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.

SW Dosch Park Circle

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

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

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

Healy Heights Park

Today's adventure takes us to little Healy Heights Park, in the West Hills a bit south and east of Council Crest. I only have one photo of the park; this blog is a peculiar sort of hobby, and I was actually looking for the tiny sorta-parks at Carl Place & Patrick Place. This actual park was on the way, so I figured I'd take a photo and get an extra blog post out of the excursion.

I'd actually tracked the park down once before, several years ago. I saw it on a map and assumed there would be a nice view from here, it being high in the West Hills and all. There was no view at all, though, nor anything else that looked particularly photogenic. I suppose that's how the land ended up as a park: It's not "wasting" valuable view property, and it doesn't have a view to attract riffraff photographers and other tourists from outside the neighborhood. Instead it's just your standard pleasant neighborhood park with a playground, sports fields, a drinking fountain, that's about it. If you don't live nearby, there's no particular reason to go seek it out. On top of everything else, there are also stern "No Parking" signs forbidding visitors to park anywhere nearby. I'd be kind of leery of using the ball fields anyway; I'd hate to break some rich person's window with a foul ball. There would be lawyers involved, because there are always lawyers involved, and you'd probably have to fly a bunch of stained glass artisans out from Venice to reconstruct it, obviously at your expense. In any case, I sort of shrugged and crossed it off the places I was interested in. That I'm doing a post about it now suggests that I'm either running out of material, or I've dropped my standards a bit, or both.

The land for the park was purchased, landscaped, and then donated to the city in 1951 by what was essentially the local HOA, for a playground, initially restricted to kids under high school age. Maybe that was intended to exclude the "juvenile delinquents" everyone was so paranoid about back then, although the article doesn't explicitly say so.

All snark aside, though, I'd rather have rich people living up in the hills next to the city and using public parks along with everyone else, rather than clustered in gated communities in a distant exurb, viewing the city with raw, boundless malice, which is what you get in most cities.

SW Tyrol Circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

SW Council Crest & Patrick

Our next adventure takes us back to the Healy Heights neighborhood in the West Hills, to the little triangle of land at the corner of Council Crest Drive & Patrick Place. This place is a sibling to the little triangle at Council Crest & Carl Place that we just visited; like Carl Place, Patrick Place is apparently named after a relative of Joseph Healy, the real estate developer behind Healy Heights. And like Carl Place, Patrick Place is the third name the street has worn. It was called SW Marquam Place until July 1940. In this case the city said the renaming was to eliminate duplicate street names, and didn't mention the naming nepotism connection.

This renaming was actually controversial at the time; the original name honored pioneer Philip Marquam, and the Daughters of Oregon Pioneers protested the name change. They and others were protesting against the elimination of pioneer names generally, so this may have been the last straw after a series of other events. I'm not entirely sure about that part. Portland's mayor tried to reassure people that they were only changing the name of 200' of one street, not renaming the whole surrounding area, and Marquam Road and Marquam Gulch would continue to bear this good, solid pioneer name. Except that we no longer have a Marquam Road here (as far as I know), and I'm not sure what street it is now. Meanwhile, much of Marquam Gulch was filled in to create Duniway Park not long after this controversy. There's still the Marquam nature park (about which a post is in the works), and the Marquam Bridge, as fugly as it is, and there's even a small Willamette Valley town named Marquam. So it's not as if the guy's been forgotten entirely.

In any event, the street had only been called Marquam Place since the previous Great Renaming, in February 1920; before that it was called Aupen Circle.

Unlike the Carl Place property, this spot isn't on the mysterious but official list of obscure places I've been working off of (though I noticed this one while looking at the map for the Carl Place triangle), and it doesn't have looming radio towers right at the end of the street, although the Stonehenge Tower and the others are certainly visible from here. So I don't have a lot in the way of exciting stories about this place to share. Some would argue I never have exciting stories to share, but hey.

Somewhat uniquely, though, I've actually found one reference to the little sorta-park here, not just the street or the intersection or something in the vague vicinity. July 31st 1952, a William Moyes "Behind the Mike" column included a brief reader note.

MIKE: Candidate for smallest park -- the triangle at Council Crest Drive and Patrick Place, on Healy Heights -- PAULINE KURZ, Portland

I suppose there must have been a previous column guessing about what the smallest one might be. Now, anyone versed in Portland trivia knows that the smallest official city park on Earth is Mill Ends Park, in the middle of Naito Parkway at SW Taylor. Although that's sort of a special case, and it isn't actually a piece of land owned by the city parks bureau. The more obscure Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, in the Hollywood District, is a piece of land owned by the parks bureau, and it's reportedly the smallest city block in the city, thanks to one of those diagonal intersections where Sandy Boulevard cuts through the regular street grid. The Patrick Place site is larger than either of those two, but neither of the smaller places existed yet in 1952, so it's possible the letter writer was on to something. It's a tax lot with a PortlandMaps entry, which says it comes to 4360 square feet, or almost exactly .1 acre. The entry mentions it's owned by the city transportation bureau, and like the Carl Place triangle it was owned by Multnomah County until 2006 when the city got a hankering to own it and asked for a transfer. Beats me why they'd bother to do that.

SW Council Crest & Carl

You might have noticed by now that I have a lot of weird "ongoing projects" here at this humble blog. There's bridges, city parks, public art, the painted intersections that have been popping up around Portland in recent years, and probably a few others I don't remember off the top of my head. The common thread is that I've got a list of something to work from, the obscurer the better, and I go out and take photos of an item on the list and then try to find something interesting to write about it. The subject of today's post comes from one of the weirder "ongoing projects"; some years ago I was searching for info on the nameless city park at SW 14th & Hall, and bumped into a list in the city archives of various obscure places that the Parks Bureau had had some involvement with in the 1970-1995 timeframe or thereabouts. I'm not entirely sure what being on the list signified, and the original document is actually offline now, so it's tough to go back and check again. Fortunately(?) I included the whole list in my SW 5th & Caruthers post a while back, and I have a blog tag for the lot of them, and the really important thing here is that I have a list, and most items on the list are exceedingly obscure. Most aren't on the city parks website, and several technically belong to other city departments, like the place we're visiting this time around.

This installment takes us up into the West Hills, to the Healy Heights neighborhood around Council Crest. At the intersection of SW Council Crest Drive & Carl Place is a small landscaped triangle. It may not look like much, but it was on the list, so here I am writing about it. PortlandMaps says it's owned by the city Transportation Bureau; apparently Multnomah County owned it until 2006, when the city asked them to hand over the keys for some reason. That county document calls the triangle a "traffic divider". I prefer to think I'm not writing about mere traffic dividers, though, because if I am writing about mere traffic dividers, there's just no end to that sort of thing, and I'll blaze boring new trails in internet tediousness.

I checked the library's Oregonian database on the off chance that something fascinating had happened here at some point. No luck this time around, although I did notice that "Carl Place" is the third name applied to this street. I know of at least one Gentle Reader out there who's interested in street names and whatnot, so I figured this was worth noting. The street was previously known as Villard Place until June 1941, when the city council changed the name. Before that, in February 1920, the name was changed to Villard Place from Chilion Circle, which was the original name as far as I know. A mention in Laura Foster's Portland Hill Walks explains that the current street names honor relatives of Joseph Healy, the developer behind Healy Heights. That's kind of standard practice for subdivisions. I almost had a street named after me when an uncle turned his farm into a subdivision, but he decided to go with boring nature-themed street names instead, if I remember right.

If you look in the background of the first photo, you can see the big local landmark around these parts, the ginormous tripod-shaped KGON broadcast tower, sometimes nicknamed the "Stonehenge Tower" for some reason. (A Portland radio history page insists it's named after the investment group that owns it, which if true would be a lame explanation.) It's more or less Portland's answer to San Francisco's Sutro Tower. The tower site sits behind a gate at the end of Carl Place, and another at the end of Council Crest Drive a bit further south. It's off limits to the public, but someone with NorthEast Radio Watch toured the site back in 2007 and posted a bunch of photos. The tower's officially named for KGON, a local classic rock station that used to make weird TV commercials back before radio was lame and corporate; despite the name, the tower is shared by a number of other TV and radio broadcasters. Prior to the current tower, Healy Heights site was home to a forest of transmission towers owned by individual stations, including an abandoned one for Portland's short-lived Channel 27, which went bankrupt part way through tower construction. So part of the idea behind the current tower was to consolidate transmitters on a single, more robust structure.

The broadcast industry and local residents have sometimes been uneasy neighbors. The Oregonian database records ongoing local concerns about towers possibly collapsing onto residents' homes, which is apparently something that happened to at least one tower elsewhere in town during the Columbus Day Storm. A more exotic problem concerned radio-frequency interference from transmitters located here. Neighbors reportedly dubbed the area the "electronic jungle" due to the interference. A 1986 article explained that local residents couldn't videotape TV shows or have working garage door openers due to emissions from the tower farm. Voltmeters would show readings without even being plugged in, just due to electrical fields in the air. There were even reports of residents' toasters "singing" due to the transmitters, though the paper was unable to confirm that story. The article suggests the "close proximity of homes to such a dense collection of transmitters may be unmatched anywhere in the United States".

Before it became a tower farm, the land at the end of Carl Place was home to a very different sort of structure, equally huge in its own way. During the 1920s, the Richfield oil company (now the 'R' in "ARCO") had a penchant for bold advertising. Their basic idea was to advertise their gas stations with signs saying "RICHFIELD", visible from a great distance by land and by air, on the off chance that a barnstorming aerialst might taxi by for a fill up. These Richfield Beacons were often on the roofs of buildings, and sometimes they had their own towers to hold the letters vertically. Portland's sign was a bit different, with the word RICHFIELD sitting along the Healy Heights ridge line, similar to the Hollywood Sign. The Hollywood Sign has 45' letters, and is about 350' long. Portland's Richfield sign was actually quite a bit larger than that, with 60' letters, and a length of 725'. Moreover, the sign was painted orange for daytime viewers, and lit with neon at night. It was supposedly the largest electric sign on the planet when it was built, readable 10 miles away and visible from 50 miles away. The sign went live in September 1928, and went dark in 1931 thanks to the Depression and the bankruptcy of the free-spending Richfield company. The lights came back on in 1933 but went off again in either the late 1930s or at the start of World War II, depending on who you ask. After that it pretty much vanished without a trace, which I find astonishing considering how big it was. It's hard to even find photos of it; I've seen exactly one so far, in a post about vintage neon signs at Vintage and Classic Car Blog. The photo was taken at one of the old OHSU buildings and shows the sign in the distance, so it's not a great photo but it at least proves the thing really existed at one time. The final demise of the sign and the birth of the Healy Heights subdivision happened around the same time, and I imagine the former made the latter possible. 60' high neon signs are great for selling avgas to distant Cessnas, but probably not so great for selling high-end view homes.

C & A

I was walking in the West Hills along SW Market St. Drive (yes, it's a street and a drive) when I noticed a pair of familiar-seeming sculptures at the entrance to the swanky Vista House condo complex. I thought, hey, those look like something Lee Kelly might have made. As you might already know, I'm not really a huge fan of his stuff, but it's gotten so I can often recognize it on sight. I went over to take a closer look. On the back, each has the cursive word "Lee". The taller one on the left has the number "90" near the signature (which I assume is the date), and a letter "C" on the base. The other has a "96" near the signature and an "A" on the base. I think then numbers are dates (1990 and 1996, the latter being the year the complex went in). I'm going to guess that the letters are titles, so one is just called "C" and the other "A". I have to guess because I can't find any info anywhere about the sculptures, and I've looked.

While searching for any more info, I ran across a 1996 Randy Gragg column detailing the long, strange history of the Vista House Condominiums. The owners of the land had been proposing various high rise tower designs for this location on and off since 1948, and were repeatedly rejected due to zoning, or neighbor concerns about significant trees. Gragg had high praise for the developer, for barreling through small-minded opposition like a true Fountainhead acolyte. But he didn't like the finished product, going so far as to compare the exterior to low income housing, which is possibly the ultimate insult in his lexicon. He may have been on to something this time, though, because the exterior was that infamous mid-1990s synthetic stucco that caused a national epidemic of black mold and leakage problems. In the mid-2000s the buildings were wrapped in protective tarps for over a year while work crews replaced the buildings' exterior surfaces. It was not a pretty sight.

Upper Hall Street Triangle

Today's adventure takes us to the West Hills just outside downtown Portland. SW Hall St. becomes Upper Hall St. just west of the nameless city park at 14th Avenue, and Upper Hall St. winds its way up the hill before morphing into 16th Avenue. Halfway up, the street makes a tight hairpin corner, which is where these photos were taken. The 'Triangle' of the title is the narrow bit of land on the inside of the hairpin turn. You'd normally expect a location like this to contain a tall, skinny million-dollar modern house, one that won all kinds of awards for working with a difficult site. This particular spot is public right-of-way, though, I suppose to keep it from being a totally blind corner. It's not really a city park or anything, but it's public, so I suppose you could set up a tripod here if you're willing to risk your camera on a slope this steep.

Surprisingly, I haven't found a lot of photos of the city taken from here. An image search on "Upper Hall Street" turns up nothing but real estate photos of ostentatious million-dollar houses. I suppose that makes sense, but the library's Oregonian database indicates this swankiness is a fairly recent development. An August 1934 news item described the community of modest houses along Upper Hall St.:

In passing you may have noticed the "Artists' Colony" which hugs the steep hill just below the hairpin curve on upper Hall street. It's quite an interesting colony, but there are no artists there right now, even though every place is occupied.

Twenty years ago Mrs. A.C. Wells Brown built the small, attractive lodges, 12 in all. They line three different "streets," made of thick plank, on three different levels, and the connecting links are up-and-down steps. The colony commands an excellent view of Portland, and were it not for an intervening apartment house, 'way down near Multnomah stadium, the cliff dwellers might see all the games and parades which take place there.

Everybody has a minute flower patch. All the cliff people work in downtown stores and offices, Mrs. Brown said, and the place is very quiet and orderly. No artists around to kick up didoes and make a Greenwich Village out of it.

There were amenities that would be welcome in any hip Portland neighborhood in 2014. From a Stuart Holbrook "Down Portland By-Paths" column a few days after the previous item:

On a bluff overlooking the city on upper Hall street some friend of man has built a small settee where one may sit and view Portland from the Heights to the buttes and hills east of the city. Carved on the bench, no doubt by its kindly builder, is a welcome to the weary traveler. In plain Gothic characters the legend says "If you are tired Rest yourself."

With a friend I sat on the wayside bench a while and marveled at the broad panorama which unfolded before our eyes. When we got up to leave my friend, a most pedantic fellow, paused to read the inscription. "He should," he announced, with a trace of severity in his tone, "He should have placed a comma between 'tired' and 'rest.'" I hope there will be plenty of commas in my friend's obituary. You can't tell what even a dead pedant will do when aroused.

This cozy state of affairs lasted for a few more decades, but in 1962 the city Bureau of Buildings decided The Village wasn't up to code and tried to condemn and raze the buildings. The city later stayed the razing order, as the owners and occupants were making good-faith efforts to bring the place up to code. I note that the first story called The Village an "artists' colony", while a month later it was a "controversial collection of 'shacks'". In February 1963, the owners reversed course and asked the city for a zoning change, in order to demolish the eleven existing residences and build twelve modern new ones. The city decided this was incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood and denied the request, though the owners were offered a compromise zoning change that would allow six new homes instead. At this point the Oregonian was calling The Village a "group of low-income rental residences". The place mostly vanished from the paper after that, though a December 1963 article on what Mayor Schrunk did over the preceding year mentions that "condemnation of The Village" was one of the crises he'd weathered during the previous twelve months. When not weathering crises, Schrunk also "challenged the mayors of Detroit and Los Angeles to a footrace to Salem -- the winner to get the 1968 Olympics", which is a whole other story.

Polina Olsen's Portland in the 1960s: Stories from the Counterculture (2012) spends a few pages on The Village, with photos, sketches, and reminiscences by former residents. The architect Pietro Belluschi lived in The Village in the 1920s, and Manuel Izquierdo called it home at one point as well, along with various other artists, musicians, and general Bohemians. In the book's account, the Columbus Day Storm is what really finished off The Village. The news stories don't mention this, but it seems quite plausible. Edit: The book says no such thing, and I misread the account. See comment by the author below.

In any case, it doesn't appear that the proposed redevelopment ever happened; instead, the Village was replaced by a single rich-person house on a large lot, because of course that's what would happen.

This wasn't the only controversy along Upper Hall St. in the early 1960s. Further up the hill, where it becomes 16th Avenue, developers proposed to build a huge 21 story apartment tower. Due to the hairpin bend in the road, this site was directly uphill of The Village, if I'm reading things correctly. This proposal ran into zoning difficulties at City Hall, compounded by angry neighbors who didn't want their views blocked. An August 1961 article about the controversy included a panoramic photo from the back deck of a leading anti-tower campaigner, in case it wasn't already clear where the paper's sympathies lay. This article had the tower site at 16th & Montgomery instead, downhill of the previously mentioned site, but still in a very view-blocking position. The paper then editorialized against the building in October. There are a few mentions of the proposal in the following months but no further news; that must have been the end of the proposal, since there are no 21 story buildings anywhere near this spot today.

In other news from the same era, a harrowing car accident happened here in April 1962, apparently right at the hairpin corner. A sedan was trying to park, but the brakes failed, and the vehicle rolled backward, jumped a curb, and plummeted off the cliff. Amazingly, the car got hung up in a tree, which kept it from falling another 150 feet down to SW Montgomery St. The three young men inside escaped without injury.

The area doesn't appear in the Oregonian very often after the mid-1960s, but a 1984 item mentions that a recent book Around Portland With Kids had proclaimed Upper Hall Street part of the best sledding route in Portland, which is kind of terrifying if you've seen how steep it is, and that's without the blind hairpin corner and 150+ foot cliff. This must have been just before the modern era of personal injury lawsuits really got going. I don't even have a real legal department, and I still feel like I need to tell everyone that Legal says, no, begs of you to please not sled here fer chrissakes. Just in case, and all that.

Totem Pole, SW Terwilliger

SW Portland's Terwilliger Boulevard was designed as a winding road of scenic views, and there deliberately aren't a lot of structures right along the street, to avoid obstructing these views. One of the few exceptions is the Chart House restaurant, just north of the Beaverton-Hillsdale intersection. Next to the restaurant is a rather large totem pole; the idiosyncratic RACC guidelines say it qualifies as public art, and their database has this to say about it:

“Totem Pole” was carved by Chief Lelooska of Ariel Washington from red cedar harvested from the base of Mt. Adams. This totem pole is one of the most massive in existence measuring fifty feet high and four feet wide. The carved figures depict a beaver surmounted by a grizzly bear next to a raven topped by four watchmen. The totem was carved during Oregon's Centennial in 1959, to celebrate the state's role in Operation Deep Freeze, which established a scientific station at the geographic South Pole.

Born Cherokee, Lelooska (1933-1996) was adopted into the Kwakwaka'wakw, and was known for his mastery of storytelling and carving. As a scholar and educator, Lelooska was an authority on the Indians of North America with a particular emphasis on the tribes of the Northwest coastal region. He was known for his versatility in wood sculpting, creating artwork that ranged in size from hand-held rattles and feast bowls to large-scale totem poles. This piece serves as an excellent example of Lelooska’s work and is a prized part of Portland’s public art collection.

So that's the RACC account; it didn't answer all of my questions, so I dug into the Oregonian database to see what contemporary accounts had to say about it. The first thing to note is that there have been restaurants at this site (known as "Elk Point") for a very long time, stretching back to the early days of Terwilliger Boulevard. Before it became today's Chart House, for many decades it was Palaske's Hillvilla restaurant. It seems Palaske was an Indian art collector, so the idea of adding a totem pole next to his restaurant must have seemed like second nature.

Incidentally, Kenton's Paul Bunyan statue was created for the same centennial exposition, an event that's otherwise been all but forgotten. Based on the surviving art from 1959, we seem to have had sort of derpy and juvenile notions of how to commemorate the state's 100th birthday. (Lost Oregon, Vintage Portland, & Oregon Encyclopedia have interesting posts about the exposition). A totem pole is a weird way to mark the anniversary, at any rate, since it's not as if the Oregon Trail and then statehood were exactly beneficial to local tribes.

The one thing I can't confirm is the story about Antarctic exploration. It may very well be true, but I haven't found anything in the newspaper database to corroborate it.

So here's a brief timeline of the totem pole's creation and later history:

• The log arrived March 25th 1959. The pole's design was described as a scaled up copy of one from British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, more commonly known as Haida Gwaii these days.
• A construction photo dated April 7th 1959
• A May 14th, 1959 front page photo of the pole under construction, wit the caption "Heap Big Totem Pole". In case you were wondering just how racist the Oregonian was back then. I checked briefly and didn't see any letters to the editor calling them out about this headline, which makes me think the paper's white readers of 1959 were ok with this too.
• Story to go with the previous photo, "Totem pole paint dries" . The article notes this pole had a concrete base, and steel bracing on the back. I didn't think to look at the back, so I don't know if that's still there or not..
• Raising ceremony June 4th. 27 tons. quoted: "It's an artistic triumph", reports Eddie Palaske. "It's almost half as tall as Meier & Frank's. This will be here long after the Centennial exposition is torn down, perhaps right up to the time the atom bombs strike."
• June 9th brought a story about Lelooska's indian encampment on the South Park Blocks, part of the Rose Festival Center. I can imagine an Indian encampment there, but try as I might, I can't picture carnival rides on the Park Blocks. I just can't see it.
• August 25th brought a mention of the inconvenient fact that tribes this far south didn't really do totem poles . It's couched in the usual mocking racial terms, being 1959 and all, but the underlying claim is factually accurate.
• A tall photo of the pole, dated October 6th . The caption mentions a pond at the base, which isn't there now.
• January 30th, 1961: A pair of visitors from Finland marveled at the totem pole. The wife mentioned that Finland has no totems because it has no indians. Husband: "No, but we have Swedes".
• The previous article got an indignant letter to the editor. Bigotry against Indians was still perfectly socially acceptable then, but prejudice against Swedes was on the wane on this side of the Atlantic. I suppose that may count as a form of progress, sort of.
• A photo of it being repainted for rose festival , June 2nd 1961. The article mentions it has (or had) a gas burner on top to light on special occasions. I don't know whether that still works, and if so, what constitutes a special occasion these days.
• A 1966 profile of Lelooska & a wider discussion about NW indian art
• Also a 1983 profile of Lelooska (Don Smith).
• Palaske's Hillvilla became the Chart House in 1985, and the totem pole underwent restoration at that point.
• A followup article about the changeover gave a brief history of the place

Duniway Park expedition

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It occurred to me recently that I'd never done a post about SW Portland's Duniway Park even though it's more or less in my neighborhood, on Barbur just outside I-405. I figured I could rectify that, since had a few photos of the park lying around, and more importantly the library's Oregonian database to rifle through. The park's best known today for its running track, but there's more to it than that, and the area has an interesting history.

Suppose you were standing at the Duniway Park track and were transported a century back in time to the year 1913, possibly thanks to a new Nike shoe with a flux capacitor in the heel. You would recognize absolutely nothing about the area. You'd also fall a substantial distance, and you wouldn't like what you landed in.

The present-day park is laid out as couple of flat terraces with a steep slope between them: The lower one containing the main running track, and the upper one another running course, some picnic facilities, and the park's lilac garden. The ground drops steeply again on the other side of Barbur. (The adjacent ivy-choked forest is also part of the park, but it's not the interesting part for our purposes here.) West of the park along Sam Jackson Park Road is a canyon formed by Marquam Creek, which flows down out of the West Hills and into a pipe, flowing deep under Duniway Park and on to the Willamette River. Looking around today's park, there's nothing to suggest there was ever a creek here.

It's hard to imagine this now, but Duniway Park was once Marquam Gulch, a steep gully at the south edge of downtown Portland. A high railroad trestle crossed the gulch at 4th Avenue, where today's Barbur Boulevard now runs. Like much of South Portland in those days, Marquam Gulch was a poor Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood, with little houses clinging to the sides of the gulch. It also served as a municipal garbage dump, of an unclear degree of officialness. It's unclear whether it was a neighborhood first and then a city dump, or vice versa, or both at the same time, which I can't rule out considering the time period. Presumably there's still a layer of century-old garbage down there somewhere, preserved for future archeologists.

A few links about the bad old days of Marquam Gulch:

• An Oregon Historical Society page about immigrant groups in the early 20th century. I'm always leery of accounts that generalize "The Russian Jews did X, while the Italians did Y", but it's an interesting article nonetheless.
• A Portland Police Museum account of a 1907 homicide case gives a sense of what the Marquam Gulch area was like at the time. The page includes an 1885 photograph showing the old 4th Street Bridge, which carried pedestrians and a long-vanished railroad over the long-vanished gulch. The route of the old railroad became today's Barbur Boulevard, so the location of the old bridge is now the eastern edge of Duniway Park. The whole situation is kind of hard to visualize.
• An old 1909 USGS publication, Structural Materials in Parts of Oregon and Washington, notes there were also rock quarries operating in Marquam Gulch at the time.
• The neighborhood in Marquam Gulch may not have been strictly legal. A brief Oregonian item from April 1893 mentions the O.R.& N. railroad trying to keep squatters off its Marquam Gulch land. The court case at hand concerned accusations of trespassing against a gentleman referred to simply as "An Italian, with an unpronounceable name."
• The 1904 tale of a stabbing in Marquam Gulch, which began with children arguing over a bag of peanuts, and which escalated into an adult knife fight, though it's possible ill feelings betwen the two familes extended further back to the old country. The victim and perpetrator were both Italian, and the Oregonian luridly claimed that "VENDETTA COMES TO OREGON".
• Officially sanctioned dumping began around 1914. It was argued that Seattle was dumping garbage in gullies already, and it was working out ok for them, even in nice neoghborhoods. And more importantly, it was cheaper than building a new garbage incinerator, though that eventually happened at what's today's Chimney Park. Property owners were already outraged by October of that year, claiming the stench from the Marquam Gulch dump was intolerable, and the city had unwisely promised no odors.
• Illegal dumping was prevalent as well. An item from March 1915 explains that one offender was caught when she dumped a pile of rubbish in the "forbidden grounds" of Marquam Gulch that included letters addressed to her. In related news, let's all agree that City Sanitary Inspector Salisbury had quite a thankless and disgusting job.
• A 1910 proposal would have run a railroad spur up Marquam Gulch, enabling the creation of a new warehouse district there, thus improving an area the paper called "practically worthless". Nothing seems to have come of the proposal.

The conditions at Marquam Gulch led to calls for reform of some sort or other. In 1916, local schoolchildren were recruited to write letters to the city council, begging for a proper playground so they didn't have to play in the gulch or in the street:

Mike Sholkoff writes in part: "In South Portland there are many children killed every year. The children pick things out of the dumps and sell them to the junk man for 5 and 10 cents, and then have to pay hundreds of dollars for doctor bills. A playground would cost about $60,000, but that isn't much when it saves many chidren's lives. Portland is the second cleanest city, but if the gulch were gone it could come first."

"Honorable Mayor and Commissioners," writes Harold Johnson, "I think that South Portland should have a playground for the following reasons: There is no place for us children to play except in the streets and you know that isn't 'safety first.' Just about the time that we have a good game going the cop comes along and chases us away. If you can't give us a playground take away the cops. It wasn't so bad while the cops walked, but you can't tell one Ford from another until a cop jumps out. Just think if you were a boy how much better it would be to have a playground than to play in the streets. I am willing to work for it."

This and similar efforts eventually led to today's park, which was dedicated (in a partially built state) in August 1918. A November 1919 article "Dream of 20 Years is Realized in Duniway Park", explains the long history of the project, with a map of the planned facilities, and a photo of the Southern Pacific trestle where Barbur is now. The project was funded by a voter-approved 1917 parks levy, which specified fixing Marquam Gulch as a top priority. It was originally proposed to name the park for Mrs. J.F. Kelly, who campaigned to create it. She declined the honor, however, and asked that they let her name the park instead, and "Duniway Park" was her choice.

Duniway Park is still one of a very short list of Portland city parks named for women. Named for Abigail Scott Duniway, a notable women's suffrage activist of the early 20th century. Others include the new Elizabeth Caruthers Park in the South Waterfront, and Vera Katz Park in the Pearl District. The latter isn't really a city park, per se, but I'm having to stretch the definition just to bring the list up to three. Although obviously there may be some I'm not aware of.

Duniway's brother, Oregonian editor Harvey Scott, was deeply opposed to her suffrage campaign, and the two feuded bitterly. Despite being wrong about a broad range of social issues of the day, Scott was memorialized with a smug-looking statue near the top of Mt. Tabor.

I haven't come across any mention of what became of the gulch's previous residents. As far as I can tell, the Oregonian didn't see fit to report on that little detail, much less inquire into why there were so many desperately poor people in the city.

The newly created park still didn't resemble today's park. Much of the park was below the grade of SW Barbur, and most of it consisted of baseball fields. A 1938 aerial photo at Vintage Portland shows the old gulch partially filled in, and the old trestle replaced with an earthwork structure to carry Barbur. A 1934 photo gives another view of the site of the present-day running track.

All of this reworking and reimagining hasn't done wonders for the local street grid. A page about the Marquam Gulch area at ExplorePDX digs into this and discusses why current maps of the area often sport inaccuracies, including roads that don't actually exist in the real world.

When World War II broke out a few years later, the Oregon National Guard camped in Duniway Park & the South Park Blocks in 1943. Not because of World War II necessity, but as part of a PR exercise coinciding with the movie premiere of Irving Berlin's This is the Army (which is on YouTube here). The park was used again for the same purpose (but without a movie premiere) in 1944; the Oregonian ran two photos from the encampment, one of GIs peeling potatoes, and the other of soldiers marching through mud lugging enormous duffel bags.

The current layout of the park dates to 1965 in an agreement between the city & Portland State College (now Portland State University). The agreement allowed PSC to use part of the park as team practice facilities, but without the city giving up title to the land. The land was raised to its current level at this point; the article mentions "Most of the fill material will be donated and will be from excavations for the Foothills Freeway", better known as Interstate 405. The running track went in at this point, and the baseball fields were removed.

In 1970 this was the staging area for a big protest march, part of the People's Army Jamboree, an event opposing the national American Legion convention in town. The Jamboree was smaller than first envisioned because the state government-sponsored Vortex One music festival drew many of the city's hippies and freaks and longhairs away to frolic at Milo McIver State Park on the Clackamas River near Estacada. This march became known for a nationally broadcast flag burning, which an Oregonian letter writer suggests was staged for the TV cameras.

Later in the 1970s, the park and its running track became a focus of the fitness craze. In 1977, a groovy new YMCA building opened next to the park. It was a YMCA for decades, but was sold a couple of years ago, and has bounced around between a few owners and operators since then. It's a cool building, unfortunately with a few decades of expensive deferred maintenance to sort out. Until recently it was the Duniway Park Athletic Club (which I was a member of) until the club was evicted in a dispute with the building's owner. So it's anyone's guess what happens next with the building.

Around 2005 or so (based on the date in the PDF), a Portland State engineering class studied daylighting Marquam Creek, that is, restoring it to flow above ground once again. The study is light on specifics and doesn't indicate how that would happen in an area as extensively modified as this. Digging out the fill dirt and restoring the old gulch would be a lot of work, and probably very expensive. Letting the creek flow on the surface through today's park would be interesting; it might mean a little waterfall at the edge of each terrace section, and salmon trying to leap up the falls. And then grizzly bears show up, just like in all the nature shows about Alaska. That could be cool.

OHSU Skybridge

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The ongoing bridge project makes another detour into Portland's West Hills, with a visit to the big pedestrian bridge up at Oregon Health Sciences University. The bridge provides a route between the main OHSU hospital and the Veterans Hospital that across a deep ravine from OHSU proper. Some sources insist this is the world's longest pedestrian suspension bridge, but I'm uncertain whether that's actually true or not. Structurae points out this is actually a cable-stayed bridge, not a suspension bridge; an engineering firm connected with the bridge's construction merely claims it's the longest bridge "of its type", whatever that means.

This had been on my bridge to-do list for quite some time, but I never had much of a reason to trek up to OHSU and wander around the hospital looking for the skybridge. But back in January, my mother was hospitalized at OHSU for a couple of weeks, and at one point I wandered out to go find bottled water on a Sunday afternoon, when just about everything at OHSU is closed for some reason. As I wandered around I finally saw a sign for the skybridge and figured, hey, I'll take a couple of extra minutes, and walk across (since the bridge project involves walking across whenever possible) & take some phone photos. It's a longer walk than you'd think; at 690 feet it's only a bit shorter than the Morrison Bridge (775'), so you walk and walk and the far side just doesn't get closer very quickly. Still, there were some interesting views from the bridge, and I've checked it off my list now, and it was certainly a nice break from hanging around the neurology ICU. I even found bottled water eventually (it turned out to be another seven stories down from the bridge level), and -- most importantly -- my mom's out of the hospital now and has made a great recovery.

Loyal B. Stearns Memorial Fountain

At the Burnside entrance to Portland's Washington Park, near NW 24th Place, there's a curious curved monument featuring a trio of drinking fountains. It's dated 1936, and is dedicated to the memory of one Loyal B. Stearns, a one-term Republican state legislator from Portland (if you can believe that), who later went on to hold various judgeships over the next two decades. Despite what you might think, this isn't a monument from a grateful city thanking him for his tireless public service. The Smithsonian's art inventory says this of the Loyal B. Stearns Memorial Fountain:

The fountain was funded with a bequest of $5,000 given to the City of Portland by Judge Loyal B. Stearns (1853-1936) for a drinking fountain on upper West Burnside Street. A contest for the design of the fountain was held, and the design by A. E. Doyle & Associates was chosen. Loyal B. Stearns was a politician, attorney, and jurist in Oregon. He was a member of the Oregon House of Representatives and he served as judge for the police. In 1882 Stearns was elected county judge and in 1885, he was appointed circuit judge by Governor Moody. IAS files contain related articles from the Oregonian, Dec. 30, 1983 and Aug. 22, 1983 and citations to the Oregonian, Sept. 16, 1956 and the book, "Portland Block Book," Oct. 1891.

Via the Oregonian historical archives at the Multnomah County Library, we learn there's a bit more to the story. Stearns's will specified that the fountain must be sited along Burnside, somewhere between 15th and 23rd avenues, or failing that, somewhere nearby if his preferred range didn't work out. Which it obviously didn't since the fountain ended up a few blocks west of 23rd. This was an oddly specific bequest, but one with a rather prosaic explanation: . After retiring from the bench, Stearns had a real estate office in downtown Portland, and lived somewhere around 23rd. He walked to and from work every day, and the stretch of Burnside between 15th and 23rd was part of his daily commute. It had occurred to him that there really ought to be a drinking fountain somewhere along that route, and there wasn't one. So he put it in his will, possibly thinking that it's hard for a city to refuse a prominent citizen's final request, especially if there's cash attached.

But of course giving things to the City of Portland has never been quite that straightforward. A suitable site would have to be found, and then a fountain would have to be designed and built for not a penny more than $5000. The city first wanted to build the fountain in front of Multnomah Stadium, today's Jeld-Wen Field, but could not come to an agreement with stadium management. One of the concerns about the stadium site was that the city was considering widening 20th Avenue as part of the proposed Foothills boulevard, an idea that later evolved into Interstate 405 (sited between 14th & 15th Avenues) several decades down the road. The eventual fountain site was the city's Plan B, placing it at the old Washington Park Zoo's former seal pond, which had closed some years prior and had become an eyesore. Stearns's granddaughters hated the new location; it wasn't part of their father's daily commute, they argued, which violated the spirit of the gift. This delayed the siting for some time. The granddaughters went off to search for a better location themselves, but eventually realized there were very few places one could build a fountain right along Burnside, and resigned themselves to the seal pond site. An Oregonian photo shows the site before the fountain was constructed, if you're curious to see what it looked like at the time.

Design and construction presented a problem as well. The city's arts commission seems to have felt that Stearns's bequest was not an overly generous gift for what he had in mind to build, and announced the contest would be to design for the city "the most attractive fountain that it can get for $5000 in place". The prize money for the design contest, architects' fees, and construction costs would all have to come out of the gift, as the city was determined to spend no taxpayer money on the fountain. In fact they looked into underspending on the fountain and keeping the balance. This stinginess makes a bit more sense when you recall that this gift came in the middle of the Great Depression, and the Arts Commission didn't exactly have a lot of extra cash lying around in case of cost overruns. The contest was launched in October 1940, limited to Oregon residents who were US citizens. Entrants were given just one month to submit proposals. The competition was eventually won by the prominent A.E. Doyle firm, whose proposal envisioned "a curved screen of granite, with dimension of eight feet by 12 feet, as the background for a fountain for dogs on one side, and a series of three fountains for persons on the other side." For this they received a princely $250 prize; the fact that they competed for this rather small award is another indicator this was the middle of the Depression. The Oregon Historical Society's research library has at least one of the competing proposals on file, but sadly the design sketches don't seem to be online.

Once the design was finalized, construction was delayed waiting for granite to arrive from Minnesota. (The same granite was used for the base of the Theodore Roosevelt statue in the South Park blocks, for you trivia fans out there.) The Oregonian dutifully reported when construction finally began, but after that we see no further mention of the fountain (assuming the database search function is up to snuff) until a "historic fountains of Portland" article in 1983. If there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony, it seems to have gone unreported-on by the paper. We also aren't told what the eventual cost of the fountain ended up being, despite all the handwringing earlier; some money must have been left over, though, as a "Loyal B. Stearns Foundation Trust" fund was set up to maintain the fountain, until it was merged with various other city parks trust funds in 1981.

The thing I'm really curious about, which again the Oregonian didn't report, is what Stearns's heirs thought of the finished product. For all the cost-consciousness and handwringing, we ended up with a rather attractive fountain, in an Art Deco style that's uncommon in Portland. On the other hand, his granddaughters had a legitimate point about the location; not only was it not on Stearns's daily commute, it isn't really on anyone else's daily commute either, and the fountain is lightly used and rarely noticed. I didn't think to check whether the drinking fountains were working when I visited. The dog fountain on the reverse side didn't seem to be functional at all, and probably hasn't been for quite some time. You'd think that local dog activists (which we have more than a few of here) would have demanded the city fix the dog fountain. They probably just don't realize it exists.

Jefferson Street Property expedition

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Today's thrilling adventure takes us to yet another (deservedly) obscure city park, one the city simply calls the Jefferson Street Property. Similar to the nearby Munger Property, it's a chunk of steep ivy-choked hillside overlooking US 26, just west of the Vista Tunnels. It isn't much of an urban crown jewel or anything, but I had a longstanding todo item about it, so I'm covering it purely for the sake of completeness.

Like many obscure city parks, the main useful piece of information about it on the interwebs comes from the city's Vegetation Unit Survey, which includes a map and a vegetation report. The report breaks the park down into two areas: A downslope level of primarily deciduous trees, and an upslope area of mostly douglas fir trees. And ivy. The report gives the douglas fir part of the park a 100% for non-native ground cover, and notes ominously that "The ivy infestation is complete." Yikes. And furthermore, the city's 2010 Natural Areas Restoration Plan rates the place as a "Low" on "Natural Resource Function and Value", which appears to be a longwinded term for "importance". So I think it's a safe bet that this park's going to remain 100% ivy for the immediate future.

The Munger Property vegetation map covers a wider area and puts this park in context, and based on this I'm not 100% sure I've got the park itself in the above photo. Which is always a problem when a park looks exactly like the non-park areas around it. It's either at the far left of the photo, or just outside of the frame, off to the left. If this isn't quite the right place, rest assured that the right place looks exactly like this, and I'm not inclined to go burn more gas just to take another crappy camera phone photo of anonymous trees.

Meanwhile, PortlandMaps knows the park as property ID R128449. Curiously (if you care about this sort of thing), the piece of land between this park and the big chunk of Munger Property to the south (ID R326836) is owned by the city too, but falls under the city property manager instead of the parks bureau. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. You could always call the city as an irate taxpayer demanding answers, if you're so inclined. I don't really feel like doing that that myself, but don't let that stop you. And if you do, and they give you a useful answer, feel free to post a comment here and let us all know what you found out. Really I think it would be more fun to just dream up elaborate conspiracy theories, like they're keeping it extra low profile because that's where the entrance to the lizard aliens' secret underground lab is located. I was going to say Batcave first, but the lack of Batmobile or other vehicular access makes that unlikely.

So at this point you might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, this place sounds friggin' awesome, I can't wait to go check it out, maybe bring a picnic, maybe plan a wedding there", etc., and you just need directions on how to get there. As far as I can tell the answer is "you can't". Despite the name, there's no Jefferson Street this far west. You might have been able to drive to the park before Sunset got the freeway treatment back in the 60's or so. You might even have been able to drive here until MAX construction removed part of Jefferson St. in the mid-1990s, although I'm not sure the street extended this far at that point. But it would've been a moot point anyway since the city only bought the land in 1995 (possibly in connection with the MAX project). And, unlike the Munger Property, you also can't get there from the West Hills side. Unless you buy one of the houses that back up to the park, I mean, which is yet another thing I'm not quite willing to do for the sake of a blog post. The vegetation summary report mentioned something about parking on the Jefferson St. freeway offramp, but you really don't want to do that unless you're in a large official-looking vehicle with flashing yellow caution lights on it, and probably not even then.

So a word of advice to those of you with blogs of your own. If you have an ongoing project or topic you write about regularly, and you feel you need to give it a really comprehensive treatment and cover things for the sake of completeness, eventually you're going to end up writing about stuff like this park here. You know it's useless and pointless and silly to write about it, but you can't not do it, because it's within the scope of your project, and them's the rules. And there's certainly no shortage of restaurant or band or movie equivalents to this place. So consider yourself warned, or whatever.