yellow hibiscus

Yellow hibiscus flowers in Honolulu. The wet ones are at the zoo, the others are from... somewhere else I don't recall at the moment. If I was taking flower photos here in Portland I'm not sure these would make the cut for this humble blog, due to various framing, depth-of-field, and exposure issues. But these are pretty much all of the ones I've got right now, so here they are. If you're desperate for better hibiscus photos, and you can't seem to find any on the internet for some reason, you could always foot the bill and send me back to Hawaii for another go at it.



Well, except that I'm not in this for cash or freebies. My philosophy is that it's important to have at least one thing in your life that you're passably good at and you won't do for money. Otherwise you become just a creature of economics, and that's no way to live.

So that's the high-minded philosophical reason. The second reason is that I really don't want to know just how little money I'd make if I tried to run this humble blog as a business. I think that would be more than a little depressing. And I don't want to be in a position where I'd do anything different, posting more about X or avoiding talk of Y, to keep readers and advertisers happy.

Chimney Fountain

This post probably counts as overkill. I've got a Flickr slideshow, an embedded Google map, and a Twitvid clip in this post, just to tell you about a small fountain in an obscure spot on the edge of downtown Portland. The Chimney Fountain is, as the name suggests, shaped more or less like an old brick chimney, with water bubbling up from the center and spilling down its sides. It's located next to SW Lincoln St., along the pedestrian-only 2nd Avenue walkway, in the 60's-era South Auditorium urban renewal district.

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It doesn't look particularly special or important if you don't know the backstory behind it. The chimney shape supposedly symbolizes the area before the urban renewal bulldozers arrived, a working class neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants, with small houses, family businesses (including the deli with reputedly the best bagels in town), several synagogues, etc. For more about the old neighborhood, there's a Portland Jewish Review story and a Daily Kos essay you might be interested in. I wish I had a more concrete reference for the fountain-as-historical-marker part. I know I've read that before, but I haven't found a link to share yet. I'll update the post if I can document that, but until then don't cite this notion as a fact in your term paper, or wager large sums of money on it or anything.

The fountain does double symbolic duty, in fact, since it also serves as the "Source Fountain" in the Halprin plan for the area. The idea is that water bubbles up at a little spring here. Then, flowing north, it becomes a rushing mountain stream at Lovejoy Fountain, and finally a majestic waterfall at Keller Fountain. Symbolically, I mean. The water actually recirculates separately at each fountain, but no matter.

The fountain occasionally does triple duty, as a sort of jetted bathtub for the homeless. I'm sure that wasn't a design goal behind the fountain, but it appears to do the job. I didn't actually go and ask for a user review, I mean, if I was taking a bath and minding my own business, and a stranger came up and wanted to interview me, I'd take it rather badly. Wouldn't you?

city reflections

Our occasional tour of art on the Portland Transit Mall continues with "City Reflections", one of the new crop of sculptures that went in along with the recent MAX construction.

So, ok, it's shiny and whimsical and harlequinesque, and it includes a cute dog, and that's all great and everything. But it also looks strangely dated, like something you'd have seen in a trendy housewares store in 1996, on the shelf next to the gargoyles and the chile pepper margarita glasses.

On the the bright side, if you buy it when it already looks dated, it slides over into "retro" that much quicker, and then everyone's bound to love it and see it as a local icon. So there's that. I give it another 6-8 years, 10 tops.



Additional info from across the interwebs:

• The artist's website
• A profile
by the Seattle P-I.
• Smithsonian oral history
• An interview with the UW alumni magazine.
• Craft in America story

New Frontier / Las Vegas Plaza

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Just south of the Echelon site, across Desert Inn Road, is another huge vacant lot. This one was once home to the New Frontier casino, which was imploded to make way for a super-sized Vegas edition of New York's famous Plaza Hotel. No, seriously. This seemed like a fabulous idea during the real estate bubble years, but the dream never got off the drawing board. Now, instead of an aging, down-market -- but profitable -- casino, they've got a nice big patch of empty desert. Which reminds me of a certain famous poem.

Vermont Street Park Blocks

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Today's fun expedition takes us to Southwest Portland, in the area around SW 45th Avenue & Vermont Street. Given that intro you might assume we're headed to Gabriel Park, but we're not. Gabriel Park isn't quite obscure enough for this humble blog, I think. And besides, I saw quite enough of the place back in high school, mumble-mumble years ago, since our home cross country course was located there. Come to think of it, I haven't been back since. I doubt that nostalgia alone can trigger psychosomatic shin splints, but why risk it?

In any case, thanks to a very obscure document from the city, I ran across a much more obscure spot in the vicinity of Gabriel Park: A three block span of park blocks -- or more accurately, a very long and skinny single park block, about three blocks long -- runs along the north side of Vermont St. between SW Idaho Drive and 50th Avenue. Instead of separating east and westbound traffic, the south side has busy through traffic going both directions, and the north side is basically a residential side street, and both sides are named Vermont St. Maybe that was the plan all along. Or maybe Vermont Street was supposed to have a grassy center strip with trees the whole way, and the plan didn't pan out for some reason, and this is the only remnant of that design. So far I haven't found any explanation anywhere on the interwebs. Or for that matter any mention of the place at all other than that one list in the city archives.

PortlandMaps says it's not a tax lot, which usually means the city's transporation bureau owns the place, similar to most of the East Park Blocks. That's not always the same thing as who mows the grass and trims the trees. Which again, I've been unable to find any info at all about.

waikiki soft focus

bottlebrush

A bottlebrush plant ( genus Callistemon ).

banana tree

another mystery fruit

As before, I have no idea what sort of weird tropical plant this is.

palm (detail)

mystery fruit

When I first posted this I said:

I have no idea what sort of fruit this is. My plant ID skills are pretty bad at the best of times, and I don't exactly improve while visiting unfamiliar tropical locales.

If you know what we're looking at here, please feel free to leave a comment.

The mystery is solved now, thanks to yus_prinandy on Flickr. This is a noni fruit (Morinda citrifolia). They aren't supposed to be very tasty in this form, and they're said to be rather stinky (although I didn't notice that part). Despite that, it's a traditional medicinal plant, and the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture has a site full of info on growing them.

papaya tree

A papaya tree at the Honolulu Zoo. It's a rather odd-looking plant that is apparently not a real tree, technically speaking, and has a whole genus ( Carica ) all to itself.

night, las vegas strip