november sunset (ii)

november dusk

Alive

Some photos of "Alive", the new arts-themed mural on the back of the Keller Auditorium building, on 2nd Avenue between Clay & Market. This is part of my daily commute, and I'm pleased to have something colorful to look at instead of the old blank grey wall.

Before the austerity-and-budget-cuts crowd starts in with the usual whining about the city spending money on nice things in this economy (or any other economy), I should point out it only cost us around $3,200. I imagine much of that was for the paint, and painting the wall a flat ugly grey again would've likely cost about the same.

A neat thing about the mural (and probably one reason it was so cheap) is that it was created by a a PSU professor, assisted by students from her Art 399 class. One student blogged some nice photos of his section of the mural, inspired by the work of the French painter Raoul Dufy. I seem to recall having a Dufy calendar a few years ago, for whatever that's worth. All in all, this one gets the big seal of approval.

Soldiers Monument, Lownsdale Square

A photoset of the 1906 Soldiers Monument in Lownsdale Square, one of the city's surprising number of Spanish-American War memorials. A post over at Dave Knows PDX gives a little history of the monument.

The memorial was designed by the famous San Francisco sculptor Douglas Tilden (1860-1935). Tilden was deaf since the age of 4 and had a very successful career in what's thought of today as a not very accommodating era. Tilden was also rumored to have been gay, which (true or not) is bound to infuriate the sort of person who usually loves war and war memorials, even in this enlightened post-DADT era. These would likely be the same people who freaked out when someone used a little temporary chalk on and around the monument's base during the Occupy Portland protests last year, which you'll see in a few photos in this set. They shrieked on and on about how the memorial had been permanently defiled or destroyed or something, when in reality no damage, either permanent or temporary, was actually done to it. I imagine their heads would explode if they heard the rumors about the sculptor. Maybe they'd sue, or invite Fred Phelps to come protest the statue, or something.

More about Tilden and his Bay Area works at Found SF and SF City Guides.

A 1951 Oregonian article "Portland's Outdoor Statues" (July 8th, 1951) lists it among the city's "important" public art pieces. The others included the Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt statues on the Park Blocks, and the Thompson Elk between Lownsdale and Chapman Squares, as well as the Thomas Jefferson statue at Jefferson High School, and a religious statue out at the Grotto. While I'm linking to old blog posts, I should point out that two previous subjects are right at the Soldiers Monument: The Ft. Sumter Cannons, and Benchmark Zero. So if you go to Lownsdale Square to look at the statue, you might as well look down and see those as well.

St. Francis Park expedition

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Some photos from St. Francis Park, in inner SE Portland, on Stark between 11th & 12th. It's an unusual spot in that, although it looks a lot like a city park, it's actually owned and operated by the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic church next door. The church also operates the St. Francis Dining Hall, which serves meals to the city's homeless population, so there tend to be a few homeless people hanging around the park at any given time, and big crowds around mealtime. As a result the park's gained a long-term reputation for drug and alcohol problems. This has repeatedly put the church at odds with the surrounding neighborhood, at one point leading to a city-mediated six month closure of the park.

At some point, I'm guessing during the 1970s, a great deal of money was spent on the park. A big fountain and wading pools were installed, as well as a brightly painted wagon wheel drinking fountain, and a lot of landscaping work was done. But the church seems to have an even lower maintenance budget than the city parks bureau does, and everything's fallen into serious disrepair over the years. I'm sure they prioritize feeding people ahead of repairing fountains, and fundamentally I can't really disagree with that. I can't imagine the creepy, decrepit state of the park helps mend fences with the neighbors, though. The Catholic Church probably isn't interested in unsolicited advice from a nonbeliever such as myself, but it seems like they could send word around the local archdiocese and guilt-trip people into donating or volunteering or something. It's been done at least once before; an article in the May 23rd, 1977 Oregonian is titled "St. Francis Park - once eyesore, now pride of Buckman neighborhood", detailing the then-current efforts to revitalize the place. Since it was 1977, we're told that one of the park's trees is named Beverly, and the article includes part of a fifth grader's poem about the tree.

A post over at Portland Public Art had a similar take on the place several years ago. That post points at a Picasa gallery of the park, with more photos along the same lines as the ones here.

South Falls, Silver Falls

One last (for now) photoset from Silver Falls State Park, this time from South Falls. Like North Falls at the other end of the park, a short trail winds down to the base of the falls and then continues along behind the falls.

South Falls is next to the park's main parking lot and visitor facilities, so the trail tends to be pretty busy, and you may have to be patient if you prefer photos without people in them. I realize I'm probably in the minority on that point, but there you have it. In retrospect it was nice having to slow down a bit. I was in the middle of yet another week-long photo staycation, and when I do those I tend to go charging around with an overloaded TODO list, trying to grab a comprehensive batch of photos in the least amount of time and then hightailing it off to the next destination on the list. The theory being that I don't have a lot of free time to go take photos beyond central Portland otherwise, so I need to rush around and fill up the tank then so I'll have stuff to blog about on gloomy mid-November days like today. That actually works out rather well, I think, and I'd probably just burn my whole vacation messing around on the interwebs without anything to show for it if I wasn't out taking photos. Still, it's not particularly relaxing at the time, so it was nice to have to stop and wait for people and actually enjoy the scenery a bit. I may have burned an extra ten, even fifteen minutes that way. It was nice.

Majestic Falls

Today's adventure takes us to another waterfall in McDowell Creek County Park, near Lebanon, Oregon. Majestic Falls is the main event in the park; it turns out to be only 39 feet high, but it's quite attractive, and it's my clear favorite of the four in the park (the others being Royal Terrace Falls, Crystal Pool Falls, and Lower McDowell Creek Falls). Royal Terrace Falls is substantially taller, but had nearly run dry when I was there, so it's possible I might think more highly of it if I ever go back on a rainy day in mid-March, say.

My opinion is also colored by the fact that these photos came out better than the ones at the other falls. That's partly due to not having a lot of direct sun messing up exposure, and partly due to the nice, stable observation deck that made it easy to take longer-exposure photos. I would have posted these right away, but after I got home I noticed there were a couple of very conspicuous specks of sensor dust right on several of the photos, such that I would have to retouch them before posting. That's an annoying bit of drudgery, and I ended up dropping the photos in a To Retouch folder, and a post in Drafts, and a new item on my humble blog TODO list, and dropped the matter, um, temporarily. That was back in October, 2010. I wouldn't last long in the internet breaking news business, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.

I've mentioned this over on Twitter before but I'm not sure I've done so here: A lot of people I know set aside the month of November to try to write a novel in 30 days. Others are growing moustaches for prostate awareness. My goal is simply to end the month with an empty blog Drafts folder. The last time I had that was many moons ago, so it does feel like sort of an ambitious goal. Maybe not as ambitious as writing a novel, but I like to think it's a somewhat more intellectual goal than growing facial hair would be. Although some readers (or former readers) might dispute that assessment. In any case, there are 10 days left in the month and I'm down to single digits in Drafts, so I just might hit the goal yet. Wish me luck.

Terminal Tower

Photos of the Terminal Tower building in downtown Cleveland. Opened in 1930, it was the tallest building in the world outside of New York City until 1953, and it remained the tallest in Cleveland until 1991. The "Terminal" part comes from the underground rail station, which served as Cleveland's inter-city rail depot until Amtrak moved in the 1970s. The station still serves as the hub for the local Rapid rail system. The lower floors of the tower are a large shopping center, and the complex also includes a Renaissance hotel and the shiny new Horseshoe Casino (which was still under construction when I was there).

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In many ways it's Cleveland's answer to the Empire State Building. It was the tallest building in town for decades after it was built, and remains a symbol of the city. It has an observation deck near the top, although it's only open intermittently, and was closed the weekend I was in town. And like the Empire State Building, the observation deck here was originally supposed to be a dock for airships, though it doesn't appear to have ever been used for that purpose. My eyes lit up when I read about this, since I tend to go "squee" about anything involving zeppelins, blimps, dirigibles, airships, or what have you. Had it been a practical idea, you would have been able to hop on a zeppelin at the Empire State Building, cruise in swanky 1930s style over to Cleveland, and get off at the Terminal Tower. Then you could take the elevator down to the basement, hop on a train and continue on to your final destination. It makes more sense that something like this would be proposed for Cleveland once you realize that Akron (home to Goodyear and its blimps) is a short distance south of here. Cleveland Memory has a photo of the famous Graf Zeppelin at the airdock in Akron, so there's that, at least.

Anyway, over many years I've slowly come to understand that not everyone cares about zeppelins, so I probably shouldn't end with that. Everybody likes cute animals, right? How about baby peregrine falcons? If so, you may be in luck (depending on when you're actually looking at this post), as the tower has a nesting pair, and a Falcon Cam to monitor them. D'awwww.... (just don't look too closely at what they're eating)

Rocket Garden

A slideshow from the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center visitor center, an outdoor exhibit of eight rockets mostly from the pre-Apollo era. It's an interesting historical display; I just wish it didn't cut off before I was born. It would be interesting to see a modern Falcon 9 or Atlas V (like the MSL one) next to these old rockets for comparison, particularly in a few years when these contemporary rockets begin carrying people. I realize this would be rather expensive as a tourist attraction, but it seems like it would be to the benefit of future historians as well. Imagine, a century from now, trying to reconstruct the history of early rocket technology, and realizing there are no surviving copies of anything post-1970 or so except the Space Shuttle. That doesn't seem quite right. It also might help reorient the visitor experience away from 1960s nostalgia and toward more of a "Hey, here's the next cool thing we're doing". Which I imagine would broaden the appeal to people like myself who weren't around in the 60s.

Saturn V

A slideshow of the enormous Saturn V rocket on exhibit at Kennedy Space Center. The rocket has its own building, off by itself away from the main KSC Visitor Center. You arrive by shuttle bus, and sit through a multimedia extravaganza about Apollo 8 before you're ushered in to see the rocket itself. The rocket lies on its side, suspended in midair above you; you enter at the base of the rocket, beneath its five F-1 engines, and can gaze up at it as you walk along over to the top. Historical displays detail all the Apollo and Skylab missions, and a side gallery includes some space suits and assorted hardware, plus the Apollo 14 capsule, almost as an afterthought. Naturally there's a gift shop and a snack bar, and I spent money at both while I was there. The Mars Science Laboratory launch was definitely the high point of the trip, but I did bring an ultra-wide angle lens along specifically to take photos of the Saturn V. You might notice that in several of the photos, the entire rocket fits in the frame. I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that, mostly because it makes me feel slightly less guilty about blowing all that money on a new lens.

This is one of three complete Saturn Vs on display; the others are at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the US Space & Rocket Center in Hunstsville, Alabama. Additionally, the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans has a S-IC first stage by itself. That Wikipedia page mentions the astonishing fact that not one but two ground-test copies of the first stage -- 138 feet long and 5 million pounds -- seem to have been misplaced somehow. One was last seen in Huntsville, but the current whereabouts or fate of both are unknown. Most likely they were quietly scrapped, as they weren't actual flight hardware. But it's fun to imagine them gathering dust in a huge forgotten warehouse somewhere, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Kennedy's Apollo Saturn V Center is an amazing sight, but a disconcerting one too; they seem to have been aiming for a "holy cathedral of engineering" effect, and they certainly pull that off, but the giant, nearly half-century-old rocket suspended in midair also reminds me of dinosaur bones on display at a natural history museum. Which is probably not something they were aiming for. I should note that I was there just a few months after the last Shuttle flight, and both KSC itself and the surrounding region reminded me of an Oregon timber town whose sawmill had just closed. Hopefully things will turn around in a few years as the SLS/Orion program starts to ramp up, although that's far from guaranteed given the ongoing federal budget shenanigans. Interestingly, one proposal for the second generation SLS booster would resurrect and update the old F-1 engine as a side booster engine. I'm kind of rooting for that proposal out of purely sentimental reasons.

Talbot-Lago

Photos of a 1939 Talbot-Lago at the Allure of the Automobile show last year at the Portland Art Museum.

Zero Gravity Research Facility

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A few photos from the Zero Gravity Research Facility at NASA's Glenn Research Center, next to the Cleveland airport. I was there during the NASA tweetup I went to back in March. The name sounds exotic, but the concept is actually pretty simple: There's a 510 foot hole in the ground, lined with steel and sealed, with vacuum pumps to remove all the air. Experiments are enclosed in protective vehicles and dropped from the top of the shaft. The drop vehicle experiences 5.18 seconds of free fall (the zero gravity part) before landing in a pit of foam beads at the bottom.

A datasheet about the facility lists various things it can be used for, like testing new hardware, prototyping experiments that might go to space later, and so on. As it was explained to us, in recent years the facility's been used primarily for testing things you may not want to try on board a space shuttle or space station, like studying how fire behaves in zero gravity. I get the impression this research doesn't fully utilize the facility, and the datasheet mentions possible commercial uses, which I think means it's rentable if you have money and a legitimate use for the facility. If you fit that description, you'll probably want to start by reading the detailed User's Guide (the version online dates to 1999 so the bits about instruments and data handling are probably obsolete, but it still gives a general idea about how the process works.)

The guide mentions that they have a variety of still and video recording options, including high speed video cameras, but none of this video seems to have made it to YouTube, unfortunately. GRC does have its own YouTube channel, although it isn't updated regularly, and they don't seem to have any videos from here or the other unusual & heavy-duty facilities they run. At least not so far.

We were a bit pressed for time and only got to see the facility from the top, which was kind of a shame. The Wikipedia page about the facility includes a photo looking up from the bottom, with a drop vehicle about to hit the foam beads, and another photo on archive.org shows a vehicle as it enters the bead pit. A Cleveland Magazine article visited the bottom of the pit, and the author seemed to be somewhat freaked out about being in such a deep hole.

Sacajawea, Washington Park

A few photos of the Sacajawea statue in Washington Park, by the early 20th century sculptor Alice Cooper.

The city Parks & Rec Bureau's page on Washington Park says:

A bronze statue of Sacajawea holding her son Jean-Baptiste is located near the Chiming Fountain. In commemoration of the heroic Shoshone Indian woman who helped lead the Lewis and Clark explorers through the mountains of the west, the statue was unveiled on July 7, 1905 at the Lewis and Clark Centennial. Among those present at the event were Susan B. Anthony, Abigail Scott Duniway, and Eva Emery Dye. The project was promoted and paid for by subscriptions solicited nationwide by a group of Portland women headed by Mrs. Sarah Evans. The committee commissioned Alice Cooper of Denver, at that time an understudy of Lorado Taft, to sculpt the statue. It was cast in New York and required 14 tons of copper which came from the Sweden mine, just below Mt St Helens. The copper was donated by Dr. Henry Waldo Coe of Portland. In April 1906, the statue was placed in its current location in Washington Park. Its inscription reads, "Erected by the women of the United States in memory of the only woman in the Lewis & Clark expedition, and in honor of the pioneer mother of Oregon."

A post at Portland Public Art has a bit more background about the piece. It's not a snarky post, which is unusual; the post you're reading now isn't meant to be snarky either; I generally roll my eyes at vintage statues of Indians made by white people. This one's sort of different in that it depicts (or at least symbolizes) a beloved historical figure. Note the fresh flowers at the base and what appears to be lipstick on the statue.

Normally this would be the point where I explain that a certain beloved historical figure was overrated or misunderstood or something. I even started trying to write that tangent a few times, but they were just wordy ways of saying "Nobody Knows". I can't even get snarky about people filling in the gaps with mythology or wishful thinking, since that's pretty much what happens with all historical figures to some degree. So I think I'll just leave it at that.

North Falls, Silver Falls

A slideshow from North Falls in Silver Falls State Park, downstream from Upper North Falls and a short walk from the North Falls trailhead. I don't have a lot to add about the park beyond what I covered in the Upper North Falls and Winter Falls posts, but I should point out that this is one of a couple of Silver Falls waterfalls where the trail goes behind the waterfall. (South Falls is another, and there may be others that don't spring to mind right away.) I loved that sort of thing as a kid; it was easy to imagine you were hiding out in a secret Gondorian fortress, despite the steady stream of hikers wandering through. This was always interspersed with occasional moments of "Hey, wait, what if the whole thing gives way & collapses while I'm under here?". Actually that's still more or less my reaction, despite knowing how incredibly unlikely a cave in would be. Am I the only person who ever thinks that?

"The Coming of the White Man", Washington Park

Today's piece of deeply unfashionable public art is "The Coming of the White Man", an early 20th century sculpture of a pair of Indians, located in a suitably obscure corner of Washington Park. The previous link goes to a post at Portland Public art, which notes that from a technical standpoint it's a very well executed sculpture. Hermon Atkins MacNeil, the sculptor, was nationally renowned in his day, and is probably best known for designing the US Mint's Standing Liberty Quarter, minted from 1916 - 1930. There's even a website devoted to his works, which includes a page about this piece. It's just that the subject matter is... problematic.

Books have been written about the "Noble Savage" aesthetic that was so popular in those days. It comes across as patronizing but not overtly hostile, and the artists of that era most likely felt they were creating sympathetic portrayals of their subjects. But you can't really consider this kind of thing in isolation; it was a product -- not a critique -- of the political and economic climate at the time, which was anything but sympathetic toward the Indian population. The key idea behind "Noble Savage" art was that the Indians were a proud, honorable people, sadly destined to "make way" for the White Man, in the name of Progress. Which is a fancy way of saying, "We're fascinated by you, we even admire you in some respects, but we're still taking your land."

The city parks page for Washington Park gives a bit of background on the piece:

Coming of the White Man was given to the city by the heirs of David P. Thompson, an early Portland mayor and donor of the elk statue on Main between the Plaza Blocks. Completed in 1904, this bronze statue, sculpted by Hermon Atkins MacNeil and cast by Bureau Brothers Foundry in Los Angeles, features two Native Americans standing on a block of rough-hewn native stone. Facing eastward, they look down upon the route that ox teams trudged bringing settlers to this part of the country. The older of the two is said to represent Chief Multnomah of the Multnomah people. At some point, the oak branch held by the younger figure was broken off.

Chicago's Field Museum has a circa-1910 vintage photo of the sculpture in their Flickr stream. It looks about the same as it does now; I pass it along because the caption mentions it was taken by the Huron H. Smith expedition to Oregon, which came here to collect botanical samples and take portraits of trees, as if Portland was a barely settled frontier town. It amuses me that they were still using the word "expedition" in 1910, as if they were visiting Antarctica, or a remote spot in the Amazon rainforest, or the "unexplored" Pacific Northwest of a century earlier. If you can arrive by train, and can then wander around town taking photos of contemporary art and such, you should probably be using the word "expedition" at least semi-ironically. Which is more or less what I do here on this humble blog.

Tallulah Gorge

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Some old photos from Tallulah Gorge in the scenic North Georgia mountains. There are a series of waterfalls in the area, but I don't recall whether we saw any of them or not. I know I don't have any waterfall photos, but I could simply have been out of film at the time or something. I'd be willing to go back and try again if I find myself in Georgia at some point and have a few hours to spare for the drive. It's quite a beautiful spot, even if you think you're jaded by western scenery.

Despite what you may have heard, if you visit here you will most likely not be killed and eaten by the natives, or made to squeal like a pig, or any of the other vicious rumors that have filtered out of the area over the years. It turns out all that stuff only happens in the next county over, or maybe it was two counties away, the one where everyone has the same last name and there are entire towns populated by sixteen fingered cyclopses. Man, those guys are savages.

Sunset, Phoenix Airport

Another old photo, taken while waiting for a connecting flight at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. You can tell it's an old photo because the plane carries the logo of the late, unlamented America West Airlines. I can't really put my finger on why I like this photo. I wasn't a fan of the airline, or the airport, and Phoenix has never been my favorite city on the face of the earth either. Maybe it's the connecting flight thing. It's not that I prefer or even really like connecting flights. There's just something about stopping briefly in a city you'd never visit otherwise that somehow makes it feel like you're really traveling. Is that weird?

Bison, Yellowstone

An old photo of a herd of bison blithely walking down the middle of the road, somewhere in Yellowstone National Park. We were driving along and came around a corner, and suddenly there were bison everywhere. We, and the other vehicles on the road, stopped to stay out of their way and let them pass. So we sat there as they walked by, some just inches away from our car, while we tried to be quiet and not make any sudden moves or do anything that might annoy the beasties. I should point out that we were in a tiny MG at the time, so we were actually looking up at the bison, with just a thin leather convertible top between us and them. That was actually kind of cool, although I admit to being a bit nervous at the time. I later realized that an adult male bison can weigh over 2000 lbs., which is somewhat more than an MG and two adult humans combined.

November Sunset

Here's an Instagram photo I took on the Morrison Bridge earlier today. I think it turned out ok, so here it is. Also, I'm just sort of exploring how to embed Instagram photos in Blogger. Handcrafting the HTML seems to be the only way to go, at least for now. Kind of old-sk00l, but I can live with that. At least they finally have web profiles now. Mine's here, if you're interested. Or whatever.

Updated (November 2013): Ok, IG has official embeds now, so I'm switching my hack job out for the real deal. Enjoy.

Rational Exuberance

A few photos of Rational Exuberance, a sculpture that used to sit in front of the Encore condo tower at the north end of the Pearl District (not to be confused with the swanky Encore in Las Vegas). These were taken back in June 2009, and apparently the piece has gone elsewhere now; I went back for a do-over, to take some photos of it that wouldn't have quite as much sensor grime, but I couldn't find it, which given its size probably means it wasn't there. Apparently it was always intended as a temporary installation until the city got around to working on the Fields neighborhood park, so I assume it's gone for good now, and I'm pretty sure nobody's going to pay me to use the few photos I have of it.

Anyway, the title kind of cracks me up, being a play on "irrational exuberance", the famous phrase coined by Alan Greenspan during the crazy years of the dot com bubble. It cracks me up because the Encore was among the last condo towers built in Portland before the irrationally exuberant real estate bubble burst and the economy flatlined. So, the irony, it has layers.

Coalca Landing expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to obscure Coalca Landing State Park, on the Willamette a bit south of Oregon City, just off Highway 99E. This is yet another Willamette Greenway parcel (a situation I explained in my Grand Island post a while back), so I'm not sure "State Park" is part of the official name, but there's a tiny State Parks sign at the driveway into the park, so I think we'll go with that.

Coalca Landing is a long, narrow strip of land on the east bank of the Willamette, with the river on one side, and Highway 99E and a major rail line on the other side. The entrance is fairly low key and easy to miss. Heading south on 99E, look for a railroad crossing just south of the Pearson's Art Gallery (a former historic tavern), with a few mailboxes out front. The aforementioned tiny State Parks sign is right there at the turn, but it's very little help as it's so small you won't really see it until you're practically past it. Anyway, once you're across the railroad tracks, the park's oddly enormous parking lot is off to your right, while directly ahead and off to the left are some residential driveways. The description to someone's Flickr photo of the park indicates the turnoff is near highway milepost 17, and a blog post I ran across has directions plus some great photos. Or if you prefer to go by GPS, I have coordinates of about 45.307810, -122.662881 for the parking lot, if that helps at all.

The park sits at a scenic stretch of the river known as the Willamette Narrows, much of which is part of the Greenway system (including three even more obscure areas on the far side of the river, "Rock Island Landing", "Pete's Mountain Landing", and "Peach Cove Landing".) Other parts of the area are owned by Metro. The obvious potential of the area led a 2009 University of Oregon design class to dream up a few proposals to enhance the site into a full-fledged state park, but as far as I know nothing's actually in the works. As the state's recent Willamette Greenway Parklands Strategy points out, the entire greenway system has been in a sort of political and financial limbo ever since the initial burst of enthusiasm faded in the late 1970s.

This is by no means the only scenic spot along the Willamette, but Coalca Landing has a couple of unusual points of interest:

• If you know where to look, you can spot the once-famous Coalca Pillar, our fair metropolitan area's very own balancing rock. If you look across highway 99E and uphill, you'll notice a rock that looks like it's sorta-balancing high above the highway. It might take a minute to see it; it's not quite as dramatic as the balancing rocks you may have seen in Road Runner cartoons. Still, this rock was once a big local tourist attraction, back in the days when 99E was the main road into Portland from points south. Back then the area been logged relatively recently and trees were smaller, so rock formations like this were easier to spot. And, for whatever reason, in those days motorists could actually be engrossed by a freakin' balancing rock. Which, let's be honest, just sits there and balances. It was an innocent and wholesome age, or so we're told.

  It was also an era when access to the pillar was apparently much easier than it is today. The library's Oregonian database lists numerous hikes and climbing trips to Coalca Pillar during the early part of the 20th century, but that seems to have tapered off prior to World War II, and I haven't come across any contemporary accounts of anyone visiting it.

  The rock's name comes from a local Indian legend. A circa-1898 melodramatic account of the story comes to us from a Southern Pacific Railroad guide to sights along their Shasta line as it travelled the West Coast:

  Coalca's Pillar.

  SOME three miles south of Oregon City, the Shasta Route passes below a rock-cliff, two hundred feet in height and standing out boldly toward the Willamette river. Its top is a level plateau, five acres in extent, which can be reached only by an almost impassable trail up the mountain side. Surmounting the edge of the cliff stands the wonderful stone pillar which our photographer has so successfully transferred to his camera. Coalca's Pillar is twenty feet high and weighs probably sixty tons. Its supporting stem or base is eight feet high and only thirty-five inches in diameter! While the passerby marvels at its equipoise and the geologist speculates over its formation, the chief interest in this strange monument centers in the Indian legend therewith connected.

  At the Great Tumwater, Willamette falls, once dwelt Chelko, a famed and thrifty chief of the Clackamas, who held a trust on all the adjacent fishing grounds. All neighboring tribes paid Chelko tribute for the privilege of his fishing preserves, although salmon are said to have been then so plentiful below the falls that Indians walked across the Willamette on their backs.

  Nearby lived the Molallas, whose stalwart young chief, Coalca, loved Nawalla, the only daughter of Chelko. But the daughter of a salmon king looked not with favor on the suit of a chief of an ordinary deer-hunting tribe, who lived on Molalla grasshoppers and jerked venison. Nor did her father favor the wooing of Coalca, and with the toe of his moccasin expressed energetic disgust whenever the latter appeared to pay court to Nawalla.

  Coalca was resolved to have the maiden at all risks, and at dark of one moon, when the old chief was spearing salmon, he, with three of his braves, swooped down on Chelko : s tepee and carried away Nawalla. That night there was dancing and great joy in the Molalla village over the great capture and equal lamentation among the Clackamas, when was discovered the abduction of their princess by a rival tribe. The Clackamas braves donned their feathers and war paint and the tocsin was sounded. For months waged a bitter war; Nawalla, an unwilling prisoner, died of broken heart ; Coalca's band slowly pressed back the Clackamas and finally determined to capture their village. Stealthily they trailed among the rocky cliffs and for the night camped on the plateau upon which our pillar now stands. Here, in restful security, they tarried before dealing the; final death blow to Chelko and his tribe. But they contended with an older and craftier warrior, who wearied not nor slept. Before the morn Chelko scaled the rocky pathway, drove the Molallas over the cliff, and permitted not one of them to escape death.

  The Indian legend further recites that the Great Spirit, sorely grieved at the untimely death of the beautiful Nawalla, wreaked vengeance upon Coalca and the three braves by turning the four Molalla warriors into pillars of stone and placing them at the edge of the cliff, exposed to the heat of summer and the storms of winter — that their stony forms might be an awful warning to passing Indians for all ages. But in time the heart of the Great Spirit softened to the three Molallas, who had but done Coalca's bidding in the abduction of Nawalla. Their spirits were released and permitted to go to the happy hunting grounds; three pillars were thrown to the bottom of the precipice and form now a part of the broken rock along the Shasta rails.

  The pillar sits on ODOT land, technically outside the state park proper. The state bought the land in June 1950 when Highway 99E was being widened. The linked Oregonian article indicates the state considered putting in a highway wayside near the pillar, but that seems to have never come to pass. The lack of parking might help explain why the pillar has been mostly forgotten in recent decades. I'd seen a vague mention that it was in the vicinity, but I only noticed it because a talkative fisherman pointed it out to me. Speaking of which, on behalf of him, and the few other fishermen who were there, I'd like to point out that there's absolutely nothing at all to catch here whatsoever, and you'd be wasting your time even trying.

• To find the second point of interest, you'll need to locate the trail heading north/downstream from the parking lot, and follow it a short distance. The trail passes several mysterious concrete structures, or remains of structures. From the info I've been able to gather so far (see, for example, this 2005 survey of the Highway 99E "green corridor"), the park seems to have once been the site of a sawmill owned by the old Doernbecher Manufacturing furniture company. Logs arrived by log raft, were pulled out of the river and milled, and the milled wood was then shipped by rail to the furniture plant near Portland's Hollywood District, around 28th & Sandy. This might also explain the park's enormous parking lot, much of which is fenced off: It might have been employee parking at one time. Documentation is still lacking here and I could be wrong about some of the details, and by all means feel free to correct anything I have wrong here if you know otherwise. Whatever the concrete structures were, they're kind of spooky now, and it probably goes without saying that they're not exactly kid friendly, even for kids who are current on their tetanus shots.

Apparently the Southern Pacific Railroad once had a station named "Coalca" somewhere in the vicinity, and there's still a rail siding by that name just north of the park. I came across a bunch of railfan stuff about it while looking for info on the park, so I figured I might as well pass a few links along for anyone who's into that sort of thing: A southbound train stopped & waiting for a northbound train to pass; a forum thread about the stop and its history; and a collection of train videos filmed here.

Oregon City's historic survey includes the Coalca area in the same historic district as the Art Deco tunnel on 99E that leads south out of town. It's kind of a stretch since Coalca is several miles south of the city proper, but hey. I mention this because one of the PDFs linked there mentions that the highway was once known as the "Road of 1000 Wonders", back in the days before people rolled their eyes at melodramatic names like that. The term also comes up on the City of Canby's history page, so I suppose it must have been in common use at one point. I'd imagine the balancing rock would have to count as one of those thousand wonders, but even if it wasn't, the name was just too fun not to share.

Finally, the "Best American Travel Writing 2012" anthology includes an excerpt from "Railroad Semantics" by Aaron Dactyl, in which the author rides the rails, hobo style, up through the Willamette Valley and on to Seattle. The train stops at Coalca due to some sort of malfunction, and our intrepid correspondent has to sneak around to dodge a nosy railroad worker. The rest of the story's fun to read too, btw.

Lafayette Locks • Yamhill Falls

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Today's adventure takes us out to rural Yamhill County, to Lafayette Locks County Park, on the Yamhill River near the town of Lafayette. It's hard to believe today, but back in the early 20th century the little Yamhill River had a bit of commercial steamboat traffic on it, shipping Yamhill Valley crops to market. Shipping was impeded by some rapids (known somewhat generously as "Yamhill Falls") at this point in the river, so local boosters convinced the US Army Corps of Engineers to build and operate a modest lock system, the remains of which you see here.

The old locks were on the far side of the river and aren't accessible from the park, and the riverbank's thick with trees these days, so you really don't get a good look at things like you do at Cascade Locks. Nor is there good access to the river unless you're up for a muddy scramble down a steep bank. Still, the park has a large and well-maintained picnic area, and it's a pleasant place to stop even if the park's signature attraction is across the river and behind some trees.

The locks are a little-known historical footnote, and usually it's hard to find a lot of information online about something this obscure. But back in 1990 the Oregon Historical Quarterly published a long two-part article about the locks: "From Dream to Demolition: The Yamhill Lock & Dam", by Suann Murray Reddick, in Vol. 91, Nos. 1 and 2, which as far as I can tell remains the definitive work on the Lafayette Locks. The previous link goes to a JSTOR preview of Part 1; if you have a Multnomah County library card, and you want to read the full text of both parts of the article, you can get PDFs at 2 permalinks: Part 1, Part 2. The locks are also mentioned briefly in an earlier article, "Tributaries of the Willamette: Yamhill, Santiam, Calapooya" ( Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1943)), by Ruth Rydell, giving a perspective on them while they were still in operation.

The two parts of the Reddick article come to about 90 pages. I've read the whole thing, along with the relevant parts of the Rydell piece, and I'll try to summarize the tale briefly. But if that's still TL;DR for you, I'll pass along a couple of other links first: Here are three historical photos, a YouTube video about rafting the rapids here, and a short blog post with a few photos. Also, the City of Dayton, downstream of the locks (and home to the Ferry St. Bridge), has a short article on their website about Yamhill river shipping. Dayton was effectively the head of navigation on the river until the locks came, and the article indicates river traffic had dried up there by the 1920s.

Now back to our story. Part 1 of the Reddick article details the decades-long struggle to get the locks built. Yamhill Falls was one of the few places the Yamhill River could be forded, so an Indian trail passed through here prior to European settlement. Settlers saw the value of the area early on, and the falls were homesteaded in 1840, well before any sort of local government had been instituted. By the 1850s, the Yamhill Valley had become a prime agricultural area, and initially the only way to get products to market was by boat (the same state of affairs encountered at Butteville, Cornelius, and elsewhere.)

The falls, puny as they were, still presented an obstacle to river traffic, and the first proposal to build locks on the river came in January 1859, a month before Oregon statehood. This privately financed proposal went nowhere, as did further attempts continuing into the 1870s. At that point railroads had come to the Yamhill Valley, but exorbitant freight charges led local boosters (but never quite enough investors) to see an opening for a cheaper river-based alternative. After the last private proposal fell through in 1876, attention turned to convincing Congress to fund the locks instead. This took another twenty years of lobbying, with a reluctant Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly surveying the area and coming up with different (but never very positive) recommendations every few years. Finally, in 1896, the political pressure succeeded, and Congress appropriated up to $200,000 toward the locks proposal.

Part 2 picks up with the construction of the locks. Construction turned out to be more difficult than expected, due to problems with flooding and weak, eroding river banks. The locks finally opened on September 22nd, 1900 -- rather than the original target of December 31st, 1898 -- and construction ran to over $72,000, about 20% over budget. The article points out that the locks were essentially obsolete the day they opened; the first proposal had come in 1859, when much of the area was still howling wilderness, but four decades later the Yamhill Valley had electricity, telephones, multiple railroad lines, and a few paved roads, and riverboat traffic was declining even on the Willamette and Columbia.

Within a year, the cheaply built locks proved inadequate to the task, and sustained serious damage due to the same flooding and erosion issues it had encountered during construction, as well as collisions with drifting riverboats and errant logs from log rafts. The Corps of Engineers invested an additional $22,000 in repairs just in the first year. A 1903 study gave a couple of options for strengthening and upgrading the lock and dam, but suggested they weren't worth investing in as the locks saw very little traffic. The lack of traffic was something of a chicken-and-egg problem; the locks were inoperable during high river levels, and shipping companies were unwilling to risk having their boats stranded on the upstream side of the locks in that situation. This absence of traffic in turn made the Corps not want to bother fixing the dam's high water problems.

So by 1903 traffic through the locks had essentially petered out already, only three years in, and the Corps of Engineers floated a serious proposal to abandon the locks altogether. Naturally there was a local public outcry, and suspicions that the railroads were in on the proposal. The matter was forwarded on to distant Washington DC, where it ran into bureaucratic inertia: The locks were neither abandoned nor upgraded, but simply maintained in their current state and repaired every so often.

Various schemes for shipping people and cargo on the Yamhill River came and went, and none lasted long. By 1912, the article notes, just 386.6 tons of freight and 327 passengers used the locks in the course of the entire year. This minimal level of traffic continued into the 1920s, and the Corps classified the locks as "proper for abandonment". Rydell quotes an Oregonian writer to the effect that, during this time, there was so little river traffic the locks were opened every ten days "just to shake the rust out and to show that all is well."

Traffic picked up in the late 1920s thanks almost entirely to log rafts, and local farmers became increasingly interested in the reservoir behind the dam as a source of irrigation water. Another study was commissioned in 1931 on options for upgrading the dam, but again nothing came of it. Log traffic increased through the 1930s and peaked in 1943, when 101,981 tons of logs passed through the locks. Rydell mentions that in 1942 (the previous year) an average of two log rafts per day had passed through the locks. At that point there was every reason to assume this level of traffic was the new permanent state of affairs.

The log raft trade declined quickly after World War II, however, as the Yamhill Valley started running out of trees, and modern log trucks took much of the remaining business. By 1953 the locks were back on the chopping block, thanks to the loss of traffic and Congressional budget cuts. As in 1903, there was a public outcry, in part about the locks themselves, and in part about the adjacent park, which had been developed by the first lock keeper back when the locks opened. This time, local protests proved futile, and the locks and dam were officially abandoned on February 4th, 1954. The newly formed county parks department took over the locks and the park roughly a year later.

Back in 1908, the state's Deputy Fish Warden had already raised alarms about the dam as a barrier to migrating salmon, and he somehow convinced the feds to install a primitive fish ladder at the dam. The article doesn't mention any further concerns about fish until after the abandonment of the dam, at which point the Oregon Fish Commission stepped in and raised new concerns about the dam and salmon. The dam was still used for irrigation water at that point, and a farmers-vs.-fish battle ensued that should seem all too familiar to anyone who witnessed Southern Oregon's Klamath River water wars just a few years ago. And similar to the Klamath situation, the state sided with the fish. Or more precisely, it sided with sport fishermen who thought the river looked promising. By 1960, the Oregon Fish Commission was insisting that the county had to provide adequate fish passage, or the dam would have to be removed. Meanwhile, the abandoned and unmaintained locks and dam continued to deteriorate, and the county had no funds on hand to repair them. They county sided with farmers and dragged its feet cooperating with the state, and several years of legal wrangling ensued. Then, in 1963, a subtle and little-noticed change to state law removed the county's power to block state action on the dam, and on September 18, 1963 the state dynamited the dam, to the great surprise and dismay of the local community. A 1976 proposal to build a shiny new dam for irrigation went nowhere, and contemporary (circa 1990) discussion around building a new dam or at least creating a fish pond at the old locks seems to have come to nought as well.

The article goes on to point out that, from a sport fishing perspective, the promised benefits to fish may have been somewhat oversold, and (as of 1990) neither coho nor chinook salmon populations had become established in the river. It isn't indicated whether there had ever been coho or chinook in the river before the dam went in, which is the key point ecologically speaking. It's quite possible nobody knows.

Another thing the article barely mentions, but which I'm intrigued by, is the fact that the old Yamhill Falls site was a major river crossing prior to European settlement, so presumably local tribes had been using this spot for thousands of years before pioneers arrived with their money-making schemes. So the area is at least potentially an archeological site, albeit a heavily disturbed one. I wonder if anyone's ever taken a professional look at it?

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. I don't usually do blog posts quite this long anymore, but I basically go wherever the source material takes me. As I mentioned earlier, the park isn't terribly exciting these days even if you're a history nerd like me. But it does preserve an unusual bit of local history, and it's certainly a change of pace from other better-known Yamhill Valley attractions: The aviation museum, the big Indian casino out west of McMinnville, pretentious wineries and art galleries everywhere, and that sort of thing. So if you go, take a picnic lunch along, slow down, and just watch and listen to the river for a while. It's quite nice, really.

Salmon Street Springs

A slideshow of the Salmon Street Springs fountain, in Waterfront Park at SW Salmon, just north of the Hawthorne Bridge. The city Water Bureau, which is responsible for the fountain, describes it:

This fountain celebrates city life. A computer regulates the changing patterns of the water display. At full capacity the fountain recycles 4,924 gallons of water per minute through as many as 137 jets at once. There are 185 jets.

The Portland Development Commission funded the fountain. It was dedicated in 1988. A contest generated the name in 1989. Robert Perron Landscape Architects and Planners designed the fountain. The three cycles of the fountain are called misters, bollards and wedding cake.

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The slideshow has photos of all 3 modes, plus a few taken while it was turned off for the winter. The fountain's a local landmark, and it's also relatively recent in origin, so I don't have any obscure historical details to share about the thing. Which is probably why I haven't gotten around to covering it until now. Still, it's pleasant enough & I figured it at least merited a slideshow here.

line.plane.object

The ongoing public art tour visits the east side again, with a stop at line.plane.object, a temporary art installation at East Burnside & MLK, on the odd-shaped chunk of land created by the Burnside-Couch Couplet a few years ago. The project's Wordpress blog (where the previous link goes) explains the project a bit more, and shows additional objects that were either gone when I dropped by (due to the whole temporary thing) or were there and I just didn't notice them (which happens to me a lot).

It wasn't so long ago that this part of town resembled Detroit from the Robocop movies. You just didn't want to go there at any time, day or night. East Burnside's become a hip (though still a bit edgy) neighborhood in recent years, and this spot is supposed to be part of the long-delayed Burnside Bridgehead project someday. In the meantime, the Portland Development Commission is sponsoring art projects like the one you see here, similar to what they did at Block 47 across from the Convention Center. This is the point where I make a not-terribly-original observation about artists and hipsters serving as the vanguard of gentrification, raising the tone of the area and making it safe for upscale condo buyers.

That said, I do like the pieces here, taken on their own merits. Whoever selects art projects at the PDC seems to know what they're doing, or at least they have a feel for what the Right Sort of Art is. Tasteful abstraction is a good thing; a giant gold animatronic statue of Rush Limbaugh would probably be a bad thing, and would almost certainly attract the wrong sort of condo buyer to the neighborhood. Sorry, I honestly thought I was done being snarky, but talk about the PDC just sort of inspires that reaction in me. So in conclusion let me just say the area's interesting right now; nice, but not too nice. But in a few years it'll be crawling with retired Boomers from the Bay Area, people who care about aligning their chakras and finding the perfect $500 cabernet to the exclusion of just about everything else. At which point the neighborhood will be perfectly safe and pleasant and terribly boring. You might as well go and have a look around before that happens.