Cobbletale

A few photos of Cobbletale, on the Portland State campus at 11th & Mill St. The artist statement, via the UO Library's One Percent for Art digital collection:

Cobbletale metamorphises the West Hall courtyard into a topographic landscape and kinesthetic artwork. It is meant to be experienced by touching (feet, hands, posterior) as well as by sight. Cobbletale examines and appreciates, both geologically and in the more recent historical sense, Portland's cobblestones. In a subtler way, Cobbetale is a site-specific metaphor for history's layers and transformations. Either way, it constradicts and expands the notion of the courtyard. Through its materials, shape and scale, Cobbletale empowers the site's surrounding architectural forms and landscape paintings. The idea for Cobbletale came from the design team's discovery that cobblestones were unearthed during preparation for West Hall's construction. Sometime around the turn of the [19th] century, they had been laid along a streetcar route on Southwest 11th. Their location was at the edge of the present artwork. Some of these original cobblestones are now a part of Cobbletale. During the sixteen-month period of creating Cobbletale, the artist gained assistance from eleven different state and local agencies and bureaus, as well as three museaums and numerous private individuals. In order to gather an appropriate ""pallet"" of materials, the artist hand cleaned over 6,000 cobblestones with a hammer and scrub brush, eventually using approximately 4,000 and returning the remainder to the city's storage (Mayer, 1992).

The fun thing about Cobbletale is that it was created in 1992, nearly a decade before today's Portland Streetcar began operating. Streetcars were strictly an object of romantic nostalgia at that point, and there was every reason to believe they were gone for good. The present-day streetcar has a stop just two blocks west of here, and another two blocks north. Still, cobblestones haven't really come back into vogue yet, so there's that.

The bottom photo in this post was actually taken way back in 2006. I knew I had an old Flickr photo of it, but I couldn't recall writing anything about it, so I figured it must've shown up in one of those "miscellaneous random photos" posts I used to do. But I checked all of those & didn't see it, and neither Blogger search nor Google were any help. I had a multi-megabyte full-blog-export XML file lying around from the last time I updated the Cyclotram Map, so I was able to track it down that way (although TextEdit bogged down on the big file & I had to use Emacs instead).

Another sort of blog post I used to do was a bullet point list of unrelated news items and tidbits from around the interwebs. Which seemed like a great idea back then because Twitter didn't exist yet. In a post of that sort from almost exactly 7 years ago, I tacked an item on the end linking to (but not inlining) a few photos I hadn't used yet. I needed to do that because I didn't yet have a Flickr Pro account, and until recently free Flickr accounts only let you browse your 200 most recent photos. You could still access them if you had a direct link, but you couldn't browse through your photos with the 'next' button and see them. So I posted links just so I'd continue to have access to those photos. But I didn't even bother explaining what they were photos of, so it's entirely possible -- probable, even -- that nobody has ever clicked those links in all this time.

I'm thinking maybe I'll go back and edit the old post & inline those photos. Just on the general principle of trying to do things the right way, even if nobody ever sees it. I don't get search hits on 2006 posts too often. People might find it from the post you're reading now, assuming anyone stumbles across it. Which they might now, but in another 7 years? I mean, nobody's going to want to look at plain old photos in the year 2020. Either a.) You'll need full holographic video with HD smell-o-vision, or your fickle audience will go elsewhere; or b.) everyone's too busy scavenging and fleeing atomic mutants to worry about this stuff. I'm not really sure which is more likely.

Harvard Bridge

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Boston's Harvard Bridge crosses the Charles River between the Back Bay neighborhood and the MIT (not Harvard) campus. It's not really that photogenic of a bridge, and I only ended up with a handful of photos of it. I became distracted by other more interesting things and neglected to take any photos of it from the side until I was pretty far away. You can probably find better ones on the net somewhere if you're curious.

(Also, @Mile73 points out this is usually called the "Mass Ave Bridge", due to carrying Massachusetts Avenue over the river. That seems much better than naming it after a university it doesn't even go to.)

In the top photo, you might notice a green painted mark on the sidewalk, and (if you look closely) similar marks in various colors further away. These are "Smoot marks". Their story, as told by Wikipedia:

The Harvard Bridge is measured, locally, in smoots.

In 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT measured the bridge's eastern sidewalk by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year, Oliver Smoot (who later became president of the International Organization for Standardization), end over end.

Crossing pedestrians are informed by length markers painted at 10-smoot intervals that the bridge is 364.4 smoots long, "plus one ear". The qualifier "plus or minus" was originally intended to express measurement uncertainty, but over the years the words "or minus" have gone missing in many citations, including the markings on the bridge itself. The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity.

During the reconstruction in the 1980s, the smoot markings were repainted on the new deck, and the sidewalks were divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six feet. The Cambridge police use the smoot marks as a coordinate system when reporting accidents on the bridge.

Given that Smoot was 5 feet 7 inches (1.702 m) tall in 1958, the given measurement in smoots of 364.4 yields a "bridge length" of about 620 meters (2,030 ft). Published sources give the length of the bridge as approximately 660 meters (2,170 ft). The difference in length between the sidewalk markings and the published figure represents a 40-meter (130 ft) discrepancy.

An article at the Cambridge Historical Society mentions the Smoot connection, and points out a plaque marking the spot where, in 1908, a shackled Harry Houdini jumped off the bridge and made one of his famous underwater escapes. That's way cooler than any fraternity prank, if you ask me.

LADEE Launch, Wallops Island VA

LADEE Minotaur V @ Wallops Island

Photos from Launch Pad 0-B at Wallops Island, Virginia. This Minotaur V rocket (a converted Peacekeeper ICBM) is set to launch the LADEE moon probe tomorrow night, at 11:27pm Eastern.

Sun Lakes

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Here's a slideshow from Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in Eastern Washington, about 40 miles north of Moses Lake. The state parks description of the place:

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park is a 4,027-acre camping park with 73,640 feet of freshwater shoreline at the foot of Dry Falls. Dry Falls is one of the great geological wonders of North America. Carved by Ice Age floods that long ago disappeared, the former waterfall is now a stark cliff, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. In its heyday, the waterfall was four times the size of Niagara Falls. Today it overlooks a desert oasis filled with lakes and abundant wildlife.

These photos are from the park area "downstream" of Dry Falls. (There's a separate post on the way with photos from the overlook above Dry Falls.) It's hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the Missoula Floods, but to my non-geologist eyes the the Sun Lakes area (and similar areas around Washington's Channeled Scablands region) really do look like the result of an enormous flood, with piles of rocky debris, and deep gouges now filled by lakes. This sort of terrain is considered to be the closest terrestrial analogue to outflow channels on Mars, like the one visited by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

The high freestanding rock formation in a few of these photos is Umatilla Rock. I ran across a blog post about it with a lot of great photos, including some from the top of the rock, at a site devoted solely to Ice Age Floods.

I should point out there's more to the park than gawking at geology. A recent Associated Press story about the area goes on about the recreation options here. Beyond the obvious hiking, boating, and fishing options, apparently there's even a 9 hole golf course somewhere in the state park. It seems like a long way to go just to play golf, if you ask me. But then, crossing the street is a long way to go just to play golf, as far as I'm concerned. The park also has mini-golf (aka fun golf), paddle boats, and even a concession selling water balloons at $2 per bucket, so you can have a water balloon fight without the hassle of filling water balloons first. That actually sounds cool.

Contact II

A few photos of Contact II, the red-orange abstract sculpture in the southeast corner of Jamison Square, due south of Rico Pasado. Public art in Portland is usually funded by the city, and commissions tend to go to regional Northwest artists. Contact II is different; Alexander Liberman, its creator, was "a Russian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor.", with long stints as art director for Vogue and editorial director for Condé Nast. Voguepedia (which exists) has an interesting bio of him. When he passed away in 1999, obituaries ran in papers around the globe, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Independent, as well as in various trade publications.

As you might imagine, the city didn't commission or buy this one. Rather, it was donated by the late Ed Cauduro, a prominent local art collector, in memory of his parents. In general I prefer the publicly funded route, rather than relying on the whims of rich collectors, but indulging the occasional rich collector does seem to add a little variety that we wouldn't have otherwise. Unfortunately, by 2007 Contact II was visibly suffering from weathering and vandalism and was temporarily removed for restoration. It hasn't required similar attention since then, as far as I know, so the restoration work seems to have been a success so far.

If you search for other Liberman sculptures around the net, you'll quickly realize this is an extremely tiny sculpture by his usual standards. A few more typical examples of his work include Argo at the Milwaukee Art Museum; Gate of Hope at the University of Hawaii - Manoa; and The Way, in Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis. The Way is built from recycled oil tanks, measures 65' high by 102' wide by 100' deep, and weighs around 55 tons. Our puny example of his work could probably fit inside one of those oil drums, but it still bears a family resemblance to its huge siblings, with cylindrical forms and bright cadmium red tones. Ours is nice, I guess, but I'd really rather have one of the huge ones.

Innerbelt Bridge

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Here are a few photos of Cleveland's current Innerbelt Bridge, which carries Interstate 90 over the Cuyahoga River. Oddly enough this isn't the first I-90 bridge that's appeared on this humble blog; a post just a few days ago covered the Vantage Bridge over the Columbia River. Same Interstate 90, just 2,268 miles to the west.

The Innerbelt Bridge only dates to the 1959, but it's currently being replaced. It was well overdue for repairs when the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneaapolis collapsed in 2007, and it turned out that the Innerbelt Bridge was of a similar design. So local officials decided they'd rather just replace the bridge instead of trying to patch up a bridge with basic design flaws.

The replacement project is proceeding rather quickly, it seems; the westbound span of the replacement bridge topped out just last week. The photos in this post were taken in March 2012 (from the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge just downstream) and at the time there were just a few concrete supports in place, so everything else was built between then and now. I can't help but compare this to our recent ill-fated attempt at building a new Interstate 5 bridge here in Portland. It seems entirely possible to me that Cleveland is simply better at building things than we are.

The current bridge replaced the earlier Central Viaduct (1888), which included a swing span over the river until 1912. The swing span was the site of a streetcar disaster in 1895. Under normal circumstances, a safety switch was supposed to prevent streetcars from traveling over the bridge while the span was open. But somehow this switch failed, and a streetcar plummeted off the open bridge into the river on a dark, foggy night, killing nearly everyone on board. The Central Viaduct was closed in 1941 and scrapped for the war effort during World War II.

In any case, for project updates on the new bridge, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the local newspaper) has an Innerbelt Bridge status page, and the project's Twitter account is updated regularly.

Julia Butler Hansen Bridge

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Several years ago, I did a post about the Wahkiakum County Ferry, which crosses the Columbia River between Westport, Oregon, and Washington's Puget Island. This was before bridges became a thing here on this humble blog, so I just included the above photo and noted there was a bridge from Puget Island to the Washington mainland, and moved on. Only later did I realize I'd made a serious omission, to the degree that anything on this blog counts as remotely serious. I'd decided a while back that I ought to include bridges to islands in my little project, for the sake of completeness, hence the posts last year about the Sauvie Island and Lambert Slough bridges. Clearly, a new bridge post was required here too.

I've had something of a mental block about reusing photos in multiple posts, so I entertained the notion that I needed to go back and take new photos specifically of the bridge. I think I'm sort of getting over that idea, though; I ended up reusing the same photos in multiple Cleveland bridge posts just because it's very difficult to take a photo of only one bridge there and not have three others in the background. I mean, I'm quite willing to go do something absurd and tedious for the sake of a blog post on a blog almost nobody reads. I think I've demonstrated that pretty conclusively already. It's just that I prefer it to be easy and not too time consuming. So I think we're going to go with the one recycled photo this time around.

In that spirit, let's move along. The Julia Butler Hansen Bridge connects Washington's Puget Island with the north bank of the Columbia at Cathlamet, WA. The bridge's HistoryLink.org page indicates it was once known simply as the Puget Island - Cathlamet Bridge until it was renamed in the late 1980s to honor the area's longtime state legislator & US Representative. Further downriver, a National Wildlife Refuge for the endangered Columbian White-Tailed Deer is also named in her honor.

Bridge proposals had been discussed repeatedly for several decades before today's bridge was built; in 1922 the states of Oregon and Washington studied bridging the entire river at Puget Island, rather than the bridge and ferry arrangement we ended up with. I imagine that would have been a massively expensive project had it been built, but the news article notes that one of the engineers doing the study was Conde McCullough, who designed many of the classic Art Deco bridges along the Oregon Coast. So it's hard not to daydream about what might have been. The eventual bridge is much more utilitarian-looking, and seems to have been built in part as a Depression-era stimulus project. It's not that visually captivating as far as bridges go, and I doubt it attracts many tourists on its own merits (I mean, it didn't even draw me back there), but it at least has its own Structurae & BridgeHunter pages. I tend to use that as a measure of whether a bridge is officially "obscure" or not, but I admit I may have something of a warped perspective on the subject.

The Cathlamet Chamber of Commerce has a brief catalog of things to see and do around Puget Island, many relating to its Scandinavian heritage. A 1953 Oregonian article gives a sense of just how physically and culturally isolated Puget Island once was, dubbing it "Little Norway", and noting that many residents once spoke Norwegian at home. The separate island culture more or less fell by the wayside after the bridge opened, and the local single-room schoolhouse closed in favor of school buses to the English-speaking mainland.

The bridge was dedicated on August 26th 1939, just days before the outbreak of World War II. In Washington DC, President Roosevelt pressed a button to officially open the bridge. Rep. Hansen presided over the ceremony, and various politicians and dignitaries spoke. US Senator Lewis Schwellenbach alluded to contemporary events as he spoke: "Senator Schwellenbach drew a parallel between the peaceful purposes for which America builds roads and bridges and the military use for which they are designed in Europe.". Sigh...

Frank Beach Memorial Fountain

Here's a slideshow of the Frank Beach Memorial Fountain at the Rose Garden in Washington Park. The fountain is a memorial to Frank E. Beach, a prominent local businessman of the early 20th century, who (we're told) invented the Rose Festival and christened Portland the "Rose City". He also developed the Parkrose neighborhood, participated in civic organizations, appeared in the local society pages from time to time, and apparently had a role in preserving the downtown Park Blocks.

Beach died in 1934, after being hit by a car, shortly after exiting the Vista Avenue streetcar. An Oregonian editorial the next day cautioned pedestrians to pay closer attention to traffic and to please look both ways before crossing the street.

The fountain was a gift to the city from Beach's son, Frank L. Beach. The winning design (by the unavoidable Lee Kelly) was unveiled in May 1974, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held at that year's Rose Festival. The completed fountain was officially dedicated at the next year's Rose Festival. In 1977 the younger Beach donated an information kiosk to the Rose Garden. He passed away later that year, and the kiosk was later dedicated to him.

I'm actually not going to go off on yet another gripe-fest about Kelly, the fountain's sculptor. Maybe it's the stainless steel, or maybe it's the reflecting pool, which makes it at least sort of a fountain, as broadly defined. Whatever the reason, this one and the Kelly Fountain downtown can stay. It's still not my favorite style, but I realize this style was considered super-groovy back in the 70s for some reason. So keeping a couple of examples around would make sense, for the sake of art history or something.

Snails

Portland's new The Fields city park includes a number of small sculptures here and there. They, collectively, are Snails, by Portland sculptor Christine Bourdette. Her description of Snails, via RACC:

My goal has been to create episodic moments of surprise with works of small scale—objects of simple form but with a small amount of intimate detail that an adult would bend down to look at and a child would find of familiar scale. The thought of the garden paradise—Elysian Fields—came in to play, as well as natural forms that might reflect the eddying, spiraling, form of the park’s design. It seemed an opportunity to create work playful and quirky that somehow reflects the idea of escape, release, imagination, and slowing down—reasons we go to the parks.

The snail—a creature of every garden, beloved or not, but necessary to the natural scheme—is the basis of my imagery here. Its spiral shell is its retreat wherever it is and is a metaphor for renewal and regeneration. The mathematical sequence of that spiral underlies the growth patterns of nature, though these works depart from elegant mathematics as they are eccentric abstractions. And, of course, there is the matter of its pace; the snail is another reminder to slow down, to be in the present.

The Fields

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Portland's new city park at the north end of the Pearl District is named, pretentiously, "The Fields Neighborhood Park". It completes a planned chain of city parks that also includes Jamison Square and Tanner Springs a few blocks to the south, and despite the twee name, this is actually the least pretentious of the three. The center of the park is just a big grassy oval that serves as the neighborhood dog park. A smaller area off to one side is dedicated to some high-end playground equipment. That seems odd, but I suppose the dog park to playground ratio reflects the actual demographics of the Pearl District. In any case, there's also a landscaped area with flowers at the north end of the park, and a few small and unobtrusive public art pieces scattered around the park. The public art will get its own post here, because I get two blog posts out of the place if I do that, and I feel twice as productive that way. I'm sure I'd sound more like a credible Real Blogger if I insisted it was my SEO content optimization strategy or something. And as far as I know that might even be a valid strategy. I haven't looked into it. I don't do this for a living, so I actively avoid the whole subject of how to get more page views. To me that feels like being needy and trying too hard, and the whole business feels vaguely embarrassing just thinking about it.

People more cynical than I -- who do exist, believe it or not -- might argue the park is less pretentious than its elder siblings because the economy tanked before they built it, and the condo bubble money just wasn't there. There may be a grain of truth there; the slideshow above includes a couple of photos of a design diagram the city posted during construction. It provisionally included an "Urbanology Trail", whatever that is, along the northern edge of the park, budget permitting. That doesn't seem to have come to pass, although this article insists the current trail next to the railroad tracks is the Urbanology Trail. I don't know what an Urbanology Trail is supposed to look like, and maybe nobody does, so that could actually be true as far as I know. At one point the city also had grand plans for a pedestrian bridge over Naito Parkway to the redeveloped Centennial Mills building. That hasn't come to pass either, although we can blame this one on the still-not-redeveloped Centennial Mills building, which is a whole other tar pit.

For several years before the park went in, "The Fields" was merely an un-landscaped big grassy field, awaiting city funds to make the place fancy. Then, as now, it served as the neighborhood dog park. To brighten things up a little and raise the tone and such, the area temporarily hosted an abstract sculpture titled Rational Exuberance. Which, sited as it was near the heart of Portland's real estate bubble, was possibly the most ironic thing ever. It's gone now. No idea where it went. I'm going to guess a well-heeled private collector has it now, just going by the name.

Vantage Bridge

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A few photos of Eastern Washington's Vantage Bridge, where Interstate 90 crosses the Columbia River at the tiny burg of Vantage, WA. The usual bridge-nerd sites ( BridgeHunter and Structurae ) have pages with all the engineering trivia you'd ever want to know about it.

The current bridge, and the current town, only date to around 1962 when the Wanapum Dam flooded their previous incarnations. And before them, a history article at the Ellensburg Daily Record explains that a small car ferry plied the Columbia at this spot, and the original town of Vantage sat next to the ferry at yet another townsite. I suppose the town (such as it is) could move yet again if they ever remove the dam to help salmon runs or something. The whole thing reminds me of a certain 1970s folk-rock song about the impermanence of almost everything. The guy with the blue ruffled tux adds an extra layer of cheesy awesomeness to the video. If you ask me.

As for the original 1927 Vantage Bridge, instead of demolishing it the state elected to move it to a spot on the Snake River east of the Tri-Cities, where it now serves as the Lyons Ferry Bridge. It's a fairly huge bridge in its own right, and I'm really curious how they moved it. I've come across several reminiscences about Snake River life before the bridge came, but so far nothing about how the bridge actually got there. If anyone out there has links, info, photos, home movies, etc. about how they pulled this off, feel free to post a comment down below. Thx. Mgmt.

SE 16th & Brooklyn

A few days ago I did a post about the City Repair street graphic at SE 15th & Alder. I mentioned something then about a possible future blog project of tracking down other painted intersections. And then, by chance, I stumbled across another one, this time at SE 16th & Brooklyn. I didn't have the ultrawide lens with me, or a quadcopter camera drone, or anything like that. But I had something just as good, or maybe better, namely the Brooklyn St. footbridge right next to the intersection. So I was able to just stand at the top of the bridge and take photos looking down. That doesn't really translate to any of the other street graphics out there, but hey, it got the job done this time.

The City Repair page about this project describes the design of colorful interlocking gears:

At the intersection of 16th & Brooklyn in SE Portland is a community-built skate park and a pedestrian bridge over the railroad. We chose this location for a number of reasons--to expand it’s potential as a community gathering place, to be more inviting to the neighborhood, and because it is where we live! Muted by past and present industry, we felt that this area could really use some more color and vitality. We want to grow out from the skate park and recharge this space, by collaborating in the creation of a street mural that captures our collective creativity and identities.

Over several months we have amassed ideas from community members and artists who we’ve met along the way, and developed the design pictured here. The center of each gear features a piece created by a participant in this collaborative process—and the gears show that, while we are each individual, we maintain connections that are integral to keeping the community churning. The points of contact between two gears set into motion contact between other gears in the collection, overall creating a movement that is sustained by the whole group. Each part is equally necessary and essential to everyone working together.

In the 15th & Alder post, I also said something about checking the Oregonian historical database for all the fascinating historical events that have occurred nearby. So I tried that for 16th & Brooklyn, and I've got absolutely nothing to pass along. But hey, I tried. On the bright side, this is a sign the houses nearby probably aren't haunted or anything. Or at least not haunted due to anything newsworthy.

The one other thing here besides the footbridge and the painted intersection is the Brooklyn St. Skate Spot, a skate park directly under the bridge. I'm not a skater myself; around age 16 I was given a skateboard because they were on sale at Costco. Which I guess was a big deal because this was shortly after the wheel was invented. Anyway, I tried it once, fell off, and decided it wasn't for me, so it went in the attic to gather dust. It may still be in my dad's attic for all I know. A practically-unused vintage 1980s skateboard might be worth something on eBay. I haven't actually checked. Anyway, long story short, there's a skate park here, if you're into that.

Brooklyn Street Bridge

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Photos of the Brooklyn St. footbridge over the Union Pacific tracks in SE Portland, north of Powell Boulevard and its older sibling at Lafayette St. This bridge only dates to October 1976, and while it looks a lot more stable than the Lafayette St. bridge, it somehow manages to be even uglier. The razor wire and the random garbage probably aren't helping. On the other hand, there's a residential neighborhood on the east side of the bridge. There's also a fairly new skate park directly under the bridge, and the intersection of Brooklyn St. and SE 16th Avenue hosts its own City Repair street graphic, which you'll see in its own post here sooner or later. So that part's ok. The west side of the bridge is strictly an industrial area & probably not part of anyone's commute, so it's not really clear to me why the city felt a bridge was needed here. But hey.

A recent comment here by Gentle Reader Max pointed out that the current bridge is supposed to be demolished for MAX construction in the near future. The construction equipment nearby seems to indicate that's going to happen fairly soon now. The MAX master plan envisions a new bridge here eventually, but no funding for it has been identified at this time, which I imagine means an extended period of time with no bridge here. So, I guess, enjoy this one while you can, if you can.

Main Avenue Bridge

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Next up we've got a few photos of Cleveland's Main Avenue Bridge, which carries the Memorial Shoreway freeway over the Cuyahoga River. It's sometimes called the Memorial Shoreway Bridge, and rarely if ever by its offical name, the "Harold H. Burton Memorial Bridge". I didn't walk across this one, or drive across it, or even get that close to it. But it's a really enormous bridge, and it's painted a bright blue color, and it kept showing up off in the distance in my photos, so I figured it was sort of demanding its own post. Info about this bridge can be had at some of the usual sources: HistoricBridges.org & the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at Case Western Reserve University.

Lafayette Street Bridge

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Here's a slideshow of the sketchy Lafayette St. Bridge, which crosses over the Union Pacific Railroad's Brooklyn Yard in SE Portland. I lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood for a while back in the 90s, and I never used this bridge. I knew it existed; I even thought about using it once or twice. But it didn't go anywhere I needed to go, and it didn't exactly look bike-friendly, so I never got around to it.

In a recent post about the pedestrian bridge at Union Station, I tried to list a few other similar pedestrian bridges I was sort of aware of. I vaguely remembered this one and the one at Brooklyn St. north of Powell, so I included them. A commenter then pointed out that the Lafayette & Brooklyn St. bridges were going to be demolished soon & eventually replaced due to Milwaukie MAX construction. So I figured I ought to hurry up and take some photos before that happened.

The Lafayette St. Bridge is a bit... picturesque. It's surrounded by a somewhat gritty industrial area, not overly inviting for the casual pedestrian. The bridge is tall and narrow, with steep staircases at either end, and there's nothing remotely ADA-compliant about it. It seems to have been cobbled together from scrap wood and spare railroad parts. Without using a level or straightedge, apparently -- especially on the staircases. There's graffiti everywhere. There are even gaps and holes in the boards that make up the bridge, and you can see daylight through the gaps. This is not to say it's actually unsafe, just that it fails to inspire confidence, which is something I look for in a bridge.

As you've probably guessed by now, this is not a newly built bridge. In fact this year marks the 70th birthday of the Layfayette St. Bridge. Back in 1943, the Southern Pacific Railroad (now part of Union Pacific) convinced the city to close several railroad crossings in the Brooklyn neighborhood, at Lafayette, Pershing, and Haig streets. The city agreed, with a stipulation that the railroad had to construct a pedestrian bridge at Lafayette St. at its own expense. The bridge was partially reconstructed in 1961, replacing some wooden parts with metal. This may have been the last serious maintenance it's received. The local neighborhood association was already concerned about its state of disrepair back in 1984, nearly 30 years ago. In addition to demanding basic repairs and safety features, the neighbors lobbied for better bike accessibility at the time. They, or their descendants, are obviously still waiting for that to happen.

The Oregonian database shows several instances of people being hit by trains at the Lafayette St. crossing prior to 1943, usually with fatal results. So it's no big mystery why the bridge was built.

While researching this post, I came across a Tinzeroes post about the two SE footbridges (here & the one at Brooklyn St.), and a post at Sellwood Street about this one, both from 2006. The Sellwood Street post shows a board on the bridge labeled "DANGER - do not step". Which could mean there really was a broken board, or just that somebody with chalk was trolling people who use the bridge. I didn't see this warning when I visited, so either the board's been replaced since then, or the warning's been painted over. I also came across a mention of this bridge in a paper about pedestrian/bike bridges, including an inventory of ones in the greater Portland area. I'm not saying I'm going to take that on as a project. Most of the ones on the list look kind of uninteresting, especially the ones over freeways. But if I ever do decide to do that at some point, I now have a list to work from, which is always the key step. Oh, how do I keep stumbling into these projects?

McCosh Park, Moses Lake

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From a recent trip to Moses Lake, Washington, a few photos of the city's McCosh Park on the shore of the town's eponymous lake. Surprisingly the lake is at least partly natural, even though it's the middle of a desert. And unlike many desert lakes (Mono Lake & Summer Lake, for instance), it isn't just a dead pool of salt and alkali. It actually has fish and everything. The weird geological history of the region may have something to do with this.

The park itself has more amenities than you'd expect for a town of this size: An amphitheater and even a water park, and apparently it also hosts the local farmers market. It probably helps being the largest town for many miles in all directions.

Portals

A few photos of Portals, near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge at SE Water Avenue & Clay St. (Not to be confused with Portal, singular, the hammer-arch thingy on Southwest 1st.) The RACC description of it:

Using slabs of concrete cut from the original Holman Transfer Building, Portals acknowledges the industrial history of the Eastbank and creates continually changing views of the city and the Willamette River. Concrete is made from the earth...gravel, sand and rock from the river. The materials embody geology and time while the swale looks to the future.

Portals is part of the same Green Street project as Eye River, and was created by the same sculptor. As the above blurb mentions, it's basically a collection of recycled concrete chunks left over from the rehab of the adjacent Holman Transfer Building, now known as the RiverEast Center. Former city commissioner Randy Leonard hated the RiverEast project for some reason, but it seems to have gone ahead anyway without his approval.

A PDC PR piece about the project mentions that the building "... was built in 1951, serving as a product distribution hub for Quaker Oats, Coca Cola and C&H Sugar for many years.". It was actually the second Holman Transfer building on this site; the National Register of Historic Places nomination for downtown's Roosevelt Hotel building mentions that its architects also designed the "utilitarian" and "now demolished" 1912 Holman Transfer Building. A sketch of that building appears in a short history/PR video from the current Holman Distribution Co. They seem proud of having been founded here in 1864, but they must've pulled up stakes and left town at some point, because their narrator can't seem to pronounce "Oregon" correctly. (Hint: Ore-e-GONE is wrong. Very, very wrong.) So, go figure.