Northgate Park

I was in North Portland recently taking photos of Portsmouth Cut bridges, and I needed a couple of places to park. For the Fessenden St. and Columbia Boulevard bridges, I figured I'd park at nearby Northgate Park and walk from there. To be honest I'd never actually heard of the place before. It's your basic neighborhood park with ball fields and play equipment, and an elementary school next door. As I've said umpteen times now, parks like this typically aren't that interesting, blogwise, and I don't actively seek them out. If I happen to be at one anyway, though, I'll take a couple of photos and see what I can dredge up about the place on the interwebs. (Incidentally, for the bridges at Willamette Boulevard & Lombard St., I parked at the adjacent Fred Meyer store, and bought a tomato plant by way of thanks for letting me use their parking lot.)

Northgate Park's main point of interest is the school building next door, which you can see in the background in a couple of the photos. This is the former Clarendon Elementary School, which was built in 1970, and closed in 2007 in one of the Portland school district's endless reorganization efforts. I didn't pay much attention to the school until I started putting this post together and realized how unusual it looks from above. The school is the weird cluster of hexagons on the right side of the above map. The unusual design isn't just an architectural whim; it embodies circa-1970 cutting-edge thinking about how schools should work, namely the "open-plan classroom" concept.

A recent historic building assessment done for the school district determined it's a significant building, but isn't yet eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as it's not 50 years old quite yet. (As a fellow product of the year 1970, I'd just like to point out that it's going to be an exceedingly long time before anything from that year turns 50.) The report describes the school building at length; here are a couple of excerpts that explain why it is the way it is:

The hexagonal form facilitated the design of the school following an “open classroom” concept without corridors or interior walls to separate classrooms from one another. Beyond the entry lobby, the main gathering spaces are contained within the three central pods. The most prominent of these spaces is the central pod which features a large concrete column with several arches that branch out to meet individual glulaminated ridge beams which in turn support the hexagonal pitched roof. A platform with a safety railing, accessed via a stair, encircles the concrete column. Several steps descend from the platform to the base of the concrete column. Globe lights, suspended from the ceiling, supplement the illumination provided by the glazing in the cupola Between the northernmost common area pod is a glass enclosed courtyard that features some original concrete playground forms as well vegetation. Immediately to the north of this courtyard is a large multi-purpose area/gymnasium that features exposed concrete masonry unit walls.
...
Unlike the earlier “finger plan” schools constructed during the post-war period in Portland (See Ogata 2008), the Clarendon Elementary School was based upon the hexagon as the organizational unit for each classroom and common space in the building. Each hexagon or “pod” could house up to 90 students in an open classroom environment – an experimental shift in educational focus. When opened, Clarendon “rejected grades in favor of performance groupings” (PPS Staff Report 1971: 2). The advantage of this educational approach was to group students together regardless of age into groups with similar levels of understanding. Daily evaluations were made to determine whether students should shift groups depending upon their achievement (PPS Staff Report 1971: 2).

The design of the school was tailored to this method of teaching. The lack of walls, doors, and corridors, wide open classroom space, and use of bright colors such as oranges and yellows, smaller scale cabinets and sinks, as well as formed concrete columns that resembled tree trunks created unique interior experiences. The independence of each pod was further enhanced by having direct access to the exterior and neighboring Northgate Park thus minimizing potential distractions during recesses and increasing fire safety.

I can see why the district picked this school to close, instead of one of a more traditional design. The philosophy behind it is essentially incompatible with contemporary thinking on education, which focuses on rote memorization and endless high-stakes standardized tests to the exclusion of all else. I don't know whether 70s-style unstructured free-form learning was necessarily "better", but it was probably less soul-crushing. My own elementary school, in Portland's western suburbs, was built in a sort of pod design (albeit without the hexagons and cool tree trunk columns), but it had mostly reverted to a more traditional teaching style, and the floor-to-ceiling movable classroom dividers almost always stayed closed. Anyway, here are a couple of pro articles and con articles about this style of education, if you want to read more about it.

I was about to suggest the old school would make a great McMenamins, or maybe fun offices for a tech startup, but the Portland school district already has plans for the building. As of March 2014, the plan is to reopen the school as a "regional early learner center", as part of the district's expanding pre-kindergarten program.

Portland's Favorite Tree

Recently I wrote about "Freda's Tree", the City Repair intersection project at NE 56th & Stanton, which is sort of a memorial to a beloved, long-vanished neighborhood chestnut tree. During the 1987 Rose Festival, the tree was a finalist in a "Portland's Favorite Tree" contest put on by the Oregonian, but it lost out to a redwood tree (of all things) in the West Hills, near 860 SW Vista Avenue. The contest hasn't been held since, so presumably the redwood tree is still our fair city's reigning favorite tree, in the same way that the USA is the reigning Olympic rugby champion since the sport hasn't been included since 1924.

Long story short, I went to go look for Portland's favorite tree, and here it is. I think. There are actually several redwood trees nearby; I'm assuming the largest and most imposing of them is our favorite. The late 80s were not exactly an era of subtlety and aesthetic restraint, so I'm guessing people went with the biggest tree they could find and automatically called it the best. At least it's a redwood tree, so we can blame the whole thing on Californians.

Couch Park Mosaics

Today's installment in the ongoing Portland public art project is a fairly obscure one. Back in 2012 I did a post about NW Portland's Couch Park, including a bit about the groovy 70's abstract sculpture at the east end of the park. That's the only art the RACC database lists at Couch Park, but later I noticed the Smithsonian art inventory lists a couple of others, so I went back to find them. The Couch Park Mosaics are a collection of glass mosaics on a pair of large planters at the west end of the park, near the Multnomah Learning Center. They date to 1976-77, which is about the era I would have guessed just looking at them. Some details, from the database entry:

Artist:
Grimm, Jere, 1933- , sculptor.
Inscription:
(On third tile from the left on Hoyt Street side, bottom:) THESE MOSAICS WERE/MADE BY MANY/NORTHWEST/PORTLAND/PEOPLE FOR THE/ENJOYMENT OF ALL/WHO USE THIS PARK
Description:
Mosaics of blue, green, yellow, black and brown are inlayed on two sides of two planters. Trees and shrubs are planted in the planters.
Remarks:
Commissioned by the Portland Development Commission and funded through its Housing and Community Development Program. This work was installed as part of a park improvement program initiated by the Northwest District Association. Schoolchildren and other community residents created the tiles under the direction of Jere Grimm, Artist-in-Residence and Couch Park Art Coordinator. IAS files include pertinent memoranda and correspondence from the Development Commission.

I also would have guessed, without ever reading the entry, that the mosaics had been created with the help of semi-skilled neighborhood hippies of all ages, and the work parties were far out, man. The one odd bit here is that the Portland Development Commission owned the mosaic. Much of the Smithsonian's data for the Portland area comes from a 1993 survey, if you can believe that, so I don't know if they still own it or not. If so, it would explain why there's no RACC listing for it, since it's not theirs to keep track of.

Relying on a 1993 survey is the big limitation of the Smithsonian database. It's great for things that date to before 1993 and still exist but have fallen into obscurity, like the mosaics here, the little Lee Kelly sculpture at NE 72nd & Fremont, and the Michele Russo sculpture on Pettygrove near Chapman School. Entries for art that arrived after 1993 are few and far between, though; I think I've seen a few, but I could be wrong and there just aren't any. Likewise a fair number of database entries are out of date. Ownership may have changed, or an artwork may have been moved from its 1993 location (like just about everything along the Transit Mall), and some have been lost entirely. Case in point, the database lists an additional artwork here in Couch Park, a shelter structure that doesn't seem to exist anymore. It also dated to 1976, and was described as "Two four-sided carved supports for a trellis structure. Each side of the poles is divided into eight rectangular sections. The top section has carved masks on each of the four sides of each pole; a total of eight masks. Below each mask are rectangles painted in colors to coordinate with the masks.", and its condition was given as "Treatment urgent". Based on that description, I don't think it refers the park's play structure, which also dated to 1976, and was condemned as structurally unsound in April of this year. If it's the same structure, it's gone now, or will be soon. If it was a different structure, I imagine the city removed it for similar reasons sometime in the last 20 years. It's the eventual fate of all untreated wood structures in this climate. There's probably a great environmental lesson for kids here. Circle of life, and all that.

Walker Park, Honolulu

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Today's adventure takes us to tiny Walker Park, near the waterfront at the edge of downtown Honolulu, at the intersection of Queen St. & Fort St. It's a small plaza built around a fountain, with an abstract sculpture at its center. There's also an ornate gate, and an old cannon. The caption to a wallyg Flickr photo of the park explains that the park dates to 1951, and is a bit of land left over after widening & realignment of Nimitz Highway & Queen St. It's dedicated to the memory of H. Alexander Walker Sr., longtime president and chairman of American Factors, Inc. (later Amfac), a Hawaiian sugar company and one of the "Big Five" corporations that essentially controlled the state during the sugar cane era.

The park's Walker Fountain dates to 1972. The central sculpture Puna (by Hawaii sculptor Sean Browne) was added in 1991, in memory of Una Craig Walker, wife of the park's namesake. (I'd rather think of them as co-namesakes of the park, but apparently that's not how things worked back in 1951.) The caption to a second photo explains the wrought iron gate. It stood in front of American Factors company headquarters from 1902 to 1972, when it was moved here. I didn't notice this at the time, but apparently the park also has a few blocks remaining from the original Liberty House department store, which once stood nearby and was razed in 1979.

I'm not sure what the story is with the park's cannon. A blog post I ran across speculates that it might be from the old Honolulu Fort, which was located here from 1818-1857 (and was the site of a short-lived French invasion in 1849). If it's not an original cannon, it's probably at least a nod to that period of history.

A historic inventory from the Hawaii Culture & Arts District (a local nonprofit) describes the history of the old fort:

Description: Fort Street takes its name from a one-time defensive work located at the present intersection of Queen Street and Fort Street. The Honolulu Fort originated with the Russian-American Company blockhouse. Directed by the German adventurer Georg Schaffer (1779-1836), they built their blockhouse near the harbor, probably against the ancient heiau of Pakaka and close to the king’s palace. Pakaka was an important sacred site for Ku, the Hawaiian war-god and a place of great symbolic and ritual importance to the victorious King Kamehameha. Hearing about this development, Kamehameha I, the king, ordered his advisor Kalinimoku to take a contingent of Hawaiian soldiers to Honolulu and press the Russians to leave. Threatened by a large number of Hawaiians, the Russians quickly abandoned their blockhouse and sailed for Kauai, where they had earlier attempted to start a trading post and soon built another fort. Kamehameha I appropriated the fort and it protected Honolulu harbor and also housed a number of administrative functions, including many years of service as Honolulu’s prison. Created first in 1951 as a product of the widening of Nimitz Highway by the city of Honolulu, Walker Park received new attention in the aftermath of the construction of the Amfac Financial Center in 1968-71. At that time the company, through its president, Henry A. Walker, Jr., contributed to the enhancement of the earlier park through the donation of the paved walkway, benches, sculpture and the wrought and the historic cast and wrought iron sign and gateway that serves as a centerpiece of the park.

Anecdote: The The first capital punishment carried out at the fort was the hanging of Chief Kamanawa (c.1785-1840) and his accomplice Lonoapuakau on October 20, 1840. The Hawaiian Court found him guilty of poisoning his wife Kamokuiki, carried out Kamanawa to avoid a charge of adultery. Kamanawa was the grandson of one of Kamehameha I’s principal advisors, Kameeiamoku, and the grandfather of David Kalakaua, later King Kalakaua. The execution took place on the scaffold set up just inside the fort’s main gate. It attracted 10,000 viewers, all of whom watched solemnly as the Governor carried out the sentence.

Honolulu is in the early stages of building a light rail transit system, which will eventually run on elevated tracks somewhere near Walker Park. Several lawsuits were filed attempting to stop the project; in one of the cases, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed an amicus curiae asserting that the raised trackway would block important views from the park and a few other locations, and obstruct views of the historic Aloha Tower. The city's own 2008 evaluation of the park in preparation for the light rail project had concluded that it was technically eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but really wasn't all that significant of a place in itself. As of May 2014 the city has fended off the various lawsuits, and construction is proceeding, with completion expected in 2019.

Columbus Road Bridge, Cleveland

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A couple of years ago, I was in Cleveland for a weekend and ended up with a bunch of bridge photos, which slowly trickled out in a long series of blog posts. I thought I was done with those, but it turned out I had a so-so photo of one more bridge, so obviously another blog post was in order. The Columbus Road Bridge isn't the main bridge in the photo above, but the one in the background that you see straight on. It crosses the Cuyahoga at the apex of a bend in the river, right next to the Cleveland Union Terminal bridge, which carries the Rapid Red Line. As I said, the photo isn't that great, but it's still a sort of collector's item. I didn't get close enough to the bridge to notice this, but apparently it was in an advanced state of disrepair, and the county decided to replace it. It sounds like the bridge approaches were kept and renovated, but the lift span itself was demolished and replaced. It's not clear whether this means they also replaced the towers and counterweights, or just the lift span, but in any case the bridge closed for demolition work last May, and the shiny new span was floated down the river and installed this July, just a couple of weeks ago.

A history page notes that the then-current bridge was the fifth at this location. The first was nearly destroyed by angry westside protesters, who feared the new bridge would divert commerce away from the original Center St. Bridge and thus away from the Ohio City area. As the story goes, westside residents boycotted the new bridge, and the city of Cleveland retaliated by demolishing its half of the Center St. Bridge, leaving the Columbus one as literally the only bridge in town. An angry mob showed up to destroy the Columbus bridge, chanting "Two bridges or none", but they were stopped by the mayor of Cleveland and a group of armed militiamen.

An 1857 replacement for the original bridge quickly rotted and collapsed in 1863. An 1870 replacement lasted to 1894, when it was replaced with a double swing span bridge. In this arrangement, the bridge separated in the middle, and the two halves swung off to the side in opposite directions. This lasted until 1939, when it was replaced with a lift span bridge (i.e the one pictured above) as part of a larger project to improve navigation on the river. The lift span lasted much longer than its predecessors, but was poorly maintained beginning in the 1980s, and decayed to a point where it was cheaper to replace it than to attempt repairing it. The 2014 bridge is scheduled to open in October; it's a lift span and is basically similar to its predecessor, but features 5' wide bike lanes as this is apparently a major bike commuting route.

This is actually the second Cleveland bridge that's been replaced since I was there, the other being the Innerbelt Bridge. I'm kind of thinking I may need to go back soon just to keep this blog up to date. By which I mean, enjoy some beer and pierogies, hit the West Side Market again, and keep this blog up to date.

Unity Circle

Today's Portland painted intersection is "Unity Circle", at NE Emerson & Haight, one block east of Jefferson High School. A May 2014 Skanner article describes the project:

The Unity Circle first came into being in 2012, the vision of artist Kymberly Jeka. Living near the Haight and Emerson intersection, Jeka knew it marked the spot where DeAndre Clark, 25, had been shot and killed in 2011. And she knew dozens of students travel that route every day, on foot and in school buses. So she dreamed up the street painting as a way to build community and to bring beauty and hope to the intersection.

This year's City Repair Village Builder guide explains the design:

Te thriving diversity of the Humboldt neighborhood is the inspiration for the painting. The design represents a cohesive geodesic structure with multi-colored triangular pieces joining together harmoniously.

The Facebook page for this year's repainting (May 31st - June 1st) includes a few photos of the event.

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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Next up, a photoset of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall, which extends west from the Public Garden through the Back Bay neighborhood. I wandered along the central mall for a while, taking photos of the over-the-top houses and churches on either side. I'm not sure what we're looking at here; I found a page documenting every building along the avenue, but I haven't gone through to figure out which ones I have photos of. That part is left as an exercise for the reader (he said lazily/hopefully).

It was a very hot day, and eventually I wandered off to find a Starbucks for an iced coffee like a good West Coast tourist, and fortunately there was one a couple of blocks south(ish) on swanky Newbury Street, and ended up walking along over there instead. I feel compelled to explain that I normally avoid Starbucks, but I wasn't sure whether there was iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts (which is essentially the competing coffee behemoth in New England), and I needed a cold but very caffeinated beverage right then thanks to jet lag.

I had a theory -- and I think I mentioned it in a previous Boston post -- that perhaps Commonwealth Avenue was an inspiration for Portland's Park Blocks, since Portland was founded by a bunch of New Englanders, and the city itself would have been named "Boston" if a coin flip had gone the other way. The dates don't bear this theory out though. The South Park Blocks were dedicated in 1852, while Commonwealth Avenue was designed in 1856, and long tree-lined parks like this were simply the vogue at the time, popular among major cities as well as muddy little pioneer towns with big dreams. An architecture guide to the city calls it the "French Boulevard style". 1856 seems like a surprisingly recent date for central Boston, until you remember that the whole Back Bay area was an actual bay until it was filled in during the 1850s. As a West Coast tourist, knowing that makes me worry the ground here will basically liquefy if there's ever an earthquake, like what happened to SF's Marina District back in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Apparently Boston doesn't get earthquakes, though. At least as far as they know.

Brewer Fountain, Boston Common

Couple of photos of the Brewer Fountain in Boston Common, an ornate 19th century concoction that was recently restored to working order. There was a little stand next to it encouraging people to slow down and sit and read one of the free books, and more than a few people had taken them up on the offer. I'm not sure that would work in Portland. Maybe if you stocked it with graphic novels, so long as they're the cool kind, whatever that is.

Wikipedia says there are at least sixteen other copies of this fountain around the world, including ones in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. I occasionally go on about doing a project around visiting every copy of something or other. The Fremiet Joan of Arc would involve a lot of traveling around France, plus trips to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which would be ok. The itinerary for The Ideal Scout would spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering around rural Pennsylvania, which is less of a welcome prospect. Visiting the Brewer Fountain's siblings would be one of the better trips; a page about another copy in Tacna, Peru lists additional known copies in Australia, Chile, Quebec City, Liverpool, four around France, two in Lisbon, and others in Geneva and Valencia. So that sounds like it would be ok, so far as silly projects go.

This fountain dates back to a time when all fountains were expected to come encrusted with mythological characters; cherubs, naiads, mermen, and whatnot. I was going to propose a glib theory that this was because running water was a rare and precious novelty back then, and fountains got the mythology treatment because they were a very big deal. I'm not sure this checks out though. The fountain went live in 1868, and Boston's first waterworks dates all the way back to 1652, over two centuries earlier, so I'm not sure the chronology lines up on this idea. It's also possible this mythological stuff was simply the fashion for a while, and eventually people tired of it and went on to do something else instead.

Cultural Totem

A few photos of Cultural Totem, a public art piece at NE 14th & Alberta, created by artists Roslyn Hill and Lillian Pitt (who also co-created Salmon Cycle Marker at PSU. The description from its RACC page:

As artists, one Native American and one African American, we have made this contemporary totem to reflect our cultural and heritage stories, recognizing our many similarities.

Portland Public Art gave it a meh back in 2006, calling it "largely forgotten" and saying it "serves as a beginning, I guess".

Some years ago the city blocked 14th at Alberta as a traffic control measure, creating a sort of mini-plaza where the street dead-ends. There are a few trees here, and I took a couple of photos since it's the closest thing Alberta has to actual greenspace along the street. Maybe I only noticed this because it was a hot day, but Alberta doesn't have a lot of shady trees, and (unlike the Pearl District) the city didn't put in any sidewalk planters as the area gentrified. Maybe trees have gone out of fashion temporarily in the urban design world, I dunno.

MLK Gateway Plaza

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Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE Grand Ave. & Hancock St, the point where two-way MLK splits into southbound MLK and northbound Grand Avenue. The traffic shift creates a couple of awkward (and unbuildable) triangles of land, which the city's tried to do various things with over the years. Most recently, it's been transformed into something the city calls the "Gateway and Heritage Markers Project" The skinny south corner of the main triangle is landscaped with some sort of tufted grass, I think to discourage people from walking through it. The triangle's divided by a curved metal mesh wall, maybe 7'-8' high, with an inspirational MLK quote facing Grand Avenue, in a font that makes it look vaguely like a Nike ad. The north side is a small concrete pedestrian plaza with displays about Oregon African-American history.

The design of the place is odd for Portland, seemingly designed for the benefit of passing motorists rather than pedestrians. The project was put together by the city's transportation bureau and this isn't technically a city park, which might explain the vehicular orientation of the place. The design drew complaints over the lack of sidewalks; apparently the city felt there were some unsafe pedestrian crossings here, and set out to discourage people from crossing the street in these spots rather than figuring out how to make them safer.

The one-way couplet of Grand Ave. and Union Ave. (the previous name of MLK) was announced in August 1957, and the change went into effect in January 1958. Initially this involved northbound drivers making two 90 degree turns, a left from Grand onto NE Hancock and then a right onto northbound MLK. In 1978 the city bought up the car lot on this block and created today's angled arrangement. This was part of the same project that created a landscaped median along the two-way portion of MLK, while eliminating much of the on-street parking along the street. This design has been widely regarded as a disaster, one that killed off many of the businesses along the street and made the street into a sort of neighborhood barrier since there were very few intersections where cars or pedestrians could cross it. They've worked to mitigate this in recent years, but it's hampered by the fact that MLK is a state highway (OR 99), and ODOT hates traffic lights and anything else that would prevent semis from barreling along city streets as fast as possible.

I ran across a pair of city planning documents from when the Transportation Bureau had to get design approval to proceed with the redesign. One mentions that the original design included additional heritage markers up and down MLK north of here, but noted there was no funding in place to actually do this.

Architects and designers love talking about places as "gateways". That often seems to be meaningless professional jargon, but this spot really is a sort of gateway, or at least historically it's been one. Before gentrification took hold in Northeast Portland, it was at least symbolically an entrance to the only majority-black neighborhood in the city. Growing up out in sheltered 1970s Portland suburbia, I can distinctly recall being cautioned to never ever go north of this spot because it "wasn't safe". Now it's more of a gateway from one trendy hipster neighborhood to another, yoga studios and artisanal coffee roasters as far as the eye can see.

On TV / Electro Umbilico

Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE MLK and Graham St., Atop one of the buildings is a stainless steel frame that sort of resembles a TV screen, with a disembodied head (or maybe an Earth) floating in the picture. A big steel power cord coils its way along the side of the building. This building is home to Portland Community Media, the nonprofit in charge of our local public cable access channels, and the TV-like thingy is today's public art object.

The TV sculpture is titled either On TV or On the Air. Its Smithsonian art database entry gives a date of 1985-86, and claims "This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program."

Rooftop sculpture of an oblong box television with a revolving globe placed where the screen should be. The television sits on a fabricated carpet or table cloth whose corner drapes over the building. The set has an antenna, an electrical cord and a fishbowl on top.
...
Funded with a National Endowment for the Arts, Art in Public Places grant of $5,000 given in 1987 to Portland Cable Acess TV. Additional funding was provided by Portland's Metropolitan Arts Commission and the Oregon Arts Commission. This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program. According to the attached article from the Oregonian, the site address is 2766 N.E. Union Avenue. The sculpture is attached to the building, and the artist used the building's walls for portions of the work.

Don Merkt, the sculptor, also created Driver's Seat, on the transit mall near Union Station, and Water, Please at a city office next to Cathedral Park. Other works not visited by this humble blog include several indoor sculptures at City Hall and the local state office building, a giant urn structure in Culver City, CA, and a baseball-themed sculpture in Dublin Ireland. He also created a cool (but unbuilt, as far as I know) concept for Broadway Bridge lighting. I think we ought to build this, if only because Portland currently has zero laser-armed bridges.

It turns out the electrical cord is a later addition, added during remodeling in 2004. It was created by Portland's Blashfield Studio, and goes by the title Electro Umbilico. The website describes it:

A sweeping exterior redesign of the Portland Community Media building as part of the facility's new identity. An 80 foot aluminum umbilical cord droops languidly across the side of the building, seeming to connect the existing Don Merkt sculpture (an abstract TV set) with a huge abstract plug shape above the newly designed entryway facade.

The TV dates to the era when some people still thought cable TV might change the world for the better somehow. Or at least locally produced cable might have a crack at it. It was the era when MTV still showed music videos, TLC had educational programs, CNN had news, Max Headroom was a pop culture icon, and (in theory) anyone could create their own cheesy cable access show, a la Wayne's World, or I suppose the original MST3K. I mean, I certainly wouldn't trade the modern internet for that imagined TV utopia, but it seemed like an inspiring vision at the time.

I honestly couldn't tell you what the future holds for the public access TV model. There are still no HD public access channels in Portland, and I haven't heard of any proposals to create them. The proposal that would bring Google Fiber to Portland is said not to include any subscriber fees to support cable access channels. Which makes sense in a way, since Google Fiber is promoted as a broadband Internet service, not a competing cable TV provider, though it can certainly act as one. A news account I saw indicated that the Google deal might give Comcast some leverage to weasel out of cable access fees too, which I think would essentially defund the current system.

roseburg, july 2014

Little Golden Hallway

Here are a few photos of Little Golden Hallway, an art installation inside Portland's Pioneer Place mall, located next to the skybridge over 4th Avenue. Despite being inside a private shopping mall, the RACC (the local public art agency) had some sort of role in its creation, so it shows up in some of their databases and arts maps. I didn't go looking for it because a.) it's inside a mall, and b.) somehow I'd sort of assumed it was in the mall's other skybridge over SW Yamhill, which was demolished a few years ago when the old Saks store became the new Apple store. Recently I happened to be in the mall with a few coworkers, heading to the mall's top-floor bowling alley, when I noticed it and the title seemed familiar. Weird little random details like this tend to stick in my head better than things I actually need to remember, I'm not really sure why, and I'm not sure it would be a useful talent at all but for this humble blog and the occasional bit of pub trivia. Anyway, I made a mental note and came back later to take some photos without coworkers around, because telling coworkers you have a blog results in them wanting to look at it, and I don't see a lot of upside to that, to be honest.

In any case, the artists' website gives the date as 2000 (around when the mall expansion opened, which makes sense) and describes the piece thusly:

“Little Golden Hallway” was a project included in the new wing of the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, Oregon. The piece was fabricated using cast resin panels, each of which was bolted to a steel frame to create larger grids. Inlaid in each panel is a high lead crystal lens and a photograph taken around Portland–of people, places, and things the artist experienced over the course of one summer. The photographs provided a snapshot of the artist’s interactions, while also working to solidify a certain time in the history of Portland. Situated on the north end of a sky bridge, the piece immerses the viewer by slightly overhanging into the walkway. With the attendant light, and the nature of the resin used, the hallway emits a soft golden glow.

Noble Architect

At the trendy corner of NE 18th and Alberta, a giant statue of a beaver stands at a bus stop, facing the wrong way, gazing off at the eastern horizon. This is Noble Architect, a 2012 addition to the artsy (or wannabe-artsy) neighborhood. The RACC page describes it briefly:

Facilitator of rich ecosystems - Benefactor of the past - Builder of the future.

This sculpture honors the majestic beaver that once abundantly inhabited and thrived in this area. The beaver—called Ina (eena) by the Chinook—faces the rising sun looking for a day when humans and nature harmonize.

A press release for the unveiling elaborates:

Artists Ruth Frances Greenberg and David Laubenthal conceived of the sculpture to “mirror the ebullient, raw and wonderful vigor of nature as well as our relationship to it.” Many different species of animals inhabited and thrived in this area before it was settled as the Portland we know. One of the abundant animals was the beaver. One could scarcely take a short walk without seeing one.

In a written statement, the artists explained their inspiration: “With so much regional history and lore we chose this remarkable animal to represent our reverence and respect for the resilient, beautiful, and abundantly generous natural world that remains intertwined with our human development. Our rendition of the beaver is intended to show the beaver in its innate majesty, grace, wildness, and dignity. It is an homage…a reverent depiction of a magnificent animal.” Its pose is dignified and vaguely humanized, standing on its stump, at just over six feet tall. The “fur” is a richly, hand-crafted, textured mosaic, inviting “petting” from passersby.

Calling them noble and majestic is great and all, but I've always thought the beaver is an innately silly creature, with one unusual (and instinctual) talent. It's a nice change from salmon, but a beaver is still a derpy-looking bucktoothed rodent, and anthropomorphizing it isn't helping. That said, the ceramic tile work simulating fur is really great. Maybe it would help to re-spin it as a friendly kids' storybook creature instead of an environmental message piece. I dunno.

For what it's worth, Alberta St. needs public art because it's sorta-officially the "Alberta Arts District". The name comes from a brief period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when art galleries moved here after being priced out of the Pearl District, creating an alternative "Last Thursday" event to rival the Pearl's First Thursday. For several decades up until that point, Alberta St. had been a lower-income, predominantly African American neighborhood, but when gentrification arrived it happened in record time. Within a few short years the galleries had been priced out again (along with many minority longtime residents), by the usual array of posh restaurants, yoga studios, and doggie day spas. People still act surprised when this pattern plays out all over again in a new neighborhood. Anyway, "artsy" is still part of the street's value proposition, as it were, according to both City Hall and every realtor in town. So, in lieu of actual present-day galleries, it gets some public art.

Going by the art and the other twee touches the city's added in recent years (bioswales, fancy bus platforms, etc.), you'd know there was wildlife here once upon a time, but you wouldn't have any idea this was ever a black neighborhood. I mean, acknowledging people while aiding the real estate market that's pushing them away isn't a good look either. But as it stands now, everyone who lived here in 1994 has been written out of history, essentially. That can't be a good thing.

Updated: I only realized this after posting this, but it turns out that today's beaver sculpture replaced a previous sculpture of a baobab tree, by the same artists, at the same location. The baobab arrived around 2004, and was still there circa 2010, but apparently it had a variety of maintenance issues and the city decided to just junk it and go with a different design. A different and non-African design, to be exact. Now, it's possible that was a total coincidence and I'm just being cynical, but it really makes you wonder.

Kings Corner, NE 13th & Webster

The next stop on our ongoing tour of Portland painted intersections takes us to NE 13th and Webster, a block north of trendy Alberta St. The design is simpler than a lot of the others you've seen here. Apparently this is one of the early ones, having been mentioned in a City Repair guide way back in 2006. Back then you could get away with multicolored dots; today (2014) the bar's been raised (as silly as that sounds), and people expect salmon, bears, rainbows, that sort of thing, or at least a much fancier abstract design. That City Repair page calls the intersection "King's Corner" but sadly doesn't explain which king they had in mind. Apparently they considered also doing the next couple of intersections north on 13th, at Sumner and Roselawn (the latter right next to Roselawn Park) but so far haven't gotten around to it.

NE 13th & Beech

Here's the painted intersection at NE 13th & Beech, one block west of the rainbow-patterned one at NE 12th & Beech. It's another part of the larger "Beech St. Project" you read all about in the previous post (assuming you read the previous post), but this one has a nature theme instead of an abstract rainbow design. I suppose if your neighborhood can't agree on a single design that represents its "identity", you can always do multiple ones, if the alternative is angry shouting at neighborhood meetings. I dunno. Neighborhood association politics are basically opaque to me. Having two intersections competing for volunteers might make people even more unhappy, as far as I know.

NE 12th & Beech

Here's another of Portland's painted intersections, in the Sabin neighborhood at NE 12th & Beech. It's supposed to be part of a larger "Beech St. Project", which this year's Village Building Convergence guide describes as:

Our goal is a super community-friendly, gorgeous, interactive, happy space for moseying and chatting with neighbors. Including: two intersection paintings, three little libraries, filling several curbstrips with beautiful pollinator attracting plants, and an urbanite bench. We are planning to have lots of fun working together, so come by and join in. This is a Fly Awake PDX project, with support from: Whole Foods, Advantis Credit Union, Albina Library, Beanstalk, Papa Murphy’s, Nature’s Needs, Caffé Destino, Acadia, Hankins Hardware, Ticket PDX, Irvington Veterinary Clinic, and, of course, our awesome neighbors, City Repair and, all you, the volunteers!

So this is a bit more ambitious than your average intersection repair thing, where people have an annual block party, meet their neighbors, paint (or repaint) a single intersection, and call it good. I don't want to snipe at people for being way more ambitious and energetic than I am, but multiple intersections, multiple library boxes and more just seems like overdoing it a bit, if you ask me.

But maybe this project's raising the bar for everyone else around town. Maybe by this time next year you'll get sneered at if you don't have a high-concept multiblock project in the works, and the other cooler neighborhoods will laugh and kick sand, er, organic compost on you. A couple of years after that, you'll need to hire professional painters and landscapers, because nobody has time for all that volunteering, and to pay them you might need to work some advertising into your intersection design, or sign the little libraries up as Amazon affiliates or something. Then local tech companies and such join the craze, painting the intersections outside their offices as a cool Portlandy team building thing, and everyone gets a polo shirt and commutes back home to Tualatin afterward.

Ok, no, I'm getting silly here, that's probably not going to happen, or most of it probably won't. The tech company part is bound to happen sooner or later, though. My company would probably have done one already if we weren't right downtown on a busy street. Speaking of which, although we may be up to a couple of dozen painted intersections now, as far as I know there are still zero anywhere on the Westside, not even near 23rd or in Multnomah Village. I probably ought to have a glib sociological theory about why that is, but I don't have one yet.

the new bridge

Couple of photos of Portland's new light rail bridge, which they've decided to call "Tilikum Crossing: Bridge of the People". I can't say that with a straight face. Maybe I'll get used to it someday. Besides the obvious double entendre, "Tilikum" is also the name of a homicidal Sea World orca. I don't claim credit for the name "Murderwhale Bridge", but I'll probably be calling it that a lot.

I stopped by because they've just opened the Esplanade walkway under the east end of the bridge. It's kind of an interesting spot because you get a good look at the attach points for the bridge cables. I suppose all cable-stayed bridges look like this on the underside, but I hadn't seen it before.

Desert Harvest

The next sculpture from outside the Portland Art Museum (since we still have a few of them left) is Desert Harvest by Native American artist Allan Houser. His Wikipedia bio claims he was influenced by Henry Moore (Upright Motive #9 & Reclining Connected Forms ) and Barbara Hepworth (Parent I & Young Girl) among other people. The Oklahoma History Center, Phoenix's Heard Museum, and the Oklahoma Museums Association have online exhibits about Houser's life and work.

Desert Harvest sits next to Coyote VI in the museum's sculpture court, forming a small Southwestern-ish section. I think this arrangement is the museum's doing, though, not one intended by the pieces' creators.

Weather Machine

If you've ever been in Portland's Weather Machine in Pioneer Courthouse Square at precisely noon, you may have noticed the square's Weather Machine. It's the tall column next to Starbucks, and at noon it wakes up, plays a fanfare, spins around a bit, and pops up a sculpture based on the next day's predicted weather. Its Smithsonian inventory page explains:

A tall pole topped with a sphere containing three weather symbols that represent typical weather conditions in the Portland area. Each day at noon there is a two-minute sequence of music and the weather symbols appear --Helia (A stylized sun, for clear sunny days); Blue Heron (For the days of drizzle, mist and transitional weather); Dragon (For stormy days of heavy rain and winds.

Apparently the weather forecast part involves someone in the square office calling the national weather service and asking. Or at least historically that's been the case; you'd think this could be automated. It's fun to imagine the phone conversations though. I imagine the same two people having a routine phone call every morning since 1986 or so. Maybe there's small talk, maybe they've become lifelong friends through the weather machine. Or maybe it's a brief cryptic conversation every day, a voice you've heard every day for 25 years and know nothing about. Or maybe they've grown to resent each other and this daily chore over the years, and it's an "Oh, it's you again" sort of conversation.

Will Martin, the square's overall designer, thought the place needed a whimsical "weather machine", but he died in a tragic plane crash before he could explain what he had in mind. The city got as far as designing the pillar here, and then held a design competition to decide what sort of weather contraption. to put on top of it. Here's a timeline, via the library's Oregonian newspaper archives:

• Competition announced August 1985
• The paper's art critic's take on it, with a mention of a copyright stipulation on the thing, to prevent the winning artist from creating an identical weather machine elsewhere.
• 33 designs submitted, including "Will's Wacky Weather World" which was same basic idea as the final product, but with more elaborate gadgetry, and photovoltaic power
• A letter from Terrence O'Donnell pointing out it was originally his idea, not Will Martin's, despite the Oregonian presenting Martin as the sole genius behind the square
• The competition was narrowed to 2 finalists by February 1986
• The winning design was selected in April 1986
• The first public model was unveiled April 11th
• The finished product was finally unveiled in August 1988
• A follow up article on September 1st noted that the machine is technically able to play at other times besides noon, but doing so would violate the city's noise ordinance, whereas playing at the strike of noon does not.

Princess Ka'iulani Statue

In the middle of Waikiki, at the intersection of Kuhio and Kanekapolei, is a small plaza with a statue of Crown Princess Victoria Ka'iulani, a niece of Queen Lili'uokalani and the last heir to the throne of Hawaii. (Smithsonian Magazine and SFGate have good articles about her short, tragic life.)

The Honolulu city arts page for the statue has a brief description:

A Sculpture by Jan Gordon Fisher. Larger than life-size bronze figure of Princess Kaiulani with a peacock at her feet, eating from her hand. Located at Kaiulani Park.

The statue's location wasn't chosen at random, or for the convenience of tourists. A Hawaii for Visitors page about the statue mentions that the little park is on the site of ʻĀinahau, Ka'iulani's home, which was demolished in 1955 in the name of progress. Oddly enough the statue was commissioned by Outrigger Enterprises, a local hotel chain.

Fisher (an art professor at the Brigham Young Hawaii campus) also created the Duke Kahanamoku statue elsewhere in Waikiki; I don't have a photo of it because it's usually mobbed by tourists. Tourists seem to generally ignore this statue, but locals regularly adorn it with fresh leis, as a gesture of respect and remembrance.

Host Analog

Just outside the Oregon Convention Center's main entrance is Host Analog, a very large and very obscure public artwork. Unless you read the rather small signs around it, you may not even realize what it is. Here's the Smithsonian art inventory description:

 

Artist:	Simpson, Buster, 1942- , sculptor.
Title:	Host Analog, (sculpture).
Dates:	1991.
Medium:	Sculpture: metal and fir; Base: red rock and brick.
Dimensions:	Sculpture: approx. H. 11 ft. x W. 6 ft. x L. 70 ft.; Base: approx. H. 2 1/2 ft. x W. 35 ft. x L. 110 ft.
Inscription:	(Three plaques located at 30 ft. intervals discuss the Portland Water Works Project and general and scientific information concerning the art work) unsigned
Description:	A nurse log is segmented and arranged like a fallen classical column. Indigenous seeds and seedlings are planted in each of the segments. An irrigation line is incorporated into the work to keep the log moist and fertile for new growth.

I'm partial to conceptual work like this, and there really isn't much of it in Portland outside of gallery shows (unless maybe it's even more subtle than Host Analog and I haven't noticed it yet). The artist's website has a more detailed explanation of what's going on here:

Host Analog teaches us to see the beauty found in the order of chaos dynamics. Transposing phenomena into aesthetics, this sculpture creates an anomaly with new paradigms. This old growth nursing log, decomposing and nursing a new landscape, is a work in progress. For over 500 years, this Douglas Fir was nurtured in the same watershed which sustains Portland today. In the 1960s, this monarch fell to the winds and later bucked to determine if suitable for lumber. Not harvestable, the eight sections of the old growth trunk, measuring eight feet in diameter by eight feet long each, lay host in what became the Bull Run watershed. Rediscovered by the artist in 1990, the nursing log was moved to rest adjacent to the Oregon State Convention Center to continue its regenerative processes. Over the past nine years, the Host Analog has re-established itself in this new context, nursing both its original indigenous plants, as well as a new "invasive" plantscape from the adjacent urban landscape.

A "volunteer" Pin Oak now grows adjacent a Douglas Fir seedling, the willow, and birch roots between Western Red Cedar and Hemlock. Oregon Grape, salal, and other native ground cover commingle with imported groundcover, some perhaps hitching a ride at some time on the transcontinental railroad to Portland. During the ten years of this sculpture's nursing, the vegetation on and adjacent the sculpture has been un-hampered by human intervention. The sculpture has been prolific and informative as we become the observer of the juxtaposed phenomena, and the accommodation and expansion has taken place.

A 2011 Shockwrite article "Art in Public: Buster Simpson’s Philosophy" includes a mention of Host Analog:

It does not look like a typical public work of art, except for the signage included around it. If a viewer takes the time, they can read about many different elements relating to this idea. Simpson took this naturally felled log from a nearby forest, brought it to the city center (outside of the city’s Convention Center), to juxtapose the time it takes to cut down a tree to the time it takes to grow a forest. He included images of his daughter growing up over the years next to the tree, along with pictures of ancient Greek ruins that mirror the falling of a great column to the falling of a great tree, and images of loggers that eat from a great log table in a forest. In this seemingly simple design, Simpson incorporates art as idea and art as process for the viewer. He is able to entice both the art aficionado who revels in artistic complexity and the art novice who perhaps though contemporary art was only paint splattered on canvas.

A few other assorted items

• A 2009 Landscape Urbanism post discusses Host Analog and includes a bunch of photos.
• Someone's doctoral thesis about Simpson's work
• Number 16 on an "18 Strangest Gardens" listicle on Popular Mechanics.

Columbia Boulevard Bridge

The final stop on our tour of Portsmouth Cut bridges is the one on Columbia Boulevard. It's the northernmost of the four, borders an industrial area, and carries a lot of commercial truck traffic. It seems to be in better shape than the others (at least from the standpoint of a non-civil-engineer walking across it), and it was widened to four lanes at some point. Its entry in a city bridge inventory says bridge 078 dates to 1909 and 078A dates to 1968, so I imagine that's when the widening happened. I couldn't find any news stories in the Oregonian database about that project to confirm that. I suppose it didn't merit one, as an unattractive bridge in an industrial area, bordering what was then an impoverished neighborhood. Ok, that or the database's search feature is a little substandard and misses stuff you're looking for, which wouldn't be the first time I've run into that. It also does't have Bridgehunter or Structurae pages, only an UglyBridges.com entry. That's usually a sign this whole bridge thing has gone a bit far down the rabbit hole.

This is probably a good time to point out that this entire bridge project got started because I got the notion to walk across the Morrison Bridge, back before they added the nice walkway it has now, and I realized I'd never done that before, and I thought it would be interesting to do the other Willamette bridges too and take some photos in the process, and it's sort of taken on a life of its own since then. To be honest, a lot of the motivation behind this, as well as the public art and city park things (which have long since gone down rabbit holes of their own), is that I don't travel as much as I'd like to, and I have to go to somewhat absurd lengths to continue playing tourist without leaving town. I keep thinking I'm bound to run out of material for these projects sooner or later and I'll have to go find a different silly hobby. Hasn't happened yet, though.

Fessenden Street Bridge

The third Portsmouth Cut bridge on our tour carries N. Fessenden St. over the ravine. It's about the same style as the others; same age, same designer, same disrepair. It's got the usual Bridgehunter, Structurae and UglyBridges.com pages, where we learn things like:

History
     Built 1909
Builder
     - Ralph Modjeski of Bochnia, Poland (Engineer)
Design
     Warren deck truss
Dimensions
     Length of largest span: 89.9 ft.
     Total length: 164.1 ft.
     Deck width: 40.0 ft.
...
Inspection (as of 07/2012)
     Deck condition rating: Poor (4 out of 9)
     Superstructure condition rating: Poor (4 out of 9)
     Substructure condition rating: Satisfactory (6 out of 9)
     Appraisal: Structurally deficient
     Sufficiency rating: 49.7 (out of 100)
Average daily traffic (as of 2010)
     4,931

I don't know if anyone particularly cares about bridge trivia sites, but those are often the only sources of information when a bridge isn't particularly attractive or significant. That's certainly the case here. Fessenden is not a major arterial street, or at least it's not intended to be. As one of only four streets that cross the Cut, and only six connecting St. Johns to the outside world (the others being Marine Drive much further north, and the St. Johns Bridge), it's gotten a share of truck traffic heading for the Rivergate industrial district or the St. Johns Bridge. Complaints by residents prompted the city to encourage trucks to use Columbia Blvd. instead, or else. The Columbia Blvd. route is apparently two miles longer and burns an extra 15 minutes of driver time, so I suspect compliance will be a bit spotty when nobody's looking.

The Cut bridges have a less visible role carrying utilities; the Willamette Boulevard bridge has what looks like a water main on its underside, and this bridge carries a natural gas pipeline. I suppose that would be an argument for not letting these bridges completely fall to pieces.

apparently there's a natural gas pipeline here

Lombard Street Bridge

Our tour of Portsmouth Cut bridges continues with the Lombard. St. Bridge, the next one north from the Willamette Boulevard bridge. It's a similar deck truss design and has the usual Bridgehunter and UglyBridges.com pages, for your bridge-geekery needs (if you have bridge-geekery needs). The city's 2002 St. Johns/Lombard Plan calls out this bridge (but not the others) as having high historical significance. The brief blurb about it just describes its construction and doesn't explain what's so special about it. The Portsmouth Cut itself only managed rank III, though it merited a longer description:

Railroad Cut 6929 N. Carey Boulevard The Portsmouth Cut is an approximately 6,600 foot long cut in the bluffs at St. Johns through which run two mainline and auxiliary railroad track.
Significance: Transportation. The railroad bridges, cuts, and tunnels of North Portland, all built circa 1907, were the result of competition between the principals of two major railroads: James J. Hill (Great Northern,Northern Pacific, and Spokane, Portland, and Seattle (SPSRR)) and E. H. Harriman (Union Pacific and Southern Pacific). The Great Northern did not have direct access to Portland, leading Hill to build the SPSRR to provide independent access to Portland. He built the bridge over the Willamette River, the cut through the North Portland Peninsula, and the steel bridges over the Oregon Slough and the Columbia River. On the other hand, Harriman wanted direct access to Seattle for his Union Pacific line, which passed through Portland. Around 1910, the railroads settled their differences and the Union Pacific built a tunnel through the peninsula to connect with the SPSRR at what is now called North Portland Junction.

The Lombard St. bridge has the same messy ownership & maintenance situation as the Willamette Blvd. bridge, and it seems to be in more or less the same state of repair. There's an added twist here in that Lombard doubles as US 30, an Oregon state highway, so the state transportation department is responsible for the road. The state's role regarding this bridge (if it has one) is unclear; at any rate they don't appear to have any more leverage over the railroad than the city does.

For a bridge the city thinks is an iconic landmark, I can't find much in the way of interesting links to share about it. What's more, a lot of the search results that do come up (like this city trail alignment plan) refer to an entirely different bridge, which carries Lombard over the Columbia Slough up near Kelley Point Park.

I did find an account of a 2012 protest on the bridge, in which environmental activists campaigned against coal trains running through the Portsmouth Cut. That's obviously a concern, since the cut borders residential neighborhoods on both sides. But as dirty and flammable as coal trains are, the latest controversy involves oil trains. The current North Dakota oil boom came with an infrastructure problem, in that there was no existing pipeline to get the oil out of North Dakota, and building a new one would be expensive and involve a great deal of bureaucracy and controversy. So instead the oil companies quietly began shipping oil by rail, and they aggressively lobbied state governments to keep all information about the trains private and confidential. I suppose they figured that in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic oil train disaster, running hundreds of oil tank cars through residential neighborhoods might be a tad... controversial. Some of the North Dakota oil is destined for export -- yes, the USA is actually exporting oil now -- and this oil travels by rail to an export terminal at Port Westward, OR, near Clatskanie. I didn't realize there even was an oil export terminal there; it turns out that it used to be an ethanol plant, built with public subsidies no less, and they're somehow reusing the environmental permits the plant received when it made ethanol. The route to Clatskanie takes oil trains right through the Portsmouth Cut, as many as three trains per week. The Oregonian dug this up in a rare (for them) bit of investigative journalism, despite the state's effort to shroud the whole business in total secrecy. This may seem surprising in a state with such a liberal, tree-hugging reputation, but in general the state government (and DEQ in particular) have always sided with corporations over public health and safety, at least when they think nobody's looking.

Willamette Boulevard Bridge

The ongoing bridge project takes us back to North Portland, for a different sort of bridge. You might recall an earlier series I did on railroad bridges in North Portland: The Burlington Northern railroad crosses the Columbia River on the Vancouver Railroad Bridge (and the smaller Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge), and crosses the Willamette on a bridge sometimes known as "Bridge 5.1" (meaning 5.1 miles from downtown Portland). In between, as it crosses the peninsula between the Columbia and Willamette, the railroad runs much of the way in the Portsmouth Cut, a wide man-made ravine up to 100' deep, since railroads like to avoid grade changes if possible. The cut forms a sort of artificial canyon between St. Johns and the rest of North Portland, and this gap is crossed by just four bridges, at Columbia Boulevard, Fessenden St., Lombard St., and Willamette Boulevard. We'll be visiting all four eventually, but our destination right now is the Willamette Boulevard Bridge. It has the usual Bridgehunter, Structuræ & UglyBridges.com pages, if you're interested in bridge-geek stuff; Warren deck truss bridges are not really the most visually exciting things out there, but this and some of the other Portsmouth Cut bridges were designed by Ralph Modjeski, a well-known bridge engineer who also created the aforementioned BNSF railroad bridges as well as Portland's Broadway Bridge. So at least there's a little historical significance here.

In a number of the slides you'll notice this bridge looks a bit... worse for wear. In 2007, the Oregonian sounded an alarm about this bridge, titling their article "10,000 cars a day on rusting hulk". This was the same bout of handwringing over sufficiency ratings that got us a new Sellwood Bridge (now under construction), but nothing's happened here so far. The Sellwood rated a lowly 2 out of 100, while the Willamette Blvd. bridge scored a 47. The fine print, though, indicated that the Sellwood rated so poorly due to carrying far more traffic than it was designed to handle, and was actually in better structural shape than the bridge you see here.

You might wonder how the city let it get so shabby, and why they haven't fixed it. It turns out that fixing it is not the city's job, or the state's job for that matter. Back in 1906 when the railroad line went in, the railroad needed a franchise from the city in order to dig the cut and run the rail line through it. The city noted that the dig would cut through 18 city streets, leaving St. Johns effectively an island. Some degree of haggling went on, and the resulting city ordinance required the railroad to build and maintain up to four bridges over the rail line. That arrangement continues today, and legally the bridges are the railroad's problem. They're not exactly revenue-generating assets, though, and they seem to be prioritized accordingly.

In October 1906, Mayor Harry Lane vetoed the proposal as not serving the city's interests. The four bridges had already been negotiated, but the proposed permanent franchise had no provision requiring the railroad to replace the bridges when they inevitably wore out. The 2007 Oregonian story indicated that the city council overrode Lane's veto. I can't find an archived news story about that, but I assume it must have happened that way since the Portsmouth Cut obviously exists. Here's a big excerpt of Lane's veto message, since I like his writing style:

There is no time limit placed upon this franchise, and the failure to set such a limit upon the life of its franchise is now claimed by the holders of the Fourth-street franchise to make it last forever, which, I here may remark, is an exceedingly long time.

I can see no harm in a franchise granted to last forever if at the same time it contains a provision allowing the people to recall it at any time such grounds of complaint against its further existence as would hold in a just court of law. There is no such provision in this ordinance.

No promise is made to build any new bridges when these wear out, and inasmuch as the franchise is for a cut 100 feet deep and two hundred feet wide, to last forever (if it does last that long), for that same length of time people are going to require bridges to cross the chasm, and for exactly as long as the chasm lasts, so long should bridges be provided.

Presume that lightning destroyed one or more of these bridges, or that some miscreant destroyed one or more of them with dynamite. From that day forth, so far as this franchise is concerned, they would go unbridged or the city would be compelled to build them at its own expense.

As there are 18 streets crossed by this deep cut, and steel bridges of the required type now cost, say $60,000 each, you must allow that it would prove quite expensive. I think that more specific terms should be used in regard to this matter.

In the near future many people will dwell and do business upon the peninsula, and it is within the bounds of reason to suppose that some day some other railway company will wish to enter the city there or thereabouts, and if so another 100-feet deep gash with more bridges would be necessary before it could do so. I think it not unreasonable to require that a common user clause on terms just to all be included in the franchise.

Construction was already underway in December 1906. They used much the same technology as was used to dig the Panama Canal: Steam shovels from the Columbia end of the cut, and hydraulic mining on the Willamette side. Hydraulic mining (which was also employed during the California gold rush) uses high pressure water jets to erode and wash away the land you'd like to be rid of. It's a highly efficient way of digging large holes quickly, so long as you don't really care where all the silt ends up. The Oregonian article about the dig claimed that tailings would be used to fill in low-lying areas around the Willamette River bridge, but I suspect most of the dirt just ended up in the river.

The next year, Lane also vetoed an ordinance authorizing a railroad tunnel under North Portland, on similar "perpetual franchise" grounds. As he'd predicted the year before, a second railroad needed a route through North Portland, and would be unable to use the Portsmouth Cut because the city hadn't insisted on a "common use clause" during the previous negotiations. The tunnel proposal claimed to have a common use provision, but Lane wasn't sold and saw a crucial loophole in the proposal. It's not clear to me sure whether this second veto was overridden as well, but tunnel was eventually built, and today connects Swan Island to industrial North Portland, traveling directly under N. Dana Avenue. In any case, Lane's veto message this time around had a distinct tone of I-told-you-so:

This franchise or grant has a common user clause which allows other railroad companies to use the tunnel upon payment of a just proportion of the cost of the same, but nowhere provides any right of access or egress to said tunnel. In other words, any other railroad company, upon payment of its proportion of the cost of the same, can use the tunnel, providing it can conjure up some means of getting into it, or out of it, which quite naturally it could not do unless it in some way secured a right to use the approaches to such tunnel, which is the right, in my opinion, that should be insisted upon by the representatives of the city before the grant is made.

Also, there is no time limit set upon the life of the grant so far as I can ascertain, it being a perpetual franchise with no restriction, of which grants this city has had experience in the past, and is now having.

The city's interests demand that as few bridges, tunnels and cuts through, over and under its property be made as possible, and in the event that another railroad should come to the city, ordinary foresight suggests that the provisions for the same be made as soon as possible. If the city, through its agents, had taken such a view of the matter when the deep cut across the Peninsula, now in process of construction, was suggested, it would not have been necessary to deface that section of the city with the deep gash which is both destructive to its beauty and its usefulness, nor would the present grant have been asked for.

Also it would have rendered it unnecessary to construct the bridge across the Willamette River, which is now being erected, and which, when completed, will forever be a bar to navigation and add to the cost of every shipment from this port in the future, to the detriment of the community.

The interests of the people are greater than are those of any corporation, and however much any particular company may have suffered at the hands of a most astute or canny rival, in its efforts to secure terminal facilities, the fact remains that we are but the agents of the people, and our duty is to them alone and to none other.

The ownership and maintenance situation apparently remains unchanged to this day. I ran across a 1986 incident in which a city water main broke and washed out two supports for the Willamette Blvd. bridge. The city and railroad fought over who had to pay for repairs. Reports at the time explained that the city technically owned the bridge, but the railroad was on the hook for maintaining it. The railroad argued that since the root cause was a faulty city-owned water main, the city ought to pay for repairs instead. This went on for a while and the bridge remained closed while the sides haggled. In the end, the city ended up footing the bill. Presumably they felt a bit more urgency about getting the bridge reopened than the railroad did. With a historical precedent like that, from the railroad's standpoint it's reasonable to assume that if the bridge gets bad enough, someday the city will either foot the repair bill again, or take it off their hands (and balance sheet) entirely.

this week in instagram commute photos.

Assorted photos taken while walking to work last week. I'm told the standard hashtag for these is supposed to be "#commutestagram", but that's just too silly for words.

split ring (instagram)

Wrote about this back in August 2013, but Instagram recently improved its filters with some shiny new bells and whistles, which called for a new photo. So here it is.

improbable beach

Strip Stake

You might recall that one of the many ongoing projects here at this humble blog is writing about the public art outside the Portland Art Museum. I haven't done one of these posts for a while, but there are still a few left to cover; today's item is Strip Stake by Anthony Caro is located on 10th outside the old Masonic Temple building. It's easy to overlook since it sort of looks like it might be an abandoned bit of gear left behind by carpenters or window washers. I'll try to be objective and not snark about it, but I admit this really isn't one of my favorites. Caro also created Gulf Stream just around the corner, which I'm a bit more fond of.

Caro's website includes a gallery photo of Strip Stake. The same photos shows up in a PORT review of someone's local gallery show; one of the pieces is compared to Strip Stake toward the end of the review:

It reminds me somewhat of Sir Anthony Caro's Strip Stake at the Portland Art Museum, but differs in that Reflexion isn't terribly invested in being an object… but as a project completed.

A Portland Monthly review of the same show made a similar comparison:

Remove this piece from its context in Tractor, and it becomes a crisp sculpture of scale, a Donald Judd take on Anthony Caro’s “Strip Stake” at the Portland Art Museum (find it outside on SW 10th).

Strip Stake arrived in Portland circa 2001 as part of the estate of Clement Greenberg, the prominent art critic. The museum hosted a show then to show off their new acquisitions; an SFGate review of the show praised a number of the pieces but suggested it had been inadequately curated. Strip Stake got a brief mention:

Several large pieces by sculptor Anthony Caro make him look overdue for reappraisal. His great "Strip Stake" (1971-74), all legs, and not all of them reaching the floor, is the philosophical contemporary of Richard Serra's best work.

These mentions are clearly meant as compliments, if only I was a little better at deciphering them. I gather Strip Stake possesses, or is believed to possess, deep and arcane artistic merits that I'm entirely failing to grasp. I like to think I'm a reasonably intelligent and sophisticated person, but I may have to just throw up my hands and say "I don't get it" this time around. Sigh.

Highwood Park Blocks

Our next adventure takes us to the Portland-Gresham borderlands again, to NE 162nd & Fargo St, a bit north of the Sandstone blocks I just posted about. Like that previous post, this was a reader suggestion from Gentle Reader av3ed, and we're here because of the median strip down the main street of a subdivision. This area is called "Highwood", and it's roughly contemporary to the "Sandstone" subdivision further south that we just visited in the previous post. The same year the Street of Dreams visited there, one of the houses here was part of the "1979 Tour of Homes", which I gather was a sort of rival to the Street of Dreams, except the houses were distributed around the metro area.

There's no jogging path or anything fancy here, just sort of an ivy median down a quiet dead-end street. "Park blocks" is probably not the right term to be using here. I probably wouldn't have bothered with this place at all, to be honest, except that a.) I was already in the area, and b.) it was a reader suggestion, and reader suggestions are rare here, and I feel like I ought to run with the few I get. On the theory that this might encourage more suggestions or something.