Waterline

As with the previous post, we're once again at the Delta Park/Vanport MAX station to look at another piece of Yellow Line public art. This one takes a bit more effort to find; the station includes a couple of overflow parking lots, the furthest next to the entrance to Portland International Raceway. The whole area is naturally low and marshy, and they must have concluded the parking lot would need a stormwater drainage feature. So a small wetland area was created and the lot built around it. This being a publicly funded transit project, some 1% For Art money was spent on sprucing up the new wetland area, and Waterline was born:

The artist was involved with much of the site design including grading, lighting, materials, and plant design. The visual focus is a basalt boulder that Is cut in half with stacked welded steel and acrylic and is lit with fiber optics at night.

That "Art of Stormwater" list from the city that I keep referring back to has a different take. (I apologize for this post being so quotation-heavy, but I figure I can either give you the original descriptions by people who knew what they were talking about, or I can try to paraphrase them as best I can, and I'm not really in a paraphrasing mood.)

Linda Wysong, Artist; 2004 Located near the Vanport site, Waterline integrates art, engineering, and the environment - reflecting the juxtaposition of the built and the natural environment in the managed landscape.

TriMet's Yellow Line art guide elaborates further:

• Massive steel arcs allude to the engineered landscape and Liberty ships made by Vanport residents.
• A glowing monolith of stone, steel and acrylic symbolizes the unity of human and natural worlds.

The "glowing monolith" resembles parts of Wysong's Shifting Assets along the Willamette stretch of Springwater Corridor. You can't really see the "glowing" part here since I took these during the day, but another of the city's stormwater art documents (since stormwater art is a thing apparently) has a nighttime photo of Waterline, showing the, uh, water line glowing. This saves me the trouble of going back to take my own nighttime photos. Which I probably wouldn't do anyway, on the theory that there are likely to be a few mosquitoes here at night for much of they year. I've gone on several times about (pseudo-)bravely risking a case of West Nile on behalf of this humble blog and its Gentle Reader(s). In reality, I think I'd like to avoid that, if at all possible.

Vanport

North Portland's Delta Park / Vanport MAX station features a number of steel tent-like shapes next to the platform stairs. These are collectively known as Vanport, and they're one of the public art installations at this stop:

This storm water swale treats water collected from the bridge and parking lot. The three Corten roof sculptures refer to the Vanport flood,

Michael Creger for bronze storm drain scupper on wall.

It's fair to say this is one of the more downbeat public artworks around town, focusing as it does on the deadly 1948 Vanport Flood. TriMet's Yellow Line art guide elaborates further:

Linda Wysong addresses the area's layered history with an emphasis on the city of Vanport, a large wartime housing project swept away by the flood of 1948.

• CorTen steel sculptures recall rooftops adrift in the 1948 floodwaters.
• Remnants from a Vanport foundation are set into the sidewalk.
• A bronze railing features cast artifacts from the Chinookan culture, Vanport and the Portland International Raceway.
• A cast-bronze scupper channels stormwater into the bioswale below.
• Community maps overlay the current Delta Park site onto the city grid of Vanport, and show the location of the station within the local river systems.
• Works by Douglas Lynch and Timothy Scott Dalbow are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel.

Wysong also created a number of other things we've seen here before: Shifting Assets along the Springwater Corridor; and Portals and Eye River, near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, north of OMSI. Several of those pieces have water themes as well. She also created Waterline elsewhere at the Vanport MAX station, which will be the s

I should point out that the Yellow Line opened in 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina. That, and not the Vanport flood, is probably the event that comes to mind now when you think of floodwaters and rooftops. If, by chance, the line had been delayed, or the hurricane had come a year earlier, this sculpture might have been considered sort of, I dunno, insensitive.

Vanport Wetlands

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Here's a slideshow from the Vanport Wetlands natural area, just south of the Portland Expo Center. I'd ridden MAX to the end of the line to get some photos of the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (as one does) and I had some time to burn while waiting for the train back. So I figured I'd go take a look at the nearby lake. At first glance it looks like your standard run-of-the-mill wetland area near the Columbia, like Smith & Bybee Lakes, Whitaker Ponds, and many others. While that's basically true, there's an interesting story behind this place and how it got this way.

The first thing to know is that this isn't a regular city park, or even a Metro natural area. Instead, the Port of Portland owns and maintains it. Which is strange because their main business is running the Portland Airport and various shipping terminals, not creating duck habitat. It seems they needed to fill in about 14 acres of wetlands at the airport, so they had to create wetlands elsewhere as mitigation, and thus Vanport Wetlands was born. This is how the US Army Corps of Engineers wetland process works, more or less: They'll generally give you a permit to fill and build on wetlands, so long as you create or maintain some other wetlands elsewhere. The theory is that the new wetlands are supposed to be at least as good as the old ones. I suspect that's often not the reality; certainly the little fenced mitigation areas next to suburban minimalls don't look anything like real wetlands, for instance. I'm not a wetland biologist and I can't speak to how good of a job the Port did here, but at 90 acres the Vanport Wetlands are at least larger than the filled area they're supposed to replace.

Back in 2002, toward the end of the Port's restoration effort, they decided to embrace modern technology and they put up a website about the area, its history, and its future, rather than installing the usual interpretive signs at the lake itself. That website has unfortunately been defunct for several years now, but it turns out that the (usually) trusty Wayback Machine has a copy. So I can fill in a few details about the place's unusual history.

Prior to the wetland restoration project, this site had been home to KGW radio towers since the mid-1920s. A pair of 625' towers stood near the center of today's lake. A nearby creepy-looking multistory transmitter building apparently dated to before the 1948 Vanport Flood, which devastated the once-populated surrounding area. The rest of the tower site was a forest of guywires supporting the two antennas. Less visibly, the towers were connected to a grid of buried copper grounding wires, I suppose in case of thunderstorms or something. All of this had to be removed as part of the restoration project, so it wasn't just a matter of taking down the towers and flooding the place. The towers were toppled in December 2000. It's a shame the one online video clip of the toppling is a pre-YouTube, postage-stamp-sized Windows Media file, but that was the state of the art back then. Frankly, I have no idea how we got by in those days.

I couldn't get very far during my brief visit because the Vanport Wetlands are surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and the only gate is closed and locked. The old website explains that this is intentional:

Until 2001, access to the site was restricted to a gate on the eastern boundary of the property off N. Expo Road. Following mitigation construction, a second gate, along the northern boundary of the property, was installed. Due to the conservation restrictions placed on the property, there is presently no public access to the site.

A chain-link fence now surrounds the site, with the only vehicle entrance being a gate at the northern end of North Expo Road. Visitors must receive Port of Portland permission to enter the property due to the sensitivity of the wetlands restoration effort underway there. Once native wetland vegetation is firmly established, the Port anticipates some public use of the property for passive recreation and educational activities.

To my untrained eye the wetlands certainly look established at this point, but clearly this maybe-someday public access hasn't come to pass yet. I can see it not being a high priority for the Port; It's not exactly their core business, after all. They do operate a couple of other public parks, though, although none of them are nature areas: McCarthy Park on Swan Island, and the Stanley Park Blocks and much of the Marine Drive Trail near the airport.

The closure may not be that big of a deal, though, since (as far as the general public goes) the Vanport Wetlands are mostly of interest to birdwatchers. If you're serious about birding, you presumably already have gear for observing from a distance -- binoculars, monster telephoto lenses, etc., and I suppose the fence isn't that big of a deal in that case, so long as you can get an unobstructed view over it from somewhere.

The water comes right up to the property line (at least on the east side of the lake), so it's not like they could put in an extensive trail system here, and I think the lake's too shallow for canoes most of the year, but I imagine a boardwalk or observation deck would be doable at some point.

For what it's worth, there seems to be a minor geographic dispute about just what the lake is called. The Port's old website says it's called "Force Lake", but Google and the Friends of Force Lake say the real Force Lake is just northwest of here, on the other side of Force Avenue. Which I think would make this lake Not The Lake You're Looking For. I'm sorry, that was lame and I apologize.