Bull Run Powerhouse

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Today's adventure takes us back to the Bull Run River, last seen in our visit to the Bull Run River Bridge. I made the trek out to this old bridge because it was built with recycled parts of the original Burnside Bridge. And now this post will help explain why, a century ago, the city of Portland saw a need for a bridge way out here in the middle of nowhere. The key is this derelict building just downstream from the bridge. This is the historic Bull Run Powerhouse, a remnant of PGE's now-defunct Bull Run Hydroelectric Project. You might note there's no actual dam here; the dam was on an entirely different river, and water from it was piped underground to the powerhouse here. Meanwhile much of the Bull Run River's original water was, and still is, diverted away to be Portland's drinking water supply. Give solid practical reasons all you like, but I'm still going to believe civil engineers were just showing off when they designed that arrangement.

The photoset would probably be far more exciting if I'd managed to get inside somehow, but I didn't. I wasn't quite interested enough to try sneaking past the barbed wire fence around the place and the security cameras that might still be working. Plus it's been a while since my last tetanus shot. Plus I was there to see the bridge, and the powerhouse

What to do with the building? I haven't seen anyone propose this, but I can't possibly be the first person to see this building and think "McMenamins". They've become the default answer for preserving historic buildings, particularly weird and unwieldy ones. And they've already done at least one other power plant somewhere on their Edgefield campus, so clearly they're the experts on this sort of thing. I mean, beerwise I'd be happier if some other brewery took it over instead. A hotel of the non-brewing variety would be acceptable as well, in a pinch.

This post has been floating around in the drafts folder for a while, primarily because I ended up with a big batch of varied and interesting links to pass along. Taking a pile of raw sources and building a semi-coherent blog post around them is always the hardest part, and I've been procrastinating about that for months and months now. So I think what I'm going to do this time is just sort the links into categories and let you, the Gentle Reader, explore as you see fit.

History

• PDXHistory: "Bull Run - The Town That Time Forgot"
• OpenSpaces: "Going, Going Gone: Reflections on the Retirement of the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project"
• Oregon Historical Society: Bull Run Dam Construction
• PGE's Bull Run Little Sandy Flume Railroad

Preservation

• SaveBullRun.org: SaveBullRun.org
• OregonLive: "98-year-old Bull Run Powerhouse set for preservation"
• OregonLive: "Bull Run River A tour for creatives leads to a new exhibit", in which several painters had a look at the old powerhouse.

Environment

• "The Bull Run River-Reservoir System Model", a paper by a civil engineering professor at Portland State that discusses ways to better manage the old hydroelectric system to improve salmon habitat short of removing dams. Which is kind of a moot point now.
• PGE: Salmon and Steelhead Runs and Related Events on the Sandy River Basin — A Historical Perspective
• Oregon Magazine: "The Old 'Bull' of Bull Run", profiling a longtime Bull Run conservation activist.
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Bull Run dam removal poses engineering challenges"

Photos

• Wikimedia photo showing the powerhouse from the bridge.
• two photos of the river, much better than the ones you see here.

Other

• USGS: "Virtual Inspection of Cableway, Bull Run River near Bull Run, OR"

Echelon Place, Las Vegas

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A few photos of the unfinished -- perhaps never to be finished -- Echelon Place complex, on the north end of the Strip in Las Vegas. The Echelon was designed to compete with MGM's ginormous CityCenter complex further down the Strip, and the architectural renderings suggest it would be quite the modern ultra-swanky place, if only the nearly $5 billion price tag (and the end of the real estate bubble) hadn't interfered with the grand dream. Shame about the dumb name though; the complex was supposed to consist of a central casino-hotel surrounded by an "echelon" of trendy luxury boutique hotels (although Las Vegas is probably the only city on Earth where a 500 room hotel counts as "boutique"). This was more or less a clone of the CityCenter concept, except without the deep pockets and first mover's advantage. CityCenter opened in December 2009 and is the glitzy newest new thing in Vegas right now, but it's also saddled with a ridiculous amount of construction debt to pay off. So maybe it'll turn out to have been a good bet, and maybe it won't. It appears there was room for somewhere between zero and one CityCenter-style complexes, and Echelon was the second.



This site was previously occupied by the Stardust Casino, which was imploded in 2007 to make way for the Echelon. Construction began, but halted in August 2008 when the developer (Boyd Gaming Corp.) "delayed" the project. Construction was supposed to resume around the end of 2009. Then, last November, they announced a further 3 year delay, to no earlier than 2012. The very latest info I've seen is that the owners are profitable again, but their earnings release neglects to mention anything about the (mumble, mumble) Echelon. Meanwhile, rumor has it that the also mothballed, but much more complete Fontainebleau Las Vegas just north of here won't open until around 2015. So the Echelon may sit abandoned like this for a very long time.

On the other hand the Echelon's website is still up, so you can still go check out how sleek and fancy things might have been, if only the irrational exuberance had continued for another year or two...

vegas (and bust)

Here we have some photos of a few defunct casinos around Las Vegas. First up, the former Hotel Nevada and Casino, on Main St. in downtown Vegas, a bit south of Fremont St. It looks like it's been vacant for many years, but according to the only review I've found of the place it was still open in August 2005, and was a complete dump. The review's titled "Welcome to the Bates Motel", and suggests that sleeping there would make for a good "Fear Factor" episode.

For photos of the Hotel Nevada in (relatively) better shape, I ran across photos from before and shortly after it closed.

All in all, this one's probably no big loss.









Next up is this ghostly sign for the former Silver City Casino, just off the Strip near the Convention Center. The casino itself was demolished a few years ago, but the sign lingers on.




I'm actually not sure this next one is really defunct, since I just glimpsed it from the taxi on the way to the airport. The Key Largo certainly looked like an ex-casino, but I ran across reviews here and here dating to late 2008. The small attached hotel is/was a Quality Inn, but the Quality Inn website doesn't contain any mention of the place, so it may be a recent casualty of the economy or something.




And finally, a couple of shots of the Lady Luck, which stands tall, dark and vacant just north of Fremont Street. It was one of the larger casino hotels in downtown Las Vegas until closing in February 2006. That was supposed to be temporary while the buildings were renovated, but then the developer ran out of money, and here we are going on four years later. Still, the hope is that the place isn't permanently defunct. The city's offered various incentives to the owners to renovate and reopen the place, but nothing's happened just yet. Maybe things will turn around once the economy improves. With any luck.

Portland Avenue Bridge

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A few photos of the long-abandoned Portland Avenue Bridge, which crosses the Clackamas River down in Gladstone. Built in 1893 or so, the bridge was once part of a rail line between Portland and Oregon City, which was abandoned in 1968 and subsequently removed. Seems the line was abandoned in part due to the deteriorating condition of the bridge, and since then the bridge has just sat there, unmaintained and fenced off, for over four decades now. So I can only imagine what sort of shape it's in these days. You might need a tetanus shot just from looking at it.

Updated: This bridge was severely damaged by a winter storm in March 2014, and was demolished shortly afterward. So there's no longer anything to see at this spot, and this post is now sort of a historical artifact. Feel free to still visit cosmopolitan downtown Gladstone if you like, though.

I realize that, as part of this ongoing bridge series, really I'm supposed to try to walk across these things if at all possible. But I wasn't tempted this time, not even a little, not even for a moment. There was, technically, a hole in the fence, and technically I suppose I could've ventured out onto it, and I suppose people actually do that from time to time. I think mostly to jump in the river, not to cross it. The Clackamas River looks cool and clean and refreshing on a hot day, and people just can't resist jumping in. That description is accurate, if by "cool" you mean "slightly above freezing", and by "refreshing" you mean "except when fatal". Follow the news any given summer, and take one look at the bridge, and the "not dying" angle for this bridge should be immediately obvious.

I've only found two current photo links to share, and they're actually both the same photo. I also ran across one historical photo from atop the bridge, looking north along Portland Avenue.

Portland Avenue, which dead-ends at the bridge, is apparently Gladstone's historic main street. The city of Gladstone recently (2008) put together a plan to revitalize the Portland Ave. corridor, and the plan envisions restoring the bridge for pedestrians and bikes, similar to the 82nd Drive bridge further upstream. The document notes that the bridge is still railroad-owned, even though there haven't been tracks on either side in decades, and the railroad's opposed to anyone doing anything with the bridge. Don't ask me why. You'd think they'd go, "Hey, that's a nice plan, we'll sell you the bridge for a dollar, as is", just to unload the potential liabilities on someone else. But apparently that's not how they see things. Beats me.

I'd never figured Gladstone as a very interesting place -- I guess I'd assumed that McLoughlin was its main street, and the whole town was basically just car lots and fast food outlets. The city and the local historical society would like us to know that, in fact, they have a long and somewhat unusual history, featuring a long-running Chautauqua Festival (which the streetcar was apparently built in part to serve), traveling evangelists, vaudeville, and similar thrills of a bygone era. Said bygone era seems to have ended around 1929, and if anything notable has occurred since then, the city and the historical society are keeping it to themselves. More photos from around Gladstone here and here.

The streetcar line, as it turns out, is the same one that once served Elk Rock Island and its somewhat, um, earthier delights. So you could tell everyone you were catching the streetcar down to Gladstone for a nice uplifting day of educational lectures and Sousa marches, but hop off at Elk Rock Island instead for some drinkin' and dancin' and carryin' on. At least, that's probably what I would've done.

More streetcar stuff at Cafe Unknown and Tin Zeroes -- the Tin Zeroes page refers to a different defunct streetcar line, I think, but it's an interesting story anyway. If you're into this sort of thing, I mean, and I realize you probably aren't, even if you read this humble, geeky, all-too-pedantic blog regularly. In which case I'll probably have another batch of flower photos soon, if you prefer those. And maybe some pics of the cat too, if I can get him to hold still, the little bastard...

like amethysts beneath my feet

If you live or work in downtown Portland, you may have noticed the little purple glass squares and circles set into the sidewalk here and there, at seemingly random locations. If you're like me (which I admit is unlikely) you might've been curious about them. They're obviously quite old and a bit weatherbeaten, but it's not so obvious what they are or what they're for. Fortunately, in this modern era, the answers are just a few keystrokes away, out there on the interwebs.

The purple glass bits are known as "vault lights". See, a "vault" is an underground area, well, ok, a vault, situated under the sidewalk or under the street proper. If you want natural light in your vault, you install some of these. Hence the name. In Canada, they call them "sidewalk prisms", which has a more poetical ring to it. It's also a bit more informative, since the lights do have prisms on their down-facing sides, for diffusing sunlight all over the subterranean vault. Flat glass on the bottom would mean a few small pools of intense sunlight, which isn't what anyone's likely to want.

Vault lights aren't all that common anymore in Portland but underground vaults are all over the place. Some are abandoned and bricked up, while others are used for storage. If you've seen the super-cool freight elevators that pop up out of the sidewalk, they exist to provide direct access to your sidewalk vault right from the street, so you can stock up your underground storeroom without hauling everything in through the front door. This can be very helpful, since our fair city generally lacks back alleys for that sort of thing.

I can't find a comprehensive list of vault lights in Portland, but I'm making notes now when I run across them. I'm certain these aren't the only ones, but these are the ones I know of right now. The largest collection I'm aware of is around the Galleria building, which is where the top two photos were taken. The south side of the building facing the MAX tracks has an array of clear vault lights, which I'm guessing may be more recent replacements for older lights. The third photo is from outside the Dekum Building, on SW 3rd around Washington or Alder, I think. A third grouping is in front of the Clyde Hotel building on Stark St. You could also count the clear lights that serve as skylights for the visitor center in Pioneer Courthouse Square. They obviously aren't any older than the park itself, but I guess we can still count them if we want to.

[Updated 1/2/07: Two more vault light sightings to report, both on the edge of the Pearl. #1, the sidewalk outside the North Park Lofts building, on the North Park Blocks at Everett. #2, outside the office supply place at 9th & Flanders. ]

I was curious why they're always purple: If that was just an aesthetic choice, or was mandated by law, or something else. Turns out the answer is "something else" in this case; the lights actually started out as clear, but prolonged exposure to UV light caused impurities in the glass to turn purple over time. In the early 20th century, it was common to add managanese to glass, to combat existing impurities that would make the glass green. That works great in the short term, but eventually your 'clear' glass turns purple, sort of potassium permanganate colored. Manganese is actually the cause of the very similar purple color in amethysts, the only difference being that amethysts are quartz instead of glass. Still, they're close cousins, and the family resemblance should be pretty obvious. Restoring vault lights could be kind of a problem; do you restore to clear glass, or to the purple glass everyone's so used to?

As an aside, if you ever see anything advertised as "vaseline glass", with a fluorescent yellow-green color, just be aware that it gets its color from... uranium. Seriously.

Back in the Galleria's heyday, the vault area was just part of the mall, and you could stand there and look up and out. You couldn't get a clear look at the foot traffic passing overhead, but you could tell they were there. I remember thinking that was very cool. Of course, I've always had a fascination with all things subterranean, I mean, the very name of this blog refers to a 50's sci-fi mole machine, so I may think this stuff is cooler than the average person might. But really, how can you not love having another entire world directly beneath your feet. That's just cool.

I have a dream here. Vault lights are cool, sidewalk elevators are extremely cool, and I just don't think either is being used to maximum advantage. Imagine, an underground bar, purple vault lights in the roof, as many as the city will let us have. And instead of carrying freight, the sidewalk elevator is the bar's main entrance. You press a call button, the elevator pops up out of the sidewalk, you hop in, and it whisks you down to a secret space beneath the feet of passersby. Decorwise, either Art Deco speakeasy, or Victorian boudoir would seem fitting. I'm not sure what I'd call the thing; the obvious choice is something using the word "vault" or "prism", but perhaps that's just too obvious. Failing that, as a geek I've always thought "/dev/null" would be a great name for a bar, although it doesn't exactly have a retro ring to it.

Further resources about this stuff:

• An extremely thorough page about vaults (a.k.a. "sidewalk basements") and vault lights. Everything you ever wanted to know, and much, much more. Plenty of photos, too.
  
• Two pages concerning city regulations of sidewalk elevators. So far I haven't seen anything that explicitly prohibits using them to carry passengers instead of freight.
• More resources about how glass gets to be purple: here, here, and here. From the first link:
  

  
  Take a century-old glass bottle, and expose it in the desert to the ultraviolet radiation present in strong sunlight. Come back after ten years, and the glass will have acquired an attractive purple color. Heat the bottle in an oven, and the color disappears. Next expose the bottle to an intense source of energetic radiation, as in the cobalt-60 gamma ray cell of Figure 24, and within a few minutes an even deeper purple color appears, as shown in Plate XI.
  ...
  A century ago, glass used to be decolorized with manganese additions to remove the green color caused by iron impurities. It is the Mn2+ left from this process which loses an electron to form the purple Mn7+ shown in Plate XI in the solarization process described at the beginning of this section.
  

  
  
• Photos of vault lights in Portland, Astoria, Seattle, and Victoria, BC.
  
• The National Park Service considers them part of the "look" of historic Lowell, Mass., and therefore worth preserving.
• As part of an award-winning restoration of Seattle's Pioneer Square, "pre-purpled" vault lights were installed.
• And two pages touching on vault lights in New York City.
• If you need to buy modern replacements for your vault lights, here's one source for them. Not purple, though.
• A mention of underground vaults in connection with persistent stories across the Old West that they were somehow connected with secret doings in the Chinese community. Our own "Shanghai tunnel" mythology may be connected to this as well.
• Off on a bit of a tangent, a piece about obscure & unusual elevators in the state of Oregon. Sidewalk elevators get a brief mention here:
  

  
  The City of Portland in the past gave out permits for sidewalk elevators so the downtown buildings could receive freight below ground in their basements. As far as anyone knows there have been no new permits issued for a long time but there are some of these elevators used today. We will not list them.
  

• An interesting, poetic blog entry about vault lights.
• Portland's sidewalk elevators get a mention in this intriguing thread about the tech behind vaults and elevators, among other things. This post discusses how sidewalk elevators work, and has this to say about vault lights:
  

  
  The glass blocks you recall being imbedded in the sidewalk were called "vault lights". As you note, some businesses had extended their basements out past the "building line" and under the sidewalk. Usually, this was done to provide working space around a sidewalk type freight elevator, additional storage or utility space (as for water,gas and electric meters) or was done to provide space for coal bins or bunkers. I have been in a few such basements in really old buildings and walked in under the vault lights. It is a strange feeling to be "under the sidewalk" and see the changing light patterns as pedestrian traffic keeps right on walking accross the vault lights with no knowledge you are under their feet. In truth, a weak light, at best, came thru the vault lights. These were solid pieces of glass imbedded in a concrete slab which the formed the roof of the "vault" or extended basement. The glass was usually quite thick, ont he order of 2 or 3" thick. Over time, the glass became frosted from foot traffic, steel wheeled carts, and the use of sand and ashes on the sidewalks during winter weather. Typically, if you looked closely at the sidewalks where there were vault lights, you would see a strip of bronze imbedde dint he concrete- this marked off the limits of the "sidewalk vault". You might also see a small cast bronze tag imbedded in the concrete giving the name of the vault light maker. I haven't been down in the old parts of NY city in years, so don;t know if the sidewalk freight elevators and the sidewalk vaults and vault lights still exist.
  

• JSTOR has the text of a book or article titled Superstitions from Oregon, but the Google search that led me there indicates there was a superstition about walking on sidewalk vault doors. Which isn't completely unreasonable, since some of them can get pretty slippery when wet.
  
• The MySpace profile of a local guy who lists vault lights as one of his interests.
  
• From the state building codes division, we learn that sidewalk elevators now only need to be inspected once every two years, instead of annually. (It's on page 4 of the linked PDF.) An earlier doc from the same agency informs us that yes, you do need a permit for a sidewalk elevator, and the pertinent safety regulations may be found in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' A17.1 Part IV. Unfortunately I'd have to pay money to find out what that says. So first, I guess I need to find someone to fund my latest "coolest bar ever" idea, and then find out whether it'd actually be legal or not.

Stairs & Ruins

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No, I'm not wafting around Tuscany, at least not today. These photos are of what was once the gatehouse for an old 19th century reservoir near SW 10th & Clifton, in downtown Portland just south of I-405. Seems the reservoir wasn't big enough and ran dry in the summer, so it was eventually replaced by the much-beloved reservoirs in Washington Park and on Mt. Tabor. I really can't tell where the reservoir itself is supposed to have been. But everyone says there used to be a large body of water around here somewhere, and I don't know why someone would lie about a piece of trivia like that, so I imagine it had to have been around here somewhere.



If you look in through the "window", you can see someone's been sleeping inside there quite recently. I would too, if I was homeless. Not "swanky" exactly, but it has a roof, and it's built better than most new houses these days.

Just to the left of the view in the top photo, 10th ends in a short public stairway up to Cardinell Drive. I was down at the Central Library the other day and looked over their reference copy of the ever-elusive Portland's Little Red Book of Stairs, and plotted this walk out from it, more or less, sort of.

One thing you don't see on the [map] is that there's a path between Cardinell Drive and Hoffman Avenue, right at the hairpin turn where Hoffman turns into Sheffield. The signs indicate it's private property open to public use, "at your own risk". It's a nice, wide, flat path, so I think the "risk" bit is just lawyer-speak, unless you suddenly get the notion to hurl yourself down the hill or whatever.

Going between the aforementioned stairs and the path is kind of interesting, because it turns out there's a gate on this part of Cardinell, to keep out the greasy hordes of the lumpenproletariat. At least the ones who arrive in cars, anyway. There's no gate on the sidewalk part, so you can walk through the area, you just can't drive through. I was actually coming the other direction, from the Hoffman side, so I didn't realize there was a gate until I was already on the snooty side of the gate. Weirdness.

(I'm doing this in backwards order because I liked those gatehouse pics the best and wanted to put them at the top. Plus it seems kind of artsy and pretentious this way, which seems appropriate considering we're in the West Hills here.)

Which brings me to how I got to the Hoffman Avenue end of the path. As you might suspect, it involves stairs. Lots and lots and lots of stairs. The Little Red Book dubs them the Elevator Stairs, and after climing them I tend to agree. Since we're going in reverse order, the first photo is from the top of the stairs, looking out at Mt. Tabor:



The last couple of photos are from about 1/3 of the way up. One photo looks up the stairs, and the other down:

Spooky, Mysterious Kelly Butte

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's Kelly Butte [map], a city park in outer SE portland between Division & Powell, just east of I-205. Very few people know about this place, and it appears the city likes it that way. I visited on a warm sunny afternoon, in the middle of summer, on a weekend, right in the heart of a 2-million-strong city, and saw exactly two other people, plus one dog. They were as surprised as I was to run across other living souls in the park.

The city parks department refers to the area, very briefly, as "Kelly Butte Natural Area". Which I guess is supposed to indicate that there aren't any public facilities here. Not anymore, anyway.

Kelly Butte is visible from downtown Portland and all over the east side, and and is bordered on three sides by some of the busiest roads in the metro area, but it's not really obvious how to get a closer look at it. First you have to find your way to the park entrance. (I used to say "[a] Blackberry with Google Maps is a real help here", which gives you some idea of how old this post is.). Having been here before in the park's better days is an even bigger help than just going by phone maps. What you want to do is turn off Division St. onto SE 103rd Ave., going south. There aren't any signs pointing to the park, and it's not, umm, an overly affluent area; this may deter many prospective visitors before they ever find the place. Just block out the ominous banjo music you think you're hearing, stay on 103rd, and it'll soon turn into a narrow, rutted road winding up the hill. You'll come to a battered, rusting gate with a heavily vandalized sign listing the park hours. The usual, distinctive wood Portland Parks sign is absent here, and nothing here even gives the name of the park.

So if you leave your car here (locked, of course) and walk past the gate, the road continues to the top of the hill. There you'll find a couple of weedy, abandoned parking lots, cordoned off with lengths of chain link fence. The fences stand ajar, unmarked, neither inviting nor forbidding visitors. There's a stop sign here, for some reason, again heavily vandalized. Next to one of the parking lots is a small meadow area with a nice view of Mt. Hood (top photo photo #2), with unmarked trails leading off into the forest in all directions. On the surface, the whole area looks like the city simply forgot it had a park out here, or they lost the keys to the front gate one day, or something, and nobody's been here for years, maybe decades.

If you look closer, you can see that a (very) minimal level of maintenance is going on. The grass in the meadow has been mowed recently, and if you wander down to the lower parking lot, there's a pile of dirt with fresh bulldozer tracks in front of... what on earth could this be?

>

Congratulations, you've just stumbled across the park's big forgotten secret. It's not much to look at these days, but this was once the main entrance to the city's Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center. Built in 1956, the city describes it as having been "designed to survive a 'near miss' by up to a 20 megaton bomb and to be self-sustaining for up to 90 days." Here's a 1960 photo of the city's nuclear doomsday bunker, from the Oregon Historical Society. A bit more history at Stumptown Confidential and Urban Adventure League. This page mentions the Kelly Butte bunker as well, while discussing the area's "civil defense" preparedness efforts. Seems they made all these elaborate emergency plans, and then the 1962 Columbus Day Storm hit. That storm, a remnant of a massive Pacific typhoon, was one of the worst natural disasters to hit the Northwest in modern times, and it revealed the Civil Defense Center was not quite the impregnable fortress it had been advertised as.

The bunker figures quite prominently in the 50's CBS docudrama "The Day Called 'X'", which portrays the city evacuating due to an imminent Soviet nuclear attack. It's also a fun time capsule showing what parts of downtown looked like back then, including parts of Broadway near where Pioneer Courthouse Square is now, and the old Morrison Bridge.

Later on, this Cold War relic evolved into the city's emergency/911 dispatch center, until that moved into a new, above-ground building in the mid-1990s. So it's actually only been empty for about a decade or so. I understand the place was never popular with the people who worked here. I remember seeing news reports about workers' "sick building syndrome" complaints about the place, and the inside walls were (and presumably still are) covered in lurid and disturbing murals painted in the late '80s by the local artist Henk Pander.

Once the 911 center moved out, the city tried to find new users for the place, but nobody wanted it. A Oregonian piece back in December 13th, 1992 put it this way:

OLD BOMB SHELTER AVAILABLE AS 9-1-1 CREW MOVES OUT

For Sale or Lease: One concrete bunker.

With its current tenant about to move, one of Portland's most despised properties is about to become available -- the 9-1-1 center at Kelly Butte.

Originally designed as a Civil Defense bomb shelter, the 18,820-square-foot center offers many uniquely unattractive features. Largely underground, the dark and gloomy center has no view. Employees work under a weird mural of partially standing columns.
``It reminds me of what's left over after a major nuclear attack,'' said Marge Hagerman, a secretary who also thinks the mural is ``sort of tropical. I don't know what the intent was.''

Last spring, a ``sick building syndrome'' felled workers in droves with nausea, headaches, sore throats, rashes and a metallic taste in their mouths.

Despite ventilation changes and special cleaning, another wave of sickness hit months later, bringing ambulances to the center four times.

So far, the city is marketing the property internally. In a memo to bureau officials, Fred Venzke, facilities manager, suggests the center might make a good records warehouse, indoor shooting range, community activity center or computer center.

``Facilities Services would be happy to show you the site and discuss its many possibilities,'' he said, noting the center has a 110-ton air conditioning capacity, emergency power and showers.

If the city can't find any takers internally, the center could end up for sale to the general public.

And the price?

``We haven't even addressed that,'' said Diana Holuka, city property manager.

At one point in the early 2000s it was possible to sneak into the bunker and do a little urban exploration, and there was even a public page of photos hosted on Myspace(!?) for a while, but that's been down for over a decade now & I haven't found a good mirror or replacement for those photos. IIRC it looked wet and gloomy and there seemed to be records and office equipment there that didn't move when the city moved out of the bunker, and were slowly decaying in the elements.

While scanning the interwebs for interesting stuff to share about the place, I came across a document titled Portland: The World of Darkness, which is a guide to the city for some sort of fantasy/horror RPG. It says, of the Kelly Butte bunker and the era that spawned it:

In this time of Cold-War paranoia, vampires were able to increase their holdings within the territory, constructing backalley deals with the local politicians and constructing secret “bomb-shelters” that became havens that would potentially last a thousand years; delightfully, most of these constructions were kept secret. When the paranoia revolving around nuclear weapons settled into a more fatalistic attitude, the shelters (and the vampires who inhabited them) were forgotten by the public.

So someone's finally outdone the "Shanghai tunnels" guys in trying to give our fair city some exciting urban mythology. It doesn't seem all that farfetched when you look at the thing up close, either. The place would be a perfect vampire lair, and you're surrounded on all sides by an area the city's basically written off. You could do whatever you liked and it almost certainly wouldn't make the paper. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the undead. But maybe I've just watched too much Buffy or something. Still, vampires or no, you will want to visit during daylight hours only. It's probably really creepy here at night, plus the park technically "closes" at dusk. I think. There was spraypaint all over that part of the sign.

When I was little, my dad's company installed systems inside the bunker for the city's emergency communications bureau. I'm not sure now whether I ever actually went inside or not, but I remember the outside area pretty vividly. Back around the time the 911 center moved, around 1994-95, I was living in SE Portland and thought I'd visit the park as an adult to see what it was like. It's changed far more since 1994 than between then and the 70's, and it hasn't changed in a good way. In '94 the upper parking lot was open to park visitors, there were picnic tables here, and other park amenities, I think there were basketball hoops, or maybe a horseshoe pit. Nothing fancy, and the place wasn't exactly overrun with visitors, but it felt like a regular city park, and didn't have the derelict, back-of-beyond feel it has now. I don't know what happened here. Maybe this is the place where the parks department absorbs its budget cuts, so they can keep the fountains on in the Pearl District. It's like they've put the whole place in suspended animation, waiting for the condo tower crowd to take an interest in the surrounding area. Here's an angry letter to the Portland Tribune by an eastside resident infuriated about the ongoing decline in local park facilities in SE Portland. The "Division-Powell Park" he mentions is another (older?) name you occasionally see for the park.

[Updated 12/29/06: The Mercury's Blogtown has a couple of posts about the butte today. Post #1 links to this humble blog (yeehaw!), while the second post has actual photos from inside the bunker. Kewl. For the record, I didn't take those inside-the-bunker pics, but whoever did, I doff my hat to you, good sir / ma'am. It's a real shame that Cheney wasn't home, though.

I've been meaning to go back to the butte for a while now. I half-seriously considered going up there a few days ago, on the winter solstice, to maybe set something on fire or whatever. I'm not a religious person, or even a spiritual person, but I thought it might be cool, and by cool I mean photogenic. Sadly, I'm far too law-abiding for my own good, plus it was nothing but meetings all day at the office, plus it was cold and dark, plus I don't really like fire very much, plus I decided it was a stupid idea, so I stayed at home and watched TV instead. But hey, it'll probably be a bit warmer on Walpurgisnacht, April 30 - May 1, so there's still time to organize a proper event. No Morris dancing, though, please. Thx. Mgmt.]

It's not hard to come up with fun ideas for what to do with the bunker. If I was to become a James Bond villain, or a superhero, it might make a good lair. It's not all that huge, so it'd be more of a starter lair, or a pied a lair, so to speak. Or if we're going to stop being geeks for a moment, one obvious possibility is a museum of the nuclear age. It could explain how the bunker worked, do a bit about Cold War paranoia, and present nice Portland-friendly platitudes about why The Atom Is Not Our Friend. Sure, you'd occasionally lose a school bus or two off the narrow windy road to the top, but the survivors would get a good education.

One other thing looked different when I visited in 2006, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Until late 2005, there had been a rather tall communications tower right near the bunker, but the city had stopped using it and recently decided to remove it due to, you guessed it, vandalism trouble. The local reaction seemed to be along the lines of "Hmm, something looks different. Oh, the tower's gone? Huh. Ok. Whatever."

In truth the spooky Cold War stuff only occupies the eastern half of the park, while the western half is host to an obscure Portland Water Bureau facility holding a huge underground tank. This is part of how Portland was able to just take the Mt. Tabor reservoirs offline a few years ago and just keep them around to be decorative. I don't know whether this half of the butte is open to the public or not. There are similar tanks in operation on Powell Butte and visitors don't seem to be a problem over there, but I've also never heard of people going there and haven't seen any photos from there, and I don't see anything on the map that looks like an obvious main entrance, other than a little driveway that connects into the parking lot of the huge megachurch at I-205 and Powell, which is bound to deter a lot of potential visitors. Or at least it deters me. The water tank area obviously doesn't have trees on top of the tank, so that spot may have a nice view of sunsets toward downtown. Except that after the sunset you're on Kelly Butte at night, which could be a problem.

Years ago I came across a couple of brief mentions of the water facility here, here, and here, back when the tank was above ground and smaller. And the water bureau's website had a few photos of deer at the facility, which is kind of cool, I guess, unless you live next door to the place and have a garden. I haven't checked those links in years though and don't know if they're still valid.

[Updated 9/13/06: A new post on the Water Bureau's blog talks about the bureau recently repainting the Kelly Butte Tank. The post includes a photo of a few people standing in front of the freshly painted 10M gallon tank, which gives you an idea just how big it is. Seems the previous paint job on the thing was done with lead paint. On a drinking water tank. Nice. Granted, it was on the outside of the tank, but still...]

In years past, Kelly Butte also hosted a jail and an associated rock quarry, not to be confused with the similar and much-better-known facilities further north at Rocky Butte. The Rocky Butte jail didn't close until some time in the 80's, IIRC. This page from the county Sheriff's Office indicates the Kelly Butte jail was operating at least as late as 1924. Another page I saw (which I can't locate now) stated the quarry was on the west side of the butte, so a long time I thought the water facility might have taken its place, as that seemed eminently logical. I recently (2022) figured out that the old quarry was actually located I-205 runs now, which is also a logical thing to do with an old quarry, just one that hadn't occurred to me previously. And the jail was right there at the quarry, so that seems to rule out the existence of an intact abandoned jail or extensive gothic ruins hidden in the forest, as cool as that would be.

Directly to the south of the park proper, between it and SW Powell, there used to be an old drive-in theater. Like most of its brethren, the 104th Street Drive-In has been gone for a long, long time, but the cool old 50's era sign is still there, looking just a little more rusty and weatherbeaten every year. The theater's old screen, meanwhile, lives on down at the 99W drive-in down in Newberg. These days part of the area is a large RV dealership, and part is devoted to some sort of industrial use.

Oh, and did I mention the butte's an extinct volcano? It's true. It's just one part of the extensive, and amusingly named, Boring Lava Field (named after the nearby town of Boring), which is responsible for a large number of old lava domes and cinder cones across the wider metro area. The USGS has more here. More recently, the butte was also affected by the area's repeated ice age floods as recently as 13000 years ago.

This last photo was taken on one of the many unmarked, unmapped trails crisscrossing the forest. The forest is quite dense, and you could easily get lost if you don't keep track of which way you're going. A few spots look like someone has been camping there recently, fire pits and everything. I imagine this would be a good, and extremely secluded, place to have a homeless camp. The forest here is great and everything, but it doesn't take long before you start to feel like leaving. It's not that it feels unsafe, exactly, it just feels like you're intruding into someone's living room. So it's back down the path, trying not to get lost, and back through the broken fences and rusty gates, down the overgrown old road to where you parked, and you're off to your next adventure. Assuming your car's still there.

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Notes

• [Updated 9/26/06: This post had a lot of pics from Kelly Butte, but didn't actually have a photo of the butte itself. I thought I'd fix that, so I drove out to Mt. Tabor this morning before work and took the new (properly spooky & mysterious) top photo. Kelly Butte is the dark forested hill in the foreground.]
• [Updated 1/1/07: Another batch of photos of the place here.]
• [Updated 7/1/09: Yet more photos, this time in semi-glorious infrared.]
• [Updated 8/25/09: And even more photos, this time presented as a fancy Flash slideshow, no less.]
• [Updated 8/27/11: And a long history post (no photos) I did about the erstwhile Kelly Butte Jail, circa 1906-1910]