Pics: Multnomah Falls

About a year ago, I did a post about Shady Creek Falls, the smaller waterfall along the trail up to the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls. I realized at that point that I'd never actually done a dedicated post here about Multnomah Falls, and I semi-promised I'd do one at some point. So I duly created a draft post, added a photoset of all my Multnomah Falls photos (though I had fewer of those than I thought), and... nothing. The falls are one of the state's iconic tourist attractions, and I've had a year to come up with a fresh and interesting perspective on them, and I haven't come up with anything. I'm usually better at dealing with obscure stuff, and I hope that's not just due to the lack of competition. Anyway, like I usually say about famous stuff, you can Google it as well as I can.

If you're from out of town and somehow stumbled on this post among all the Multnomah Falls web pages across the interwebs, be sure to take the Columbia River Highway instead of I-84 if you have time. Quite a few other waterfalls to look at, several of which I like better than Multnomah, to be honest. Latourell Falls might be my favorite, unless maybe it's Elowah Falls. Anyway, be sure to spend lots of money at the Multnomah Falls gift shop while you're there. No sales tax in Oregon, dontcha know.

White River Falls

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Today's adventure takes us out to White River Falls, an Oregon state park about 30 miles south of The Dalles, on highway 216 between Tygh Valley and Sherars Falls. This spot is out in the middle of Oregon wheat country, with dry, rolling hills, and it's surprising to find a substantial river here, much less a huge waterfall. The name is a clue: The White River flows east off of Mt. Hood toward the Deschutes, and glacial sediment in the water sometimes gives the river a milky look.

I really didn't know anything about this place until a coworker visited early this year. He somehow managed to break an ankle on the trail down to the base of the falls. He insisted it was still worth visiting, broken ankle or no, so I figured it might be worth a look. I wasn't disappointed. It's one of the secret gems of Oregon's state park system, and I absolutely recommend it. It's totally worth the trip. Just don't break your ankle. Or if you do, be sure to have someone else drive you home instead of messing your ankle up even further. Or if you absolutely have to drive home, maybe go see a doctor right away instead of waiting a week or two and self-medicating with cheap vodka. Don't be that coworker of mine, basically.

Anyway, the state park system only acquired the falls in 1969. Before that, the site was owned by a local electric utility, and the falls were home to a small early 20th century hydroelectric plant. By 1960 the plant was considered obsolete (the article compares it to a Ford Model T), and it was taken out of service when the Dalles Dam opened. The old plant was just abandoned in place, though, and much of its infrastructure remains in place, including an old stone powerhouse with several vintage turbines inside. I'm actually saving that for a separate post, simply because I took way too many photos of both the falls and the hydroelectric ruins, and I'm fairly sure nobody would page through that large of a Flickr slideshow. I'm not sure people page through any of my slideshows to be honest, but it felt like a giant 80+ photo slideshow would be overdoing it.

The one unfortunate thing about the park is that the trail down to the river peters out part of the way down. It branches out into a bunch of use paths, and it's hard to tell which path is the right way down to the bottom, and you could easily break an ankle if you aren't careful. I had to backtrack a couple of times before I figured it out. Upgrading it to a proper trail wouldn't be that difficult or expensive, I imagine. The state may have realized that a nice paved trail to the bottom would mean more people visiting the rickety old powerhouse, and sooner or later someone would get hurt there and sue. And renovating and tourist-proofing the powerhouse looks expensive. They'd probably want to put a new roof on the building, and pick up all the sharp rusty tetanus bits lying around, and make sure there aren't any PCBs left over from the old electrical gear, and ideally turn the whole thing into some sort of interpretive center, possibly with a park ranger or at least seasonal volunteers. I think that's worth doing, but White River Falls is far away from the state's major cities and almost nobody has ever heard of it, so it's never gotten the same level of attention that a place like Silver Falls does.

Here are some assorted items about the falls, from across the interwebs:

• Some general articles about the falls, most with the same obvious "hidden gem" angle I'm going with, at OregonLive, the Salem Statesman-Journal, TheGorge.com, and Hikelandia.
• A forum thread at Portland Hikers Field Guide with lots of photos.
• A blog post about the falls by @BJDorr
• From the library's Oregonian database, an 1893 proposed railroad from Portland to White River Falls (and presumably points east), on the idea that this was the only viable route through the Cascades in Oregon. This railroad was never built. The river-level route along the Columbia existed, so I suppose they were looking for a competitor. The current rail route over the S. Cascades from Cottage Grove over to Chiloquin / Klamath Falla came later, if I'm not mistaken.
• A circa-1895 grist mill at the top of the falls, of which no obvious traces remain. It's a logical thing to do here in the middle of wheat country.
• An Oregonian piece from 1903 about an early photographer going on a wagon journey around Eastern Oregon, photographing the area's unknown and overlooked sights, while also making himself available to do portraits. His wagon was outfitted as a complete photography operation, complete with darkroom, and decorated with examples of his work. That was probably quite a sight when it rolled into a dusty ranch town. Itinerant photographers were a staple of old classic Western films, and here we have a little evidence that at least one actually existed just like in the movies.
• Historic Hood River has a vintage photo from the hydropower days, with a forest of wires connecting the hydro plant to the outside world.
• The falls merit an entry in something called the Encyclopedia of Forlorn Places, thanks to the derelict powerhouse.
• A WyEast Blog piece on the falls, concerning a rejected 2010 proposal for a new hydro project here, and a counterproposal for a major expansion and enhancement of the state park.
• Incredibly, the falls appear in a large photoset of people kayaking over waterfalls. So either it's been done at least once, or someone has excellent Photoshop skills.
• A kayak website informs us that the lower (and more kayak-able) cascade of the falls is proposed to be named "Celestial Falls". Which I guess isn't a bad name, assuming the lower cascade needs a name of its own.
• During the 1980s there was a controversy around stocking the river above the falls with hatchery salmon. Apparently the state had decided that a good way to make up for all the habitat destroyed by dams would be to introduce salmon to places they had never been before. The idea was publicly broached in a 1984 Oregonian op-ed. A 1985 study by ODFW & the US Forest Service insisted that introducing salmon was a great idea, even though it would cost millions of dollars and would likely displace native trout species upstream of the falls. 1989 saw the final agreement to begin stocking the river, and that's the last I've seen about the idea. So I don't know whether it actually went ahead or not. The obvious problem, to me, with this plan is that baby salmon would eventually follow their seagoing instincts and head downstream to certain doom at the falls. None of the articles explain how the state planned to get around that little detail.

Space Shuttle Endeavour, KSC

Here's a slideshow of something nobody will ever see again. Back in 2011 I was in Florida for the launch of the Mars rover Curiosity, and as part of the event we went on a tour around Kennedy Space Center. One stop on the tour was a visit inside the vast Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn V and Space Shuttle were readied for launch. The space shuttle program had ended just a few months earlier, and several of the shuttles were still at KSC while being prepped for their final voyages to various museums around the country. It turned out that Space shuttle Endeavour was parked in one of the VAB bays, with a few parts disassembled, so we all stopped and took photos and generally paid our respects. It just so happened that our guide on the tour had been the lead engineer responsible for Endeavour. She lived in Florida when the shuttle was here, in California if it happened to land at Edwards Air Force Base, and in Houston while it was in orbit. She referred to the shuttle a couple of times, half-jokingly, as her "baby", and may not have been joking at all. As I recall she was a little choked up at this point on the tour.

Other than the launch itself, a lot of the event had a weird, downbeat sort of feel to it. The analogy I often use is that it felt like a Northwest timber town after the local sawmill closed. My photos of the shuttle seemed especially gloomy, I suppose due to the combination of the partial disassembly, the light, and just knowing its flying days were over. I think that's the main reason I didn't post them before now, but it occurred to me that, gloomy or not, they're kind of an interesting historical document. Endeavour is a museum exhibit in Los Angeles now, and I can't think of any reason it would ever be back in the VAB again. Moving it would be a problem now, since the modified Boeing 747 planes used to transport the shuttles are also museum pieces these days. They'd probably have to move the shuttle by boat or something if they ever wanted to move it again.

Sherars Bridge

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Here's a slideshow from Sherars Bridge, which carries OR 216 over the Deschutes River just downstream from Sherars Falls. The falls are a traditional Native American fishing site, so it's possible there has been a bridge at this spot for an exceedingly long time. An 1826 expedition by Peter Skene Ogden, chief trader for the Hudson's Bay Company, reported that there was an Indian village here at that time, along with a narrow bridge over the river. Traditional fishing involves building wooden platforms that project out over the river, and the river is quite narrow at the site of the current bridge, so I imagine building a bridge would have only involved a small extension of existing technology

The current bridge is named for Joseph Sherar, who bought an existing (circa 1860) bridge at this spot and built a hotel here. Sherar replaced the bridge with a sturdier wooden toll bridge some time in the 1870s or 1880s. A 1998 Oregon Historical Quarterly article about the Yale Scientific Expedition of 1871 includes an undated vintage photo of the wooden bridge, adjacent wooden buildings, and Sherar's rather swanky hotel building.

The bridge was replaced again in 1922 when the automobile rendered the previous bridge obsolete. This time the state highway department built a simple deck truss bridge, with the design credited to Conde McCullough, the state's famous chief bridge engineer. That bridge was in turn replaced with the current bridge circa 1979 or so. Unlike the previous no-frills utilitarian bridges, the current award-winning bridge is decorated with local tribal designs.

Sherars Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Sherars Falls on the Deschutes River, located along Highway 216 east of White River Falls and Tygh Valley. The falls are only about 15 feet high, so they look more like very serious rapids. The Deschutes upstream of here is a popular rafting river, but Sherars Falls is an impassable major obstacle. An article on the history of boating on the lower Deschutes puts it this way:

Sherars Falls will likely always be considered the grand daddy of all hazards on the Lower Deschutes. Sherars Falls is a class VI rapid and considered by most prudent people to not be navigable. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a few folks tried, but very few survived. Attempting to navigate Sherars Falls was then outlawed and the falls became forbidden territory for boats.

That said, here's a video from 1972, back before safety was invented, in which a bunch of guys went over the falls in a bunch of inner tubes lashed together, and somehow survived. Legal says I have to caution you not to try this, although if watching the video isn't enough of a deterrent, I'm not sure what would be.

In short, boating is not the reason there's a big parking lot and RV park here. The falls are impassable for boats going downstream, but not quite impassable for salmon headed upstream. Migrating fish stack up here while trying to make their way up the falls, so this has been a productive fishing spot since time immemorial. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and other tribes retained treaty fishing rights here, and wooden platforms for traditional dip-net fishing (video & photos: [1] [2] [3] [4]) line the riverbanks near the falls. This is similar to what was once practiced at Celilo Falls, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The tribes have owned the land around the falls outright since 1980, but continue to allow non-tribal members to fish here, so long as they comply with tribal regulations and state fishing laws. There's a lot of stuff on the net about non-tribal fishing here, which to me (as a non-fisherman) isn't that interesting, though I did bump into a fishing guide's tale about a broken boat trailer and karma at the falls.

While researching this post I also ran across a 1980 Bend Bulletin article about the tribe purchasing the falls. The purchase was mildly controversial at the time, so the article starts with references to "war whoops" and "peace pipes". Apparently it was perfectly fine to print that sort of thing in a family newspaper in 1980. A 1987 article in the same paper about traditional fishing at the falls left out the weird racist jibes. Hopefully they received a few indignant letters after the 1980 article and got a clue or two.

In addition to salmon, the falls are also a traditional fishing site for Pacific lamprey, a much less charismatic fish. Lamprey are a traditional native food that never caught on with the European-American population; a 2008 Bend Bulletin article explains that it has a strong taste, something like a cross between fish and liver, and an even stronger smell, and a very firm texture. Lamprey fishing at Sherars Falls involves a long pole with a hook at the end, which is used to pry fish off of rocks they're attached to. Due to a major population decline in the lamprey population at Sherars Falls (which is almost certainly due to dams) tribal members have taken to collecting lamprey at Willamette Falls instead. Willamette Falls lamprey supposedly has a subtly different flavor, although the man who explained this to the Bulletin didn't go on record as to which one is better.

I was curious about how long people have fished here, but I can't seem find a concrete answer to that question. You'd think there would have been an archeological dig here at some point; fishing platforms themselves would have fallen into the river eventually and wouldn't have left any evidence behind, but presumably people camped here for weeks or months at a time while fishing. Searching for academic articles isn't really my specialty, but I checked JSTOR and Google Scholar and didn't see anything relevant. It's certainly still possible there are old papers that aren't online, or which only exist in specialized databases I don't have access to. I did come across a few Oregon Historical Quarterly articles about the pioneer era and nearby Sherars Bridge, and a lot of papers about fisheries management, but nothing on archeology. A website focusing on Oregon rock art has photos of a few pictographs nearby, which is interesting, but that's about it.

(As an aside, I also ran across a few plant genetics papers about Mimulus nasutus, a small, yellow flower that grows here. Apparently the local population (located right at the falls) is genetically distinctive and has been studied extensively. See for example this study on factors that control the timing of flowering, which I won't even try to summarize. The complete genome of the closely related M. guttatus has been sequenced & released; apparently it has relatively few genes and it's only a 430Mb download, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Anyway, in lieu of having a solid archeological date, several of the previous links in this post speculate that the falls have been used by people for hundreds or even thousands of years. Thousands seems like a very safe guess to me. The standard theory on human settlement of the Americas suggests that people took a roughly coastal route down through Alaska and coastal British Columbia on their way here from the old Bering Land Bridge. Assuming that's the case, more or less their entire route went through prime salmon habitat, and it's reasonable to assume they already knew all about salmon and waterfalls well before they set eyes on Sherars Falls, and likely began fishing here shortly after arriving. It also seems reasonable to assume people first fished here around the same time as at Celilo Falls, where more extensive research has been done. Archeological work at Celilo Village has indicated the site has been continuously occupied for at least 11,000 years.

Columbia Slough Natural Area

Our next adventure takes us back to the Columbia Slough again, but this time to a spot much further east. Portland's Columbia Slough Natural Area is a fairly new city park, located along Airport Way in a light industrial area about 3 miles east of I-205 and the airport.

This area was previously called the "Big Four Corners Natural Area", but the name was apparently changed quite recently, within in the last couple of years, such that a number of signs around the park still use the old name. In some ways the former name was better, in that it referred to this specific location and not the slough in general. But it also sounds like somewhere that desperadoes would rob a stagecoach, probably by heading it off at the pass, whatever that means.

This section of the slough is complex of ponds and intersecting channels, hence the "Big Four Corners" name. (There's also a "Little Four Corners" further west, just east of I-205, next to the Inverness Jail. I haven't been there.) The channel complex forms the largest (extant) wetland area along the slough other than Smith & Bybee Lakes in North Portland, and provides important habitat for birds (note the heron flying in the first photo), native turtles, salamanders and other wildlife. Some of the ponds here are particularly important as habitat for baby turtles, as they aren't directly connected to the slough, and not exposed to invasive carp. It seems that carp stir up sediment and eat the same aquatic plants that turtles rely on, and bodies of water without carp are quite rare, so protecting these ponds has become a priority.

The park also has a variety of recreational features, including a dock for launching canoes and kayaks. This dock is a popular launch point for the annual Columbia Slough Regatta, which is not a race, but a boating event aimed at raising awareness about the slough. The regatta celebrated its 20th edition in 2014.

The park also has a few trails. A segment of the Columbia Slough Trail (which doesn't yet link to its western counterpart) follows the north shore of one of the slough channels. This channel heads north to a pump station where the slough once connected to the Columbia River, and the trail connects to the east end of the Marine Drive Trail at that point. The park also includes a Columbia Slough South Shore Trail somewhere around here, but I couldn't find it and I'm not sure where it goes.

South of Airport Way is a (relatively) remote part of the park known as the Mason Flats Wetlands, which was only recently restored and is not currently open to the public. Apparently there's also an even more (relatively) remote "Alice Springs" area somewhere south of the slough, although I doubt it's anywhere near as wild and exotic as its Australian namesake.

Palace of Fine Arts

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Here's another batch of old SF photos, this time from the famous Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few surviving structures from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, a World's Fair highlighting the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake.

Although, strictly speaking, this isn't really a surviving structure. The fair's elaborate faux-Roman buildings were meant to be temporary, and were built cheaply out of wood, plaster and even burlap. The elements took their toll on the surviving buildings, and in 1965 the original palace was demolished and replaced with a more durable copy made with steel and concrete. I'm not sure why, exactly, but this story has always struck me as kind of hilarious. It stands to reason that a few cultural theory papers have been written about this, with the words "simulacrum" and "pastiche" used liberally, and many citations of midcentury French philosophers. I mean, I can't possibly be the first person to think of that.

Anyway, here's a Bollywood number filmed in part at the Palace of Fine Arts, from the 1999 hit film Biwi No. 1.

Minute Man Monument, Concord MA

When I was in Boston back in 2012, I spent most of the week at a conference hotel out in the 'burbs. The hotel turned out to be a few miles down the road from Concord, MA, the site of a famous Schoolhouse Rock video, and the related historical events of 1775. One day after a long day of death by PowerPoint, I drove over and visited the historic Old North Bridge, which turns out to not be very old at all. In addition to the bridge itself, both ends of the bridge feature modestly-sized memorial columns, which were added in the 1800s. (If the Revolution had begun in what's now DC, or anywhere in the South, there would be a giant bombastic ultra-patriotic memorial here, and you'd have to go through a TSA checkpoint to visit it. But this being New England they've managed to keep it modest and low key and reasonably authentic, right down to the simple wood replica bridge.)

The column on the south side of the bridge dates to 1875, the centennial of the battle here, and it's topped by a statue of a local minute man. This statue is by famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, who was renowned for his historical and allegorical works. It seems this was the work that first established his reputation. He later went on to create the Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, among other things. I haven't covered any other work by French here, but he did create a famous memorial to Martin Millmore, who was the sculptor behind the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston Common. Curiously, French also created a small sculpture of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the poor creature blamed for starting the great Chicago Fire.

There's a similar monument a few miles east at the Battle Green in Lexington, and apparently the two statues are often confused. A 1998 Concord Magazine article helpfully explains the differences: The Concord Minute Man is wearing a hat, and holds a plow in one hand and a musket in the other. They didn't actually plow and shoot at the same time in real life; this is just an 1875 way of pointing out the Minute Men were farmers. The 19th Century art world loved that sort of thing. Anyway, the Lexington statue is not wearing a hat, and not engaging in agriculture, and the base once featured a trough for horses, and technically the guys fighting in Lexington were the local militia and not Minute Men at all, strictly speaking. So now you know.

Memaloose Overlook

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Our next adventure takes us back out to the Columbia Gorge, to the Memaloose Overlook, a scenic spot on the old Columbia River Highway segment between Mosier and Rowena. The overlook takes its name from Memaloose Island, a traditional Indian burial site, which is visible in one of the photos in the slideshow. (If any of these photos look familiar, you win a gold star. Some appeared here once before, back in 2007 when I was just figuring out this blog business.)

This overlook is one piece of Memaloose State Park, which also includes a campground and rest area along Interstate 84. From the park's history page:

The original park tract was 2.64 acres given to the state in 1925 by Roy D. and Bernice M. Chatfield. Situated on what was originally the old Columbia River Highway, the park was called Memaloose Island Overlook. With the reconstruction of the highway, additional private lands were purchased in 1952 and 1953. Land not needed for highway purposes was transferred to the Parks and Recreation Division. The park is named for a nearby island in the Columbia River which was a traditional Indian burial ground. In Chinook language, the word "memaloose" is associated with burial ritual. The most prominent feature on the island is a monument to Victor Trevitt, settler of The Dalles and friend of the Indians who died in 1883 and was buried on Memaloose Island in accordance with his wishes.

Unfortunately Trevitt's gesture (and showy monument) drew public attention to the island. Bone-thieving souvenir hunters soon followed, and local tribes understandably stopped using the island. The Wasco County Historical Society's account states that thieves stripped the island clean of bones -- other than Mr. Trevitt, of course -- while a Friends of the Gorge page indicates that the Corps of Engineers moved 650 skeletons off the island in 1937, just before the island was partially flooded by Bonneville Dam. Both versions of the story indicate Trevitt is now alone on the island, as far as anyone knows.

Summer St. Bridge, Boston

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The southernmost of the four Fort Point Channel bridges we're covering is the Summer St. Bridge, built circa 1899. It's not terribly photogenic, but it's considered historic anyway due to its unusual design. Instead of a drawbridge that raises, or a swing span that pivots, the Summer St. bridge is a "retractile draw", which opens by sliding diagonally back and off to one side. Or both sides in this case, since it's a "double retractile" design. (Strictly speaking it doesn't open at all now, since it's unreachable by large vessels due to the fixed-span Moakley Bridge north of here.)

The Library of Congress collection of vintage photos of it; unfortunately none of them show the bridge in an open position, but an aerial photo makes it somewhat easier to visualize. Their info page about the bridge has a brief description, at least:

Significance: The Summer St. bridge is a rare movable type of bridge known as a retractile draw, in which the moving span is pulled diagonally away from the navigable channel on several sets of rails. Only four of these have been identified in the country, two of which are on Summer St. in Boston. The form is thought to have been invented by T. Willis Pratt in the 1860's. This bridge is a double retractile: parallel spans pull away from the center in opposite directions. Despite its deteriorating condition, the bridge is the center element of the rich Fort Point Channel Bridge District. / The Summer Street Retractile Bridge is the only known surviving electrically-operated, paired-leaf oblique retractile drawbridge. Despite its poor condition and loss of much of its operating equipment and auxiliary structures (gates, Tender's House, and pedestrian waiting shelters), several of the early components (superstructure, retractile rails, wheels, and operating machinery on the south side) remain. The Summer Street Retractile Bridge is one of five surviving movable bridges located in the proposed Fort Point Channel Historic District. It is one of eight known remaining nineteenth-century movable bridges in the Massachusetts Highway Department Historic Bridge Survey.

This bridge was the site of a 1916 streetcar disaster, in which a streetcar plunged off the open drawbridge into the channel, killing 47 people. Which is more or less what happened in Cleveland's Central Viaduct streetcar disaster two decades earlier. The accident here was blamed on operator error, compounded by poor signage & signals that were supposed to indicate when the bridge was open, but failed to get the driver's attention.

Congress St. Bridge, Boston

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Here's a slideshow of Boston's Congress St. Bridge, which crosses the Fort Point Channel next to downtown. This lift-span bridge opened in 1930, replacing an earlier swing-span bridge. The bridge underwent a $19M renovation completed in 2008, several million over budget because it was in worse shape than they thought. Although it's also possible the money just sort of "vanished", this being Boston and all.

The bridge's most distinctive feature is the Boston Tea Party museum attached to the bridge, in the center of the channel, with a couple of sailing ships docked to it. The building used to be the bridge tender's house, but the bridge no longer opens, so the house was repurposed as a tourist attraction, basically. Historians disagree as to the exact location of the original tea party, but few claim it was at this exact spot, and furthermore the ships are 20th Century replicas. Still, it has positive Yelp reviews from a lot of tourists who loved the historical reenactors and audience participation stuff. So if you're stuck in Boston with your wingnut Tea Party uncle, this might be a way to keep him occupied for a few hours. Though I don't know whether this would calm him down for a while or wind him up further. There are probably EPA rules against dumping actual tea in the bay these days, so he'll have something to be outraged about.

"Congress Street" is not an unusual street name, so I kept bumping into a couple of other bridges while looking for trivia about this one. The "Congress St. Bridge" Wikipedia article is about a different bridge in Troy, NY. And there's the famous Congress Ave. bridge in Austin, TX, home to a ginormous bat colony.

Evelyn Moakley Bridge, Boston

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The next Fort Point Channel bridge on our mini-tour is the new-ish Evelyn Moakley Bridge, which sits just south of the Northern Avenue Bridge that it effectively replaced. It's named for the wife of Congressman Joe Moakley, who represented South Boston for nearly half a century. A Boston Globe columnist recently mentioned this bridge in a laundry list of things named after politicians, a practice he was none too happy about.

Unlike the older bridges along the channel, this is a fixed-span bridge (i.e. it doesn't open), which meant that the bridges south if it (including the Congress St. & Summer St. bridges) no longer needed to open either. In addition to the obvious cost savings from doing this, a page at EngineerYourFuture mentions that the Moakley bridge was also designed to carry various utilities across the channel. That probably drove the bridge design too, since you can't really have a water main or electrical supply that cuts out whenever a bridge opens. Nobody would stand for that.

The bridge is the main gateway to a redeveloped former port area the city insists on calling the "Innovation District". A recent Boston Globe article said "The Innovation District has all the charm of an office park in a suburb of Dallas", and grumbled about the ugly cookie-cutter buildings and vast parking lots. A 2013 Chowhound article wasn't too impressed with the local restaurants either.

Northern Avenue Bridge, Boston

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When I was in Boston a couple of years ago, I spent a couple of days wandering around the central city after I was done with meetings out in the 'burbs. At one point ended up in the Fort Point Channel area, after getting off the Silver Line at South Station and heading toward the nearest body of water. The channel is sort of a narrow arm of Boston Harbor just east of downtown, crossed by a number of bridges, and the surrounding area is a former industrial district that's been thoroughly gentrified in recent years. I've been known to devote blog posts to bridges now and then, so I took a few photos of the four bridges along the north end of the channel. I haven't posted them until now because honestly none of them are really all that remarkable to look at, and probably none of them appear on anyone's list of top 100 Boston-area tourist attractions. Still, I did manage to dig up a few semi-interesting facts and bits of trivia about each of them, so I figure I have enough material to support a brief post about each of the four. And thus, a new mini-tour is born.

So the first stop on our mini-tour is the Northern Ave. Bridge, the northernmost bridge over the channel. It's a swing span bridge built in 1908, about the same vintage as the two remaining swing-span bridges in Portland. It's also the only one of the historic channel bridges that still opens, since the channel now only serves as a harbor for small boats. It's been a pedestrian-only bridge since the adjacent Evelyn Moakley bridge opened next door. Unfortunately only a portion of the bridge is open to pedestrians since it's in a general state of disrepair, and plans to do something about it stalled out, without any consensus on whether to renovate or just demolish it.

The Library of Congress has a set of historic photos of the bridge along with a short description:

The Northern Avenue Swing Bridge, built in 1908, is one of only three surviving swing bridges built by the city of Boston in the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, still operated infrequently on its original compressed-air system, it is the only operable bridge in Boston of its type. The bridge is 80 feet in width, encompassing between four sets of pin connected trusses, two sidewalks, two roadways and a center lane reserved for a double-track freight railroad. The swing span is 283 feet in length. The rim bearing swing span is carried by a 40 foot diameter drum, in turn supported by 56 steel wheels running on a track along the rim of the granite island pier.

Essential Forces

Our next adventure takes us back to Portland's Rose Quarter, home to sports arenas, MAX trains, and very little else. I've done a few posts about the art scattered around the area, but I haven't yet done a post about Essential Forces, the signature fountain at the south end of the complex. This is because the fountain is almost never running, so it's nearly impossible to get photos of it doing its thing, and I usually feel like that's important when doing a post about a fountain. The fountain has 500 computer-controlled valves that spit out bursts of water on command, and two large pillars that can optionally spew fire. It all seems very Vegas and not very Portland, so it's not surprising that the fountain was created by LA-based WET Design, the company behind the world-famous Bellagio Fountain. The company created a few other fountains around Vegas that have appeared here too, like the Glacia, Halo, Lumia, and Focus fountains at CityCenter.

I gather that the fountain is so elusive in part because it's rather delicate. The Portland Tribune included it in a 2007 list of broken things around town:

Essential Forces, built in 1995, has 500 shooters or valves, and when one malfunctions they all have to be tested, like fixing old Christmas tree lights. There is no set date but he said it should be up and running again 'before the warm weather arrives.'

That list doesn't even mention the fire pillars, which were out of commission for close to a decade until they were repaired in 2014. Rose Quarter management started talking about bringing back the fire theatrics about a year ago, but only as a maybe-someday item. Then the whole Rose Quarter underwent major renovations over summer 2014, and they fixed the fountain as part of that effort. I'm told the arena food has improved, too.

The other part of the problem (at least for me) is that they appear to only run it for Trailblazers home games, and then only if the weather isn't too cold, which leaves brief windows in the fall and late spring when it might be operating, assuming it's in working order. I'm not really a big basketball fan, so it's never going when I'm there. I've lost track of how many times I've gone by to see if it's running, and it just never is. So I finally decided I'd just go with the photos I had; I've reached my limit for how much I'm willing to invest in this particular blog post. One of the photos shows a little water gurgling up through one of the valves, so I do technically have a photo of water coming out of it, and that's just going to have to be enough. Strangely enough, one time several years ago I did take a video clip of it running, but my phone's internal SD card promptly became corrupted before I could upload anything, so it's possible I've already squandered my one and only chance to see it in action. Unless maybe I happen into some free tickets somehow, and they're for an evening when I don't already have plans. In any case, I did find a short Instagram video clip from the official Moda Center account showing it running back in September. So at least I found some evidence that it operated for at least 10-15 seconds a few months ago, unless maybe they CGI'd the whole thing or something.

The fountain was unveiled as part of an exclusive VIP bash for the new arena in October 1995. Tickets cost $125 per person, but came with all sorts of goodies:

Comedian Dana Carvey will perform a stand-up routine to top the evening's program, which also includes an arena tour, live music, food from the arena restaurants, a chance to shoot baskets on the new basketball court and skate on the new ice surface. All that, and the debut of the fire-and-water fountain, Essential Forces. The program runs from 8 p.m. to midnight.

Recall that this was back during the Michael Jordan era, a time when basketball had a reasonable claim on being the country's real national pastime. Nike's basketball shoe business was booming. The movie Space Jam came out the next year, starring Jordan and various Warner Brothers characters. Off the top of my head I can't think of any contemporary athlete in any sport who would be a similar box office draw today. Things went south for the Blazers just a few years after this, culminating in the infamous "Jail Blazers" years. One local blogger recently suggested adding a Rasheed Wallace plaque to the fountain to commemorate his all-time record for technical fouls in a season, a record that may very well stand for all time.

I've mentioned the Essential Forces fountain in passing before, in a very early post from January 2006, back when I still had a fresh supply of snark. I was pretty thrilled when Alt.portland linked here. The fountain also got a brief (and unfavorable) mention in a Portland Public Art post, contrasting it with the Holladay Park sculptures & fountain. (If you ask me, a more striking contrast would be this fountain versus the World War II Memorial & Fountain next door at Memorial Coliseum). Portland Public Art went on hiatus in April 2009, and Alt.portland has been on "extended hiatus" since 2010, and somehow I'm still going. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Ulsan Bell of Sisterhood

A few months ago I wrote a post about the Sapporo Friendship Bell in front of the Oregon Convention Center, a gift from Portland's sister city of Sapporo, Japan. I mentioned briefly that there was a second bell nearby, and suggested there would be a post about it sooner or later, when I got around to it. Today we're visiting the second bell, the Ulsan Bell of Sisterhood which was a gift from Ulsan, South Korea, another of Portland's sister cities.

A note on the Portland-Ulsan Sister City Association's Facebook page calls it "a copy of the famous Shilla Dynasty bell". The famous bell in question is probably the Bell of King Seongdeok, cast in 771 AD during the Silla Dynasty period. Portland's copy is obviously a scaled-down version of the original bell. A larger copy, the "Korean Bell of Friendship", is located in a park in Los Angeles.

In addition to the bells themselves, the bell-ringing system is a public artwork in its own right. Bell Circles II is a sound installation created by composer Robert Coburn. The system rings the two bells according to a programmable and varying schedule. I'm not clear on exactly how this schedule works; signs near the bells merely warn visitors that they ring without notice and are quite loud. I'm thinking the sound installation stuff deserves a blog post of its own, but for that I'll need a video or audio clip of at least one of the bells ringing. And to do that I'll need to figure out the ringing schedule, since I'm not going to hang around in front of the convention center all day filming bells just in case. That's just not going to happen. The news items below give some clues, but it could easily have been reprogrammed any time between 1990 and today.

Anyway, the Oregonian covered the Ulsan bell when it was donated in January 1989. The article explains that the original concept would have included a third bell, donated by Beaverton's sister city Hsinchu, Taiwan, along with some aluminum wind pipes, and continues:

According to Coburn, the $30,000 bell is modeled after a 7th-century Buddhist temple bell. It's decorated with images of Korean angels and topped by a dragon. An inscription commemorates the sister-city relationship.

When installed, the three bells will give off deeply resonant tones that will serve as aural landmarks at the convention center, orienting visitors to the building's entrances, Coburn said. One bell will be in the main courtyard and the other two will be at entrances. Each bell has a specific pitch. A computer will activate automatic striking devices that will sound a slow melodic pattern.

Coburn will arrange the cyclic patterns so they change over long periods of time, coinciding with the changes in seasons. On each equinox and solstice, the cycle will restart, Coburn said.

In addition to the temple bells, clusters of two or three aluminum wind pipes will hang in trees around the center. The pipes will be oriented to the wind and will sound pitches that relate to the bronze bells.

Much of Coburn's music is concerned with sound and the environment. The bell project is an attempt to neutralize urban noise, welcome visitors, orient them to the building, and provide sanctuary, he said.

The convention center opened in 1990, and the paper's architecture critic went on at length about all the art. After a bit about the big Foucault pendulum in an atrium, he spent a few paragraphs on the bells:

As the pendulum marks time inside with its metronomic swing, two bronze Oriental bells outside will mark time in sound. In a project conceptualized by composer Robert Coburn, Portland's sister cities Sapporo, Japan, and Ulsan, South Korea, each donated bells. They will be struck with a computer automated device according to a composition created by Coburn.

At this writing, Coburn had not completed his score, but he explained his two main goals are to orient people to the convention center's outdoor spaces with what he describes as ``soundmarks'' as opposed to landmarks. And, he wants to call attention to two scales of time.

``The intention is not a musical composition,'' Coburn said, ``but to make references to how we measure time versus how nature does.'' He explained that the Sapporo bell will be struck hourly while the Ulsan bell will be struck on a daily and seasonal cycle. ``On the equinox and solstice, they will be struck together at noon,'' Coburn added.

Three other wind bells, donated by the Republic of China, will resonate when a breeze blows. ``Usually architects use waterfalls to mask the traffic noise,'' Coburn said. ``I wanted to create a situation where the traffic would become a background to my composition.''

In addition to the pure aesthetics of sound and the marvel of seasonal rhythms, Coburn's bell project also represents a cultural handshake, an anticipation of the growing economic friendship between Portland and its potential Pacific Rim trading partners.

Monument Square, Lone Fir

Our next adventure takes us back to SE Portland's Lone Fir Cemetery, but we aren't looking at headstones this time. Instead we're taking a look at an obscure war memorial located in the middle of the cemetery. This was built circa 1903 as a Civil War memorial, organized by the Grand Army of the Republic, the main war veterans' organization. As this was not long after the Spanish-American War, the memorial also includes nods to the other conflicts, including, unusually, the Indian Wars. (Although given the date, it was probably only intended to honor the white, not the Indian, side of the conflict.)

Planning for the memorial began in 1901-1902, and it was dedicated on Memorial Day 1903. It wasn't actually complete at dedication, though, as the statue on top had yet to arrive. So a second grand ceremony was held in October for the unveiling of the statue. That article refers to the surrounding area as "Monument Square", and mentions that it was being dedicated or deeded as a public park. I'm not sure what that means, exactly, since PortlandMaps shows the area as legally part of the cemetery, not a separate parcel. The name "Monument Square" seems to have fallen out of use over the next decade, and doesn't occur in the Oregonian after 1916. But as far as I know that's still the legal, official name for the place, so that's what I'm going with as a post title.

Metro's 2008 "Existing Conditions & Recommendations Report" for the cemetery calls the area "War Memorial Park", and describes it:

The cemetery’s 1944 amended plat map designates the area around the Soldiers Memorial as a public park. The existing area of this delineated park contains the classic single monolith Soldier’s Memorial, three donor benches, and a later addition concrete slab that is currently being used for funeral services. The Soldier’s Memorial is made of granite with a bronze statue and bronze plaques. It is in stable condition, although the soil appears to have eroded away at the base, exposing some of the foundation in places.

The memorial was designed by local architect Delos D. Neer, who's best known for a number of historic county courthouses around the state, including the landmark Benton County Courthouse in Corvallis.

Details are sketchy about the statue on top. An article about the design simply mentions that it was bought from an unnamed eastern firm, which created a special model to the city's specifications. So there may or may not be other identical or similar copies out there, and it's hard to be sure because we don't know the firm or artist.

I had previously been under the impression this was a Spanish-American War memorial, and I think I've said something to that effect in a couple of earlier posts, I think in the context of marveling at how many Spanish-American War memorials Portland ended up with, like the Soldier Monument in Lownsdale Square, and the Battleship Oregon memorial in Waterfront Park. So I may have to go back and fix those older posts now. I also asserted once that the pair of Ft. Sumter cannons in Lownsdale Square was the only Civil War memorial in town, and obviously that isn't quite true either.

Miscellaneous items concerning the memorial from around the net:

• brief mention in Randol B. Fletcher's Hidden History of Civil War Oregon
• Waymarking page, with GPS coordinates in case you don't want to wander aimlessly around a cemetery looking for the monument.
• A post at Destinations Northwest
• A post at Blogging a Dead Horse

Vanport Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the newest, other than the recently replaced Vancouver Ave. bridge. The Vanport Bridge is the long elevated structure right next to the Denver Ave. bridge that carries the MAX Yellow Line over the slough, Columbia Boulevard, the Union Pacific rail line, and a long stretch of industrial land north of the slough. Altogether it's nearly 4000 feet long. It's a fairly utilitarian-looking structure, so TriMet has tried a few things to, I guess, humanize it a little. First, they had the public vote on names for the bridge back in 2003, before the line opened, and "Vanport Bridge" was the overwhelming winner of that contest. (Not to be confused with an entirely different Vanport Bridge in Pennsylvania, which carries Interstate 376 over the Ohio River somewhere near Pittsburgh.)

TriMet also spent a decent chunk of the MAX line's One Percent for Art money on public art to decorate the bridge. From TriMet's Yellow Line art guide:

Spencer T. Houser and Chris Rizzo present two approaches to the nearly 4,000-foot light rail bridge.

• Ninety flaming comets inspired by the car culture of the '50s blaze northward from Kenton.
• Blue metal panels on the north end of the bridge allude to the Columbia River.

Despite the art it hasn't yet become a beloved local landmark, so there isn't a lot of stuff about it out on the net. I did find a few mentions of it from TriMet and various engineering firms that had a hand in its construction:

• It's mentioned in TriMet's "DBE & Workforce Story" (where "DBE" stands for "disadvantaged business enterprise") explaining how the MAX line construction benefited minority workers & businesses.
• The engineering firm responsible for design of this segment of the MAX line includes it in a PDF of their recent or high profile bridge projects.
• The FE Ward engineering firm both designed and built the bridge.
• Info from another engineering firm that had a hand in the project.

MLK/Grand Ave. Viaduct

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The next installment in the ongoing bridge project is only sort of a bridge, but it's right in town and convenient to get to, so I figured I'd include it. Starting a few blocks south of the Hawthorne Bridge, MLK and Grand Avenues travel on a raised viaduct until near the Ross Island Bridge, crossing over a large industrial area and several railroad lines (as well as the upcoming MAX Orange Line). The current viaduct opened in 2011, replacing a circa-1937 viaduct designed by Conde McCullough, the state's well-known chief bridge engineer during that era.

I'd vaguely intended to go walk across the old viaduct before it was too late, but I never quite got around to it. Which is a shame, because it would have made for some interesting photos. This was one of the main highways into Portland before Interstate 5 went in, so the old viaduct was a high profile project and it was built with some interesting architectural details, including the (mostly unused) grand staircases around the bridge piers. McCullough's Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport has similar staircases, but it's not clear why they were deemed necessary here, since this has long been an industrial area without a lot of pedestrians. The new viaduct doesn't have similar stairs, probably for ADA or bike reasons since it does have ramps in a couple of spots.

I've been told that there was once a great view of downtown Portland from the old viaduct, before the view was blocked by the ugly Marquam Bridge in the early 1960s. That was well before my time, but it reminds me of when the KOIN Center blocked the view of Mt. Hood from the Vista Tunnels. There was a lot of public unhappiness about that, but Portland doesn't have strong regulations protecting specific views like that, so legally there wasn't much anyone could do about it. There are number of vintage photos of the old viaduct on the net if you're curious about it, such as these four photos from AncientFaces.com

(Note that the old viaduct is often referred to as the "Union Avenue viaduct", that being the old name of MLK before the street was renamed in the 1980s. For what it's worth, the city of Tacoma has or had a similar-looking Union Avenue Viaduct dating to about the same era.)

By the early 2000s the old viaduct was sagging and cracking, and the state decided it had to be replaced, not repaired. Unfortunately the replacement effort took twice as long and cost three times as much as planned, largely due to building on unstable ground. Turns out the whole SE industrial area is built on a former wetland area, which was filled in with old sawdust from the enormous sawmills that once stood here. Historical accounts refer to an enormous mountain of sawdust here back when the mills were in operation; a Cafe Unknown article includes a photo showing sawdust hills on the waterfront as late as 1940. In some areas there is reportedly a 66' deep layer of sawdust below ground. That's feet, not inches. I find that hard to imagine, but news accounts insist it's true.

Some items on the new viaduct and its long and complicated genesis:

• Willamette Week: "Why the New Grand Avenue/MLK Viaduct Feels Like a Rollercoaster"
• ODOT viaduct replacement project
• Tribune: SE Portland transportation history
• Portland Architecture post about the design
• DJC project delayed by 'surprises'
• Oregonian on project delays
• East PDX News on traffic changes due to the new viaduct.

So what's it like to walk across the semi-shiny new viaduct? Not great, I'm afraid. There's a sidewalk, obviously, but you're obviously on the side of a highway here: Heavy, fast-moving traffic, with lots of trucks. I didn't see any other pedestrians or even bikes while I walked across, and the collection of road garbage along the sidewalk indicates they don't come by and clean it very often. Which is disappointing considering this is a new structure. If the city of Portland had built it, rather than ODOT, there would at least be modern bike lanes, and maybe a guardrail between traffic and the sidewalk. Although it would have also been even more expensive, and the city could easily have failed to get the job done at all.

Claremont Avenue Bridge

The next installment in the ongoing bridge project is a little unusual. NE Portland's Woodlawn neighborhood is basically flat and doesn't have any major bodies of water, so you wouldn't expect it to have much in the way of bridges, but there's one obscure one in the middle of the neighborhood's Woodlawn Park. The park was built in the 70s with urban renewal money, and they seem to have had a very generous budget. They must have concluded that Claremont Ave. needed to be a through street through the area of the proposed park, but instead of just running the road through like they normally would, they built a pint-sized bridge/overpass over the park's main trail, and located restrooms and an office underneath it. I don't know if the designers were consciously trying for this effect, but I'd actually call it kind of cute. I mean, by 1970s concrete bridge standards, at least.

The city's 2010 bridge inventory has some trivia about this bridge (although there's now a weight restriction sign on the bridge, as you can see in the first photo).

COP Bridge #	005
NBI #	25B05
LOCATION OR ROUTE	N.E. CLAREMONT ST. VIADUCT
FEATURE CROSSED	CITY PARK WALKWAY
Bridge Type	Vehicular
Yr. Built	1974
Material Type	PS Concrete
Current Inspection Date	08/12/2010
Current Sufficiency Rating	62.90
NBI Sufficiency Status	Not Deficient
Weight Limited Bridge Posting	No Posting
PBOT Condition Rating	GOOD
SUMMARY: Long Term Estimated Capital Need	$522,970
SUMMARY: Overall Bridge Capital Need	SEISMIC REHAB

Woodlawn Park

A post here a couple of months ago talked about Buckeye Bench, a small art thingy (which doubles as a bench) in NE Portland's Woodlawn Park. I'd never been to the park before so I wandered around and took a few photos of it too. It's an irregular shape, in keeping with the goofy Woodlawn street grid, and totals less than 8 acres, but it feels much larger than it is. I'm still not sure how they pulled it off, but if the designers didn't pick up an award or two for Woodlawn Park, they were robbed.

The park also has quite an unusual history. The park wasn't part of the original neighborhood plan; it originated much later as a 1970 urban renewal project by the Portland Development Commission, as Woodlawn was historically a lower-income part of NE Portland. Their May 1970 park plan required condemning and demolishing 34 homes in order to make room for the park. Which is kind of an astonishing idea. You could never get away with something like this today, even in the poorest neighborhoods in the city. You just couldn't, and rightly so.

Apparently 1970 was a different world, though. The neighborhood association's history page says people tried to fight City Hall over the proposal, but you wouldn't know it from contemporary Oregonian coverage, which made almost no mention of any public opposition. (For example, see this 1971 article on planning for the park ). The only clue we get about this not being a universally beloved project was an August 1971 item in which the PDC was asked to reword a HUD grant request so that the money could potentially be used for redevelopment & rehabilitation, not just for a pure "clearance project" where everything in sight gets bulldozed. The PDC gamely reworded the grant request, but this doesn't seem to have altered the project trajectory significantly.

This display of media bias is not exactly surprising. Whether it's 1904, 1974, or 2014, the Oregonian's default position has always been to cheerlead for whatever plans the city's movers and shakers and power brokers have come up with. They do at least mention public opposition now, though they don't always give it a fair hearing.

One odd detail in the early 1970s news accounts is that the local neighborhood association (or a predecessor of today's association) was apparently in on the urban renewal effort, even teaming up with the PDC to use the park to sell condos nearby. Building parks to sell condos is more or less what happened in the Pearl District thirty years later, although at least they didn't bulldoze anyone's home to make room for the park. The neighborhood association's website neglects to mention this little episode.

Anyway, here are some news items relating to the park after it was completed:

• A 1977 article on citizen participation called the park a great example of citizen involvement. Although I suspect those 34 homeowners might have disagreed, if anyone had thought to ask them. The article includes a winter photo of the park, with snow and a groovy 70s play structure, which probably doesn't exist anymore.
• The 1970s grooviness didn't stop with the play structure. A July 1979 photo shows a group of kids pushing an enormous shiny sphere around. At one time this sort of thing was supposed to be the utopian future of outdoor recreation for all ages, which is one of those mysterious 1970s things that nobody will ever be able to explain properly. The photo caption doesn't spell this out, but I assume everyone in the photo is wearing corduroy bell bottoms.
• The long-awaited condos finally opened in 1979. The article mentions the connection with the old "Model Cities" urban renewal program, phrased as if the project was already a weird vestige of a bygone era, which it more or less was.

Then the 1980s rolled along, and suddenly news stories about the park were all crime stories, no more kids pushing giant shiny spheres around. The 80s were a golden age of "moral panic" journalism, so news coverage of anything related to drugs or gangs tended to be lurid and sensationalistic, with ugly racial undertones. So take these news articles with an appropriately sized grain of salt:

• In April 1980, the park saw a group of 300 unruly youths throwing bricks at cars. Police dispersed the crowd and closed the park. This was only about a year after the groovy thing with the giant sphere, so either the neighborhood changed suddenly over the previous year, or the paper's coverage changed.
• A very early interview with a Crips gang member from 1982, which notes that Woodlawn park was part of their territory at the time. This was early enough that the paper still had to explain what the Crips were.
• Beginning at some point in the mid-1980s, the park lent its name to the notorious Woodlawn Park Bloods, so that gang-related violence miles from here still ended up tarnishing the park's name even further. There were occasionally gang shootings in and around the park itself, including a 1988 fatal drive-by shooting.
• A 1988 feature about gang violence in NE Portland talks a lot about the local Bloods, though it focuses more on neighborhoods to the west and south of Woodlawn. The article mentions a lot of areas that are quite twee and trendy today, but at the time houses were being boarded up and residents were fleeing the area.
• Woodlawn Park Bloods members congregated in the park after the 1993 shooting death of a gang leader.
• Violence continued into the mid-1990s, including a 1995 fatal stabbing and a 1996 fatal shooting.

Violence ebbed away after the late 1990s as gentrification began to reach this part of town, though news articles still referenced the neighborhood's lingering reputation.

• "Investors reshape Dekum Triangle", 2009
• Also in 2009, the park hosted the inaugural season of "Trek in the Park", the year they did the classic episode "Amok Time".
• A recent controversy over idling TriMet buses next to the park, which TriMet wanted to do in part so drivers could use the park's restrooms. Neighbors found the buses loud and annoying and fought back, calling it "a slap in the face". The article continues:

  "It's been a nightmare," Matt Busetto said. Underlying the ill will is a sense the community was dismissed because of its troubled past.
  
  "There's a lot of anger that maybe they took advantage of Woodlawn," he said.
  
  Gladstone said, "We've worked hard to stabilize this neighborhood, and this is disruptive."