...and the hawthorne bridge, finally...

So I figured that, for the sake of completeness, I had to cover the Hawthorne Bridge too. I initially wasn't going to, you know; I'd dismissed most of the downtown Portland bridges as "uninteresting" from a walking standpoint, and declared the bridge-moseying project complete. I've already declared Mission Accomplished at least twice now, and it doesn't seem to be helping.

I figured I needed a gimmick if I was going to make the Hawthorne interesting. Just playing tourist and taking tourist photos wasn't going to cut it this time. So I figured, hey, what I'll do is put the infrared filter on the camera, walk across, take a few photos, and hit the Roots brewpub. After a bit of tasty sudsy refreshment, I'll switch filters and put the UV-pass one on instead, and walk back the other way. There's a nonzero possibility that nobody's ever done this before, but I could be wrong.

In case you find it hard to tell, everything above the HR tag (the horizontal bar) is infrared, and below it is ultraviolet. And the slideshow at the top is just all Hawthorne Bridge photos I have on Flickr, including ones from long after I did the post you're reading now.


Incidentally, there were a couple of odd things I noticed around the east end of the bridge which I'd never paid attention to before. Or the east end of the approach viaduct to the bridge, which is not the same thing. There's a sign in the same unreadable dark-brass-on-dark-aggregate they used on the Morrison (hence no photo), telling us the bridge's East Approaches date back to just 1957, so they aren't really historic. When it's time to gentrify the area, we can tear them out with a clean conscience, like the city did with the Lovejoy Ramp some years back, and then we have room for shiny new condo towers. Hooray!

The other odd thing is how, at the very end of the east viaduct bit, pedestrians are shunted over a block to Clay St., and bikes get to stay on Hawthorne itself. Kind of strange, not the end of the world of course, and it actually puts you closer if you're heading to the Roots brewpub like I was. Just a strange little quirk is all.



Oh, I almost forgot -- I guess I ought to do a links section here, in case readers want actual useful information about the bridge.

• The bridge page at Structurae
  
• And the equivalent Brigehunter page too.
  
• Multnomah County's page about the bridge (because they own it, natch)
  
• And here it is on PortlandBridges, too.
  
• The Hawthorne has its own Flickr group. Not all Portland bridges have these; I imagine only the ones with fans do.
  
• A post at Portland Architecture griping about the bridge, particularly the fact that they have to raise it a lot. Which is true, sure, it does open a lot, and yes, it can be mildly annoying at times, I guess.
  
• Speaking of which, check out this cool time-lapse video of the bridge at night. It opens at one point, so you can see what that's like.
  
• More cool video about operating the bridge.
  
• And video of a typical morning rush hour on the Hawthorne. Look at all the bikes.
  
• A Bojack post worrying that they might build condos at the west end of the bridge instead of the proposed courthouse. Which I'm sure is a distinct possibility, at least once the real estate market recovers.
  
• A great mid-bridge panorama.
  
• The bridge was renovated & repainted about a decade ago. The company that handled the work has a page describing the project.
  

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Ok, now with the UV.

Spring Street Bridge

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The Spring St. Bridge barely merits a post here. It's a little pedestrian bridge over a ravine up in the West Hills. It connects two dead-end streets, and I'm sure it only exists so that kids can walk to Ainsworth School, on SW Spring St. You can't even see the bridge on the Google map above, so just trust me that it's in the forested bit in the center.

I only bothered doing a post because of a rather embarrassing detail. The bridge is just down the block from Jewett Park. I've been there a couple of times and never noticed this was just down the street. I had no idea it was here until I saw it on Structurae and Bridgehunter. So much for my quasi-legendary powers of observation. Sheesh.

Although, in my defense, I wasn't really looking for bridges at that point. I suppose that's always a risk with single-mindedness, isn't it?

The bridge does show up in the city's bridge inventory, which tells us that it was built in 1938, it's made of wood (duh), and could maybe use a seismic upgrade someday. Which probably follows directly from being old and made of wood.

Next door to the bridge there's a little mini park area I also didn't notice. It seems that the land belongs to the school district, and the school has an "Environmental Club" devoted to maintaining it. Which is one of those nice perk programs you get to have when you're a school in the nice part of town, I guess. They call the place "Ainsworth Greenspace", which sounded oddly familiar to me, although I didn't immediately realize why. Turns out that the place suffers from a rather improbable naming collision. There's another tiny "Ainsworth Greenspace" up in North Portland, next to the MAX line, which plays host to a sculpture called "River Spirits". That Ainsworth is named after the street it's on. This one is named after the school it's next to, while the North Portland Ainsworth is next to an entirely different school. Both the street and the school are named for the same guy, a certain Captain John C. Ainsworth, as is Ainsworth State Park out in the Columbia Gorge. Oh, and let's not forget the Ainsworth Blocks, on NE Ainsworth St. in NE Portland (as opposed to N Portland, where one of the Ainsworth Greenspaces is at). And CafeUnknown has a post about Portland's late, lamented Ainsworth Building.

So now you know. And, in the immortal words of G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

Mason Hill Park expedition

Today's adventure takes us a little further afield than usual, to tiny Mason Hill Park in the remote, hilly northwest corner of Multnomah County (a region the county refers to as the "West Hills Rural Area"). The park caught my eye while I was looking at a map the other day -- with the word "Hill" in the name, I figured there might be a nice view, possibly, and even if it didn't, it's in a corner of the greater Portland area I'm not overly familiar with, so I figured I'd go check it out and see what gives.

A sign in the park notes that this was once the site of the local one-room schoolhouse. Nothing remains of the school, but there's a picnic structure that sort of evokes it. A 1986 Oregonian article about a school reunion mentions that the school closed in 1944, and then sat derelict until 1962 when the Columbus Day Storm (aka Typhoon Freda) finished it off. After that, the park you see here was born.

So it's a peaceful little spot for a picnic, with a nice view of the Tualatin Valley to the south. I've actually come across a couple of references to the park as a convenient rest stop while biking around the area. That could be fun -- it's quite a scenic area, if you can handle all the hills.

A note on driving, or I suppose riding, to the park: I looked at the map and decided the quickest way would be to head out Sunset, get off at the Jackson School Rd. exit, and head north, and then get to the park via a couple of smaller roads. As it turns out, these smaller roads are, uh, unimproved. That's transportation speak for "gravel". Munson Rd., in particular, is narrow, rutted, steep and twisty in parts, and washboardy in a couple of spots. Or it is until you it the Multnomah County line. Then it's nice and paved. This isn't the first time I've seen a road paved right up to the county line, but it always cracks me up when I see it. So if (like me) you don't have a truck or giant SUV, or you do have a truck/SUV but you're afraid of messing up the paint or something, you may want to take a different route. Skyline to Johnson Road is a good route, paved the whole way and everything, and the northern stretch of Skyline is beautiful, except for the huge tacky McMansions everywhere. Yes, sadly, the McMansion plague extends out this far. And further still, I'm sure. It seems all rural and bucolic, but land is expensive here, as it turns out.

I should also note that the Thomas Guide has the park's location slightly wrong. It's on the other side of Johnson Rd. from what the map shows. Other maps may do this too. So don't go blundering onto someone's farm thinking it's the park. If it looks like a farm, it is.

I had to do a bit of digging to figure out who owns Mason Hill Park. The sign says Multnomah County, but the county turned its park system over to Metro back in 1994. I finally checked PortlandMaps, which is sort of the final arbiter of these things, and its page for the park confirms that it belongs to Metro. Metro's website doesn't mention it; their parks section only mentions a few of the "crown jewels" like Blue Lake, the Smith & Bybee Wetlands, etc., and even then not in great detail.

I did come across a more extensive list, actually a list of the former county parks that Metro owns now. Seems that as part of the deal, the county still kicks in a little money to help maintain them. From the document:

...the following Metro natural areas and regional facilities that were transferred from Multnomah County in 1994:

• Mason Hill Park
• Sauvie Island Boat Ramp
• Multnomah Channel Park
• Bybee-Howell House and Park
• Bell View Point
• James Gleason Memorial Boat Ramp
• Broughton Beach
• Beggars Tick Marsh
• Glendoveer Golf Course and Fitness Trail
• Blue Lake Park
• Gary and Flagg Islands
• Oxbow Park
• Indian John Island
• Larch Mountain Corridor
• Chinook Landing Marine Park
• Sandy River Access Points
• Smith & Bybee Lakes Addition
• Phillipi Property (the east end of the Marine Drive Trail)
• The Expo Center

Some of those I've heard of, others not. Bell Vue Point is a little spot out on the easternmost point side of Sauvie Island, across the river from Kelly Point. and I think Multnomah Channel Park would have to be somewhere around Sauvie Island too. This "Phillipi Property" I have no idea about. Google comes up with a few references to a "Philippi Property" way out in Eastern Oregon, and a "Philippi Park" on the Columbia, also way out in Eastern Oregon. So I'm guessing neither of those are the right one.

Updated: I've found the elusive "Phillipi Property". Metro's GIS system shows it as a narrow strip of land between Marine Drive and the Columbia, starting a little east of the intersection with NE 138th Ave., and continuing to a bit west of NE 185th Ave., at the point where the east end of the Columbia Slough connects (joins? branches off from?) the river. The place has a bike path, so it's visitable. I've driven by, but I haven't stopped yet, since I couldn't find anywhere to park safely. Clearly this will require a bit more researching.

In short, I've got a brand new list of obscure places to try to track down, if possible. Yay!

Updated 12/24/22 (and previously updated 9/5/12, 8/24/14, 4/29/18.) This post has sort of evolved into a list of lists, covering places previously owned by Multnomah County, and/or currently owned by Metro.

Westside parks, formerly belonging to the county and now owned by the City of Portland unless otherwise noted.

• Dickenson (the city now spells it "Dickinson")
• Lesser
• Maricara
• Orchid Street. Despite the name, this park consisted of three vacant lots at SW 51st & Marigold, a block north of Orchid St. This park was only around 0.3 acres, and was declared surplus and sold off for development in 1994.
• Oregonian Printing Press Park is still technically owned by the county, since it's a tiny stray bit of Morrison Bridge right-of-way. This park has been closed and fenced off for several years now, unfortunately.
• West Portland (aka Loll Wildwood)
• Woods Memorial

Eastside parks, formerly belonging to the county and now owned by the City of Portland unless otherwise noted. As far as I know all of these are of the basic neighborhood playground & ballfields type. As of December 2022 I haven't visited any of them.

• Brentwood
• East Lynchwood (look for the city to rename this one like they did with Lynchview Park below)
• Gilbert Heights
• Gilbert Primary
• Holladay
• Lincoln
• Lynchview (renamed to Verdell Burdine Rutherford Park in 2020 because of the word "Lynch" in the name)
• North Powellhurst
• Parklane
• Raymond
• Vance
(transferred to City of Gresham)

Metro Parks. These are a mix of old Multnomah County parks (listed in italics), and new ones bought with Metro bond measure money. For a number of years Metro's website devoted almost no space to their former county parks but they seem to have fixed that oversight now. Links go to blog posts here, or to Flickr photosets if I have photos for a post I haven't finished yet.

• Blue Lake
• Broughton Beach
• Canemah Bluff
• Chehalem Ridge
• Chinook Landing
• Cooper Mountain
• Farmington Paddle Launch
• Gleeson Memorial boat ramp
• Glendoveer Golf Course + nature trail
• Graham Oaks Nature Park
• Howell Territorial (aka the Bybee-Howell House)
• Killin Wetlands
• Mason Hill
• Mt. Talbert Nature Park
• Newell Creek
• Orenco Woods
• Oxbow
• Sauvie Island boat launch
• Scouters Mountain
• Smith & Bybee Lakes

Metro Cemeteries. It used to be that county governments would take over responsibility for old pioneer cemeteries and others that, er, outlived whatever organization was responsible for them. Metro has since taken this over from Multnomah County, at least. I'm less sure about the other two Metro-area counties. I'm not actively seeking these out to visit, but I do have posts about three of them.

• Grand Army of the Republic
• Lone Fir
• Powell Grove

Metro Venues. Also not really parks, but an assortment of other things that have ended up on Metro's plate over time.

• Oregon Convention Center
• Oregon Zoo
• The Expo Center
• Portland'5 (yes, that's an apostrophe-five at the end), the unpronounceable name for the collection of downtown performing arts venues.

Metro Natural Areas. This is an interesting category. Metro has bond measure money is strictly for buying land, based on long-term needs, with the idea that land isn't getting any cheaper or more plentiful around here. So by design there's a second category of Metro-owned places that aren't developed as parks, some of which may get promoted to Nature Park status someday, and others may never get upgraded, period. I've read somewhere that they legally can't fence these areas off and close them to all public access, but they really aren't set up for mass visitation, have minimal facilities at best, and appear absolutely nowhere on the Metro website outside of Metromap, their GIS system. Quite often a label in Metromap will be the only mention of a given place anywhere on the entire internet. It's an impressive bit of anti-SEO, honestly. I would feel kind of bad about messing up their system, but I've been doing this for (checks math) 17 years now and (as far as I know) have never inflicted a visitor tsunami on anyone, or anything, or anywhere, and it would be a bit surprising if that suddenly became a thing now. As above, the ones in italics are pre-existing ones that were transferred from the county; everything else is a subsequent Metro purchase.

• Baker Creek Canyon (out in the hills west of Sherwood)
• Balch Creek (located in the West Hills next to, & administered by, the Portland Audubon Sanctuary)
• Beggars Tick Marsh
• Bell View Point (on Sauvie Island across from Kelly Point Park. Accessible by boat, and illegally by private road with large "No Trespassing" signs.)
• Buck & Gordon Creeks
• Burlington Creek Forest (in the West Hills, NW of Forest Park)
• Chinquapin Bluffs
• Chinquapin West
• Ennis Creek Forest (in the West Hills, NW of Forest Park)
• Fern Hill Forest
• Flagg Island (a small island in the Columbia, offshore of the Sandy Delta & accessible only by boat)
• Gary Island (another small island in the Columbia, offshore of the Sandy Delta & accessible only by boat)
• Indian John Island (a small island in the Sandy River, south/upstream from Oxbow Park)
• Kingfisher (on the east bank of the Sandy, between Oxbow and Indian John Island)
• Larch Mountain Corridor
• McCarthy Creek (in the West Hills, NW of Forest Park)
• Multnomah Channel (wetlands across Multnomah Channel from Sauvie Island)
• North Abbey Creek (in the West Hills, WNW of Forest Park)
• Penstemon Prairie
• Phillipi Property
• Sandy River Access Points
• South Beaver Creek
• Springwater on the Willamette
• Upper Mitchell Creek

Pics: Steel Bridge

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Next up, a few photos of the Steel Bridge, yet another downtown Portland bridge. Most of these photos were taken from the sidewalk on the upper deck of the bridge. Not everyone realizes you can walk across the upper part; the shiny new-ish walkway on the lower deck is wide and convenient, and connects directly with Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade. The upper deck sidewalks are perfectly fine, but they aren't as convenient, so they don't seem to get a lot of foot traffic. I know I don't go that way very often.



That's kind of a shame really; if you're interested in the bridge at all (which I realize is unlikely), you get a better view of it from above. And if you're interested in the view from the bridge (more likely, although still not super-likely), that's better too. There's even a guardrail between you and the cars on the bridge, which is a nice, and unusual, touch. Still, on the east side you're dumped off into the N-dimensional circus that is the Rose Garden transit center, with streets and MAX lines radiating off in all directions, and then some. And on the west side, well, it's Old Town. Which I'm not afraid of, but a lot of people are, and sometimes I admit they might be on to something.

(Note to this humble blog's surprisingly large (i.e. nonzero) UK readership: "Old Town" in the Portland sense means roughly pre-1900. Seriously. Feel free to giggle if you like.)




A few semi-interesting tidbits about the Steel Bridge:

• It's owned by the Union Pacific railroad, not the city, county, or state. Railroads aren't usually too concerned about aesthetics, which explains a lot about the Steel Bridge. It's a workhorse, not a show horse, as the saying goes. I'm not sure why it's painted black. Maybe they got a good deal on black paint, many years ago. Must've been a one-time deal, if so, since it hasn't been repainted in a very, very long time.
  
• The standard bridge links: Structurae, Bridgehunter and PortlandBridges.
  
• As the Wikipedia article (above) notes, the lower & upper decks raise independently, which is unique in the world, yeehaw. This relates to the next point:
  
• The bridge carries all sorts of traffic. It carries normal road traffic (it was the downtown bridge for US 99, back before I-5 existed), plus MAX trains, heavy rail (including Amtrak service), pedestrians on both the lower & upper decks, and I understand that it even caries a variety of utilities, although I'm not sure which ones. Which leads us to the next point:
  
• Thus, the Steel Bridge is probably a great chokepoint for the Evildoers. (If you're an Evildoer, please stop reading now. Thx. Mgmt.) We probably don't have any Evildoers here, but the security industry insists it's a concern, so we might as well have a cow about it. At least that way we'll get our fair share of that dee-licious Homeland Security pork spending.
  
  Don't believe me? Last October, our fair city played host to something called "TOPOFF4", a Homeland Security shindig that involved a simulated "dirty bomb" attack against the Steel Bridge. (A few stories on that from Indymedia, the Mercury, the Tribune, and OregonLive.) The amusing thing about this is that they actually did the thing up at Portland International Raceway, and just pretended they were at the Steel Bridge. Now, I've been to PIR on numerous occasions, and I can state with authority that there's nothing there that in any way resembles the Steel Bridge. One would think that would be an obstacle, but if you have a Homeland Security-style hyperactive imagination, I suppose anything can stand in for anything else. Invading Iraq can stand in for catching Osama, for example. But I digress. Alternately, well, "TOPOFF" is security-speak for "Top Officials", and this was a bigwig-centric exercise. Which probably meant there was a big freakin' bigwig party at taxpayer expense. Maybe afterwards, but maybe during. Probably everyone got a solid gold "Mission Accomplished" paperweight and a gallon of caviar. That's how these things go, usually. And all those out-of-towners would need to relax after a hard day of manly-man Homeland Security playactin' and simulatin', so naturally there'd be strippers, this being Portland and all. Gotta show the big boys from DC a little local color, right?
  
• A fun twist on the security angle involves the huge grain terminal that sits right next door to the bridge. You know, the one that used to have the ginormous Amazon.com ad on it. As it turns out, the common variety of wheat grown here in the Northwest is ideal for making pitas, naan bread, and other varieties of Evildoing baked goods, so a lot of our exports go to various corners of Evildoerstan. On several occasions I've seen grain ships docked here which had the ship's name in both English and Arabic, and at least one listed its home port as Alexandria, Egypt. Which is just one of those things that happens naturally when you're a major seaport, as we occasionally pretend to be, but I'm sure it's ulcer fodder for the security guys.
  

All that security theater nonsense leads us to today's obligatory "not dying" angle: When crossing the bridge, by whatever means, try to avoid Evildoers. Especially the ones with WMDs. Domestic Evildoers with mysterious but important-sounding government jobs bear watching as well. You may want keep this advice in mind while crossing other bridges too, if I may be so bold. Have I mentioned that I've got more photos on Flickr? Well, I do. FWIW.

Pics: Burnside Bridge

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The Burnside Bridge is next up in our hurried, semi-enthusiastic look at downtown Portland bridges. As I said in the last post, I figured I already had a bunch of photos of the bridges downtown, and they're right here if I needed to take more, so putting a post together shouldn't be a big deal.



Also, if I didn't do the post, I'd feel that the bridge project wasn't really and truly complete, and it would bug me and continue to bug me until I finally did it for completeness's sake, so I might as well go ahead and do it now and get it over with. Oh, and not whine and complain about it while I'm doing it, there's an additional thought. I mean, whose bright idea was this, again?



Anyway, I figured a Burnside post shouldn't be a big deal, since I don't really have much of an opinion about it either way. It's fine, I guess. The towers are distinctive, but I've never been able to decide whether they're cool or silly. We're told this is the only bridge in town where they employed an actual architect in the design process, rather than letting "mere" engineers do it all. As always, employing an actual architect made the bridge much more expensive, so there was a big scandal, and the entire Multnomah County commission was recalled over it. It's not a very juicy scandal by political scandal standards, but it's all we've got. Or at least it was one of the rare cases where official misbehavior a.) became public, and b.) something actually happened as a result.

Anyway, walking across is pretty uneventful, which is a good thing unless you need a hook to hang a blog post on, which I do. I did manage to dream up a "not dying" angle, although not a very credible one, so I'll get to it later.

One mildly unique thing about the Burnside, by Portland standards, is that around its west end there are a few parking spaces and meters on the bridge. Not on the part over the water, though. Hey, I said mildly unique, didn't I?



I'm not going to bail completely on trying to be informative, so here are the standard links about the bridge: Multnomah County, Structurae, Bridgehunter, and PortlandBridges.

And, naturally, I have a Flickr photoset about the bridge, with all the photos you see here and much, much more, or not.

One more thing -- the earlier 1894 Burnside Bridge lives on, in a way, and you can walk over it too, or at least parts of it. When the current bridge was built, the old bridge was recycled and became part of at least three other bridges. Some of it became part of the Sellwood; the almost-ready-to-fall-down part, in fact. Other pieces apparently became part of the Lusted Road Bridge and possibly the Ten Eyck Road or "Revenue" Bridge over the Sandy River, as well as the Bull Run River Bridge (none of which I've covered here, at least not so far) There may be others I'm unaware of.



The bridge is not to be confused with Burnside's Bridge, a small stone bridge in Maryland that figured in a major Civil War battle. If your friendly neighborhood search engine sent you here while you were looking for Civil War stuff, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sorry. Our bridge isn't even named after the same guy.



I don't even have any ghost stories this time around. Closest thing is a 2006 page about "Haunted Exhibition", a show at the late, lamented Disjecta art space. Not really the same thing. Surely that other Burnside Bridge has ghosts, or maybe brain-eating Confederate zombies. Woohoo, zombies! Ok, so you might find tweakers hanging around our bridge sometimes, and it's true they strongly resemble zombies in a lot of ways, but as far as I know they don't actually number among the legions of the undead, technically speaking. Not yet, at least.



Maybe that's our creative "not dying" angle this time around: Don't accidentally visit the bridge in Maryland instead, thus falling prey to the ghastly living dead. Yeah, that'll work. Laugh with incredulity if you like; that only goes to show you've never been to Maryland. And don't get me started about Delaware, come to think of it.

Pics: Broadway Bridge

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Yes, kids, it's bridge time again. I realize I said earlier that I probably wasn't going to include some of the downtown bridges in the ongoing bridge-meandering project, on the grounds that lots of people walk and bike over them every day, everybody takes photos of them, and therefore they aren't "interesting".

Then I figured, hey, I've already got a bunch of photos of most of them, and they're right here, and I'm unfortunately rather big on doing stuff for the sake of completeness. And really the hard part about a bridge post is the research, not the photos or the walking. I doubt there's any groundbreaking new research to be done on most of the downtown bridges, and I'm not that keen on doing any, so by dropping that it ought to make it relatively simple to complete the set, so to speak. In that spirit, here are a few photos of the Broadway Bridge.



The Broadway comes up a bit short in the grace and grandeur departments, if you ask me, although the latticework looks kind of cool in a steampunk sort of way. And it's a nice color, you gotta give it that.





The main interesting thing about the Broadway is that it's of an unusual design, something called a "double-leaf Rall-type bascule". Which, as Multnomah County's page about the bridge explains, is a type of drawbridge where the 1250 ton counterweight and most of the drawbridge mechanism sits above the bridge deck. We're told it's the longest remaining bridge of its type in existence, and furthermore it's one of only three remaining in the country.

When they say the design is rare, what they mean is that it's an evolutionary dead end, and for good reason. It seems our fair city did the usual Oregon thing, and picked the design that was cheapest in the short term. As it often does, that turned out to mean that the bridge was very expensive to maintain in the long term. And finding spare parts when it breaks down? Not so easy.

Also, the complex design means it opens and closes verrrrry slowwwwwly. If you know anyone whose daily commute includes the Broadway, ask them about it sometime. They'll either get livid about it and turn the same shade of red as the bridge, or they'll smile and tell you what a Zenlike experience it is. The former possibility is the more likely of the two.



Incidentally, the bridge used to be one of those scary open steel grate designs, which are, uh, challenging when wet, and become an, um, advanced challenge when icy. After the recent renovation, the new bridge deck is made of something called FRP, or "fiber-reinforced polymer". Which I think means plastic. Really strong plastic. I hope. The material's manufacturer notes that the Broadway now has "the largest movable FRP vehicular bridge deck in the world." Take that, Seattle! Ha!



I don't know which gets more bike traffic, the Broadway or the Hawthorne, but it does seem that cyclists on the Broadway are much more determined about it, and they're going a lot faster. So if you happen to be an itinerant blogger with a camera, or a photographer with a blog, and you decide to stop and take a photo of something, you'll want to be aware of your surroundings. Everyone on the bridge except you is going with the flow, and you're just standing around dawdling and making an obstacle of yourself. It's not really a "not dying" angle, but there is a real potential for bodily harm. So pay attention. Trust me on this.



A couple of other links:

• The PortlandBridges page on the Broadway has some good photos, as you might expect.
  
• The bridge's Structurae entry.
  
• And the equivalent Bridgehunter page
  
• My inevitable Flickr photoset about the bridge.
  

Alexandra Avenue Bridge

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So today's unusual adventure takes us to an obscure corner of Forest Park to what you might call Portland's own "Bridge to Nowhere". The Alexandra Avenue Bridge is a fairly long and substantial (although narrow) bridge over a deep forested ravine, with a creek somewhere far below. It seems like you've wandered into the back of beyond, although you're actually just a few blocks off NW Thurman St. As you go uphill on Thurman, turn right onto Gordon St., and follow it to where it turns right again and becomes Alexandra Avenue. The bridge is right there. But strangely, Alexandra Avenue dead-ends into Forest Park just a few blocks past the bridge, and doesn't connect to any other streets. The city clearly went to a lot of trouble and expense to build a bridge here, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and basically nobody uses it. So the obvious question is "Why?"






I haven't been able to find a definitive answer, but I have a couple of competing theories:

1. The bridge was supposed to spur residential development further north, and it just sort of didn't work out. Forest Park wasn't created until the late 1940s, and prior to that the whole area was platted out for more upscale West Hills houses stretching off to the horizon. Leif Erickson Drive was supposed to be the main drag through the future ritzy suburb, but there were problems with mudslides, and then the Depression came along, and eventually the city ended up with all the land due to unpaid property taxes. The bridge was built in 1922, which would be the right timeframe for this.
2. It's really more of a "Bridge to Almost Nowhere". There are two things at the far end of the bridge, and perhaps the bridge was always intended just for them. There's a huge Water Bureau tank on the far side, and if you look at the photos above you can see what looks like a large water main under the deck of the bridge. So possibly the water's the main thing, so to speak, and they just figured, hey, if we're building a bridge we might as well let cars use it too. So that's one possibility.

The second thing on the far side of the bridge is the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, which they describe as:

The Salvation Army White Shield Center has been located in Northwest Portland since 1917. The center began as a maternity home and hospital. We continue to serve the needs of pregnant and parenting clients between the ages of 12 and 18 but have added an additional program to serve the needs of adolescent girls who need a safe, secure, and nurturing environment. Clients are referred to the programs by state social service agencies or the juvenile justice system.

The term "maternity home and hospital" in this case meant it was the place where young girls who'd "gotten in trouble" would go to live for a few months until the baby was born and given up for adoption. The whole idea was to be quiet and discreet about it, given the extreme social stigma attached to unwed mothers back then. There'd be the usual cover story about the girl going off to visit Aunt Edna for a few months, and afterward everyone would act -- outwardly -- as if nothing had happened, and society could go on pretending this sort of thing didn't happen, at least not in our fair city. It was a very different time, I'll say that, all about keeping up appearances and "respectability" and false facades. I suppose at the time a "maternity home and hospital" was a way to treat the issue compassionately, while also helping to hide it, so that society could go on not facing facts as they really are.

So because of all that, you don't really want your maternity home to be located on a busy neighborhood street, with nosy neighbors and Model T's whizzing by constantly. If the dates are right, the center was here first, and then the bridge a few years later. So it's possible the bridge was built to serve this place, and Alexandra Avenue was never meant to extend any further than it does.

While researching, I came across the White Shield Project, a site dedicated to collecting memories and accounts about life at White Shield over the years. Here's a forum thread on the same topic, with a few responses discussing the place.

A bit more info via the Oregonian: November 2006 article, and this rather sad Margie Boule story from September '03.



So, in short, I still don't know why the bridge is here. At least I can try to explain how I came across the bridge. If you've read any of my recent posts here, you might have noticed I've been doing a local bridge thing for a couple of months now, on and off. It seems there are a couple of sites on the net that are just big databases of bridges and other structures from around the world. So naturally once I was done looking at the page for the McLoughlin Bridge, or whichever one took me there, I thought, hey, let's see the list of what they've got for the Portland area. From there, went (as I tend to do) hey, I've never heard of that one, what's the deal there? Looked at the photos on the site, decided it looked interesting. Then found it on Google Maps and figured it was reasonably nearby. And thus, a new TODO item was born.



So here are the bridge pages at Structurae, Bridgehunter, and Brueckenweb. You might notice that two of the three sites are out of Germany, for some reason. Also, they all seem to be working off the same master list. The bridge shows up almost nowhere else on the interwebs, but it does show up on the City Bridge Inventory, where we learn it has a "sufficiency rating" of 51.70 out of 100. Which is not great by any means, and it may rank as high as it does because it gets almost no traffic. One component of the sufficiency rating is whether the bridge has enough capacity to handle current & projected vehicle traffic. And on that count, at least, it seems to suffice quite well. The inventory also describes the bridge as in "POOR" condition, and also calls it "Functionally Obsolete" (along with a lot of other bridges in town). The bridge also appears on this list of bridges eligible for repair or replacement. In which we learn that rehab costs were estimated at ~$900k, compared to ~$1.2M to replace the bridge, so rehab it probably is, whenever they get around to it. We also learn that the stream it crosses is simply called "Unnamed Creek". One other little bit of trivia to pass along: According to PortlandMaps, if a neighborhood had sprung up around the bridge, it would have been known as "Blythswood", at least according to the tax rolls (example). If history had turned out a little differently, if the Depression hadn't come along, and possibly if there hadn't been a La Niña year at just the wrong time, (with the accompanying heavy rains and mudslides), right now we might be muttering and shaking our fists at the rich twits up in Blythswood, careening around the narrow streets in their monstrous luxury SUVs. Most likely there would be a "Friends of the Alexandra Avenue Bridge" organization, with big gala fundraisers every so often, and there'd be nature walks and assorted family-friendly activities. The creek below would have a name, and there'd be all sorts of public handwringing about watersheds and native fish species. I can safely say all this based on how the locals get worked up over Tryon Creek and Balch Creek, further south. In any case, as always I've got a few more photos in my Flickr photoset about the place. Updated 9/09: We have linkage from here, on a wiki page about White Shield. I haven't read much of the site, but the person/group/organization behind it appears to be very skeptical about teen programs such as this.