december fruit

river traffic, st. johns bridge

A tugboat pushing a barge downstream, from the St. Johns Bridge. I didn't use these in my mega-post about walking the bridge, so here they are now...

a tiny fountain

A few nighttime photos of the tiny fountain outside the PSU Student Health Center building. I don't know anything about it, not even a name, assuming it has one. Which makes this post a lot easier to put together, I guess. It's possibly less boring this way, too.

Pics: O'Bryant Square

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Since I'm on a deadline and don't have a lot of free time at the moment, I thought I'd raid the archives again. So here are a few old photos from downtown's much-maligned O'Bryant Square.

You might notice that almost all of the photos are of flowers. Hey, that's what I had in the archives. I don't have time right now to go take a new batch of photos, or do research for a "comprehensive" post about the place. I just don't.



People seem to think of O'Bryant Square as a miniature no-go zone, full of homeless people, criminals, and junkies. In reality, there are about as many homeless there as anywhere else around downtown. And I've never seen people shooting up, or shooting each other, in all the times I've been by there. It may still happen, I guess, but I've never seen it. So I imagine it can't be as common as local mythology would suggest. The "needle park" thing may have been more true 15 years ago than it is now.



Anyway, they're planning to totally redo the place in a few years, assuming they find the money. Which is fine, I guess. It's pretty much a generic brick plaza as it is now. They don't even run the park's "Fountain for a Rose" fountain anymore. Which is a real shame, as it's kind of a cool fountain. I'd happily do a fountain post about it, if only it was operating. So my wish list for the overhaul has exactly one item on it: Either keep the fountain like it is now, or move it somewhere else that has a bit more visibility.

december sunset

Nobody really wants to be at the office on Saturday, at sunset, still trying to sort out that last stupid bug before the Deadline hits.

When your office is in downtown Portland, though, sometimes there's an upside...