The Thompson Elk

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So apparently I'm doing a little series about fountains now. I recently realized I had a bunch of Flickr photos of various fountains around town, most of which I hadn't ever done a post about. So I figured, hey, I've already done a lot of the legwork, now I just need to search the interwebs a little and mash everything into a semi-coherent jumble, and I've got a new series of posts going. It's a simple and easy formula, I've found, except for the mashing-together part.



So this stop in the shiny new fountain series takes us to the Thompson Elk Fountain, located right in the middle of Main St., downtown, between 3rd & 4th avenues, with Chapman Square on one side and Lownsdale Square on the other. The latter page (at the city parks website) describes the fountain thusly:

Between the two Plaza Blocks, Main Street curves around a huge elk fountain given to the city by David P. Thompson. Thompson arrived in Portland driving sheep over the Oregon Trail. He served as Portland's mayor from 1879-1882. One day looked out of the office window in his New Market Building at the Skidmore Fountain and decided that he wanted to dedicate a fountain to the city as well. Thompson commissioned Roland Hinton Perry, whose work adorns the Library of Congress and the dome of the Pennsylvania state capitol, and in 1900, he presented the city with a bronze elk fountain to commemorate elk that once grazed nearby. Local architect H.G. Wright designed the stone base of eastern granite, which included drinking troughs for horses and dogs. The Exalted Order of Elks refused to dedicate it because they considered the statue "a monstrosity of art." Many have tried to have Thompson's elk removed because it can be considered a traffic obstacle, but the elk statue remains. In 1974, after a debate about disturbing the blocks in order to complement the then-new General Services Building, Thompson's elk and the Plaza Blocks were designated as Historic Landmarks.

I'm not sure everyone realizes the elk is, technically, a fountain. Mostly what you see is the big statue of the elk, but there's running water at the base of it. Like the Skidmore Fountain over in Old Town, it serves a practical purpose as a drinking fountain for horses and dogs. That's not completely archaic, either; I've seen police horses drinking from both fountains before. And let's not forget the cute little Water Bowl fountain in the North Park Blocks, which is kind of a Benson Bubbler shaped like a dog bowl. I've seen dogs drinking from the regular Benson Bubblers too, come to think of it. C'mon, stop going "eeww" -- it's much more likely for you to catch cooties from a rich guy in a suit than you are from some street kid's pit bull. Think about it.



Regarding the statue, it's not a "monstrosity of art", it's just a plain old elk. I don't actually have much of an opinion about the elk, one way or the other. Possibly familiarity breeds indifference, I dunno. I suppose it's unusual to put up a statue of an elk, and we Portlanders just forget how weird this is because it's been here forever.

In a way, the elk is our little taste of the rural Oregon experience (except without the banjos and ritual cannibalism): You're driving along, and then you swerve at the last minute to avoid a huge elk in the road that won't freakin' budge. Or even look at you, since the statue faces away from oncoming traffic. I recently figured out why this is, incidentally. Portland got the statue in 1900, and downtown's one-way street grid was instituted much later by Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee, some time between 1948 and 1952. So the elk started out facing the right way, and nobody thought to rotate it once the traffic layout changed. So now you know.



The best part about the Thompson Elk isn't the elk, though. The actual fountain part of the fountain has a bunch of tiny spouting animal faces, which are adorable. And since the elk sits between two lanes of traffic, you have to brave gruesome vehicular death to see the little faces. They're pretty obscure, and there's an element of pseudo-danger involved in seeing them, so they're basically perfect for this humble blog, hence most of the photos are of the little animals and not the elk itself. Hell, everybody's got photos of the elk.



Like many (but not all) of the city's fountains, the Thompson Elk is part of the Water Bureau's bailiwick. They're a bit more clued in about the whole "series of tubes" thing than most government agencies, and the Elk occasionally shows up on their surprisingly entertaining Water Blog.

A while back, they ran a mini-bio of Mayor Thompson, "The Man Behind Elk Fountain", as part of a limerick contest about the Elk. No, seriously. A limerick contest. Apparently they do these contests on a semi-regular basis.

And get your mind out of the gutter -- they're only interested in family-friendly limericks. Or haikus. Or whatever poetical form they decide to do next. Maybe they should go for more of a challenge next time and do sonnets, or Icelandic-style sagas, maybe. That could be interesting.



So here's the inevitable bullet-point list of Elk-related items from around the net:

• A page about the Elk at Waymarking.
  
• Our fair city's new and tragically hip Ace Hotel uses it as a design motif.
  
• A winter photo at PortlandBridges
  
• An OregonLive article about Gus van Sant says the elk shows up in his films now and then. I don't recall ever seeing it, but Shawn Levy says it's there, and I'm sure he's watched a lot more van Sant than I have or probably ever will.
  
• The Elk shows up in a short travel blog post about visiting Portland.
  
• An old(ish) photo, from the U of O architecture department.
  
• Two posts about the Elk at Portland (OR) Daily Photo
  
• A blog post with a nice fall photo of Lownsdale Square and the Elk.
  
• Another fall photo at Photomic.
  
• PortlandNeighborhood's Downtown Portland page has a photo of the elk, among other things.
  
• And the absolute most awesomest of all: The elk shows up on an album cover for a local metal band. Yeah.
  

In the unlikely event you noticed & wondered why the photos have an odd look about them, I used yet another old vintage lens for these. This time I used an old screw-mount Vivitar 50mm f/1.8. It was getting dark, so I think I shot these either wide open or close to it. Not a bad lens overall, but definitely some funky stuff going on with the out-of-focus highlights and so forth. The lens came off an old Vivitar 220/SL, so I'm pretty sure it was made for Vivitar by Cosina. FWIW. Updated: We have linkage from Midnight Movie Guy, in a hilarious rant about 2009's awful G.I. Joe movie. So the elk statue isn't really the main point of the post by any means, but hey. Chances are you'll enjoy his post more than you're enjoying mine right now, so I figured I ought to pass it along. So now you know. And like G.I. Joe always said, knowing is half the battle.

Tideman Johnson foray

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Here are a few photos from a quick trip out to Tideman Johnson Natural Area, a little park on Johnson Creek over near Reed College. I dropped a week ago, on a sunny Friday afternoon, and found the place busier than I expected. Plenty of bike commuters along the Springwater corridor, of course, but also a lot of people just out for a walk. So the place isn't exactly obscure, although I'd never been there before.



I found it an exceptionally pleasant spot, although that might have been the place, or it might have been the time, or both, perhaps. You can't really disentangle the two. Warm(ish) sunny afternoons in November are uncommon in this part of the world, and unexpected when they do occur, and there was a sort of giddy, yet determined feel about the place. It was as if people knew this was bound to be the very last hurrah, for real this time, and they weren't going to let a moment of it go to waste. I know that's how I felt, at least.



It had already been an unusual day. I'd spent the morning packing up and moving out of the office where I'd worked for the last eight years. Not changing jobs, just the company moving to new offices a few blocks away, and it'd be back to business in the new digs, with the same coworkers, come Monday. Still, although nothing really changed, I spent the day boxing up books and taking things down off walls and taking a photos of the place for "posterity". It felt like the last day of school. (I understand the usual word for this feeling is "valedictory", but I was never a valedictorian and can't say for certain exactly what that feels like. I suspect a morbid fear of public speaking is a large part of it, though, or at least it would've been for me. But I digress.)

When I finished packing and went home, I knew I needed to get outside. Immediately. I already knew I was going to be sore from all the packing and moving, and going for a hike after that wasn't the obvious logical choice, but it's what I felt like doing, and it's what I did. So I picked a spot off my to-visit list, grabbed the camera and map, and set out on another foray. If not the last foray of the season, probably the last sunny one of the season, at least. This time I obviously, very obviously, picked the right place at the right time.



Tideman Johnson is not a very big place, just 7 acres in a long skinny strip between the Springwater trail and Johnson Creek, along the bottom of a sort of gully. So if you visit and want to make it last a while, slow down, or you'll run out of park.

As it turns out, a lot of the park is fenced off because they're trying to restore this stretch of the creek to something resembling a natural state. There's a walkway through the park, and you're expected to stay on it.

(Note: The next few paragraphs are full of earnest earth-saving do-good-ness. I usually try to avoid lecturing people about Important Issues Of The Day -- no, really, I do -- but the environmental stuff is really the core story of the place this time. I'd feel irresponsible if I wrote about the park without at least mentioning it, and when I write about something I try to do a reasonably thorough job. If this isn't really your thing, feel free to just scroll down and look at the photos. You probably ought to care, but I won't be offended (and won't know) if you don't.)



Restoring the creek is going to be tough. I'd never heard about this before, but back during the Depression Johnson Creek was "improved" as part of a major WPA public works project. The creek's always been prone to flooding, and the thinking was that it wouldn't flood so often if it drained its watershed more efficiently. The idea was that if the rain all flowed to the willamette as quickly as possible, it wouldn't pool up and back into people's basements and so forth. So they straightened the creek and lined the entire creekbed with stone, from the vicinity of Powell Butte basically all the way to the Willamette. Naively, that sounds like a fantastic idea, but in practice it turns out not to work very well. The creek, reportedly, floods just as much as it ever did. They may have moved the flooding around a bit, but they didn't solve it. They may have even made it worse.



And this being the Northwest, you can't tinker with local waterways even a little without running into salmon trouble, as we've repeatedly discovered. They're very picky and fragile fish, it seems, and an engineer simply looking at a river or stream here is apparently enough to trigger a Salmon Apocalypse. So, in short, the ultimate goal is to put the creek back to something like it was before people started improving it, and hope the fish are appeased, the tasty little bastards.

(For more on the salmon situation, check out a doc from the city, "Where are salmon in the City of Portland?" Which, I should point out, was not written with fishermen in mind.)



Anyway, that's a long stretch of creek they're talking about, and a lot of rocks to pull up, and a lot of habitat to restore. It would only be fair to get a massive federal grant and take care of it all at once, after all, since the problem was originally caused by a previous massive federal grant. But in the absence of that, it looks like the work proceeds a bit at a time, in fits and starts. I find it interesting that this particular part of the creek runs through a relatively nice area, at least by Johnson Creek standards. Further east, the creek flows through the heart of an area commonly, and unkindly, known as "Felony Flats". Maybe the city cares more about upscale-ish parts of town (and it wouldn't be the first time). Maybe they're simply afraid to venture out into Tonya Harding country. I don't know. Less cynically, I'm sure it doesn't hurt if your local neighborhood association takes an interest in the local park's eco-troubles, and I suppose that's more likely to happen the more upscale-ish an area happens to be.





One complication is that you can see the old WPA stonework in a few places, and (as WPA work tends to be) it's well done, attractive, and historically significant. So what do you do when you have what turned out to be a really bad idea, implemented in a beautiful way? Especially now, at a point in history where a lot of us (myself included) are kind of nostalgic for programs like the WPA, and all things FDR?





There's one bit in the park where the creek goes over a sort of man-made waterfall, with stone railings on both sides. It looks to have been restored in recent years, so I imagine this part is a keeper, at least for now. While I was taking photos, a guy mentioned he'd just seen a fish trying to jump the waterfall. I missed that, unfortunately, or that would be the photo I'd lead with. Anyway, if the falls turn out to be a barrier to salmon, they may have to go too, historic or not.



Salmon aren't the only wildlife here. At one point I passed a group of older people out for a stroll, and a younger woman was telling them about the park's family of beavers. I didn't see any of those either, unfortunately, but there are a few photos of them in someone's extensive photoset about the park up on Pbase. Not that the presence of beavers is really all that rare or surprising. I'll grant that they're kind of unusual animals. As far as large rodents go, though, porcupines are much cuter.



There isn't all that much on the interwebs about the area, but I've come across a few things worth reading.

You really want to read "Pilgrim at Johnson Creek". The author tries paddling the length of the creek, and talks with the locals in some of the more Appalachian parts of the Johnson Creek area. I'm not sure which is braver. Either way, that, my friends, is true urban exploration. Me showing up with a camera and wandering around for an hour or so, not so much, really. I do have photos, though. Have I pointed out yet that I have photos? Because I do. Which is something.



The area also figures in a weirdly fascinating Mercury article: "The Accidental Exorcist".

And a post on Derivations titled "I kid you not", which I really don't think I can describe. Intriguing, though.

wavy

How to be artsy and special:

1. Have one beer too many, or a bit too much cheap wine, or whatever. Choose your poison. "High on life" is also acceptable (albeit kind of lame), so long as you follow the subsequent steps.
   
2. Put pinhole adapter on camera. If you have one, obviously. If you don't, do something else to cut down the amount of light going into the camera, so the photos don't come out all white. Which is boring, although perhaps artsy in its own minimalist sort of way, if you're into that sort of thing, which I'm not.
   
3. Take long exposure, waving camera around in tipsy (or pseudo-tipsy) fashion. Note: Do not drop camera.
   
4. Profit (or not)! Amaze your friends (or not)!
   

fog, st. johns bridge

Sexton Mountain (seriously)

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This is Beaverton's Sexton Mountain Meadows Park, the little park at the top of the hill in the semi-ritzy / wannabe-ritzy Murrayhill area.

The photos aren't real enthralling, despite the altitude. In that part of town, when you go uphill all you see is more Beaverton. Probably if one was to go to the far edge of the big water tank here, one could look down and see even more Beaverton, if one so desired.

So you may have gathered I'm not posting this because I wanted to share some cool photos I took. Nah, the photos are strictly illustrative this time. And I don't have any fascinating historical tidbits to share, unless you think 1991 is ancient history. Which it is, actually, in interweb years. So without further ado, permit me to present a silly story from the ancient USENET days of yore: "The Ballad of Sexton Mountain". Snort. Giggle.

The subdivision mentioned in the story has a website here. Lots of talk about bylaws and CC&R's, but oddly not a word about their persistent signage issues. Their site does have a photo of their entrance sign, in a non-vandalized state no less, but I didn't check whether it's actually there or not...

The Marquam Bridge, alas

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A while back, I set a challenge to myself to try to make the Marquam Bridge look interesting. Which is a real challenge, as in real life it's not very interesting at all. Nobody (myself included) ever has anything nice to say about it. It's a big, ugly, cheaply-built, 60's freeway bridge, and it's part of the freeway that hogs the east bank of the Willamette.

So I don't know whether I've succeeded here or not, but this is what I've got for the time being. Maybe next year I'll do the Bridge Pedal, the one time each year where you can walk or bike over the Marquam and the Fremont. That way I might get some cool photos from the bridge. That'd be cool. The one great thing about the Marquam is the view of downtown, which is pretty much unparalleled -- except maybe by the view from the Fremont. It's a shame that under normal circumstances you only catch fleeting glimpses of this view while dodging semis and weaving around geezers in Buicks.

If I did the Bridge Pedal thing, I could also get some nice photos of the Marquam's intricate architectural details, if it had any, which it doesn't.



Some years ago, I had a near-accident on the bridge. I was going eastbound onto the bridge, a bit too fast, when a very slow UPS truck pulled into my lane just ahead of me. I had to slam on the brakes, and I ended up spinning around, ending up on the shoulder (there's a shoulder on the ramp, but not on the bridge itself), facing the wrong way, into traffic. I'm still amazed I didn't hit anyone, or ram into the bridge railing, or flip over the railing entirely and plummet into the river. I didn't even scratch the paint on my car, amazingly. I had to wait a while for a gap in traffic so I could get turned back around and continue on my way. That wasn't fun at all, and I occasionally still think of that incident when I drive over the bridge. I shouldn't bear a grudge against the bridge itself over a thing like this, but I have to admit I sort of do.



I suppose I ought to go ahead and make a proper bridge post out of this, although for reasons I've just explained, I might be a bit more halfhearted about it than usual.

So... here are the Structurae and Bridgehunter pages for the bridge.

The city has an old photo of the bridge under construction

And on Flickr, a cool time lapse video of traffic at night.



The Zinester's Guide disses it a little.

Here's someone's vision to get rid of the Marquam and turn the remnant into a park.

Part of Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven takes place in an Alien-run antique shop located beneath a surviving remnant of the destroyed Marquam Bridge.



Other photos, from across the Information Superhighway:
[1] [2] [3] [4]

Keller Fountain

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If you live in Portland and have a camera, sooner or later you'll end up with a bunch of photos of downtown's uber-famous Ira Keller Fountain. Or at least that's what's happened to me.

Normally the Keller Fountain wouldn't meet my criteria for inclusion here. It's not at all obscure, certainly; it's about as non-obscure as anything in the whole city. I also don't have any particularly original insights about it. I do have some photos, though, and it's popular enough that it's not hard to find random weird stuff about it out on the net. So I figured I'd pass a few of those links along, along with a few of my old photos, and presto, voila, a new post here on this humblest of humble blogs.

That may be the secret to this blogging racket: The lower you set your standards, the easier it gets.



Special insights or not, I do love the place, especially the little behind-the-waterfall nook. They'd never put something like this in these days, for fear of homeless people sleeping back there, like anyone could sleep with all the noise, no matter how drunk they re. Or there might be perverts lurking, or evildoers doing evil, or ne'er-do-wells doing their thing, whatever that is. Or teens engaging in a bit of heavy petting after the prom, for that matter, which is of course the worst thing of all.

It seems like there's always a faint whiff of weed smoke when you walk past the fountain at night. And sometimes during the day, too.



The park was recently invaded by Imperial Stormtroopers. You know, from Star Wars. Dang, I missed it. Everyone fighting over who gets to be Vader, and when it's finally your turn you realize it smells all sweaty from the last 20 geeks who've worn it, and then it turns out you get lice or crabs or cooties or something from the costume, and you have to explain to the doctor what you were up to. And what's with the single sandperson over on the side? Do you get to be the sandperson by drawing the short straw, or the long one? I guess I just don't understand how these things work.

Also, whenever you see someone dressed as Leia, why's it always the white-robed, earmuff-haired Leia from the first movie, I mean, Episode IV? Why's it never the shiny metal bikini Leia from Episode VI? It's all wrong, I tell you.



The Mercury mentions the recent Halprin-themed TBA event. I caught a rehearsal for the Keller Fountain segment, but didn't have a camera along at the time. It was basically women in flowing white outfits, alternately wafting about the fountain, and posing, gazing into the waters in contemplation. Pretty much waft, contemplate, waft, contemplate. I realize that modern dance is high culture, and as a liberal educated sort of person I ought to like it, and sometimes I actually do, but we wandered away after maybe 10 minutes of the rehearsal. It just sort of didn't resonate with me, I guess.



KATU, or a "YouNews" contributor there, apparently never heard of the old detergent-in-the-fountain gag. The gag will never go away, because it's always funny the first time you see it, and they try it, and when they're tired of it someone else will come along and think it's hilarious, and so on.



This was probably inevitable: A VR panorama of some guys doing parkour at the fountain. Some discussion of that here and here. My wife enjoys watching parkour, and I'd probably score serious points for trying it, right up until the first injury.



Here's an awesome pinhole photo of the fountain -- but the caption claims that the park is empty on hot summer days, unlike all the other fountains in town. Weird. That's never been my experience of the place. The sun comes out, the place is packed. Possibly he's thinking of nearby Lovejoy Fountain, which *is* empty most of the time. (Shhhhh, don't tell anyone....)