At 13th & Holman

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So here's a tiny city park the city just calls NE Holman & 13th. The one feature of the place is the yellow-orange semi-groovy blobby thing pictured here. It looks like art, or what passed for art in the 70's, but apparently it's a play structure instead. From space (see above Google Map), it can be awfully tough to tell the difference sometimes. From space it looked like it might be some kind of neglected sculpture or something, so I dropped by to take a look.

I realize I'm not the intended audience for the thing, and possibly it might be fun (and maybe even safe) for an especially imaginative (and well supervised) child -- but if you ask me it looks pretty crappy, as far as play structures go. There's a road caution sign nearby indicating this is a playground, with the usual see-saw graphic. If I was a small child, I'd see that sign, and then see the actual playground, and feel cheated: The government promised me a see-saw, dammit, and instead all they gave me was this pastel checkered whatzit. But then, I was a cynic from an early age.

Taken as Art, on the other hand, the thing is perfectly fine, I guess. I do like the cheery color scheme, at least.



According to the local neighborhood association, there's a plan, or at least a hope, to revamp the little space here. I'm not so sure about bringing in the City Repair Project people, though. They usually build stuff out of mud, no, seriously, they do, and it tends to be kind of blobby and hobbitty in a semi-groovy 70's Whole-Earth-Catalog sort of way. So anything they did here would likely not be much of a change. Probably less brightly colored, but I'm not sure that would be a step up, really.

I just can't get into this idea that everything ought to be built out of mud, I mean, "cob". I always heard stories from my grandmother about growing up in a sod house in Oklahoma (which wasn't even a state yet, and was called "Indian Territory" at the time). People will probably tell you that a sod house is green and sustainable and all that, and she definitely was "living off the grid" at the time, if involuntarily so. When I was little, she had a single-wide trailer in one of those over-55 mobile home parks, with electricity courtesy of the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Green or not, you could tell she thought this was a real improvement.

I'm not trying to be an ignorant know-nothing about this, I'm really not. It could very well be true that grubby little mud hovels, I mean, "cob houses", will save the world someday. It's just that people should understand there was a reason everyone stopped living in soil-based dwellings. Just sayin'.



The neighborhood may be fortunate that this object is allegedly a play structure rather than Art. A play structure you can just rip out and replace as needed, while Art has to go through a lengthy and expensive de-accessioning process. There are hearings to hold, and interested parties to appease, and I gather it's all very complicated. Buying a new play structure would also be much easier, and cheaper, than buying a new sculpture, for similar reasons. This would remain true even if the "sculpture" and the "play structure" were otherwise identical objects. Because, well, that's just how it is.

This probably says something about our societal priorities, but I'm not sure what that might be.



It wouldn't be a post about a small and obscure city park without getting pedantic about who owns it, or what it's really called, or something along those lines. As far as ownership goes, it seems the Portland Development Commission actually owns the land here. So if it ever comes time to redo the place, the neighborhood just might get a shiny new condo tower instead of a better playground for the kiddies. Gaah!

And naming? I don't think the place has a proper name, other than the street intersection. You can't call it Holman Park (although the 2002 Parks Levy mistakenly did so), because a different place already has that name. It's an equally obscure chunk of land up in the West Hills that's usually counted as part of Forest Park. So now you know.



And that's not the only Holman Park -- there's a notorious state park by that name just west of Salem, which was closed a few years ago due to persistent "lewd behavior" issues. Seems there was trouble with guys cruising the public restrooms, as if this was 1950. Or Idaho, which is essentially the same thing. Seriously, this still happens? In Oregon, in the 21st century? Who knew?

None of the mugshots seem to be of Republican state legislators, but I suspect the park was really popular among them. It just stands to reason, based on everything I know about Republicans.



Updated 10/13/09: We have -- not linkage exactly, but a photo credit in this Examiner piece about further efforts to freshen up this benighted little spot. Scoring the occasional photo credit is one of the little fringe benefits you get from blogging about stuff nobody else on earth, or at least in town, is remotely interested in. Hey, at least there is an upside to all this...

Updated 8/31/10: We also have linkage from the "It Happened on Dekum Street" group on Facebook.

Boone Bridge

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Couple of so-so photos of the Boone Bridge, the I-5 bridge over the Willamette at Wilsonville. Built in 1954, made of concrete, yawn. Even the Structurae page for it is kind of perfunctory, as if even they couldn't get excited about the thing. I figured I ought to at least drop by and take a couple of photos of it for the sake of completeness, as part of the ongoing bridge project. Well, that plus the fact that I was in the neighborhood anyway, unwisely braving the wilds of Fry's Electronics on Black Friday. That part didn't go so well, actually -- I took one look at the checkout line snaking through the store, and decided it wasn't worth it. But at least I got some bridge photos, for whatever that's worth.

Since the Boone Bridge replaced the earlier Boone's Ferry, I thought I'd make a project of it and drive the length of Boones Ferry Road, from Portland down to Wilsonville. That wasn't actually very interesting. Miles and miles of suburbia from start to finish. There's a couple of old buildings in Tualatin, and it turns out there's a rather small and rustic "old town" to Wilsonville, too, along Boones Ferry south of Wilsonville Road.



One forgets that until I-5 went in, this was absolutely not a major transportation corridor. Most people used 99E down through Milwaukie, Oregon City, & Canby, and others used 99W, which heads SW out to McMinnville and cuts south from there. The idea of a ruler-straight, non-river-following highway between Portland and Salem is a relatively recent innovation, as it turns out. For some reason, the route of I-5 south from about Tigard runs exactly along the Washington-Multnomah and then Washington-Clackamas county lines. I've never seen a good explanation for why it turned out that way. Was the land cheap? Was it to build political support by splitting the road-building jobs among all 3 metro counties? It's a curious thing, and I don't have a good answer for it.

At the far south end of Boones Ferry Road is Boones Ferry Park, site of the old ferry terminal. That's where I took these, along with a bunch of photos of the nearby railroad bridge. The marina across the river is, I think, the site of the other ferry terminal on the south bank of the river.



In theory, I could do the whole schmear and walk the bridge. It's legal, believe it or not, and a few hardy souls (cyclists, mostly) actually use the damn thing. I didn't, at least not this time. Since I can't predict the future all that accurately, I won't absolutely say I never will, but I will say that I probably won't. It looks dangerous, and not the fun kind of dangerous, either. People do this because right now there's no good way to get across the river by bike or on foot, and the only way to go by car is on the freeway. There've been discussions in the past about adding dedicated bike/ped space to either the Boone Bridge or the railroad bridge just upstream, but the preferred approach now seems to be to build a very shiny new bridge just for bikes, pedestrians, and the occasional emergency vehicle. Which is undoubtedly the right approach, if the money exists to do it.

One thing that isn't in the cards, apparently, is building a new bridge for regular auto traffic. My understanding is that the Willamette at Wilsonville is seen as a sort of moat against urban sprawl. A car bridge would cause subdivisions, the theory goes, and if the sprawl monster leaps the Willamette, there aren't any further natural barriers between Portland and Salem. If the line isn't drawn right here, the whole north end of the Willamette Valley inevitably becomes a cold, dreary, repressed version of L.A. I think this is probably the same reason Canby still has a ferry over the river instead of a bridge, even today.

Nothing to see at NE 47th & Sumner

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This, believe it or not, is yet another ultra-obscure city park, this time on NE Sumner St. one house in from the corner with 47th Avenue. It looks exactly like an empty vacant lot. I suppose it actually is an empty vacant lot, just one where the grass is occasionally mowed with your tax dollars. The place does show up on the city's Park Services Zone Map, and you can find it on both PortlandMaps and Metro's GIS system if you really care to. But beyond that, there's no info about it anywhere on the interwebs, not that I've been able to find.

So I really don't know what the rationale is behind the place. The only thing I can figure is that they're hanging on to it for possible future expansion, either when ever-scarce park funds become available, or when the adjoining properties go on the market, or a well-connected developer puts up a condo tower across the street. If any of that ever happens, and they do something truly fabulous with this place, you can look at the photos here as the "before", and be astonished.

I like to think I'm performing a valuable public service here, but it's a real stretch sometimes.

Updated 12-27-22: In 2011 this lot was transformed into the Sumner St. Community Garden, which to me counts as doing something truly fabulous with the place. So yes, these really are the "before" photos.

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]