Chiba Clock Tower

Here are a couple of photos of the Chiba Clock Tower at the north end of McCarthy Park on Swan Island. A sign at the base has a short inscription:

This solar clock tower was presented to the people and Port of Portland by Mr. Takeshi Numata, Governor of Chiba Prefecture and the administrator of the Port of Chiba, on June 5 1987. The Port of Portland and the Port of Chiba became sister ports in November 1980 to enhance the friendship and prosperity of the United States and Japan.

Apparently a "sister port" is like a sister city relationship between local port authorities, and Portland has several of these, also including Ulsan, South Korea (which also a sister city of ours) and Tianjin, China. This is in addition to Portland's half a dozen or so "regular" sister cities.

Apart from what the sign tells us, I don't know a lot about this clock. I found a city document comparing Port of Portland recreation facilities w/ other West Coast cities, which mentions the clock in passing, but that's about it. The library's Oregonian newspaper database doesn't seem to have anything about the clock, specifically, but it does tell us the gift-giving was mutal, as Portland shipped a Lelooska totem pole to Japan in 1986. (Lelooska also created the large totem pole next to the Chart House on Terwilliger, and various others around the area.)

You'd think a solar-powered clock from Japan would be a beloved local landmark in 2015 Portland. You'd think hipsters would ride their fixie art bikes to the solar clock and picnic on artisanal donuts and PBR while strumming their ukuleles, and then the tourist guidebooks would find out about it, and senior tour groups from Kansas would show up in giant buses to view Portland hipsters in their native habitat or something. But due to the weird out-of-the-way location, none of this seems to have happened, at least not yet. But at least this way I can talk about the Chiba Clock Tower and say "you probably haven't heard of it", for whatever that's worth.

Spike Flower

One of the long-running ongoing projects here at this humble blog involves tracking down local public art, taking a few photos, and writing about it. I deny having any particular expertise on the subject, but it's been a consistently interesting project, at least for myself, and hopefully for a few Gentle Reader(s) out there. I've run a bit low on new material within Portland city limits, so I've started looking at the 'burbs too. Recently I realized the city of Vancouver, WA has a small public art collection of its own, mostly concentrated in the city's small downtown. At some point -- I'm not sure when, exactly -- the city closed a block of E. 9th St. between Broadway & C St., and turned it into a sculpture garden featuring a number of mid-20th Century Portland-area artists. The thing that jumped out at me was that they had something by Manuel Izquierdo, whose work I'm usually a fan of (albeit in a non-expert fashion, as I keep pointing out). You can check out the blog's "izquierdo" tag for quite a few other examples.

So, with all that explanation out of the way, here's a slideshow of Spike Flower, at Vancouver's aforementioned Broadway St. sculpture garden. There isn't much about it on the net other than the city's art page, so we have to rely on the little sign next to the sculpture for info. The sign doesn't give the year Spike Flower was created, but notes it was donated to the city in 2001 by a local nonprofit, and includes a quote from Izquierdo:

The possibility that there is such an accurate mechanism in the creation of an object that expresses and amasses an unknown geometry of feelings, ideas, and aspirations, which are unclear at the very beginning of conception and are discovered through the process of creation, is one of the wonders of human endeavor. These human efforts are driven by a sublime need to reveal the spiritual reality which humans have experienced from the beginning of recorded time.

Our Ancestors left a record of their lives, their myths, and their gods painted and carved on cave walls and cliffs. These paintings and carvings show an immediate and revealing visual language which was created out of the pure need to communicate with other humans.

Doernbecher Rose

Believe it or not, I still have a few posts about Weston rose murals sitting around in drafts. Honestly, when I started this mini-project I had no idea there were so many of them. So the next one up is the Doernbecher Rose, on the sprawling U-Store complex east of NE 28th, next to I-84. As I've mentioned in an earlier post or two, the storage complex was once home to the Doernbecher furniture factory, which closed many decades ago. The mural's visible from I-84 and the adjacent MAX tracks. I actually hopped on the train just to take these photos, in fact. Which sounds kind of silly, and afterword it occurred to me that MAX occasionally hosts nosy TSA VIPR Teams, and explaining this weird little project to those guys might have been a challenge.

Aprisa Mural

The next commercial mural on our ongoing tour is a long, low painting of various fresh vegetables, located on a retaining wall at the Aprisa Mexican restaurant at SE 8th & Division. The mural's by Oregon artist C.H. Wilhelm, who either painted or repainted it in August 2013. Wilhelm's Instagram page includes more examples of his work. As for the restaurant, I haven't been there for several years, but I seem to recall it was pretty good. I'd try it again, but I always forget this corner of town has restaurants now. I'm used to it being a sketchy industrial area, and even today there's no sign of the city's gentrification tsunami in this corner of the Central Eastside district. Though I expect that won't last forever.

Gilbertson Machine Shop mural

The mural tour pays another stop in inner SE Portland, this time at the Gilbertson Machine Shop at SE 8th & Belmont, where a large mural shows a collection of classic American cars. Unlike a lot of murals done for businesses this is actually signed by the artist, but it's done in traditional graffiti style and I can't make out the name. Google's no help either in this case, so I can't tell you who did it, much less link to their Tumblr blog or Facebook page, or LinkedIn profile I guess. I've seen an increasing trend of artists including an URL or Twitter handle along with a signature. I'd like to encourage more people to do that, if for no other reason than making my job here a little easier.

I'm sure my dad would be able to identify all the cars on the mural, but I can only pick out a few: Model T hot rod, VW Bug hot rod, a mid-60s Corvette, maybe a 1959 Cadillac next to the Vette (though I could be wrong about that one). And what looks like a mid-1960s Lotus F1 car on top. The others I'm not sure about.

dusting this thing off...

Ok, so last month I only managed a single blog post, and it was just an explanation/gripe about being too busy with Real Work to put any real posts together. Things have settled down a bit since then, so I'm going to try to resume semi-regular posting. In truth I probably could have done this a couple of weeks ago, but I saw the sheer size of my drafts folder and shrank back in alarm. I'm starting to think my genius New Years idea of consolidating everything into a single huge drafts folder was possibly unwise. A good idea organizationally, but bad in terms of staying motivated. Anyway, let's try this again, shall we?

keepalive

Hey, so my Real Job has been extraordinarily busy over the last month-and-change, and I haven't gotten around to finishing a single blog post in all of March. Which is kind of annoying, considering how ridiculously huge my Drafts folder is these days, but it can't be helped, apparently. It turns out that I've never gone an entire calendar month without a blog post in the entire history of this humble blog, and I don't really intend to start now, so I thought I'd throw together something brief and trivial (which is what you're reading right now), and haul up the Mission Accomplished banner for the month.

One fun thing to mention in passing, though: As part of all this Real Job business, I've had to poke into some of the darker corners of Windows Registry APIs. I haven't had to touch those in a few years, so it involved a bit of refresher Googling, and one particular search actually led back to a blog post I wrote back in 2006, back when I had the occasional notion this might evolve into a tech blog, rather than photos and history and weird hobby projects. So anyway, it still contains a lot more than you'll ever want to know about this particular esoteric Windows feature, so enjoy, or feel free to shrink back in horror, or whatever you prefer.

Everything is Everything

The next mural up is Everything is Everything, which is basically just an enormous painting of the words "Everything is Everything". It's located on a warehouse facing SE Division next to the MLK/Grand Viaduct, and was created by Zach Yarrington for the 2014 Forest for the Trees mural event.

It's tempting to chalk the phrase up as some sort of empty hipster affirmation, but it's also the title of a 1998 Lauryn Hill song:

United Finance flag mural

One of the longtime landmarks along E. Burnside is the United Finance building at Grand Avenue, the building with the giant neon "LOANS" sign on top. This building is our next destination, not because I'm doing a neon project, as potentially interesting as that might be, but because of yet another mural. The back of the building has a giant US flag painted on it, facing the building's parking lot. I noticed it when I was looking for the Cthulhu mural a block or so east of here. Which was sort of a fun contrast. I'm sure the giant flag has been there for years, possibly decades, but I'd never had any reason to pay attention until this little project got going. I figured I was there anyway, and the question of whether a painting of a US flag is art was settled by Jasper Johns sixty years ago, so I took a couple of photos, and here they are. And now that I have photos for comparison, it's pretty clear this comes out ahead of the Marquam Building flag mural in downtown Portland, or the flags that are often paired with Weston roses for some reason. Unfortunately it's not signed, and I don't have a date for it, so I don't know who gets the prize for Best US Flag Mural in Portland That I Know Of. But of course that's a provisional award. There could easily be an even better one at a VFW hall out in the 'burbs or something like that.

Salvation Army Rose

The next Weston rose (and if you're surprised how many there are, you aren't alone) is the Salvation Army Rose, on the church's building at NE 18th & Sandy. The building looks like it might be a warehouse, so I'm guessing it's where they keep the old stinky Santa suits in the off season. I bet the place smells amazing in August.

PortlandMaps says the church owns the whole block, so I don't know why they might have a Weston rose. Maybe Weston's company was the previous owner, and they kept the rose when they bought it? Or maybe he's a member or a big donor. I don't have an answer for that.

I suppose I could have gone inside and asked about the rose, but going inside churches isn't something that comes naturally to me. And I dunno, a church where you have a pseudo-military rank and uniform, and you dress up as Bell-Ringing Santa for Christmas? Charity or not, that sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch, frankly. The whole thing would actually be kind of cute if it wasn't for their retrograde anti-LGBT policies. That attitude is the main reason I don't give them my pocket change over the holidays.

Union Market mural

The next mural on the ongoing tour is at the Union Market at NE MLK and Beech. Back in 2012, the store's blank wall facing Beech was being repeatedly hit by taggers. The market's owners were tired of this and brought in artists Dylan Kauz and Arise Rawk to do a mural on the wall, on the idea that this would prevent tagging. I gather that tagging someone else's art is generally considered bad form, although I've seen plenty of exceptions to this rule.

The market neglected to get a city permit for the mural first, though, so City Hall demanded they paint over it or face very large monthly fines. The King Neighborhood Association lobbied the city to let the mural stay, on the theory that permit or no, a mural is always better than a blank, graffiti-covered wall. I couldn't find a followup article explaining how that was resolved, but the mural's obviously still here, so they must have worked it out somehow.

Floral mural, NE 21st & Broadway

I was around NE 21s & Broadway a while ago looking for a couple of Weston roses: The Mary Stephens Rose, which I've posted about already, and the Frank Edwards Rose, which doesn't seem to exist anymore. While I was there I ran across a couple of other murals I didn't know about: The new-ish one at Swift Lounge, and the faded floral design you see here, located down a gated alley behind the 7-Eleven that faces 21st. Unfortunately I don't see a signature on it, and I haven't been able to find out anything about it. Feel free to leave a note down in the comments if you know anything about this one. Thx. Mgmt.

Dreaming Realities

The next mural up is Dreaming Realities, a 2010 Ashley Montague mural on a weird old building at NE 6th & Failing. This was listed on the RACC's now-defunct Murals of Portland site [link goes to an archive.org copy], but nowhere else that I've come across, including the main RACC website. That's often a sign that a mural's been painted over since the list was compiled, but it looks like this one just sort of fell off the radar somehow. So here it is.

Koken Market mural

Our next stop on the mural tour is the Koken Market mural, the hops-and-barley design outside the eponymous store at NE MLK & Dekum. This was painted by Adam Brock Ciresi, who also did the Frank Dekum & Birds mural across the street.

Frank Dekum & Birds

The next mural up is Frank Dekum & Birds, on a restaurant building at NE MLK & Dekum. The design honors(?) 19th Century Portland businessman Frank Dekum, the street's namesake. Downtown Portland's historic Dekum building (the one with all the weird gargoyle faces) is also named after him. And thanks to the street, Dekum's name has appeared here a few other times: The City Repair painted intersection at N. Dekum & Borthwick; Dekumstruction a few block east of here in front of Breakside Brewing; and the mysterious Dekum Court Triangle further east around NE 28th.

Anyway, the somewhat gory mural is a reference to Dekum's weird hobby of importing nonnative German songbirds to Oregon. His "German Song Bird Society" imported hundreds of thrushes, starlings, and nightingales and released them in Portland's city parks, in the hope that they'd go native and make Oregon more like Dekum's native Germany. This was, of course, a terrible idea. A similar effort in New York City led to today's enormous populations of invasive starlings all across North America. The Portland effort was mercifully less successful, and the introduced bird species all died out within a few years.

The mural was painted in 2012 by Adam Brock Ciresi. Photos of at Kay-Kay's Bird Club are clearer than mine, since it looks like a higher fence and a canopy have been added since 2013. A piece about the mural at PDX Street Art describes the project:

Adam wanted to present some of this place’s rich history in his mural. Playing with the image of Dekum, an old bearded capitalist, Adam wanted to “provoke viewers to consider different connotations of this history, and their geographical environment.” Adam is interested in how street art can form bonds between people and history. While painting the mural, Adam was excited by the number of pedestrians and neighbors who were interested in the piece and stopped to talk with him about it.

The Scrap Mural

Our next stop on the ongoing mural tour is The Scrap Mural on trendy Williams Ave. a bit north of Failing. The mural covers the entire front of a building that's home to Sidebar, part of the Lompoc Brewing empire. (Lompoc's larger Fifth Quadrant brewpub is around the corner on Failing.) The RACC description of the mural:

This mural colorfully depicts people engaged in painting, singing, writing, reading, sewing, and cooking. Directly above the building entrance a mother is reading a story to a child. The mural incorporates elements of the neighborhood and its creativity and reuse, and celebrates its civic pride.

The mural was created in 2005 by artist Bruce Orr, predating the building's current occupant by several years. The building was remodeled sometime in late 2014, and if you look at the photo on the RACC page, or this photo by wiredforsound23 taken last August, and compare those to my photoset, you'll notice that a large window has been added since then, and a large section of the mural has been removed. It strikes me that chopping up a community spirit thing to make way for the needs of business is kind of a metaphor for 2010s Portland in general. Maybe I'm overthinking this, I dunno.

ITS_4_U

The next mural up is ITS_4_U at the Jupiter Hotel on E. Burnside. It's located along the hotel's back driveway, on the side of the KBOO building (which has a mural of its own on the front). This design was created in 2007 by "The Dotmasters"; the vines in front were smaller then, so their photo of it (in the first link) gives you a better look at the mural than mine do, and you can see it's sort of a reference to Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam at the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure the mural's even harder to see when the vines have leaves on them, so if you're interested you might want to go now, before spring really gets going. The vines seem to kind of defeat the point of having a mural, but I dunno, maybe it's deliberate, for serious conceptual art reasons I'm not privy to. Anyway, here are a couple of other photos of it I ran across:

• A winter 2008 Flickr photo of it shows almost no vines at all.
• A more recent photo by Wiredforsound23 looks a lot like mine. He calls the mural "Closeted Creationism" for some reason.

The Exalted Ruler

Here are a few photos of The Exalted Ruler, the big elk statue outside the OHSU Casey Eye Institute. It's by Troutdale sculptor Rip Caswell, and commemorates the local Elks Club's longtime support of the hospital's childrens' eye clinic. Caswell's work has appeared here a couple of times before, namely the goose at the Kings Hill MAX station, and the deeply weird 9/11 memorial on SE Belmont.

Portland Public Art did a post about this elk back in 2006, and an unusually mild post by that site's standards. I assumed it would compare this elk unfavorably with the famous Thompson Elk statue in the downtown Plaza blocks, but it didn't. Then I got to looking at the two side by side, and it struck me that the OHSU elk is actually better than the famous downtown one. Or at least it's more realistic and lifelike, which would seem to be the main criteria for evaluating elk statues. I should note that the local Elks refused to have anything to do with the Thompson Elk, calling it a "monstrosity of art", and I'm starting to think they had a point; it looks a bit like the artist grafted elk antlers onto a small and slender type of deer. I'll just note that Roland Hinton Perry was an East Coast artist, so it's possible he'd never actually seen a real, live elk when he took the job.

Mean Greenies

The next stop on the ongoing mural project takes us to the back side of a warehouse on N. Page St, between Vancouver & Flint. A Flickr photo by wiredforsound23 calls it Mean Greenies, and notes that it's by local artist Charlie Alan Kraft. It's located on a west-facing wall between the warehouse and an adjoining house. Somehow I didn't notice it the first time I looked for it, and I figured it had been painted over or something. Later I checked Street View and realized I'd walked right past it, but going the wrong direction so I wouldn't have seen it. I'm sure I'll get better at this "noticing stuff" business eventually, someday.

30 Seconds Over Portland

The next mural up is 30 Seconds Over Portland (aka Love Bomb), the WWII bomber dropping parachute hearts at SE 82nd & Woodstock. The mural's located on the back side of the McCollum Automotive building, facing a church parking lot. A Tribune story explains that it was created by Tim Janchar, based on an earlier painting of his, for an ongoing neighborhood revitalization effort called "Our Happy Block". A Culturalogique post has a story about the design. I haven't seen any other sources mentioning it, and I don't know whether it's accurate or not, but here's the story:

Commissioned by the son of a WWII veteran who’s father had flown this exact type of airplane bomber during the war. The son later witnessed his father’s tremendous guilt and loss over the destruction and death he had caused and commissioned this mural on his behalf.

Carl, Pastor of the Calvary Lutheran Church shared with me that the father was able to see it while still alive and it had brought him great joy to know that one of these bombers was now dropping ‘love-bombs’ all over Portland.

Art Fills the Void!

The next mural up is Art Fills the Void!, the giant banana mural at SE 12th & Division. It's not the most elaborate mural in town, and it obviously needs a touch up, but there's a story behind this one. It turns out this banana dates back to 1982, which makes it positively ancient by mural standards. PDX Street Art explains that it was created by a group of artists calling themselves "Gorilla Wallflare", and the banana was meant as a protest against the Reagan-era guerrilla wars raging across Central America.

A Portland Public Art post about it went with the common theory that it's a riff on Andy Warhol's cover art for a 1967 Velvet Underground album. The PDX Street Art article includes an interview with one of the artists, who mentioned Warhol as one of a long list of inspirations, so I imagine there's at least a kernel of truth to the idea.

A September 1982 Oregonian article "Fruit looms on blank wall as first sign of attack on blandness" explains that the building was then home to an office supply company, rather than the assorted hipster businesses it hosts in 2015. Although the banana appeared without the company's involvement, employees immediately fell in love with the thing, and it quickly began showing up in sales presentations and the company newsletter. This undoubtedly helped it survive over 30-odd years. Gorilla Wallflare painted a number of other murals around town during the 80s, but apparently this is the only one left. The others have all been lost to time, the elements, periodic crackdowns by City Hall, and developers' bulldozers.

Prestige Motors mural

The next mural on the tour is the a small painting of a Vespa against the Portland skyline, located on the Prestige Motors building at SE 6th & Madison. (The company is, or maybe was, a scooter dealer.) The mural's signed "Zak", and dated 2008, but that's all I know about it. All I've found are Flickr photos of it by ohhh_yeah808 and Squid Vicious, which doesn't really help. Oddly enough there's a "Zak's Prestige Motors" located out at SE 82nd & Liebe, but Street View doesn't show any scooters, and as far as I can tell it's a completely separate and unrelated business. It's as if guys named Zak are somehow magically drawn toward prestige and motors. I agree this really isn't a high quality theory, but if you have a better one I'd love to hear it.

Green Hammer Mural

Here's a slideshow of the large new mural on the Green Hammer building on SE 6th, just north of Madison. It was painted in October 2014 by Stefan Ways, who posted a short "making of" video about it to YouTube. The video caption describes the design:

A hand holds a wood scribe, carving a half circle - contained within it in grayscale are city landmarks including the abandon factory at Fields Park, Hawthorne Bridge, and Union station.Outside the circle are images I referenced while hiking "The Gorge" east of the city. Swallows fly about transforming from the wood chips pulling the viewer toward "OR7", the lone wolf, introduced into western Oregon for the first time since the 1940s, and now has a mate and offspring - showing the importance of how vast, preserved wilderness allows for even the most endangered of species to thrive once again. All in all, this mural depicts a city, Portland, surrounded by natural beauty and wonders.

The Green Hammer company also posted several times on Facebook about the mural as it was being painted, if you can't get enough of "making of" photos: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Swift Lounge mural

The next mural up is at Swift Lounge on NE Broadway around 19th, sort of across the street from the building with the Mary Stephens Rose, which is what I was actually looking for when I bumped into this. It was painted in 2012 by Ashley Montague, and features (among other things) a bunch of Vaux's swifts, which are the weird little birds that roost in the Chapman School chimney every fall.

Swift-watching has become a popular activity in Portland since the birds adopted the Chapman chimney some time in the 1990s. Crowds gather at the school at dusk to watch vast clouds of strange little birds swirl and vanish into the school's chimney. A friend who's an avid birdwatcher dragged me along to watch the swifts several years ago, so I can attest that it looks just as bizarre in person as it does on YouTube. The high point of the evening, though, was when a hungry peregrine falcon showed up, looking to pick off one of the countless swifts for a meal. This seemed to generally distress the crowd, and there were even a few scattered boos here and there. I was a distinct minority in rooting for the falcon. If I was more of an extrovert I would have tried explaining that we were witnessing the world's fastest bird in action, and I would have mentioned the inspiring comeback story about DDT and eggshells and the Endangered Species Act and urban falcons. And if that failed, maybe resorting to the "Circle of Life" song from The Lion King would do the trick. I mean, it's not as if swifts are gentle vegetarian birds either. But, as I said, I'm not quite extroverted enough to try all that with strangers, even when they aren't self-righteous Subaru-driving Portlanders.

North Tabor Mural

The next mural up is the North Tabor Mural at NE 47th & Burnside, on the Penumbra-Kelly Building, home to the Portland Police Bureau's traffic cops. The artists must have realized that traffic enforcement would be an unpopular theme for a mural, and went with a cheerful past-n-future neighborhood design instead. The RACC description:

The mural’s purpose is to fulfill the third part of the North Tabor Identity Project, the intent of which is to define North Tabor within the eyes of the community. On the west wall, the composition depicts modes of transportation in the neighborhood’s past, present, and possible future--old and new streetcar, Max line, old truck, and future car. The mural corner portrays the old fuel station that once stood at the site. As the corner turns to the south wall, residents of various cultures gather around to socialize, walk dogs, and enjoy the soapbox-derby down Mt. Tabor. Through these scenes flows a ribbon of fabric coming from women sewing in the historic Shogren House. The mural then depicts residents commuting on longboard and bicycle with one cyclist tows trees for public planting, beginning the municipal scene of firemen, place, public transit, and postal workers. The scene pulls away into a view of urban farming, and then opens into local farmlands of the past. Leaflets of paper fly through the composition on which neighborhood children contributed images of their own design.

Cthulhu, East Burnside

The next mural on our tour is the big Cthulhu mural in a gated alley next to the Sizzle Pie pizza place on E. Burnside. This is by Bay Area artist Skinner, who describes his style as

Influenced by 80’s pop culture, human struggle, myths and violence, dungeons and dragons and the heavy metal gods, Skinner’s mind is one of psycho social mayhem fueled by a calculated chaos.

This is the part where I have to admit I walked right past the Cthulhu mural a few times without noticing, even after I'd started in on this mural project. I even had lunch at Sizzle Pie at least once while I was looking for some other mural nearby, not realizing there was a giant Cthulhu on the side of the building I was in. I'm going to blame this one on the eldritch emanations of the Great Old Ones combined with the building's non-Euclidean geometry, instead of my uneven powers of observation for a change.

Anyway, I'm kind of pleased we have a Cthulhu. What would be really great is if had an enormous life-size Cthulhu statue, rising out of the river if possible, but the mural's a good start. Anyway, here's a nice inspirational video from the internet:

Tree mural, Failing St.

Here's a small mural of a tree, located on N. Failing St. at the little alley between Mississippi Ave. & Michigan Ave. (Aside: North Portland's "States That Begin With 'M'" thing is possibly the dumbest street naming scheme ever invented.) A photo by wiredforsound23 says this was painted by someone who goes by "Yourself". Who, as you might imagine, has proven to be quite impossible to google. Or bing, for that matter, and yes, I tried that too. So the pseudonym is not what I would call a successful personal branding effort. Maybe that's the entire point of the name, I dunno. At any rate, it's a cool tree.

Lloyd Corporate Plaza Roses

The next stop on our tour of Weston roses is at the Lloyd Corporate Plaza office complex at NE 19th & Oregon, just south of I-84. The Lloyd Corporate Roses appears to be a large printed photo instead of a painting, so I don't know if it really counts as a mural or not. It's a decent flower photo, though, and I'm certainly not arguing that paintings are a higher form of art than photos. In any case, it's a Weston rose, and we can't say we've seen them all unless we visit this one too.

For what it's worth, the building here is home to a number of county offices, including county health inspectors, public defenders, and the headquarters of the Multnomah County library system.

butterfly, sw 2nd & washington

Downtown Portland's Historic Postal Building, at SW 3rd & Washington, has a blank wall on the back side of the building facing 2nd. There may have been an adjacent building at one point, but right now it's home to a surface parking lot, and since the blank wall faces traffic coming off the Morrison Bridge, it hosts a couple of very large billboards. Look below those billboards, though, and you'll see a blue butterfly that someone's painted. Google Street View indicates it's been there since at least April 2014, and it's obvious that graffiti near it has been painted over while it's been left alone, so I imagine it's supposed to be here. It's not signed, though, and I haven't come across anything at all to share about it.

If I had to guess, I'd guess it's supposed to be a Fender's blue butterfly, a local endangered species. The butterfly in turn relies on one rare subspecies of lupine, which is threatened by invasive species and habitat loss. This is all just speculation on my part though.

Broadway Building Rose

The next Weston rose up is on the second story of an office building at NE 10th & Broadway. The Portland Roses Tumblr just calls it the Broadway Building Rose, since this one doesn't seem to be named in anyone's honor, unlike the ones we've visited before. Or at least there's no visible caption on this one. These photos are from the Safeway parking structure across the street, which is probably the best view of it unless you have a roof key to the building next door.

Vern Hansen Rose

The next Weston rose on the mini-tour is the Vern Hansen Rose, on a building in the big Hollywood District U-Store complex next to I-84, not far from the Melvin Weston Rose we took a look at earlier. I'm not sure who this one is named for.

The photo on the Portland Roses Tumblr is better than mine. Mine was taken looking down from the west side of the 28th Ave. overpass, and I imagine the Tumblr pic was taken from a car on the freeway or from a MAX train, since I'm not sure how else you'd get that angle. It also looks like the rose was repainted recently (i.e. since the December 2010 Tumblr post), since in my photos the rose is on a dark background, and the letters are now lighter than the background. It still has a big security camera poking out of the middle of the rose, though, so it looks like it's at least at the same place on the same wall as before.

N. Dekum & Borthwick

The next painted intersection we're taking a look at is at N. Dekum & Borthwick, a block east of Albina. A City Repair project list from 2006 describes it:

This community project will include an intersection painting designed to bring the values and culture of long-time and newly rooted residents together at the crossroads in celebration. The community chose the penguin theme for the design after the penguins that once lived down the block at Peninsula Park.

The design isn't very clear from these photos, I'm afraid. I didn't include anything about penguins in my todo list item, and when I got there I happened to be looking at it from the wrong angle and didn't clue in on what it was supposed to be. At least one of the red triangles is a beak, attached to a spiral that's really a penguin head. It's a lot more obvious if you tilt your head or rotate your monitor, whichever's easier.

smoking cat, mississippi ave.

North Portland's Mississippi Ave. is generally a commercial street, with upscale condos rapidly crowding their way in, but there are still a few old houses along the avenue here and there. Just south of Mason St. there are a couple of hippie-fied houses with an elaborately painted fence out front, featuring a large cigarette-smoking cat. The captions to a couple of Flickr photos by wiredforsound23 claim that the cat was painted by Trent Gibson, while the wizard design around the corner is by someone who goes by "Acid Wizard".

Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel

Here are a few photos of Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel, an art wall in the basement of Portland State's Student Rec Center. The brief and rather unhelpful RACC description:

This is a conceptual drawing utilizing visual elements of the surrounding neighborhood and abstracting them into unusual forms. The piece comments on the development of architectural concepts in relation to modularity, transparency, multi-valence, and asymmetry.

When the rec center opened in 2011, PR about the new art in the building focused primarily on Intellectual Ecosystem, the building's video art installation. That sort of makes sense, since permanent video art is pretty rare in Portland, but the press release also briefly mentions "a cut and painted steel work 'Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel', by Damien Gilley, installed in the auditorium lobby.". The artist's website merely offers a photo of it, without further explanation.

PDX Pipeline interviewed Gilley in 2010, and this piece got a brief mention there:

Your public art piece, ”Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel”, was recently unveiled at PSU. What wit like to move from an ephemeral installation to a permanent, commissioned framework?

My approach remained simple similar to my temporary projects. I used simple materials (aluminum, auto paint, wood) that translate well in a line art, graphic look. But because I have been a graphic designer and know the process of using digital files to output hard materials, it was the same process of translating the digital into physical, a very predictable result.

Intellectual Ecosystem

Here's a short YouTube clip of Intellectual Ecosystem, a video art installation on an outside wall of the Portland State Student Rec Center building, facing the Urban Plaza. The university's PR describes it as:

...a video work that uses imagery of PSU student performances, faculty work, and archival holdings that were researched and filmed over a one year period.  Nearly forty faculty members and student groups were engaged by the artists.  
...
“Intellectual Ecosystem” contains a total of 160 minutes of original video content, projected in a custom programmed sequence to remix the clips.  The work is viewable from inside the ASRC and also animates the busy Urban Plaza from a 12’ x 16’ transparent holographic screen that, even when the projector is active, allows the activities of students inside the building to become another layer of the composition.  The title of the work is inspired by PSU Environmental Studies Professor John Reuter, who has called for the creation of new metaphors and the identification of characteristic patterns to allow people to grasp the immensity of natural processes.  

The installation was created in 2010 by artists Fernanda D’Agostino and Valerie Otani; you might recognize both names from other Portland public art projects that have appeared here previously. D'Agostino created Urban Hydrology and Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action along the MAX line at PSU, Icons of Transformation at North Portland's Overlook MAX stop

Otani created Voices of Remembrance and Prowform & Propform along the Yellow Line, Money Tree at the SE Powell Green Line station, and Folly Bollards at the downtown Peforming Arts Center, I mean, "Portland'5 Centers for the Arts". (Yes, that's an apostrophe-five, and it's there on purpose. It's a terminally silly name, and some marketing consultant probably made a ton of money thinking of it.) The two artists collaborated on the Flows and Eddies sculptures around the Smith & Bybee Wetlands nature area.

purple creature, sw 2nd

This little creature is painted in a downtown Portland doorway along SW 2nd near Taylor, next to the hyper-trendy Lúc Lắc Vietnamese place. It's been there for a couple of years without anyone painting over it, so I imagine it's supposed to be there. I have a sneaking suspicion it's from an anime or a video game, and I ought to be embarrassed about not getting the pop culture reference. If you know what it is, feel free to make fun of me in the comments below.

Cyclone Bicycle Supply mural

One odd thing I've noticed during this mural project is that Portland bike shops are very likely to have murals outside. I'm not sure why exactly, and it's not like I've run the numbers and have an exact percentage to give you, but it's more common than just about any other sort of business, with the possible exception of tattoo places. Today's example is at Cyclone Bicycle Supply, at 21st & Vaughn in a weird corner of industrial NW Portland. I ran across this one in a Bike Portland article while searching for an entirely different bike mural. The article lists a few of those, and mentions the mural was created in 2012 by artists Jeremy Eaton and Nick Makanna.

The "Go By Bike" sign in the mural is a play on the "Go By Train" neon sign that's long graced Portland's Union Station, and the "Go By Streetcar" sign that's been in the Pearl District since the early 2000s. I could swear I've seen a real, live "Go By Bike" sign somewhere around town, but for the life of me I can't recall where I saw it. It's possible it wasn't real after all and was just a detail in another bike mural. It all gets to be a big blur after a while.

Updated: Apparently the "Go By Bike" sign is at the massive bike corral next to the South Waterfront aerial tram station. Thanks to gl in the comments below and @WookieOfDoom on Twitter for pointing this out. Another commenter mentions there's also a "Go By Cab" sign at Radio Cab in NW Portland. At this rate I have to assume there's a "Go By Enormous SUV" sign somewhere in darkest Tualatin.

Pranayama

The next mural on the agenda is Pranayama, located outside the Yoga Union building at SE 50th & Lincoln, created in 2007 by Dana Lynn Louis. The brief RACC description:

Earth tones and natural shades of red, greens, and blues are used in a diptych portraying a set of abstract yin/yang flower vases reflective of the yoga practiced within the building walls. Local artists and residents participated in its construction.

I am not a yoga person, so I had to google the title of the mural. Wikipedia says "Pranayama" has something to do with yoga-style breathing and related mystical concepts. I think. Although (as a non-yoga person) I'm left scratching my head after reading the article a couple of times. The artist's website gives an alternate title of Unification, in any event.

The yoga studio's website says they're moving to a new building in July 2015, so the mural may or may not stick around after that.

SE 9th & Stark mural

The next mural on the tour is another Forest for the Trees one, a geometric design created by Brazilian artist Marcelo Macedo for the festival's 2013 edition. This one was hard to find; it's down a sorta-alley on SE Stark between 9th & 10th, next to a sketchy Multnomah County corrections building. The alley's blocked off by a chain link fence, and you can't see a lot of the mural due to various things parked in front of it. A photo of it at the site for Honolulu's similar Pow Wow Hawaii festival provides a better look at it than my photos do, if you're curious. The fact that I couldn't see an artsy mural because there was a defunct food cart blocking it sounds like a lame joke from the #PortlandProblems hashtag, but seriously, this is exactly what happened.

Dekumstruction

The next art whatzit we're taking a look at is Dekumstruction, at NE Dekum St. & Durham Ave., right outside Breakside Brewing, and just down the street from Woodlawn Park. This is public art that doubles as a bike rack for a brewpub, and triples as a stormwater management device. It's hard to dream up a more Portlandia thing than this, and naturally it's won all sorts of national awards. The artists' statement from their website:

Dekumstruction is a sculptural artwork installed on top of a custom bike rack, also designed by artists Peg Butler and Buster Simpson. The art installation works as an overhead shelter for the bike rack and uses materials and imagery related to petroleum. Twenty halved oil barrels that serve as planters represent the culture of big oil and reconnect the petroleum product with the earth. The barrels also receives roof water from an adjacent building which is fed through the planter to a downspout that flows onto an upended oil barrel, beating the drum during rainy days. The installation relates to shifting attitudes about energy, consumption, and stormwater management.

Simpson also created Host Analog, the slowly-decaying log installation outside the Oregon Convention Center.

Jeffrey Weston Rose

Our next Weston rose is the Jeffrey Weston Rose, on the old Portland Bottling Co. Building in the 1300 block of NE Couch. Going by the name this is probably another one named for a family member, but that's all I know.

Tiffany Weston Rose, Sandy Plaza

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour is the Tiffany Weston Rose, on the Art Deco Sandy Plaza Building at NE 18th & Sandy. This is the second rose named after the owner/developer's daughter, the first being the circa-1994 Tiffany Weston Rose on the Tiffany Center in downtown Portland.

Flowering Legacy of the Civil Rights Leaders

The next mural on our ongoing tour is Flowering Legacy of the Civil Rights Leaders, in the Brooklyn neighborhood on SE 13th at Powell. The RACC description:

The mural project was made by students from the Oregon Leadership Institute at Portland State University. It features a Portland Rose with petals showing the faces of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Chief Joseph, Ceasar Chavez, and Mahatma Ghandi. Other images of freedom are also included in the mural.

To be perfectly honest, the faces-growing-out-of-roses thing looks a bit like a mad science experiment gone awry. I'm sure they meant well, though.

The winged figure on the left appears to be the statue atop the Victory Column in Berlin, a 19th century German war memorial. I imagine it's here as an "image of freedom" because a.) the column's located near the Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall once stood, and b.) Brooklyn was once a German immigrant neighborhood. At one time it even had streets with names like "Bismarck", although most of them were hastily renamed during World War I.

A Neighborhood in Motion

The next mural on our tour is another "celebrate our neighborhood" design: A Neighborhood in Motion is in the Roseway neighborhood, at the fun six-way intersection of 72nd, Sandy, and Fremont. The mural's on the 72nd Ave. side of the Missing Link bike shop. This area may sound kind of familiar if you've been reading this blog for a while, since we've been here couple of times before on other quixotic wild goose chases, I mean, projects. The first time was in 2008 for the Roseway Parkway, the wide sorta-Park Blocks down the middle of 72nd north of Sandy. A couple of the photos above were taken from the parkway blocks, in fact. More recently, last May I stopped by for photos of the untitled Lee Kelly sculpture at the US Bank branch across the intersection at 72nd & Fremont, as well as the nearby painted intersection at 77th & Beech. For what it's worth, I've also been to the nearby Roseway Theater a few times, albeit without writing about it. Unfortunately I wasn't looking for murals on these previous visits, so I didn't clue in on this one, even though it takes up the entire side of a building. So I had to make another trip back, and I can't decide whether I'm being extremely thorough or extremely inefficient. If I ever decide to start a project on historic buildings, I'll probably have to make yet another trip here.

Anyway, the the RACC description of the mural has this to say:

This mural reflects the surrounding community, brought together by the mural process. A winding road with trucks and cars, a barbershop, grocers, soda jerk, war time workers, and unicyclist are among the many neighborhood images shown.

The website of one of the artists has more closeups of the mural. As I mentioned in another recent mural post, the drug store across the street still has a working soda fountain. I'm not sure why I keep mentioning that, other than that it's an odd anachronism that's somehow survived into the 21st century. But then, a couple of downtown Portland buildings still have manual elevators, and they employ people to operate them. Or at least they did as recently as 2012.

Mary Stephens Rose

The next Weston rose we're looking at is the Mary Stephens Rose, on the side of an otherwise nondescript building in the 2000 block of NE Broadway. I'm not sure who this rose is named for, which makes for a very short blog post this time around.

SE 45th & Henderson

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One of the more dubious ongoing projects here at this humble blog involves tracking down places on a weird list I ran across in the city archives. Some of these places are obscure city parks, while others are various landscaped bits that the parks bureau had a hand in designing or maintaining at one time. And then there are a few that I can't quite figure out, like today's installment. We're on SE Henderson St. at 45th Avenue, on a hillside a bit east of the swanky Eastmoreland neighborhood. The city's official neighborhood map says we're in a long, skinny part of the Woodstock neighborhood, between Eastmoreland and the far less upscale Brentwood-Darlington area. I'm describing this at length because this whole area was a blank spot on my mental map of the city, and I'm fairly sure I'd never been here before I came looking for the subject of this post.

The aforementioned hillside is the reason we're here, as it turns out; when the houses along this stretch of Henderson were built, the developers put a divider down the middle of the street such that the westbound lane is maybe 3-5 feet above the eastbound lane. I suppose this way yards and driveways on either side of the street don't have to be as steep. As far as I can tell, the divider is the reason this street is on the list. The divider is just solid concrete, without any landscaping or anything decorative, so I'm not sure what the Parks Bureau would have had to do with the place, but the list says they were involved somehow, so I went to take a look. An imaginative and unsupervised child could probably find something fun to do here, but calling it a park would be a real stretch. Maybe the bureau shrugged and said they couldn't work with this place, or they came back with a budget-busting landscaping plan that wasn't adopted, or something like that. I suppose that would still count as "involvement", if you defined the word broadly enough.

Araminta

If you drive or ride along NE Sandy at night, you might have noticed the tall glowing spiky thing in front of the old fire station at 56th Ave. Portland fire stations often have a bit of public art on display, often thanks to "1% For Art" money from when stations receive seismic upgrades. I'm not sure whether that was the case here. In any event, today's post pays a visit to Araminta - Carrying People to Safety by James M. Harrison. The RACC description:

Araminta was Harriet Tubman's given name at birth. The piece is designed to be a light beacon and to inspire our better nature -- to remind us that we should be strong rather than fearful in moments of crisis.

I'm not sure I'm sold on how Harriet Tubman, firefighting, and abstract art are all interconnected, but hey.

Bell Circles II

A couple of earlier posts here talked about the pair of bells in front of the Oregon Convention Center, donated by Portland's sister cities of Sapporo, Japan, and Ulsan, South Korea. I mentioned there was also an acoustic art installation connected to the bells: Bell Circles II is an automated system that rings the bells every so often. Signs simply say the bells ring without warning, but they allegedly operate on a set schedule. Supposedly the Sapporo bell rings hourly, while the Ulsan bell rings on a schedule that evolves over time and resets on each solstice and equinox.. I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because I was at the Convention Center recently and I had the idea of filming the Sapporo bell ringing. I'd checked YouTube and couldn't find any video of either of the bells ringing, so it seemed like this would fill an important cultural gap or something. So I started filming just before the top of the hour, and kept filming for four minutes, and came away with a boring video of the bell just sitting there, doing nothing. Later it occurred to me that "hourly" doesn't necessarily mean "at the top of the hour". Still, I feel like I've made a good faith effort to record the bell doing its thing, and I don't really feel like going back and hanging around for an hour or more to see if it ever actually rings. So I'm just going to go with the video clip I already have, and imagine that the bell's playing a famous John Cage piece. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Solar Flare

The next mural on our ongoing tour is on SE Ankeny, right next to the Giant Snail mural we just saw, and it may or may not be titled Solar Flare. It's hard to be sure because even though it's a recent mural, the artist's website is down (and Archive.org doesn't have it), and the Twitter handle listed on the mural seems to belong to someone else entirely. I did run across a Facebook profile of an artist with the right name, but I don't know if it's the same person or not. In short, I don't know a lot about this one.

I actually didn't realize this was a separate mural at first, and somehow only got one photo showing this part of the wall the first time I visited. So I had to make a special trip back to get a few photos of this mural. Well, this and a sort of graffiti skeleton design on a nearby garage, which seems to have been painted over already. I've gotten used to that. Unlike traditional public art, which in theory sticks around forever, off the top of my head I only know of a handful of murals that have been around longer than a decade. Before the early 1990s there weren't a lot of them to begin with, and generally speaking they're more likely to be painted over than restored. Sometimes a mural's host building is demolished, and I've never heard of a mural being salvaged when a building here is torn down. That's happened before in New York, or maybe it was in the UK somewhere; a doomed building was home to a Banksy, so when the building was leveled, the mural was rescued at the behest of a well-heeled art collector, or maybe it was an art dealer. I'm hazy on some of the details, but in any case we have no (known) Banksys here, nor has any local street artist achieved that same level of global fame, so when a building goes, anything painted on it goes too.

Melvin Weston Rose

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour of Weston roses is the Melvin Weston Rose, located on the big U-Store self-storage complex next to I-84, just east of the 28th Ave. overpass. These photos were taken from the overpass, and I'm not really sure where else you can get a good look at this rose, as large as it is. Maybe from a moving vehicle on the freeway, and maybe if you're right up next to it in the middle of the storage complex. I'm not sure who this rose is named for, but I imagine it's a family member, just going by the name.

A Vintage Portland post explains that this complex was once home to the Doernbecher Furniture manufacturing plant. (In fact there's a Doernbecher Rose elsewhere on the building, but I think it's only visible from I-84/MAX, and I don't have photos of it yet.) Wood for the plant came from the company's own sawmill, which was located at Coalca Landing, at the Willamette Narrows south of Oregon City. The site is now an obscure state park, with river access, some concrete ruins from the old sawmill, and views of the once-famous Coalca Pillar, Oregon's vey own balancing rock. The park is worth a visit, if you can find it (and my post about the place explains how).

Giant Snail mural, SE Ankeny

The next mural on our ongoing tour is a Giant Snail mural by Hunter Armstrong, located on SE Ankeny between 22nd & 24th. Strictly speaking it's on the back of a building that faces Burnside, but you can only see it from Ankeny. It's one of two large and brightly colored murals at this spot, the other being Solar Flare, about which a post is coming. Wiredforsound23 (whose Flickr photos lead me to a lot of murals I wouldn't know about otherwise) calls this one At a Snail's Pace, but the artist doesn't seem to use that name on his own photos of it, so I dunno. In any case, here's a short video of the snail mural being painted, if you're curious how these things come together.

When I stopped by to take these photos, a couple of guys with leafblowers were clearing the parking lot in front of the murals. They seemed confused and a little suspicious of this random guy walking up with a camera taking photos. I tried to reassure them that I was just taking photos of the murals and not of them, and explained I ran a website about art and assorted Portland stuff, which is more or less what this blog is about right now. I think that upgraded me from suspicious to merely weird in their eyes because they went back to blowing leaves. Later I made sure I didn't have any identifying photos of the guys, since I have no desire to get anyone deported. Not even leafblower guys, as much as I hate leafblowers.

Douglas Building Roses

A number of recent posts here have been about Weston roses, which are paintings (or sometimes printed photos) of roses on buildings owned by a local real estate tycoon. (See this earlier post for more backstory, if you're curious.) If you've been reading these, you might have noticed I keep linking to the Portland Roses Tumblr, which is someone's site about paintings of roses around Portland and sometimes further afield. The lion's share of posts are about Weston roses, but the genre isn't completely monopolized by one rich guy. This post is about one of the exceptions.

The historic Douglas Building, at SE 35th & Hawthorne, is home to a pair of semi-abstract roses. As far as I know, they only appear on the Portland Roses Google Map & didn't merit Tumblr posts of their own, which made them harder to find when I went looking for them. I only have photos of the rose on the west side of the building, facing 35th; the other one is on the east side of the building, and as I recall it looks identical to this one. There's also a similar pair of roses on another building further east at 48th & Hawthorne, but that's a separate post. Because rules or something.

Tapestry

The next mural we're taking a look at is in sort of a weird location. Tapestry covers a long, low retaining wall along the back of the Barbur Transit Center, next to the path leading to the footbridge over Interstate 5. It's not visible at all from SW Barbur or the transit center itself; you can glimpse it from I-5, though, and you can't miss it if you're walking or biking over the footbridge. The RACC description of Tapestry explains that this is exactly the viewing experience artists John Early and Laura Bender intended:

The mural is about movement, energized by color relationships and crisp patterns. Along the course of a slowly curving wall, a tapestry of improvisations unfurl in a music-like progression. The mural is meant to be experienced on the move; walking, biking, or driving along. The series of stenciled shapes and overlapping patterns that are used are derived from various cultural and natural sources.

The artists' website includes a clever Flash animation that tries to give internet viewers a taste of the intended motion experience.

Martin and Grace Johanson Rose

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour is the Martin & Grace Johanson Rose, on the NW corner of the Rose Festival warehouse on NE 12th, near the Buckman Field tennis center. The larger Keith Vernon Rose is on the SW corner of the same building. This rose is painted on a panel rather than directly on the building, which turned out to be a bit of foresight: The rose used to be located on the Duniway Plaza building at SW 4th & Caruthers, just south of downtown. Weston roses usually get painted over when a building is sold, but in this case they apparently just popped it off the wall and hauled it away to its current home. The Tribune's 2008 article about Weston roses explains that this one is named for a couple who young Joe Weston delivered the Oregon Journal to back in the 1950s.

As a tangent, here's the story of a different, unbuilt Duniway Plaza building, which would have been a condo tower where the now-vacant YMCA building stands next to Duniway Park. Although the story is more about an eager young architect's journey into cynicism/wisdom, thanks to one flaky client after another.

Keith Vernon Rose

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour (assuming you aren't sick of them yet) is the Keith Vernon Rose, on the SW corner of the giant Rose Festival warehouse at NE 12th & Davis. I'm not absolutely sure, but I think this one's named for a property manager for the Weston real estate empire.

Like a lot of the most recent roses, this is not a painting but a photo, printed and applied to the wall. This is a distinction that actually matters a lot under Portland's convoluted sign vs. mural regulations. My understanding is that the city's more inclined to see something as a sign (and not a mural) if it's printed and applied vs. painted in place. But I also have a vague recollection that there have been various things painted at this spot over the years and it may be grandfathered in, regardless of what the current material happens to be. (The usual disclaimers apply about me not being a lawyer, much less your lawyer, so don't blame me if the city comes and paints over your fancy decals.)

Ken Gephart Rose

The next Weston rose on the agenda is the Ken Gephart Rose, on the Willamette Park Plaza building, at SW Macadam & Nebraska. This is right next to Willamette Park and sort of across the street from the McMenamins Fulton Pub, the ancestral home of Nebraska Bitter (which is named after the street). I'm telling you all of this because I'm not sure who this one's named for. I found a few 1980s news articles (like this 1981 Popular Science article, and this Christian Science Monitor piece) mentioning a Portland-area architect or designer with the right name, but I don't know if it's the same guy or not.

Take Flight

Our next stop on the ongoing mural project is in the middle of the Pearl District. The Pearl as a whole isn't home to a lot of murals. It's full of shiny new condo towers these days, and no self-respecting condo HOA would ever let someone paint on their building. The very idea is laughable. The south end of the Pearl is still home to some older buildings, though, many with big blank walls, and at least one has sprouted a mural recently. The Low Brow Lounge is a dive bar at NW 10th & Hoyt; I'm not sure how old it actually is, but it seems like a relic of the Pearl's old days as a blue-collar light industrial area, full of auto shops and plumbing supply stores and so forth. One wall is now home to the striking owl mural you see here. This is Take Flight, a new Ashley Montague mural painted in October 2014. I'm sure someday this block will become another cookie-cutter tower for the $500 pinot noir crowd, but until then there's at least a cool owl to look at, and the lounge reportedly fries a mean tater tot.

For those of you keeping score at home, I don't actually know whether Take Flight is an official title; wiredforsound23 on Flickr used that name, and he appears to generally know what he's talking about, street art-wise. So I'm going with that in the absence of anything more definitive, just because I need to call this post something.

Sam Bates Rose

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour is the Sam Bates Rose, in the Hollywood District on NE Hancock between 43rd & 44th. The 2008 Portland Tribune article about these roses mentions that this one honors the man who gave Joe Weston his first job, as a soda jerk. (Weston, of course, went on to fame and fortune as a local real estate mogul, and presumably owns the building that hosts this rose.)

Incidentally, the job of soda jerk is not entirely extinct in Portland. Sandy Boulevard hosts not one but two independent drug stores with soda fountains: Paulsen's here in the Hollywood district, and Fairley's further out in the Roseway neighborhood. I've never been to either one, but they sound like great places to take a nostalgic parent or grandparent. My dad occasionally laments not being able to find Green River soda, since apparently it was everywhere when he was a kid growing in the Midwest. I tried it once and didn't think it was anything special, but childhood tastes are like that. To wit, the bubble gum that came with Topps baseball cards in the 1970s was objectively terrible in all respects, absolute bottom of the barrel, no redeeming qualities. Roughly zero out of five dentists recommended it. But I still associate it with long summer vacations and walking with friends to the distant (and long-gone) corner store to load up on baseball cards and random candy, all with zero adult supervision. Sometimes we even rode bikes without helmets or safety pads or full-body bubble wrap or 24/7 GPS tracking. I will absolutely agree that the 70s were a dark and primitive time; it's just that there was an upside to it every so often.

Healing Moon

The next mural on our ongoing tour is Healing Moon, at the Mississippi Health Center on N. Albina Ave. This is actually the same building as the Albina Press coffee place, home to the Life Cycle of a Sunflower mural and another mural on the building's garage. I posted about both of those back in September, but at the time I didn't realize there was another one on the far side of the building. That's kind of embarrassing, but honestly there weren't any clues indicating I should go look at the other side of the building. I'm starting to think that overlooking semi-obvious stuff is just an unavoidable hazard of this particular project.

Anyway, Healing Moon was created in 2011 by artist Sheri Love Earnshaw, who also did the sunflower murals on the other side of the building, with the help of art students from Reynolds High School. Both murals are done as a series of panels on a common theme.

Marquam Building Flag Mural

In the previous post, I talked a bit about the Kathleen Gorman Rose mural, on the west side of the Marquam Plaza office building next to I-405, south of downtown Portland. The same building also has a mural on its east side, this one of a US flag and the words "United We Stand" (quotation marks included). I initially figured this was some sort of 9/11 thing, but later realized that Weston rose murals often include flags, and it's just that this time the flag is on the far side of the building.

So as far as I know it's not supposed to mean anything in particular beyond a general "Go USA!" sentiment. Although I admit the "United We Stand" phrase has always puzzled me. On the surface it seems really vague, almost devoid of meaning: Unity and determination, sure, but not with any particular goal or idea in mind. And yet it's enormously popular. It seemed like the default go-to patriotic phrase after 9/11, and back in 1992 it was the original name of Ross Perot's organization before it evolved into the "Reform Party".

It also shows up in more divisive contexts. I distinctly recall counterdemonstrators hollering the phrase at people protesting the start of the Iraq war, and it shows up (often misspelled) on Tea Party signs fairly often. So obviously it means something else entirely to certain demographics, and I've never quite cracked the code. It feels like a demand that people shut up and stop rocking the boat, or be excluded from the national "we". I doubt they realize how weird it sounds outside their little echo chamber.