not just due to the lack of competition. Anyway, like I usually say about famous stuff, you can Google it as well as I can.

If you're from out of town and somehow stumbled on this post among all the Multnomah Falls web pages across the interwebs, be sure to take the Columbia River Highway instead of I-84 if you have time. Quite a few other waterfalls to look at, several of which I like better than Multnomah, to be honest. Latourell Falls might be my favorite, unless maybe it's Elowah Falls. Anyway, be sure to spend lots of money at the Multnomah Falls gift shop while you're there. No sales tax in Oregon, dontcha know.

Memaloose Overlook

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Our next adventure takes us back out to the Columbia Gorge, to the Memaloose Overlook, a scenic spot on the old Columbia River Highway segment between Mosier and Rowena. The overlook takes its name from Memaloose Island, a traditional Indian burial site, which is visible in one of the photos in the slideshow. (If any of these photos look familiar, you win a gold star. Some appeared here once before, back in 2007 when I was just figuring out this blog business.)

This overlook is one piece of Memaloose State Park, which also includes a campground and rest area along Interstate 84. From the park's history page:

The original park tract was 2.64 acres given to the state in 1925 by Roy D. and Bernice M. Chatfield. Situated on what was originally the old Columbia River Highway, the park was called Memaloose Island Overlook. With the reconstruction of the highway, additional private lands were purchased in 1952 and 1953. Land not needed for highway purposes was transferred to the Parks and Recreation Division. The park is named for a nearby island in the Columbia River which was a traditional Indian burial ground. In Chinook language, the word "memaloose" is associated with burial ritual. The most prominent feature on the island is a monument to Victor Trevitt, settler of The Dalles and friend of the Indians who died in 1883 and was buried on Memaloose Island in accordance with his wishes.

Unfortunately Trevitt's gesture (and showy monument) drew public attention to the island. Bone-thieving souvenir hunters soon followed, and local tribes understandably stopped using the island. The Wasco County Historical Society's account states that thieves stripped the island clean of bones -- other than Mr. Trevitt, of course -- while a Friends of the Gorge page indicates that the Corps of Engineers moved 650 skeletons off the island in 1937, just before the island was partially flooded by Bonneville Dam. Both versions of the story indicate Trevitt is now alone on the island, as far as anyone knows.

MLK/Grand Ave. Viaduct

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The next installment in the ongoing bridge project is only sort of a bridge, but it's right in town and convenient to get to, so I figured I'd include it. Starting a few blocks south of the Hawthorne Bridge, MLK and Grand Avenues travel on a raised viaduct until near the Ross Island Bridge, crossing over a large industrial area and several railroad lines (as well as the upcoming MAX Orange Line). The current viaduct opened in 2011, replacing a circa-1937 viaduct designed by Conde McCullough, the state's well-known chief bridge engineer during that era.

I'd vaguely intended to go walk across the old viaduct before it was too late, but I never quite got around to it. Which is a shame, because it would have made for some interesting photos. This was one of the main highways into Portland before Interstate 5 went in, so the old viaduct was a high profile project and it was built with some interesting architectural details, including the (mostly unused) grand staircases around the bridge piers. McCullough's Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport has similar staircases, but it's not clear why they were deemed necessary here, since this has long been an industrial area without a lot of pedestrians. The new viaduct doesn't have similar stairs, probably for ADA or bike reasons since it does have ramps in a couple of spots.

I've been told that there was once a great view of downtown Portland from the old viaduct, before the view was blocked by the ugly Marquam Bridge in the early 1960s. That was well before my time, but it reminds me of when the KOIN Center blocked the view of Mt. Hood from the Vista Tunnels. There was a lot of public unhappiness about that, but Portland doesn't have strong regulations protecting specific views like that, so legally there wasn't much anyone could do about it. There are number of vintage photos of the old viaduct on the net if you're curious about it, such as these four photos from AncientFaces.com

(Note that the old viaduct is often referred to as the "Union Avenue viaduct", that being the old name of MLK before the street was renamed in the 1980s. For what it's worth, the city of Tacoma has or had a similar-looking Union Avenue Viaduct dating to about the same era.)

By the early 2000s the old viaduct was sagging and cracking, and the state decided it had to be replaced, not repaired. Unfortunately the replacement effort took twice as long and cost three times as much as planned, largely due to building on unstable ground. Turns out the whole SE industrial area is built on a former wetland area, which was filled in with old sawdust from the enormous sawmills that once stood here. Historical accounts refer to an enormous mountain of sawdust here back when the mills were in operation; a Cafe Unknown article includes a photo showing sawdust hills on the waterfront as late as 1940. In some areas there is reportedly a 66' deep layer of sawdust below ground. That's feet, not inches. I find that hard to imagine, but news accounts insist it's true.

Some items on the new viaduct and its long and complicated genesis:

• Willamette Week: "Why the New Grand Avenue/MLK Viaduct Feels Like a Rollercoaster"
• ODOT viaduct replacement project
• Tribune: SE Portland transportation history
• Portland Architecture post about the design
• DJC project delayed by 'surprises'
• Oregonian on project delays
• East PDX News on traffic changes due to the new viaduct.

So what's it like to walk across the semi-shiny new viaduct? Not great, I'm afraid. There's a sidewalk, obviously, but you're obviously on the side of a highway here: Heavy, fast-moving traffic, with lots of trucks. I didn't see any other pedestrians or even bikes while I walked across, and the collection of road garbage along the sidewalk indicates they don't come by and clean it very often. Which is disappointing considering this is a new structure. If the city of Portland had built it, rather than ODOT, there would at least be modern bike lanes, and maybe a guardrail between traffic and the sidewalk. Although it would have also been even more expensive, and the city could easily have failed to get the job done at all.

Gabriel Park expedition

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So here's a photoset from Southwest Portland's Gabriel Park, a place I've been meaning to visit for a while now. At around 90 acres it's one of Portland's largest city parks, and it has a little of everything: Ball fields, tennis courts, a skate park, at least one playground, a community garden, an off-leash dog area, a large indoor rec center with a pool, and a large forested area centered around Vermont Creek, with a network of hiking trails.

The last time I was here was wayyy back in high school, in the mid-1980s. I was on the cross country team, and Gabriel Park was our home course, so I was here all the time. Thinking back, I remembered the park as a place of endless hills, and endless tree roots poking up in paths, ready to grab the ankles of the unwary, and people passing me, and my shins hurting a lot. It's possible my memories of the place are not entirely objective.

I'm still not sure how I ended up on the cross country team. High school gym class began the year with a week or two of running at various distances, which I think was a disguised tryout. The coach asked me to join the team based on my mile time. The only problem is that, looking back, it's possible I may have favorably (and accidentally) misremembered my time. I can't be sure because I have no recollection of what my time actually was. In any case, once I was on the team I wasn't very fast, and I also wasn't very tough, and I tended to either quit or finish in the bottom 25%, and I never quite made it out of "junior varsity" purgatory. But we were a small private school, with a small and barely funded team, and I guess they couldn't afford to cut me entirely. I even scored a letter out of it. I think I still have it somewhere, in fact, but I never ordered a letterman jacket to go with it. I was pretty sure at the time I hadn't earned any sort of athletic recognition, and I'm still pretty sure that's true. I suppose the main value of it to me, at the time, was convincing my parents I wasn't just a basement-dwelling computer dweeb.

In any case, a few months ago I was in the area and had a camera with me, and I thought I'd take a look around. Not because I was feeling sentimental or nostalgic or anything, but just to see what it looked like without anyone yelling at me to hurry up and run faster, dammit. Parts of the forest looked sort of familiar, and I think the usual finish line was somewhere around where the skate park is now. Contrary to what I remembered, the trails were actually quite nice, and I'm not sure where that memory about tree roots came from. The more I think about it, it's possible there may have been one single tree root that I tangled with on every lap through the forest. That sounds like something awkward teenage me would have managed to do.

A few things have changed since those days. The pool and skate park both arrived some time after 1985, and there are now substantial areas of the forest fenced off in the name of water quality and environmental restoration. The fencing is a fairly recent development. Vermont Creek has the same water quality issues as other urban streams around the area, and it's part of the Fanno Creek watershed, which gets it an additional degree of attention from the city. As a result, Gabriel Park has had a riparian zone protection project beginning in 2004 (that's the fencing-stuff-off project) and ongoing stormwater retrofitting efforts. And because this is an earnest do-gooding SW Portland neighborhood, there's a Friends of Vermont Creek connected to the local neighborhood association, with all sorts of volunteer opportunities etc.

One might expect that a city park this big would date back to the pioneer era, back before big parcels of land were subdivided and broken up. Gabriel Park is relatively new, though. It's far enough from the city center that the area was still semi-rural when the land was acquired in October 1950. The land wasn't actually within city limits at the time, but the city was planning to expand westward anyway, saw a large undeveloped parcel for sale, and jumped at the chance, so for a while the city owned a park outside city limits (similar to Elk Rock Island & the Kerr Property today). The city paid $120,000 for the land, which is about $1.1M in today's dollars, which seems like a very reasonable price for 87 acres this close to downtown Portland. As for the name, part of the site was then known as "Gabriel Acres" and owned by Margaret Gabriel. I was kind of hoping there would be an interesting story behind the name, but that doesn't seem to have been the case here.

In 1952, the city was looking around for a new location to replace the original city zoo, which was located near the reservoirs in lower Washington Park. Gabriel Park was a leading candidate to host the new zoo. The eventual winner, of course, was a location elsewhere in Washington Park, a location then known as the "West Slope golf course site". Other proposed locations included the wetlands at Oaks Bottom; a portion of the old Vanport City site; and "Camp's Butte", the old name of today's Powell Butte. At the time, Gabriel Park would have been a reasonable site for a new zoo, although the visitor traffic would have required a very different street network than what the area has today.

Anyway, here's an assortment of other links about the park from around the interwebs.

• A January 2013 visit here at Exploring Portland's Natural Areas, a site by @darwinsbulldog
• A set of late summer photos at southeast main
• A Red Electric post about graffiti & cell phone towers in the park.
• Portland Upside article on community gardens around the city, including the very large one in Gabriel Park
• An article about a 2005 rally against skinheads who wanted to rock-leaflet the neighborhood
• Explore Portland photos of the park's little apple orchard
• Oregon Digital photo of a college-level cross country race here in 1979. The picture shows a U of O runner, and doesn't explain why the race was being held in Portland. I would guess that Portland State, or maybe one of the local private colleges, may have had a cross country team at the time, back during the heyday of the whole running and fitness craze.

Winthrop Square, Charlestown, Boston

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When I was in Boston a while back, I spent a few days wandering around the city taking in the standard tourist sites. At one point I crossed a bridge over to the Charlestown neighborhood, first to see the historic USS Constitution, and then the Bunker Hill Monument. On the way uphill to the monument, I ran across a small, shady city park with a statue in the middle. So I took a couple of quick photos before continuing on. This park is called either "Winthrop Square" or "The Training Field". The name situation is a little confusing here. Wikipedia isn't helpful in this case; its measly Winthrop Square article is a short disambiguation page, pointing at three different parks in the Boston area, none of which are the one here. So in addition to this place, there's a Winthrop Square in the downtown Financial District, and others in Cambridge and Brookline. And none of these parks have their own Wikipedia articles. The city's recent "Cultural Landscape Plan" for the park splits the difference and calls it "Training Field / Winthrop Square". As far as I know this is the only Winthrop Square within the Charlestown neighborhood, though, so hopefully the title of this post points at one place and one place only.

If my past record with Boston posts holds up, I'll get at least one irate commenter here pointing out that I've gotten it all wrong. Inevitably it will turn out that both "Training Field" and "Winthrop Square" are official legal names that nobody ever uses, and the actual name in use is something else entirely, something I could never figure out by googling the place since locals never utter it online where outsiders could see it. Or possibly there are multiple unofficial names, and the one you use indicates what part of town you're from, or which pilgrim ship your great-great-etc.-grandparents came over on, or your side in a centuries-old blood feud dating back to the old country, or something like that. Or possibly it really is called "Winthrop Square" and the irate commenter is just here to heap random abuse on a random outsider purely for the lulz, which I understand is a traditional and beloved Boston pastime. Which is kind of weird since everyone I encountered in Boston was actually really nice in person, at least really nice by Portland standards. I don't claim to understand this phenomenon; I just hope I got the name right this time.

The next surprising thing about the park is that last year marked the very first ever archeological dig here. One would think that in a city full of universities and history nuts, at some point someone would have wondered what might be underground here. Apparently nobody ever got around to looking until now, though. The article mentions the city thinks the park might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, seeing as it's been a city park since the 1850s, and served on and off as a militia training ground for over two centuries before that. I'm no historian, but I think they have a fair shot at landing that historic designation, if they play their cards just right.

Third mildly odd thing: The park's named for Gov. John Winthrop, who governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s and 1640s. The statue here is not of him, though. It's a Civil War memorial called either the Soldiers Monument or Soldiers and Sailors Monument, depending on who you ask. Which is not to be confused with the much larger Solders and Sailors Monument in Boston Common. Meanwhile, it turns out that the Winthrop Square in the Financial District also features a statue, and it's not of Gov. Winthrop either, but rather of Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns was Plan B after the square's developers tried and failed to obtain a historic Winthrop statue owned by a historic Unitarian church in the Back Bay. I think I've located it in Google Street View here; if it's the right statue, it seems to be a bit on the small side, and would probably look out of place in any sort of grand monument.

I mean, this is all assuming the park in Charlestown is named after this one particular Winthrop. At this point I'm not willing to assume that as an undisputed fact. It could just as easily be named after Jezebekiah Winthrop, a mad industrialist and warlock of the early 19th Century, uniquely feared for both his work with electricity and his knowledge of arcane manuscripts, and the heavy monument actually exists to seal an interdimensional portal he created, and there's a very, very good reason everyone's avoided disturbing the soil here until now. I'm not saying I know this to be the case, obviously. I'm just saying that if an army of steampunk golems emerges from beneath Charlestown to spread havoc and mayhem, well... I'm just saying there were certain potential warning signs.

Boston Common

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A couple of summers ago, I spent a week in Boston on a business trip, and managed to find a little time here and there to take some tourist photos. Actually a lot of tourist photos, such that I'm still slowly sorting through them and putting together new blog posts every so often. I walked through Boston Common a couple of times; it's a sprawling park in the middle of the city, across the street from the state capitol building, and I always seemed to end up back there after wandering around the city's mazelike streets. Which I suppose is better than running into the municipal minotaur or something.

Long story short, I was there and took a few photos. A few have showed up here previously, in posts about the Brewer Fountain near the eastern edge of the park, and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on a high point toward the park's center, as well as the Boston Public Garden next door. I still had a bunch of photos from here and there around the park, so I figured another slideshow was in order. Et voilà.

La Rivière

A few months ago I had a series of post about the art outside the Portland Art Museum. I actually still have a couple of those left to do. Our next installment is La Rivière (1943) by the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, one of a pair of giant bronze Maillol nudes flanking the museum's main entrance. Their presence here is a fairly new development, both sculptures having arrived in the last decade or so. It strikes me as a little odd and retro to do this in the early 21st Century. I don't know whether it necessarily rises to the dreaded "problematic" or "reactionary", but the two Maillols do make it pretty clear that the visitor isn't entering a museum of contemporary art.

So the museum context is kind of weird, but taken by themselves I rather like the two Maillols, the dynamic La Rivière and the placid, posed La Montagne. Even better, from a blog standpoint, there's some rather fascinating history to relate about them.

As with many of Maillol's best-known works, the model for La Rivière was Dina Vierny, who also modeled for Henri Matisse and other prominent French artists, although she worked primarily with Maillol until his death in 1944. Matisse and others encouraged her to get into the business side of the art world, and after World War II she became a prominent art dealer and collector, eventually opening a museum dedicated to Maillol and his work. NPR had an entertaining interview with her in December 2008, in which (among other things) she explained that the nude modeling was originally her idea, and she had to persuade the shy (and elderly) Maillol to do it. When Vierny died in 2009, media outlets including the New York Times and The Guardian published lengthy obits. The NYT piece noted that during World War II (and while modeling for La Rivière) Vierny worked with the French Resistance, guiding refugees over mountain paths in the Pyrenees and helping them escape into neutral Spain. She was captured twice, was acquitted once, and was released the second time after Maillol somehow persuaded Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor, to intercede on her behalf.

La Rivière is one of Maillol's most famous works, and naturally this is not the only copy of it in existence. New York's Museum of Modern Art has one, as does the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Other copies are located in Zurich; St. Louis, MO; and Pasadena, CA. In 2013, a copy from Vierny's collection sold for $8.2M. The MoMA page about La Rivière has a couple of paragraphs about it, originally excerpted from a book of museum highlights:

The daring instability and torsion of The River are rare in Maillol's sculpture. Instead of trying to emulate the dynamism of twentieth-century life, as did so many artists of his time, Maillol usually sought an art of serenity and stillness, of classical nobility and simplicity. As late as 1937, in fact, he remarked, "For my taste, there should be as little movement as possible in sculpture." Yet within a year or so afterward he had conceived The River, a work in which the movement is almost reckless.

Commissioned to create a monument to a notable pacifist, the French writer Henri Barbusse, Maillol conceived the sculpture as a work on the theme of war: a woman stabbed in the back, and falling. When the commission fell through, he transformed the idea into The River. In a departure from the usual conventions of monumental sculpture, the figure lies low to the ground and rests apparently precariously on the pedestal, even hanging below its edge. Twisting and turning, her raised arms suggesting the pressure of some powerful current, this woman is the personification of moving water.

I haven't come across anyone mentioning this, but I have to wonder whether the precarious pose is a reference to Vierny's dangerous Resistance work. It just seems like it would be difficult to work on something like this and not see the obvious analogy.

Curiously, the Portland Art Museum's website doesn't mention anything about the statues out front, and I have yet to figure out exactly how they came by the Maillol duo, whether they were purchased, donated, or loaned, or from whom, or when. (The museum's online catalog lists six other Maillol sculptures & drawings, but nothing about the giant ones outside.) I did find a couple of old Oregonian articles that pass along a remarkable historical anecdote, though. Among the many people Vierny helped to escape the Nazis was a young girl named Vera Pistrak, who grew up to be Vera Katz, Oregon House Speaker and three-term Mayor of Portland.

Harold Kelley Plaza

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Here are a few photos of Harold Kelley Plaza, the little brick mini-park at NE 42nd & Sandy. It was created in 1984 when the city closed off a short stretch of Hancock St. This was intended as a traffic improvement, to help sort out one of the many awkward intersections caused by Sandy's uneven diagonal course through the Portland street grid. The city decided to create a public plaza here instead of just vacating the right of way for real estate development; at the time the central Hollywood District had no public open space at all, and even now this tiny plaza is the only one. And even this isn't really a city park; it's still legally the Hancock St. right-of-way, so I'm not sure who's in charge of trimming the trees and emptying the trash cans.

The plaza was soon named in honor of Harold Kelley, longtime owner of a nearby appliance store, head of the local booster association, and unofficial "Mayor of the Hollywood District".

The triangular mini-block between the plaza and Sandy Boulevard is home to one tiny building, the historic Hollywood Burger Bar. I've never been there, but a post at Portland Hamburgers says it's been there since the 1950s, and the building was originally built as a streetcar ticket kiosk.

The plaza features a gold star design on the 42nd side of the plaza, because of the whole Hollywood thing. Strangely enough, the neighborhood apparently takes its name from the nearby historic rococo movie palace. It used the name first, and the neighborhood around the Hollywood Theater eventually became known as the Hollywood District. It's an unusual way to name a neighborhood, but hey.

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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Next up, a photoset of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall, which extends west from the Public Garden through the Back Bay neighborhood. I wandered along the central mall for a while, taking photos of the over-the-top houses and churches on either side. I'm not sure what we're looking at here; I found a page documenting every building along the avenue, but I haven't gone through to figure out which ones I have photos of. That part is left as an exercise for the reader (he said lazily/hopefully).

It was a very hot day, and eventually I wandered off to find a Starbucks for an iced coffee like a good West Coast tourist, and fortunately there was one a couple of blocks south(ish) on swanky Newbury Street, and ended up walking along over there instead. I feel compelled to explain that I normally avoid Starbucks, but I wasn't sure whether there was iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts (which is essentially the competing coffee behemoth in New England), and I needed a cold but very caffeinated beverage right then thanks to jet lag.

I had a theory -- and I think I mentioned it in a previous Boston post -- that perhaps Commonwealth Avenue was an inspiration for Portland's Park Blocks, since Portland was founded by a bunch of New Englanders, and the city itself would have been named "Boston" if a coin flip had gone the other way. The dates don't bear this theory out though. The South Park Blocks were dedicated in 1852, while Commonwealth Avenue was designed in 1856, and long tree-lined parks like this were simply the vogue at the time, popular among major cities as well as muddy little pioneer towns with big dreams. An architecture guide to the city calls it the "French Boulevard style". 1856 seems like a surprisingly recent date for central Boston, until you remember that the whole Back Bay area was an actual bay until it was filled in during the 1850s. As a West Coast tourist, knowing that makes me worry the ground here will basically liquefy if there's ever an earthquake, like what happened to SF's Marina District back in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Apparently Boston doesn't get earthquakes, though. At least as far as they know.

Brewer Fountain, Boston Common

Couple of photos of the Brewer Fountain in Boston Common, an ornate 19th century concoction that was recently restored to working order. There was a little stand next to it encouraging people to slow down and sit and read one of the free books, and more than a few people had taken them up on the offer. I'm not sure that would work in Portland. Maybe if you stocked it with graphic novels, so long as they're the cool kind, whatever that is.

Wikipedia says there are at least sixteen other copies of this fountain around the world, including ones in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. I occasionally go on about doing a project around visiting every copy of something or other. The Fremiet Joan of Arc would involve a lot of traveling around France, plus trips to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which would be ok. The itinerary for The Ideal Scout would spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering around rural Pennsylvania, which is less of a welcome prospect. Visiting the Brewer Fountain's siblings would be one of the better trips; a page about another copy in Tacna, Peru lists additional known copies in Australia, Chile, Quebec City, Liverpool, four around France, two in Lisbon, and others in Geneva and Valencia. So that sounds like it would be ok, so far as silly projects go.

This fountain dates back to a time when all fountains were expected to come encrusted with mythological characters; cherubs, naiads, mermen, and whatnot. I was going to propose a glib theory that this was because running water was a rare and precious novelty back then, and fountains got the mythology treatment because they were a very big deal. I'm not sure this checks out though. The fountain went live in 1868, and Boston's first waterworks dates all the way back to 1652, over two centuries earlier, so I'm not sure the chronology lines up on this idea. It's also possible this mythological stuff was simply the fashion for a while, and eventually people tired of it and went on to do something else instead.

MLK Gateway Plaza

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Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE Grand Ave. & Hancock St, the point where two-way MLK splits into southbound MLK and northbound Grand Avenue. The traffic shift creates a couple of awkward (and unbuildable) triangles of land, which the city's tried to do various things with over the years. Most recently, it's been transformed into something the city calls the "Gateway and Heritage Markers Project" The skinny south corner of the main triangle is landscaped with some sort of tufted grass, I think to discourage people from walking through it. The triangle's divided by a curved metal mesh wall, maybe 7'-8' high, with an inspirational MLK quote facing Grand Avenue, in a font that makes it look vaguely like a Nike ad. The north side is a small concrete pedestrian plaza with displays about Oregon African-American history.

The design of the place is odd for Portland, seemingly designed for the benefit of passing motorists rather than pedestrians. The project was put together by the city's transportation bureau and this isn't technically a city park, which might explain the vehicular orientation of the place. The design drew complaints over the lack of sidewalks; apparently the city felt there were some unsafe pedestrian crossings here, and set out to discourage people from crossing the street in these spots rather than figuring out how to make them safer.

The one-way couplet of Grand Ave. and Union Ave. (the previous name of MLK) was announced in August 1957, and the change went into effect in January 1958. Initially this involved northbound drivers making two 90 degree turns, a left from Grand onto NE Hancock and then a right onto northbound MLK. In 1978 the city bought up the car lot on this block and created today's angled arrangement. This was part of the same project that created a landscaped median along the two-way portion of MLK, while eliminating much of the on-street parking along the street. This design has been widely regarded as a disaster, one that killed off many of the businesses along the street and made the street into a sort of neighborhood barrier since there were very few intersections where cars or pedestrians could cross it. They've worked to mitigate this in recent years, but it's hampered by the fact that MLK is a state highway (OR 99), and ODOT hates traffic lights and anything else that would prevent semis from barreling along city streets as fast as possible.

I ran across a pair of city planning documents from when the Transportation Bureau had to get design approval to proceed with the redesign. One mentions that the original design included additional heritage markers up and down MLK north of here, but noted there was no funding in place to actually do this.

Architects and designers love talking about places as "gateways". That often seems to be meaningless professional jargon, but this spot really is a sort of gateway, or at least historically it's been one. Before gentrification took hold in Northeast Portland, it was at least symbolically an entrance to the only majority-black neighborhood in the city. Growing up out in sheltered 1970s Portland suburbia, I can distinctly recall being cautioned to never ever go north of this spot because it "wasn't safe". Now it's more of a gateway from one trendy hipster neighborhood to another, yoga studios and artisanal coffee roasters as far as the eye can see.

Weather Machine

If you've ever been in Portland's Weather Machine in Pioneer Courthouse Square at precisely noon, you may have noticed the square's Weather Machine. It's the tall column next to Starbucks, and at noon it wakes up, plays a fanfare, spins around a bit, and pops up a sculpture based on the next day's predicted weather. Its Smithsonian inventory page explains:

A tall pole topped with a sphere containing three weather symbols that represent typical weather conditions in the Portland area. Each day at noon there is a two-minute sequence of music and the weather symbols appear --Helia (A stylized sun, for clear sunny days); Blue Heron (For the days of drizzle, mist and transitional weather); Dragon (For stormy days of heavy rain and winds.

Apparently the weather forecast part involves someone in the square office calling the national weather service and asking. Or at least historically that's been the case; you'd think this could be automated. It's fun to imagine the phone conversations though. I imagine the same two people having a routine phone call every morning since 1986 or so. Maybe there's small talk, maybe they've become lifelong friends through the weather machine. Or maybe it's a brief cryptic conversation every day, a voice you've heard every day for 25 years and know nothing about. Or maybe they've grown to resent each other and this daily chore over the years, and it's an "Oh, it's you again" sort of conversation.

Will Martin, the square's overall designer, thought the place needed a whimsical "weather machine", but he died in a tragic plane crash before he could explain what he had in mind. The city got as far as designing the pillar here, and then held a design competition to decide what sort of weather contraption. to put on top of it. Here's a timeline, via the library's Oregonian newspaper archives:

• Competition announced August 1985
• The paper's art critic's take on it, with a mention of a copyright stipulation on the thing, to prevent the winning artist from creating an identical weather machine elsewhere.
• 33 designs submitted, including "Will's Wacky Weather World" which was same basic idea as the final product, but with more elaborate gadgetry, and photovoltaic power
• A letter from Terrence O'Donnell pointing out it was originally his idea, not Will Martin's, despite the Oregonian presenting Martin as the sole genius behind the square
• The competition was narrowed to 2 finalists by February 1986
• The winning design was selected in April 1986
• The first public model was unveiled April 11th
• The finished product was finally unveiled in August 1988
• A follow up article on September 1st noted that the machine is technically able to play at other times besides noon, but doing so would violate the city's noise ordinance, whereas playing at the strike of noon does not.

Princess Ka'iulani Statue

In the middle of Waikiki, at the intersection of Kuhio and Kanekapolei, is a small plaza with a statue of Crown Princess Victoria Ka'iulani, a niece of Queen Lili'uokalani and the last heir to the throne of Hawaii. (Smithsonian Magazine and SFGate have good articles about her short, tragic life.)

The Honolulu city arts page for the statue has a brief description:

A Sculpture by Jan Gordon Fisher. Larger than life-size bronze figure of Princess Kaiulani with a peacock at her feet, eating from her hand. Located at Kaiulani Park.

The statue's location wasn't chosen at random, or for the convenience of tourists. A Hawaii for Visitors page about the statue mentions that the little park is on the site of ʻĀinahau, Ka'iulani's home, which was demolished in 1955 in the name of progress. Oddly enough the statue was commissioned by Outrigger Enterprises, a local hotel chain.

Fisher (an art professor at the Brigham Young Hawaii campus) also created the Duke Kahanamoku statue elsewhere in Waikiki; I don't have a photo of it because it's usually mobbed by tourists. Tourists seem to generally ignore this statue, but locals regularly adorn it with fresh leis, as a gesture of respect and remembrance.

Soldiers & Sailors Monument, Boston Common

A few photos of Boston's Soldiers and Sailors Monument, atop a low hill in the middle of Boston Common. It's a big allegorical Civil War memorial, like the later and more ornate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Cleveland's Public Square. A page at Celebrate Boston describes the monument's allegorical odds and ends and what they all represent. CT Monuments laments graffiti and vandalism at the monument, and points out a nearby World War I monument made from a converted sea mine, which I'm quite sorry I didn't notice when I was there. Historical Digression talks about the monument a bit and moves on to Martin Milmore, its sculptor. Milmore died young at age 38, and was memorialized by Daniel Chester French's famous Death and the Sculptor, which may actually be better known than Milmore himself these days. French is best known for his Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, and he also created the Minute Man statue at the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA.

Public Art Boston's info page for the monument notes that "In honoring ordinary soldiers and sailors, rather than military leaders, this work set an important precedent adopted by the designers of subsequent memorials." and points out that it's available for "adoption" in the city's Adopt-a-Statue program.

On the point about this memorial defining a style for future ones, I came across a paper in the Spring 1988 Journal of American Culture, "Martin Millmore's Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on the Boston Common: Formulating Conventionalism in Design and Symbolism". It looks interesting but unfortunately it's paywalled, and I'm not a Real Historian who can get it through a university library, and JSTOR does't have it, so -- peon that I am -- I can only see the first page. So this is the part where I put in a plug for Open Access publishing. Here's the first paragraph, in the spirit of fair use, since that hasn't been abolished yet:

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on the Boston Common, designed by Martin Millmore and erected 1870-1877, is one of several types of memorials elevated after the Civil War. The characteristics of this monument, its configuration and iconography, were influenced by popular ideas and eclectic stylistic trends in post-Civil War America. The shaping of this type of monument was especially influenced by the popular tastes of the period. An analysis of the style, sources, and imagery of the design offers insight into the ideologies, the formulating conventions of the age, and the role of the artist in satisfying the prevalent demand for military monuments as art within the public domain.

Without really intending to, I've ended up with a handful of posts here about Civil War memorials. Beyond this one and the one in Cleveland, I've also got Southern contributions to the genre in Edgefield, SC and Tupelo, MS, as well as Portland's own very humble contribution, a couple of puny surplus cannons in Lownsdale Square. So I figured I'd go ahead and add a "civil war" post tag, so it's one stop shopping for visitors who just can't get enough of the Civil War for whatever reason. I don't get that, personally, but I like to feel I'm providing a valuable service here, even when I find it inexplicable.

Ala Wai Park & Canal

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Today's tropical adventure takes us to Honolulu's Ala Wai Canal and the adjacent city park & golf course. The canal surrounds Waikiki on three sides, separating it from the rest of the city. Until the 1920s, Waikiki was a low, swampy area. The canal was built for drainage, and was originally supposed to cut all the way through and make Waikiki an island. This had the lucrative and not entirely accidental side effect of making Waikiki prime real estate.

Unfortunately the canal's become famous for poor water quality and environmental problems; it's even been dubbed "Hawaii's Biggest Mistake" in some quarters. In 2006, major flooding caused a sewer line failure, resulting in millions of gallons of raw sewage being dumped into the canal. Several days later, a man fell into the canal, developed a massive bacterial infection, and died. So yeah, not so great. An ugly black emergency pipe installed after the floods was only just removed last May after a permanent replacement for the failed sewer line came online.

Despite all that, the canal is a popular rowing venue. I suppose because Hawaii doesn't have a lot of calm inland bodies of water, so it's either row here or row in the ocean.

The park is nice. When I visited it was full of joggers, kids at baseball practice, rowing clubs, people just enjoying the afternoon, and very few tourists. I don't think tourists cross the canal very often, and the park seems to cater to locals almost exclusively. It even has a huge community garden, for high rise dwellers who don't have room for their own gardens. The Diamond Head side of the park is a municipal golf course, unfortunately. Or fortunately, if you insist on playing golf for some reason.

Winter Column

Today's object from outside the art museum is Winter Column, by Hilda Morris, who also created Ring of Time, the "Guardian of Forever"-like ring outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings.

I realize it's abstract midcentury art, and speculating about what it's supposed to "look like" is the mark of an uncultured barbarian. But it does look a lot like an inverted tree root, torn out of the ground, like something you'd see in a clear cut, or floating down the Willamette after a winter storm. Ring of Time has the same rough organic look to it; it's easy to forget these are metal objects. Morris wasn't the only midcentury Portland artist to do this, and I've said once or twice that Frederic Littman's look just isn't my cup of tea. Somehow Morris's rough organic look works, where Littman's doesn't, at least to my barbarian eyes.

Brushstrokes

Today's installment in the ongoing "art outside the Portland Museum" series is the largest and probably newest of the lot. Brushstrokes is the enormous, brightly colored Roy Lichtenstein sculpture outside the museum's north building (the old Masonic temple). It's right on the Park Blocks in front of the building, it's painted in bright primary colors, and it's about 30 feet tall. You can't miss it.

Brushstrokes is part of a larger series of paintings and sculptures made beginning in the mid-1960s. Portland's Brushstrokes was created in 1996, making it one of Lichtenstein's last works. The series began with paintings in LIchtenstein's unique style, like the ones at the Tate in London, and at MoMA in NYC. The sculptures came later, starting in the 1980s, and were inspired by the earlier paintings. An art museum in the Hamptons has a pair of Tokyo Brushstrokes sculptures on display. The Getty has Three Brushstrokes, and the New Orleans Museum of Art recently acquired a Five Brushstrokes. Brown University appears to have another copy of the same Brushstrokes that Portland has. There was even a Brushstrokes chair and ottoman, circa 1986-88. The New Orleans story has a good explanation of what motivated the Brushstrokes series:

Roy Lichtenstein, who was born in 1923, made his mark on art history in the rock 'n' roll era. At the time, highly emotional paintings by abstractionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were the rage. Lichtenstein’s approach couldn’t have been more different. He imitated the lowbrow illustrations in comic books with a meticulous, passionless painting style. The impersonal, melodramatic comic book cells that he reproduced seemed to mock the earnest emotionalism of the self-involved abstract painters that came before him.

To put an even finer point on his dryly humorous commentary, Lichtenstein created deadpan close-up paintings of drippy action-packed brush strokes – just the sort of fevered brush strokes that Pollock and De Koonig had made famous. Lichtenstein re-imagined some of those satirical brush strokes in three dimensions – “Five Brushstrokes” is an example.

Benson Bridge

You might recall I've been doing a series lately about historic bridges along the Columbia River Highway. Today's installment takes us to by far the most photographed of them all. This, of course, is the Benson Bridge, the famous footbridge at Multnomah Falls, as seen in every Oregon calendar ever created, and every tourist guide to Portland ever written. The bridge carries a hiking trail that continues on to the top of the falls, although casual tourists often stop and turn around here.

The bridge was in the news back in January when it was damaged and temporarily closed by a falling boulder, and the bridge is still closed as I'm writing this. These photos were taken well before the big boulder crash, so you can see what it's supposed to look like, and hopefully will look like again soon.

The bridge was designed by Karl P. Billner, who also designed many of the road bridges along the old highway, including the ones at Shepperds Dell and Latourell Falls. So although the Benson Bridge obviously isn't part of the highway, it shares what today would be called a common design language: They share the basic concrete deck arch design, and even the railing style is the same as the other bridges. To my untrained eyes it looks like a scaled-down copy of the Shepperds Dell bridge, but its Historical American Engineering Record entry explains it has a variety of unique features, things that you probably have to be a practicing civil engineer to really appreciate.

I've always been curious whether the bridge was controversial when it first went in. Multnomah Falls was already a famous scenic landmark at the time, and adding a bridge significantly altered its appearance. If there wasn't already a bridge here in 2014, and someone proposed building one, it would be hugely controversial and I can almost guarantee you the plan wouldn't go through. I checked the Multnomah County Library's Oregonian database in case there were any nervous editorials or outraged letters to the editor. I haven't come across any, however, and I think I understand why not.

The key detail is that when the bridge was built, starting in August 1914, the land around the falls was still owned by Simon Benson, a local timber baron and philanthropist. He's probably best known for donating the Benson Bubbler drinking fountains located around downtown Portland, and he's appeared here before in connection with the Benson Tower, a recent condo tower on the original site of his downtown mansion, which was relocated to the PSU campus some years ago. Benson would soon donate the area to the City of Portland, but when the bridge was built, Multnomah Falls was still Benson's personal waterfall and legally he could pretty much do whatever he wanted with it. Since he happened to be in a philanthropic sort of mood, he paid for the bridge himself and somehow borrowed the state's highway engineers to design it.

The actual construction was subcontracted out to R.L. Ringer, who also built the Crown Point Viaduct up around the Vista House. Ringer apparently took a great deal of pride in his work here, and secretly left his name and the date in the wet concrete, with the idea that he probably ought to sign his masterpiece. His superiors later ordered him to cover it up, which he did... with clay that matched the surrounding concrete. So when he checked back a year or so later, the clay had worn off and the initials were exposed again. Subsequent restoration efforts (including a major restoration in 1987, and a smaller effort as recently as 2012) have been careful to preserve this inscription. I'm not sure where exactly it's located on the bridge; hopefully it survived the recent boulder incident.

The bridge's resemblance to the highway's bridges gave at least one person the wrong idea. There was a strange incident in 1932 in which someone drove a tiny Austin 7 automobile up the Multnomah Falls trail and photographed it parked on the bridge. I wouldn't believe it without photos, and even with them I'm still kind of incredulous. The way the car's facing suggests Mr. C.W. West of Portland managed to drive up to the bridge and across it, then turned around somewhere and did this photo shoot on the way back to the lodge. The caption's written as if this was just an amusing stunt someone pulled on a lark, and there's no mention of anyone being arrested over this, or even park rangers wringing their hands and telling the damn fool public to knock it off fer chrissakes.

Anyway, because I am a dork, I always get that one Enya song from Fellowship of the Ring stuck in my head when I see this bridge. You know the one:

Thomas Square, Honolulu

While I was wandering around Honolulu a few months ago, I happened to walk past Thomas Square, a city park with a circle of enormous intertwined banyan trees, or possibly it's all one banyan tree. That seemed kind of remarkable so I snapped a few quick photos before continuing on my way. Going by other photos I've seen of the park, apparently there's also a large fountain somewhere in there, hiding under the trees, but I didn't even notice it at the time.

At a street corner on one side of the park, a couple of guys were running a table offering left-wing and (De)Occupy Honolulu literature. It seems the park had hosted an Occupy encampment during the movement's heyday, similar to the one in Portland's downtown Plaza Blocks, and their choice of this particular park was anything but random.

Throughout the 19th Century, the US and various European powers jostled and schemed over control of the Hawaiian Islands, while the kingdom tried to fend them all off and remain independent. In 1843, the commander of a British naval vessel announced he was annexing the islands for the Crown due to various perceived slights against British subjects, and he declared a provisional government with himself in charge. King Kamehameha III filed a formal protest with the captain's boss, Admiral Richard Darton Thomas, at the British Navy's Pacific Station in far-away Valparaiso, Chile. Several months later, another British vessel arrived, with Thomas aboard. Thomas, of course, outranked the first vessel's captain and thus control of the new "colony" passed to him. Thomas, in turn, quickly handed power back over to Kamehameha III, in a ceremony at this spot. This is not at all how colonial empires of the 19th century usually operated, and I've yet to see a good explanation of why the islands were handed back, when so many other places around the globe weren't.

Shortly after the handover, the king proclaimed the area a public park and named it in honor of Admiral Thomas. Over subsequent decades the park design evolved into today's square.

For what it's worth, Thomas also has a swanky condo tower named in his honor, a few blocks away.