catnip buds

Inversion: Plus Minus

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A few photos of Inversion: Plus Minus, the pair of rusty steel structures recently installed at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. (There's also one, not pictured here, at the east end of the Morrison Bridge as well.) The structures replace several curved ramps between the bridges and Grand Avenue, which I imagine were removed for traffic safety. The structures, we're told, represent ghosts of buildings that were removed when the current interchanges were built, circa 1957. RACC trumpets them in a press release about various bold new public art projects around the Eastside, along with a fairly interesting Q&A with the designers.

For whatever it's worth, local internet commenters are less thrilled about Inversion. See, for example, the comments at Lost Oregon, OregonLive's Commuting blog, and a KATU story about it.

And my opinion? I'm not sure I have one yet. I understand what the designers were aiming at here, and I also get that the look of rusty Cor-Ten steel is not universally admired. I can't really blame people for looking at it and quickly deciding it's ugly. On the other hand, it feels like there are some interesting photo possibilities here. I haven't figured them out quite yet, though, so I'll probably have to go back, and slow down and stare at it for a while, thereby confusing passing motorists even further.

Sam Hill Memorial Bridge

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Today's entry in the ongoing bridge project takes us way east to the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge, which carries US 97 over the Columbia River between Biggs Junction, Oregon, and Maryhill, Washington, home of the Maryhill Museum and a famous Stonehenge replica. The bridge has a Bridgehunter page, and a page about it at Columbia River Images explains the history of the bridge and the ferry it replaced.

A Bend Bulletin story about the bridge dedication gives an inkling of what a big deal it was to finally have a bridge at this location. At one point the US portion of the Alaska Highway was going to be designated part of US 97, and the Bulletin story daydreams that this would make all of 97 part of the Pan-American Highway system spanning North and South America. Which I suppose would help the regional economy, with all the through truck traffic on the lucrative Rio de Janeiro to Fairbanks route. Or something.

Oregon Convention Center Plaza

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Today's adventure takes us to the Oregon Convention Center Plaza, the new park across the street from the convention center itself. This block is owned by the Portland Development Commission, and was originally slated to be a large "headquarters" hotel attached to the convention center. Which we're told we need because all the other competing convention centers have one. I have very little insight into the convention industry, so this may actually be true as far as I know. In any case, the project was killed a few years ago, by the price tag, entrenched local hotel interests, and general public skepticism about the project. So instead they built this outdoor event space, to be used mostly in connection with conventions across the street. An sales brochure for the plaza notes it has adjustable lighting, lots of electrical outlets and water hookups, and other features an ordinary public plaza (like, say, Pioneer Courthouse Square) wouldn't offer.

A key thing to note here is that the Powers That Be haven't completely given up on building a hotel here. Since the plaza may yet turn out to be temporary (like the PDC's Block 47 a few blocks north of here), they appear to have built it on a tight budget, resulting in a fairly generic and cheap-looking space. If you're holding an outdoor convention-style event, I suppose it's actually an upside when your space is sort of a blank slate and you don't have fountains and statues and big trees and so forth to work around. This summer the plaza's also going to host "Plaza Palooza", a free summer concert series. It seems like it would also be ideal for hosting a farmer's market or a food cart pod, though I'm not sure enough people live or work in the vicinity to make either one economically viable here.

When I walked through, though, there were no events going on, and I have to say the plaza doesn't work so well as a general-purpose public park. I realize that's completely missing the point of the place, but it's going to be event-less like this the vast majority of the time, so I think it's fair to comment on it. The design doesn't invite people to walk through, or to linger. There's no signage letting people know it's a park, and then there's nowhere to sit, and if I recall correctly there aren't even any trash bins. No art, no fountains, not much in the way of flowers. It wasn't long at all before I ran out of things to take photos of, and I wandered off to find a more interesting subject. Maybe they just don't want the public to get too attached to the place. I dunno.

Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge

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More bridge photos from Cleveland, this time of the Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge. Which, unsurprisingly, carries the Flats Industrial Railroad over the Cuyahoga River. Said railroad is a short-line railroad serving industrial customers (ok, one customer, a flour mill) in the Flats district of Cleveland. All in all, the name is about as self-explanatory as you could hope for.

It's always helpful when my interests sort of overlap with railfans, even though I'm not really one of them myself. They tend to be meticulous and take lots of photos, often from angles that wouldn't have occurred to me. So here's a nice photo of the bridge at RailroadHeritage.org, and several more at RailPictures.net.

A photo at Cleveland Memory points out that this was once known as the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railroad Bridge Number 4, while one Flickr user points out that this was part of the New York Central system at one point. Another Flickr user has a photoset about the bridge, including a photo of an award plaque from the American Institute of Steel Construction, which gave it an "Annual Award of Merit, Most Beautiful Steel Bridge, Class IV" for the year 1953. If this sort of award sounds vaguely familiar (and it probably doesn't), the Portland area's John McLoughlin Bridge, on the Clackamas River, won a similar award in 1933, but "Class C" instead of "Class IV", and no, I don't know what the difference is there. Someone else has a large photoset with great photos of the Flats area, including a few of this bridge.

Connections

This installment in obscure stuff around town takes us to the Multnomah County offices at SE Hawthorne & Grand Avenue. Flanking the main entrance are a pair of ornate bronze panels, the left one depicting a rural landscape, the right showing urban scenes. This is Connections, a 2005 piece by the Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre. His description of it:

The Multnomah Building houses the business offices of Multnomah County, the most populous county in Oregon. These two panels frame the main entry, and represent the urban and rural aspects of the county. Bridges, roads and water images are metaphors for the County’s many governmental functions. Bridges are the central design element on the urban panel; they allow a city divided by a major river to function as a cohesive whole, as the County “bridges” many diverse communities, facilitating cooperative action and successful societal functioning.

In the rural panel, the arterial (County) roads converge from the periphery as capillaries in the circulatory system, supporting urban life by the work of the agricultural base and the dramatic beauty of the Columbia Gorge scenic preserve. These panels also suggest Portland’s connection to the Pacific Rim with the oblique reference to the Asian scroll.

The Portland Public Art blog liked it, which is rare praise indeed.

Chimney Swift

Here's a new weathervane sculpture, titled Chimney Swift, on Portland State's brand new University Pointe student housing tower, which opened last fall to mixed reviews. Unlike a lot of recent posts here, I didn't find this one on a map first; I was just walking along minding my own business when I noticed the sign, which helpfully points out that the piece itself us up on the roof of the building. It turns out to be another work by Keith Jellum, the same guy behind Electronic Poet (overhead at the Galleria MAX stop), Transcendence (the salmon crashing through a building near the South Park Blocks), and Portal (the hammer arch on SW 1st near the Ross Island Bridge). Portal sits in front of the offices of the same construction company that built University Pointe and donated Chimney Swift. And with that, well, that's all I know about Chimney Swift.

Chimney swifts are another matter; the local variety is the Vaux's Swift, best known in the Portland for colonizing the chimney at Chapman School, in NW Portland, each fall. This draws crowds of human spectators, and often a few hungry hawks. I've gone to watch a few times but I've never brought a camera along, believe it or not. YouTube's full of Chapman School swift videos, though.

12th Avenue Viaduct

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge thing takes us to another unlikely spot, the 12th Avenue viaduct over Sullivan's Gulch and Interstate 84, just south of Lloyd Center. I am not, generally speaking, interested in freeway overpasses as part of this project, but this is a somewhat interesting exception. The key thing here is that this bridge, and the ones further east for MLK and Grand Avenues, are much older than I-84, and were built when Sullivan's Gulch was just a ravine with a railroad running through it.

Even that, by itself, probably wouldn't be enough to merit a blog post, but it turns out this humble overpass is a minor design by the famed Waddell & Harrington engineering firm. They're better known for designing the Hawthorne Bridge, the Steel Bridge, and the Interstate Bridge here in Portland, the Sandy River Bridge in Troutdale, the Union Street Bridge in Salem, and (according to Bridgehunter.com) the OR-99 bridge on the Columbia Slough, and a railroad bridge over the Willamette south of Harrisburg. So this is a very obscure cousin of all those well-known local bridges, and many others across the country. It's not particularly photogenic, but the bridge railing does look a lot like the one on the Hawthorne, so there's at least a little family resemblance. And more importantly, it's very, very obscure. Gentle Reader(s) (yes, both of you) out there probably realize how much I gravitate to obscure stuff.

I was reminded of this structure recently when working on a post about the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Bridge #463 in Cleveland, oddly enough. I came across a blurb by J.A.L. Waddell about his dislike of the "jackknife bascule" design used by said bridge. I started reading his Wikipedia bio (which insists his firm also designed Cleveland's Detroit-Superior Bridge, which I'm not sure is true), and then wandered off on a tangent to see what else around Portland Waddell's firm might be responsible for. No sources I've seen actually mention the one pictured here, but I vaguely remembered seeing their name on a plaque on one of the Sullivan's Gulch overpasses, so I went back recently to figure out which overpass it was, and take a few photos of it.

As you might imagine, there isn't much about this one on the interwebs, and frankly I suspect there aren't a lot of interesting facts about it out there to be discovered. It has no Bridgehunter page, but it does have a page on UglyBridges.com, which mentions it has a sufficiency rating of 58.5 out of 100 (which is better than a lot of bridges around town), and (for some reason) it isn't eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, despite its advanced age. I did find one vintage mention of the viaduct while it was in the planning stage, in which Waddell & Harrington advertised in Municipal Journal and Engineer, Vol. 28, seeking a contractor to do the construction work. The project was described as:

Furn. material and bldg. steel viaduct for city over Sullivan's Gulch, E. 12th st.: six 32-ft and two 64-ft deck plate girder spans on steel bents, concrete pedestals and abuts; 40-ft. roadway; two 10-ft. walks.

roseburg, february 2007

Lovejoy Fountain (Vine)

Here's the link to the original, if this doesn't play in your browser.

Irving Park expedition

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A few infrared snapshots of inner NE Portland's Irving Park. It's a very nice place, with pleasant landscaping and all the usual city park amenities; it's just that the city has, as a rough guess, a few dozen very similar and equally nice neighborhood parks all around town. If this isn't the closest one to you, I can't think of any particular reason to go out of your way to visit here. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I stopped here primarily to fill a midsized hole in this humble blog's giant geotag map. Since it's hard to imagine anyone but me caring about that, I popped an infrared filter on the camera in hopes of making the photos a little more unique and semi-compelling.

The city's "Historical Information" blurb (from the above link) is fairly brief:

The land in the Irvington neighborhood was originally owned by Captain William Irving, who was famous in early Pacific Northwest maritime history. Part of the land occupied by Irving Park was the site of the Irvington Racetrack, one of four defunct racetracks now sporting Portland parks.

I think I can improve on that blurb, with a little help from the Oregonian historical database. A 1904 Oregonian cartoon depicted some colorful and disreputable-looking "typical scenes" at the Irvington racetrack. Horse racing was not the track's only fame however; on June 23rd, 1907, race car driver Barney Oldfield shattered a world land speed record, covering a mile in just 52.4 seconds, which is a bit over 68 miles per hour. A subsequent event didn't turn out so well; the organizers, possibly unaware that it always rains here on the 4th of July, unwisely scheduled a (presumably) dirt track auto race for that day. Of the nine events on the program, they were only able to pull off two of them. Spectators were disgruntled, and Oldfield himself was briefly arrested for "fraud". The charges were eventually dropped, but not before a possibly intoxicated Oldfield reportedly threatened to jump off the old Hotel Portland.

Just a year later, the track was converted into today's park and surrounding residential district, an area once intended to be known as "Prospect Park". A scandal erupted in 1912 when one of the principals in the Prospect Park Company, recently disabled by a stroke, was (allegedly) defrauded out of his properties by a rival group of real estate investors. I haven't found answers yet to how that case was resolved.

Meanwhile, the old racetrack was apparently also used by the Second Oregon Infantry while preparing to go overseas to the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. So it's not that the park and the surrounding neighborhood lack for historical anecdotes; it's just that they aren't the fashionable sort of historical anecdote. Rich people fighting over land. Auto racing. War. No hippie music festivals or IWW rallies or scandalous performance art happenings seem to have occurred here. Not yet, anyway.

Mt. Adams from Goldendale, Washington

Taken back in January. Finally got around to copying these off my phone.

Cedar Mill Falls, Vine-ified

Hey, it's the new thing. (If the embedded version doesn't play in your browser, try the original here.)

Salmon Cycle Marker

The latest installment in Art Near PSU takes us to Salmon Cycle Marker, the tall decorated pole next to the university's Native American Student & Community Center on SW Jackson St. The Smithsonian Art Inventory page about it describes it:

A tall pole constructed from three trees killed by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980-1981, depicts the journey of salmon in the Columbia Gorge from their birth to their arrival in the sea where they spawn. At the bottom of the pole there are images of salmon eggs created by Lillian Pitt and Ken MacKintosh; in the middle there is an image of "She Who Watches" by Lillian Pitt; and at the top there is an image of two salmon mating by Ken MacKintosh and an abstract image of a salmon looking up toward the sky.

Longtime reader(s) might remember me getting snarky more than once about Portland's fixation on salmon art, usually Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream. I like this one, though, and I'm going to make an exception here. I note that Salmon Cycle Marker was co-created by a Native artist, whose website describes the project:

As with many of the large public projects I've worked on, I worked in collaboration with several other artists on this project.

It took a while to come up with the idea for what we were going to do, but we finally decided to have a giant marker. And then, once that idea came to us, it was like a powerful vision that kept driving us to completion.

The pole itself ... a 50 foot pole ... is a log from Mt. St. Helens that we found floating in the water. It must have been there since the time of the eruption. We thought that by using it we would not be destroying any living thing, and at the same time, we would be honoring all of the creatures and plant life that once lived on that mountain.

We put giant Salmon at the top of the pole because they were, and still are, so important to the lifeways of so many Native peoples throughout the Pacific Northwest. The salmon are huge ... 12 feet long ... but they don't look that big because they're so high up.

And we put Salmon eggs at the bottom of the pole ... and a number of other symbols going up the pole important to the Native peoples of this region.

It's nice that this isn't our usual Portland thing, where smug Subaru-driving white people babble on about magic salmon so they can look all twee and spiritual-ish. You may have seen me roll my eyes at that before, and I'm doing it again now.

Another work by Pitt and MacKintosh, titled The Salmon Offering, is a bronze cast of a traditional salmon drying rack. The City of Seattle described it, when it was exhibited there in 2001:

The Salmon Offering builds on the form of a traditional wooden salmon drying rack, which the artists adorned with their carvings. They dried fish on it, then dismantled the work and cast the parts in bronze. The bronze pieces will be reassembled on the site of the current salmon smoking area of the Native Center at Discovery Park. The artists will hand out salmon recipes at the annual PowWow of the United Tribes for All Indians.

Sculpture.org had this to say about it:

While all of the artists explored interconnections between our own survival and that of the salmon, Lillian Pitt, the only Native American artist, together with Ken Macintosh, went to the heart of the history of salmon in the culture of the Northwest. Salmon Offering, a bronze cast of an actual salmon drying rack, is installed near the salmon cooking area of the Daybreak Star Arts Center, owned by the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. The artists have donated the permanent work to United Indians in honor of Bernie Whitebear, the Native American leader who, with other native leaders, won land rights from the American government. The rack is the soul of a fish camp, where families come together to smoke and dry fish for the winter. It is also a focal point for telling myths and legends, sharing prayers, and trading with other tribes. As Pitt stated. “Salmon sustain more than the body—they feed the soul and spirit of a community.”

A quick note on terminology, you may have noticed that descriptions of Salmon Cycle Marker don't refer to it as a totem pole. The carving of totem poles was traditionally done by tribes in northern Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, and the practice didn't extend south to tribes in the Willamette Valley or along the Columbia River.