Monday, June 04, 2007

driver's seat

Some pics of "The Driver's Seat", a large sculpture on the (once and future) transit mall, at NW 5th & Irving. This is a 1994 piece by Don Merkt, added during the transit mall extension. Apparently it's going to be moved across the street in the near future due to the new MAX line, but that shouldn't disrupt matters too drastically.


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I don't have a definitive reference for this, but I'd imagine Driver's Seat is an allusion to the TriMet bus lot next door, sort of. It would stand to reason, at any rate.

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Oddly enough, I didn't actually sit in the driver's seat pictured here. I'm not sure why not. Maybe it's that this is Art with a capital A, and it's intimidating like that. I don't have a degree in art, and I don't have a doctorate in anything, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to sit in the driver's seat.

Also, for some reason this reminds me of a scene in Alien, where the crew comes across a highly deceased creature that got all chest-bursty while operating a huge sci-fi ray gun.

So, you know, no sense in tempting fate.

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Friday, June 01, 2007

photo friday: northern edition

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If you dropped by here yesterday (and don't feel bad if you didn't; nobody else did either), you might recall that I hopped the Yellow Line north to the Kenton neighborhood to play "weird guy wandering around with a camera" for a bit. Don't worry, we're done with roses for the moment. Here are a few other neighborhood attractions, starting with the, uh, famous Paul Bunyan statue. They just don't make roadside kitsch like this anymore, monumental in size but brightly colored, and with a big goofy grin. This makes him kind of hard to work with, camera-wise. You can either just take the stock photo above, or you can try to get a little creative:

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But here's the best angle available, in which we learn exactly why Mr. Bunyan sports that goofy grin:

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Perhaps you were wondering about the absent Blue Ox. This particular Bunyan never had one, even before they moved him to the current location (officially known as "Paul Bunyan Plaza") when MAX went in. Here's a 2002 Trib story about the move. The story notes:
Across Denver Avenue, a sculptor will install small statues in the shape of hooves representing Paul’s pal, Babe the Blue Ox. They will serve as seats.


So here are those hooves, which sit across Denver Ave. from Bunyan. We didn't get the full ox, and probably not for budgetary reasons, either. No self-respecting artist in this modern era would be caught dead building something that would go with the Bunyan statue. And doing just the hooves gives you a great opportunity to spout art jargon, too, stuff like "subverting the dominant paradigm". Which I suppose the hooves do, in a way.

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TriMet's public art info for the Yellow Line says the mini-park with the hooves is called "N. Denver Plaza", not to be confused with Paul Bunyan Plaza across the street. So now you know.




Next stop, a few blocks to the east at the corner of Fenwick & Interstate, is what TriMet calls Fenwick Pocket Park, featuring a few salvaged architectural elements from the old Portland Union Stockyards building that used to be around here somewhere. Kenton started out as a company town, which explains the distinctive architecture in the business district along Denver Avenue. No, I don't have any photos of the business district. I ought to have taken some, but I was a bit overly narrowly-focused yesterday and just sort of didn't.

Suffice it to say that the business district still has a lot of its blue-collar, "old Portland" character... for now. Like downtown St. Johns, it's just too cute and too close in to avoid the gentrifiers for much longer. Like St. Johns, the process has already started. If you're curious, you may want to go have a look now. You'll be able to say you saw the place before it was all upscale coffee chains, swanky martini bars, and doggie day spas, like the rest of 21st century Portland.

When the city brings in artists to build monuments to your neighborhood's vanished working-class glory, you can be absolutely sure that you won't be a working-class neighborhood for too much longer. At least not if the city can help it.

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detail, fenwick pocket park>

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The bovine theme continues at the Kenton MAX station:

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Cow, Kenton MAX Station




A couple of blocks west of Bunyan is Kenton Park, which has your usual collection of sports fields, playgrounds, etc., nice enough but nothing to go out of your way to see. I understand the city's thinking about siting a skate park here. From the neighborhood association's board minutes: Tom reports that Dreamland will be sure to design a facility so that kids will be drawn to it and not to other areas of Downtown Kenton. It will be a small enough facility that it will not attract kids from all over the city.".

Which is an interesting and rather defensive way to put it. You could probably write a whole book about how and why communities decide to provide certain sports or recreational facilities and not others. Nearly every neighborhood park in the city provides a baseball diamond or two, and these get used maybe once in a blue moon. Meanwhile, we've heard for years about the Portland area's critical shortage of soccer fields. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to convert a few baseball diamonds around town into soccer fields, but apparently it isn't quite that simple.

Conventional wisdom seems to go something like this: If you build basketball courts, you attract inner city gangs. If you build soccer fields, you get Hispanic folks, and skate parks pull in the teenagers, and we all know teenagers are nothing but trouble. Baseball fields, however, attract only wholesome, Midwestern, field-of-dreams types. Yes, even the screaming Little League dads are 100% pure and wholesome; what could be more American than erupting in a violent psychotic rage over whether the last pitch was a ball or a strike? Just thinking about that makes me want some apple pie. So even if your baseball field just sits there empty 99% of the time, it still elevates the neighborhood's moral character simply by existing. Or that's the theory, anyway.

Society's been willing to make a few concessions to the city's skateboarders in recent years. I suppose the thinking is that, unlike being an ethnic minority, being a teenager is something one grows out of eventually. If kids' anarchic impulses can just be channeled constructively for a few years, they may yet become productive, respectable, taxpaying members of society. Sure, older generations think it's a weird activity, and wonder why kids do it if nobody's even keeping score and don't have a coach screaming at them from the sidelines. But hey, teenagers are mysterious and inscrutable like that.

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Kenton Park

Thursday, May 31, 2007

rose overload

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Gentle Reader(s), it occurred to me today that you might -- just might -- not be sick and tired of rose photos just yet, so I thought I'd go take a few more.

I figured going up to the main rose garden in Washington Park would almost be cheating, plus the place is probably thick with tourists right now, so instead I wandered up to one of the city's other rose gardens, the small and rather obscure Kenton Neighborhood Rose Garden. More info about the place at OregonLive, Waymarking.com, and the Kenton neighborhood association. Seems all the upkeep is done by local volunteers, not the city. Maybe I'm biased, since I can't even grow mold on stale bread, but they've done a pretty impressive job if you ask me.


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The cephalopod conquest continues...

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This sign is on the temporary bus mall on 4th Ave. near PSU. Either TriMet now hires human-squid hybrids, or the agency's graphic designer has spent wayyyy too much time in Japan.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Civic Plaza


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A few photos of Portland's "Civic Plaza", the little triangle around the westbound PGE Park MAX stop. That's the name TriMet gives the place, and since nobody else seems to offer a different name for it, that's the name we'll go with. The name's less generic than it sounds actually; if you're new to Portland you might not realize this, but until PGE bought the naming rights a few years ago, the plaza sat next to "Civic Stadium", hence the name.

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The place exists a.) to make it easy for MAX trains to round the corner onto 18th, and b.) so large crowds can get on and off the train easily when there's a game on at the stadium. But since it's a public works project in Portland, we have to have us some art, too. TriMet describes it thusly:

Westside design team artists used the buildings and plaza to express the importance of oratory to the city's history.


  • Robert Sullivan supports the theme with an original essay
  • Bronze podiums invite spontaneous oratory
  • Punctuation marks form seating and accents on the Yamhill platform
  • Windows light up at dusk

Here are a couple of those podiums they speak of:

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I'll grant that I don't go by here every day anymore, but I've never seen any spontaneous oratory, I'm afraid. If you decide to avail yourself of our own local Speaker's Corner, be warned, though: Since this is (presumably) TriMet property, there are a number of rules & regulations you'll need to abide by. First, you'll need to keep your oratory quiet, and entirely non-musical. From the TriMet Code, section 28.15 A:


(13) Excessive Noise: No person shall:
(a) Make excessive or unnecessary noise within any District Vehicle or District Station with the intent to cause inconvenience, annoyance or alarm to the public, District personnel, or a peace officer, or with a reckless disregard to the risk thereof; or
(b) Perform vocal or instrumental music, without the prior written authorization of the District.

Well, I suppose you could get a permit and do some music, but if you need a permit, it isn't free speech, is it?

Second thing to know, your spontaneous oratory is only permissible if you're currently waiting for a train. Otherwise, no dice. From the code, part 28.15 B:


(1) Use of District Transit System for Non-Transit Purposes: No person shall enter or remain upon, occupy or use a District Station for purposes other than boarding, disembarking or waiting for a District Vehicle, in an area where non-transit uses are prohibited by posted signage. A person is in violation of this section only after having occupied a District Station for a period of time that exceeds that which is reasonably necessary to wait for, board or disembark a District Vehicle.

And don't even think of posting any handbills:


(5) Posting of Unauthorized Signs or Notices: Except as otherwise allowed by District regulations, no person shall place, permit or cause to be placed any notice or sign upon any District Vehicle, District Station or District Parking Facility or upon any vehicle without the owner’s consent while the vehicle is parked therein.

There's the usual bit forbidding threats and/or harrassment, which is fine, of course, and then there's this catch-all provision:


(6) Violation of Signage. In addition to the prohibitions set forth elsewhere in TMC Chapters 28, 29 and 30, no person shall fail to abide by specific directives provided in the form of a fixed permanent or temporary sign posted in or upon the District Transit System that has been authorized by the General Manager to address a regulatory or security concern. The General Manager or the General Manager’s designee may establish and post such signage in a manner to provide sufficient notice concerning the conduct required or prohibited. Any violation of the specific directives in any sign authorized by the General Manager shall constitute a violation of this subsection.


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So all things considered, you might want to do your spontaneous oratory elsewhere. Besides, you'll just annoy the commuters heading home to Beaverton -- when they can hear you over the trains, that is.

Still, a MAX station with an "oratory" theme in the first place is a delightfully archaic notion. Free speech anywhere near a transit facility? You can't get much more "pre-9/11" than that, can you? We won't see another place like this anytime soon, so we might as well enjoy it, I suppose. I mean, the government's still OK with you standing on a box just like the one here. It's just that the box is in Guantanamo, and there's a hood and some electrodes involved....


Moving right along... You might've wondered about the silver cube in the top photos. It's a hot dog stand. No, really. Once in a blue moon, it opens up and you can buy hot dogs. TriMet says it's called "Hot Dog Ernie's". (Curiously, a different Hot Dog Ernie's on the eastside figures in this story about a weird TriMet accident. Huh.) The rest of the time, the cube just sits there being silver and inscrutable, and if you get close enough you might get a history lesson. Here's a bit from OPB about the author (I think) of said history lesson.

If you don't have anything to say, and you aren't in the mood for a hot dog, there's really not much else to do here, except maybe wait for a train, or cross the street and go see a baseball game or something. Or, in the unlikely event that you're trying to make a circuit of places covered in my ongoing "local parks" series, you can make it a twofer and hit Portland Firefighters' Park, just steps away to the north on 18th. Or hey, make it a four-fer: Go west a couple of stops on the train to 18th & Jefferson, and you'll be right at Collins Circle. Then walk south on 18th, going under the Hwy 26 underpass, turn right on Mill Street Terrace, and walk uphill a short way to Frank L. Knight Park. I mean, you could do that, if you were so inclined. I'm not suggesting it'd be fun, exactly, but it'd certainly be esoteric, and I imagine that counts for something in some quarters.

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So I was walking to work again, this time along the South Park Blocks, and I noticed a work crew tearing down this church office building:

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Look closely at the photo (or look at the larger version), and look in the window next to the room being demolished. Look at the painting on the wall in that room. Doesn't that guy look a little familiar? I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, and I generally favor the notion of tearing out church buildings when the opportunity arises. But even to me it seems like this ought to be bad luck or something, tearing down the building without rescuing that mural first.

It should come as no great surprise that the building's being demolished in favor of an ultra-ritzy condo tower. When there's big bucks on the line, I suppose there's no room for getting all sentimental over some old painting, even if you're a church.

On a much cheerier note, here are a couple of roses near the sacreligious carnage:

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And some decorative berries nearby. They're either salal or Oregon grape, I think. I always get the two confused. Yes, yes, I was a Boy Scout once, and I'm sure there was a test on this, but that was a very long time ago. Entire new species have probably evolved since then. Continents have drifted, even.

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Elsewhere along the South Park Blocks, a couple photos from the Peace Plaza block:

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This block's been known officially as Peace Plaza since 1985, although I don't know of anyone who calls it that. The sculpture you're looking at is called "Peace Chant". I hate to sound like an uncultured rube here, but I don't get it. I don't really see the peace component to the work, I have to say. No doubt the artist and funders meant well, and everyone knows that representational sculpture is tres gauche and all that. But if your goal is to educate the public about the desirability of peace rather than war, you really want something a bit more, y'know, accessible, dontcha think? Peace is a deadly serious business. It was in '85, just like it is now. It deserves better than just another pile of mute, inexplicable stones.

The plaque that goes with the work doesn't do much to explain it:

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(You might notice the leaves; the "Peace Chant" photos were taken back in September, but I hadn't gotten around to using them until now.) Some more photos of the thing at Portland Waymarking, and it also figures in a conservative author's rant against abstract art over at the Trib. Which is funny really; you'd think that conservatives would be delighted at how utterly ineffective the thing is as a peace monument.

Contrast that with the giant peace symbol at "Peace Memorial Park", at the east end of the Steel Bridge, which is a giant peace symbol made of flowers:

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I've discussed this place previously here, before the peace symbol was replanted for this year. When I mentioned it, I'd forgotten about the plaza in the park blocks, just like everyone else. So this makes at least two close-in locations dedicated to the cause of peace, although they're still outnumbered by all the war monuments we have around town.


I realize I'm rambling and wandering a bit afield here, but while poking around in the archives looking for those photos, I ran across a couple of photos from the North Park Blocks.

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Now here's a bit of art that works, for what it is. Yes, it's a drinking fountain for dogs, another of those silly "only in Portland" things. And yes, we paid $$$ to have a famous artist design it for us, namely William Wegman of Weimaraner fame. But I like it, and it's still new enough that it doesn't show up in all the guidebooks yet. So here it is.

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At the other end of the North Park Blocks' time scale, here's an archaic street name pressed into the curb. It's Park Ave. now, and the old name hasn't been used since at least the 1930's, if I recall correctly.


So I suppose this doesn't really give you a good picture of my morning commute today, but there you have it.

Friday, May 25, 2007

This post NOT titled "Photo Friday"...

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I didn't feel like going for a hike today, or doing a lot of research, or coming up with intelligent opinions about the issues of the day, or anything difficult like that, because it's a 3-day weekend. Expending any more effort than absolutely necessary would be unpatriotic. Everyone knows that. So instead, here are a few more photos from the archives.

Top two photos are from Skidmore Fountain, at 1st & Ankeny downtown, in the middle of where Saturday Market runs on the weekend. Yes, I realize you knew that already, but I get a lot of out-of-town visitors here, and I like to give 'em a helping hand. They might decide to come and visit and spend tourist dollars (or euros) or something. So let's try to create a positive impression, shall we?

You in the back, stop picking your nose. Yes, you. You didn't realize this thing is two-way, did you? Serves you right.


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Some pink flowers from last month. It's been long enough that I've totally forgotten what they are or where they're from, but I thought I'd share the photos anyway. Enjoy.


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A seagull in Lincoln City. You can't really tell from this photo, but it's perched on a ledge 10 stories above the ocean. Although I suppose that's less of a concern if you have wings, which I don't.


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And a shark from the aquarium in Newport. Photographing fish in low light is harder than I thought. Everything comes out green, or not at all. This is one of the few that I thought turned out ok. FWIW.