Pittock Acres

View Larger Map

Next up we're visiting Portland's Pittock Acres Park, the West Hills park that's home to the (locally) famous Pittock Mansion. I'm not particularly interested in rich people's historic houses, and I visited mostly for the view and to check out some of the trails in the 54 acre park. It sits between Washington Park (& the Hoyt Arboretum) to the south & Macleay Park to the north, and the Wildwood Trail follows a winding path through the park, but it's not a place I've visited very often, so it was kind of a missing link for me, if for nobody else. It probably seems more remote to me than it actually is because I'm not interested in running across Burnside from Washington Park to get there, & that will all change when the promised footbridge over Burnside goes in.

So I drove there & parked, avoided the line to go inside, and took a few photos from the viewpoint. As far as views from the West Hills go, this is more or less unparalleled. It's worth going for the view, though you might want to pick a sunnier day than I did. Then I took the trailhead heading north toward Cornell, essentially this hike from OregonHikers.org except backwards, starting & ending at the top. I'd meant to also try the trail south to Burnside, but there was a winter-related trail closure, and I might have bailed that day anyway due to aging knees. So that part's still a TODO item, since I'm reasonably sure I've never been on that segment of trail.

Despite my lack of interest in rich people's houses, I have actually been inside, many years ago as a Cub Scout field trip. There was a guided tour, and I mostly remember velvet ropes, and being told not to touch anything, and a bathroom containing a fancy high-tech (for 1914) shower the guide called the "wettest shower in town". We learned all about how the house was built for Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian, who only got to live in it a handful of years before kicking the bucket. It does sort of amuse me that the place dates from a distant era when you could accumulate a vast fortune in local print media.

As you might imagine, the library's Oregonian archives don't lack for articles about the home of the paper's onetime publisher. I keep saying I'm just interested in the nature part of the place, but that's largely not what Pittock's newspaper cared about. I kept reading anyway and it turned out there were a few interesting anecdotes, at least more interesting than I was expecting, so that's probably going to be the bulk of this post, despite my initial intentions. (The photoset above is still mostly nature photos, though.)

So before the Pittocks moved in, this whole area was meant to be a ritzy subdivision called "Imperial Heights". That's not a place name you hear very often in 2018, because the Pittocks bought the entire area and built their house at the very top. There's a heavily graded area around the mansion, but the rest of the ~46 acres are steep forested hillsides that might have been unbuildable anyway, though PortlandMaps shows a couple of unused road rights-of-way through the present-day park, so I gather the developers at least planned to give it a try.

A July 1912 Oregonian article rhapsodized about the neighborhood & surrounding areas being platted out & developed. The article went on about the amazing views, and then points out that even more important is the invigorating atmosphere and freedom from dust and smoke, which was kind of a big deal back then. I recall seeing an urbanism theory from the early 1900s or so, and I don't remember where I saw it, that modern cities would naturally grow westward in the future. The idea was that people would keep moving west to live upwind of their cities' vast factories and their clouds of toxic black smoke. I don't know whether that was at play here. An October 1913 article includes a map of the area, showing old street names, and streetcar lines winding uphill from Burnside from the sorta-intersection of Macleay Blvd. & Tichner, which isn't exactly an intersection anymore due to rockslides and repairs in the 1990s.

In 1917, there was a brief vogue for demonstrating the power of your firm's powerful new automobile by showing it can make it up the hill at Imperial Heights or the hilly parts of Upper Hall Street. south of downtown. First it was doing so at all, and then doing so as fast as possible, which is to say that selling (and buying) cars hasn't changed at all over the past century.

• "Bad Grades Prove 'Pie' for Hudson", April 8th, in which the local Hudson dealer sent their star driver and a stock Hudson Super-Six up the hill at speeds averaging 20 MPH, reaching speeds as high as 35 at times, which would merit an expensive speeding ticket these days.
• "Steep Hills Scaled", April 15th, featuring a local Chandler dealer who made it up the hill while carrying multiple passengers, in front of witnesses and everything. At this point nobody but the Hudson had made it up Hall St.
• "Slow Race' Run Chandler Cars Creep Up Washington-Street Hill. Speed Under Four Miles Test Made May 6th. In which a new variant of the challenge emerged: Driving up the hill as slow as possible in top gear, without downshifting. This was staged as a race between two rival Chandler salesmen, with a box of cigars at stake, judged by the local dealership.
• Four-Wheel Drive Truck Powerful Duplex Freighter, With Capacity Load, Pulls Streetcar Up Grade. May 20th. In which a local truck dealer showed off the new Duplex 4wd truck by driving the hill while towing a streetcar. I wonder why the streetcar company agreed to that.
• "Automobile Salesmen Find Ideal Hill On Which To Test Cars For Every Kind Of Performance", September 23rd, in which we learn auto dealers have taken to using the hill to show off their new models. As an added attraction, at the start of the climb on Burnside (then called Washington St, as an extension of Washington downtown), there was a wide spot in the road where streetcars would turn to make the climb uphill. The photo with the article shows an equally steep road on the south side of Burnside, so I don't think this is the current Barnes Rd. route to the top of the hill. Could be Hermosa, or one of the now-abandoned rights-of-way in the present-day park. (find a streetcar map/reference, this should answer this q.) Anyway, this wide spot was used to show off a car's turning radius. If you tried doing a u-turn on Burnside today, you'd get hit, and cited for reckless driving, and you could weasel out of the charge with an insanity defense. You could also keep going west on Burnside to test out your car's springs on a really rough, poor quality road. Some would argue this is still possible. The article mentions people doing the hill climb at up to 40 MPH.

The mansion was there, recently built, and inhabited by the Pittocks while this was taking place. They can't have enjoyed the ruckus, as much as the wide-eyed coverage by his own newspaper hyped it. The fad didn't outlive 1917, but the Pittocks didn't have long to enjoy their renewed peace & quiet. Mrs. Pittock died in 1918, and Henry followed in 1919, a victim of the global flu epidemic. Their heirs owned the estate for decades after that, and it showed up in the news regularly in connection with high society teas and receptions and other tedious social events, which I won't trouble you with.

Then we get to the events leading up to the city owning the place. In 1959, the house was opened to the public temporarily as part of state centennial celebrations. This was arranged by Eric Ladd, a local restaurateur & antique dealer, who leased the house for the summer. Apparently nobody had lived in the house in years at this point, though Pittock heirs still owned it. Open for tours in the summer of 1959 as part of the state's centennial celebrations. A clue about Ladd's interest in the place came the next year when a grand estate sale was announced, and many furnishings and family collections were sold off. Huge estate sale in May 1960, sold off lots of original furnishings etc. An article previewing the sale mentioned that this might be the last time the public could see the house, as it might be torn down in the near future. The articles don't come out and say so, but it seems as though the family couldn't afford to maintain it & wanted to unload it quickly, and at a loss if need be.

Without going off on too much of a tangent, Ladd had something of a complex history with Portland's historic houses. He spent much of the 1950s demolishing old homes & selling off their salvageable pieces; after a few years of this, he started moving a few of the more noteworthy houses to the area of SW 20th (near the present-day 18th & Jefferson MAX stop), an area he called "The Colony". The whole city was engaged in demolishing its past back then, he was unusual in picking up some of the pieces. After his restored houses opened as an attraction, nobody talked about the earlier demolitions anymore. At one point he opened a restaurant in one of the houses, but closed it in 1960. In 1961 the city wanted to condemn some of his unfinished, stalled restorations. So he may have had money issues of his own at the point he got involved with the the big white elephant of Imperial Heights.

In 1963, the Pittock estate was proposed as the site of a new KPTV broadcast tower, which the city council rejected. The proposal was already in the works in November 1962, just weeks after the Columbus Day Storm. (The usual story is that storm damage caused the sale, but this seems to show there was already a deal in the works beforehand.) A January 1963 article mentions the station was looking at just using part of the estate and donating the mansion to the city. So that might have worked out in terms of preserving the house, but could have blocked the parts that are trails now.

The city eventually bought the estate in April 1964 following a fundraising campaign by local high society people.

After that it's mostly events & exhibits, which I won't bore you with, but I did come across a few items to pass along. You might have looked at the photos of the house and it's semi-secluded setting and think, why aren't they filming movies there? It turns out that there have been a few; it's just that none of them have exactly swept the awards at Cannes, if you catch my drift. I expect a Pittock Mansion film festival would be a real hoot.

The earliest record on IMDb is First Love filmed there in 1977. I couldn't find a First Love trailer on the net to embed here, but YouTube has the entire film uploaded in chunks labeled "clean edited version with provocative scenes deleted". Which sounds boring, although "provocative scenes" from that era often turn out to be sort of... problematic. So I dunno, I haven't watched either version, here's a playlist, make of it what you will.

Next up is Unhinged, a low-budget slasher film from 1982. That's not a genre I'm overly interested in & I'd never heard of this one before; the IMDb plot summary sounds identical to every other slasher movie ever: "Three college girls on their way to a jazz festival crash their car in the isolated woods during a rainstorm, and are taken in by a mysterious family in an old mansion. Little do the girls know, the family has a dark, murderous secret.". Anyway, the trailer's on the 'tubes if you're into this sort of thing:

This was followed a few years later by The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989), a spooky direct-to-basic-cable movie, in which the mansion -- at the risk of getting typecast -- again portrayed a spooky old dark house. Here's a vintage promo, because it's amazing what shows up on YouTube sometimes:

Now we get to the undisputed monarch of all Pittock Mansion films, the immortal Body of Evidence (1993), starring Madonna. Let me admit up front that is the only one of these movies that I have actually seen. I think I've mentioned this before, but I like to tell young hipster newcomers to Portland that Body of Evidence is an accurate documentary about early-90s Portland, all shoulder pads and fog machines and cheesy Enigma music. This is not actually true, of course; it's more of a cheesy 90s Skinemax movie that somehow acquired actors people had heard of, and ended up on the silver screen instead of late-night cable. With, somehow, worse acting and dialogue than its cable peers. It's one of the rare movies that genuinely falls into the so-bad-it's-good category, so you can enjoy it in that sense. Which is easier than admitting you had sort of an embarrassing Madonna thing in junior high, and never quite got rid of those CDs. I may have said too much; luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded), so it's not like the secret's out, really.

As far as IMDb knows, no movies have been filmed here since Body of Evidence, undoubtedly because everyone realizes it can never be topped. Apparently there was an Amazing Race episode that finished here a few years ago, though; I can't find any clips of it online, but CBS has an extremely detailed episode recap.

One other thing caught my eye in the Oregonian archives, and I think I vaguely remember this one. There was nothing 1980s Portland loved more than a good moral panic, and moral panics about no-good teenagers were among the best of all. So here are a couple of articles from September 1986 about the park being a teen hangout spot, which was freaking out the neighbors. It seems the teens were at it again: Drinking, partying, cruising, playing bad 80s music loudly, fighting, carrying on, "lewd activities", and the like. It was all terribly scandalous, because 1980s Portland. Before long the mean no-fun grownups (who had certainly not done anything like this as teens in the 50s & 60s) cracked down and beefed up security, and the "crisis" sort of petered out, because teens only win these things in the movies.

magnolia trail, hoyt arboretum

march flowers (2018)

The cherry trees at NW 19th & Lovejoy (2018)

One of the ongoing traditions here at this humble blog involves a January visit to the corner of NW 19th & Lovejoy, in NW Portland, where a pair of cherry trees bloom ridiculously early every year. The weather's usually terrible, and virtually every other flowering plant is at least a month out from doing anything, but these two trees bloom like this every January. I'm not a huge fan of winter, so every year I go back to see this first hint of springtime. The most convincing (if mundane) theory I've heard is that they're a winter-blooming variety (which is something that exists) and this is perfectly normal tree behavior as far as they're concerned. It doesn't explain the maple trees down the block that haven't quite lost their leaves yet, but I'm willing to believe there's also an odd variety of maple tree out there. One that sneers at our puny Northwest winters and thinks this all just an endless New England October. It could be that all the trees along this block of 19th were all planted decades ago by someone who couldn't stand the sight of bare trees in winter, such that spring arrives on the south end while autumn still lingers on the north. It could be, in other words, that sufficiently advanced botany is indistinguishable from magic.

If you follow the first link above, it goes to past years' posts from the same location and time of year. The earliest one's dated 2010, but the 2012 post insists I'd been doing this for at least four years already, which I guess would make this the tenth anniversary, if only I had some idea why I'd said that. I don't seem to have posted anything here about the place in 2008 or 2009, or even uploaded any Flickr photos from there. I suppose I could have gone & visited them without taking any photos, though that really isn't my way, now or back then. Still, I must have had some reason to believe I'd been doing this for a while already; it's just that I can't recall what it is just now. So I'm going to claim those first two years as semi-apocryphal visits and call this the tenth anniversary, even though I also skipped a few years here and there in the middle. Hey, blogging isn't an exact science, ok?

I didn't do a post last year, for one thing, though I did go and take a few photos. The first blooms last year came right after a huge snow and ice storm. Heavy ice had broken a number of limbs off the trees, and the trees were marked off with caution tape. The blooms also came just days after the inauguration of old whatsisname, who I won't name since I'd rather not attract his followers here. That was kind of a traumatic event, and I just didn't have the heart to post photos of broken trees under those conditions. It could have worked as a good (if heavy-handed) metaphor for the times, but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it, so I didn't. I feel like that's a reasonable extenuating circumstance, and one I hope to never repeat, if at all possible. In any case, they're on Flickr here; I changed them from private in case anyone's curious.

The 2014 and 2015 editions went straight to Instagram, in an attempt to stay hip & current with all the cool-kid apps and whatnot. There hasn't been an interesting (to me) new cool-kid social media app in the last couple of years, so I guess I'm back here for the time being.

You might notice that the photos are a bit more bloomed-out than previous years. I ended up making three trips this time; the first two were cut short due to having to run for a streetcar. Everyone knows there's never a streetcar around when you need one, and it turns out that if you think you'll want a streetcar ten minutes from now, it will come almost immediately and you'll have to run for it. It's uncanny. Anyway, I went back until I got photos I liked, because tradition, and the photoset leads with those. The earlier so-so ones are toward the end of the photoset in case anyone really insists on seeing the very first ones. I dunno, it's possible someone might, so they're here just in case.

Golf Junction Park

The next obscure Portland place we're visiting is tiny Golf Junction Park, on the south edge of Sellwood next to the fancy golf course. It's basically just a small grassy area next to some railroad tracks, with an old passenger railcar parked nearby. (And these photos are kind of old, so I can't promise the railcar is there right now.) A 2011 Sellwood Bee article explains that this spot was once an important railway junction, with Portland streetcars heading south to Oregon City and east beyond Estacada from here. As it was located next to the country club's original clubhouse, "Golf Junction" was an obvious, if unimaginative name for the place. (Though for what it's worth the country club's official history page for that era explains they were also really into polo back then, not just golf, and they hosted a lot of high society teas and whatnot.)

Golf Junction is not exactly a city park; the land's owned by the railroad next door, and leased in perpetuity by a group connected to the Sellwood neighborhood association, which sort of is and sort of isn't part of city government. This group has maintained the park on and off since the park was created in 1996. The park has the aforementioned railcar, though it doesn't seem to be open to the public, and apparently there's a history plaque somewhere nearby that I didn't notice or get any photos of. And that's about all there is to see here. Until the mid-2000s there were old streetcar barns just north of the tracks, but (as a Greetings from Portland post explains) they were torn out to make room for townhouses, with the last bit vanishing in 2012. Oddly enough the electrical substation across the street is historic too; at one time the Portland Traction railroad here was part of the same company as today's Portland General Electric, and the substation was built here to help power their electric streetcars. The streetcar lines just happened to run out to the PGE dams at Willamette Falls and Cazadero (east of Estacada). The much diminished present-day line now dead ends at the OLCC warehouse in industrial Milwaukee, not far from here.

The park is barely outside Portland city limits; just to the north, the rail line & SE Ochoco St. (where it exists) mark the boundary between Multnomah & Clackamas counties, and to the east SE Andover St. here marks the Portland city limit around Garthwick, a little piece of the city that spills over into Clackamas County. (The park's uninformative Clackamas GIS entry is here, for what it's worth.) The Garthwick subdivision was announced in 1914, promoted as an exclusive faux-Tudor subdivision next to the swanky golf course. Ads noted it was outside city limits back then & not subject to Portland or Multnomah County taxes, and promised there'd be chains at the two gates to the neighborhood so it could be closed off from the outside world. The gates are still there, albeit without chains. The ads ran for the next decade and change, so it seems as though the lots sold more slowly than expected. I imagine this was partly due to the long commute; the Sellwood Bridge didn't exist yet, and streetcars of the era weren't famous for being speedy.

From the library's Oregonian archives, here's a July 1979 reminiscence about the old days, riding the interurban line out to the Cedarville Park complex in Gresham for picnics and fishing. (Nearby is the only surviving station on the former rail line.) The railroad wouldn't abandon that stretch of the line for another few years, and the article includes a few photos of what it looked like before becoming today's Springwater Trail. One photo includes a very 1970s-looking guy jogging next to the tracks, as a little foreshadowing of the line's future.

Madrona Park

Next up we're paying a visit to North Portland's Madrona Park. I really do try not to say "you probably haven't heard of it" (and I was avoiding the phrase before it was cool), but this really is a pretty obscure one. It's due north of the Skidmore Bluffs, on the far side of the Going St. road cut, and it has sort of a view of the river from the south end of the park, and there's a small playground and a couple of basketball half-courts at the north end, and those have an unusual origin we'll get to in a bit. The rest of the park is just overgrown brush and trees, though. Supposedly the park's named after a particular madrona tree somewhere in the park, but I don't think I have any photos of it. Or at least there aren't any "This way to the famous madrona tree" signs, so who knows? The city's 2016 guide to official heritage trees doesn't mention any trees here, so maybe it isn't all that special, or the tree just isn't there anymore.

Since the scenery isn't that remarkable, we'll do like we often do here & play amateur historian for a bit. The city notes the land for the park was donated by Amos Benson, son of timber baron Simon Benson. You might know the elder Benson as the namesake of Benson bubblers, Benson High School, the Benson Hotel, Benson State Park at Multnomah Falls, the Simon Benson house on the Portland State campus, and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. Though not as famous, Amos did pretty well for himself too, and a huge historic house of his can be seen next to the new city park at N. Polk & Crawford. So you tend to assume the donation was another act of noble civic-minded philanthropy, but that's not quite what happened.

To get the full story, we have to dive into the library's Oregonian newspaper archives again. Here's the September 16th, 1921 article on the donation of the park. It describes the park's semi-accidental origins:

This property and a few acres north of it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Benson from the Portland Gas & Coke company at the time that the county board of commissioners was endeavoring to locate the Greeley-street extension through the property. The gas company began litigation to stop the roadway and the property was then acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Benson for the sole purpose of permitting the roadway to be constructed without the delay that would ensue as a result of any legal battle.

The tract which has been given to the city is a sightly one, overlooking the river and Swan Island. It connects with the proposed boulevard system extending around the city, and is a valuable acquisition in that it will give a park to a section that now has no recreation spot. No playgrounds will be installed, it was announced.

Park Superintendent Keyser noticed the tract and its desirability as a park site. He conferred with Mr. Benson and as a result the donation was made.

Benson owned the land rather briefly before the big philanthropic gesture. Here's a September 14th 1917 article about the proposed Greeley extension, in which Benson is described as a major promoter of the project. Benson, it seems, had no interest in the area except for his precious road, and he quickly pawned the surplus land off on the city as soon as they expressed an interest in the place.

Wanting the land is not the same thing as having plans for it, and it appears the city never had any ideas around what to do with the park beyond not installing a playground. A 1933 guide to city parks said the park was undeveloped but had views over the city airport, which was still on Swan Island at that point. The park's next appearances in the news were due to repeated citizen complaints. A 1937 complaint to the city council stated that the park was continually being torn up by cars, spraying dust everywhere. Then there was another complaint the next year, possibly by the same person, informing the city that the park hadn't been cleaned since 1933 & was overrun with poison ivy. Neither article indicates the city promised to do anything about the park's condition, and the string of complaints seems to end at two, so either the original complainant gave up in 1939, or his annual complaints stopped being newsworthy.

The park itself rarely figured in the news over the next couple of decades, but for a while after World War II the surrounding neighborhood sometimes went by "Madrona Park", I guess that being the sort of name that sells real estate (such that Seattle has a Madrona park & neighborhood of its own, which I had to weed out of search results). It inspires thoughts of nice respectable real estate, on nice level land, laid out in a nice conventional grid. Which is doable in this part of North Portland, but not without a little unsavory help. In 1947 the Oregonian explained how the city used garbage to fill in uneven terrain in the Madrona Park area and other eastside neighborhoods. The article begins “Some of Portland’s best families are living on old potato peelings, coffee grounds, and egg shells.”, which is a pretty great lede. It goes on to explain that improving the landscape with garbage is being done scientifically, not randomly, so there's no cause for concern. I'd never heard of this before, so at some point the city must've stopped bragging about this scientific feat. I was also surprised not to see any angry letters to the editor complaining about the paper hurting property values by publishing this, or wondering if doing this was safe; it would be decades until anyone thought to ask how buildings on top of garbage would hold up in an earthquake. For those of you who don't have a local library card & can't get to the original article, here's a list of spots around town that got the scientific garbage treatment between 1923 and 1947. Some of the intersections listed don't exist today, but presumably did back then:

• Guilds Lake (now industrial NW Portland), the original site, used until the entire lake was filled in.
• A former gravel pit at NE 33rd & Fremont
• Marquam Gulch, now Duniway Park
• A gravel pit around 37th-38th Avenues & Klickitat & Siskiyou Streets, in the ritzy Alameda neighborhood. You can actually kind of see this one in Google Maps if you turn on terrain view, since it has an even slope stretching over several blocks instead of a steep bluff like the rest of Alameda.
• Another old gravel pit south of Rose City Golf Course at NE 65th & Tillamook, a few blocks from one of the painted intersections I like to track down now & then.
• 20th & 21st, Belmont & Yamhill, now Colonel Summers Park
• Penn St. gulch, to provide a road to the Swan Island airport. I'm guessing this is today's Going St. but I'm not entirely sure.
• A sand pit somewhere in St. Johns.
• A gulch at Alberta & Greeley, which would put it right under an Adidas building just north of Madrona Park here (the park, not the neighborhood).
• A gravel pit at Alberta & 39th, which I think puts it under the Alliance High School campus.
• A gulch in Overlook park.
• lastly, the old Mt. Hood Railway cut at 90th & E. Burnside, probably under the religious school that was built there shortly thereafter.
• The article explains that all future garbage would be sent to the new St. Johns Landfill, which operated until 1991 and is meant to become a park someday.

The park did make another brief appearance in the news in in the summer of 1952, when it hosted one of 3 municipal forest fire lookouts to keep an eye Forest Park across the river, in response to a huge forest fire that had occurred there recently. In other parts of the state, old fire lookouts have been converted into amazing AirBnB rentals, but probably nothing that cool ever existed here.

1964 saw the one big change that's happened to the park over its history, when the city leased a chunk of it to Bess Kaiser Hospital next door for use as a parking lot. Curiously I have not been able to find a single news item about the original lease deal, and not for lack of searching. It's possible they kept the deal really quiet, since since turning parks into parking is rarely a popular move. It's also possible the database search feature is missing links here and there, which I already had grounds to suspect. At some point in the 80s or 90s, I'm almost positive there was an article about city workers coming to look for Madrona Park & not being able to find it, and realizing the part they were looking for was under a parking lot. It would have been easier to lose track of a park back then, in an era of paper records & no GIS systems. I could have sworn the article was about Madrona Park, but no such article shows up in search results no matter how I query for it, so either the search feature's broken or I'm broken, either of which is possible.

By 1968 the hospital wanted to expand further and offered to buy the whole park outright for $33,000. The city turned them down this time, admitting the park was lightly used but was part of the plan for a "Willamette Crest Greenway" connecting Overlook Park to the University of Portland. Most of this land is in public hands now, but it's been 50 years and the proposed greenway hasn't quite happened yet. It still sounds like a good idea, though.

The hospital closed in the late 1990s, and the campus was bought by Adidas in 1999 to be rebuilt as their new North America headquarters. It seems strange now, but less than 20 years ago the paper described the surrounding neighborhood as "struggling". I was about to say this was recent, because 1999 doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I suppose it kind of was. The city's lease arrangement continued with the new neighbors, though the parking lot became basketball courts and a playground, and apparently there is or was a skate park somewhere in the area too.

Which brings us to the present day, and now you know the complete history of yet another weird and unimportant place in Portland, or at least you know a few random anecdotes about it. Plus there's a chance you can now tell your fancy rich friends that they live on garbage, which is always great.

Multnomah Creek Railroad Bridge

Ok, it's time for another installment in the ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project. This is the one where I take photos of bridges around the Gorge while confused tourists stare at me because an amazing waterfall is right over there behind me and I'm taking photos of an ugly old bridge. Sometimes they bump into me because they're too busy staring at the waterfall. This happens a lot around Multnomah Falls; not only are there hordes of tourists to perplex, but there's a bunch, ok, a batch, of bridges there, and the best spots to take photos of most of them put you right in the way of literally everyone else on Earth, or so it seems. So we've already visited the famous Benson Bridge up by the falls, and the historic highway bridge next to the lodge, and the equally historic (but unloved) viaducts on the highway just east and west of the falls. And we still aren't done; this time we're looking at the 1907 Union Pacific railroad bridge just downstream from the old highway bridge.

The railroad bridge's one semi-notable feature is the wooden sign that gives rail distances to various cities from this point: Going east it's 173 miles to Pendleton, 305 to Spokane, 393 to Boise, while westbound it's 35 to Portland, 177 to Tacoma, 210 to Seattle. If I ran the railroad (which I don't), I would've at least mentioned that this is also a very old rail line, built in 1879-1882 as part of the nation's third transcontinental railroad. Basic math tells us that if the railroad's older than the bridge, there must have been an earlier bridge here. I've never seen any info about the original, but I'm sort of guessing it was your basic wood trestle sort of thing, maybe built in a rush to get the railroad up and running, and it needed replacing after a few decades of Gorge winters. I see that the current railroad bridge on the Sandy River dates to around the same time as this one (1906), so maybe there was a wider project to go back through and modernize the rail line, or it's just that the original bridges all wore out about the same time.

The library's old newspaper database didn't have much to say about this bridge here, which is why I had to guess a lot in the last paragraph. I only came across one semi-interesting bit of trivia connected to the bridge, and it's of a bit more recent vintage: A 1970 Oregonian article about recent improvements at the falls mentions that at one point there were floodlights next to the railroad bridge which illuminated the falls at night. The article says the wiring for the lights was destroyed by a storm in January 1969 when a "glacier" of ice filled the creek from the river all the way to the falls, at one point forming an ice layer up to 40 feet thick & 60 feet wide, damaging the nearby lodge. The state hoped to put the floodlights back into operation before long, but I couldn't find any subsequent mention of the floodlights being restored, and the falls aren't lit at night now, and have never been lit as far back as I can recall, and an image search for "multnomah falls at night" comes back with some artsy long exposure photos but no lights, so I'm sort of guessing the restoration never happened.

Instagram cat photos of 2017

Taz says hi #cat #neko #catsofinstagram

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0) on Jul 7, 2017 at 5:45pm PDT

A recent tradition I've come up with here is that the last post of the year is always a bunch of cat photos. This year I took a lot of cat photos but somehow only posted two to Instagram, so this is a shorter post than usual, but I think they make up for quantity with quality, especially the top one.

#catsofinstagram

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0) on May 20, 2017 at 8:38pm PDT

twelve

So it turns out that today is this humble blog's twelfth birthday. For good or ill, it's finally old enough to get shoved into a junior high locker by larger, cooler blogs. Ten years seemed like a milestone, and nine seemed sorta-milestonesque for some reason, but twelve just seems like it's been around forever. A couple of observations on yet another anniversary:

• I barely got anything done here this year. 2017 will have -- by far -- the fewest blog posts of any year so far, unless I go on an unprecedented binge in the next week and a half. I've done "keepalive" posts repeatedly just to keep the tradition of at least one post per month going. In those I usually lay out reasons why I don't seem to have any time for this stuff anymore, work responsibilities & an open source project usually being the leading culprits. I'm not sure that's entirely it, though. I've repeatedly found myself opening up Blogger, pulling up a draft post & poking at it for a while, and thinking "Ugh, this is too hard". I don't know if this counts as actual writer's block, or it's just that I did all the easy posts first and I'm left with a collection of posts that need a lot of research and wordsmithing. It's possible I may just start deleting stuff that doesn't look interesting enough to be worth finishing, I dunno.
• Another reason, certainly, is that 2017 was not a normal year. I spend far too much internet time staring at the latest horrors out of Washington DC. I usually grab my phone first thing every morning to check Twitter and see what Bigly Brother is ranting about now, and generally figure out what's gone from bad to worse while I was asleep. In the very first post here, I called then-president Dubya a "drooling idiot". Twelve years later, he's been replaced by someone far worse, which I would not have believed was even possible back then. I mean, 45 hasn't lied us into a war yet, or cratered the national economy, so Dubya's still the worse president of the two, at least so far. But 45 is likely the worst human being to ever hold the office, and he has plenty of time to pass Bush in the worst president category.

In any case, I have a couple of relevant todo items for next year, which I prefer not to jinx by calling them resolutions. The big one is to spend less time on social media, since it generally doesn't lead to increased happiness, and retweeting the latest awfulness does very little to stop it. Second item is to use at least some of that time here instead. A year ago or so I wrote down an item for 2017 to figure out what I wanted to do about this humble blog going forward. I thought about it for a while & realized I didn't want to stop doing this, but didn't manage to actually do much of it last year. So next year I'll try to make the time. I'd like to wake up on January 1st 2019 with an empty drafts folder, and never again complain about having a pile of unfinished posts, but based on how the last year went I'm only going to call that a stretch goal.

Anyway, happy blogoversary & assorted other holidays.

Anchor Monument, Kelley Point

When a blog post lies around in Drafts for ages, it isn't always because I'm too busy, or I'm procrastinating, or just lazy, or what have you. Sometimes it's because, try as I might, I'm unable to find any useful information about the subject of the post. Several years ago I did a post about North Portland's Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia. At the far tip of the point you'll find the anchor shown above; it's either an old but real anchor or a sculpture of an anchor, and I don't know which because there wasn't a sign or a label or any indication of who made it or who put it there, much less why. The usual practice here is that public art gets its own blog post, apart from the one about the park it's in, so I duly created a draft post for the anchor. But all these years later I still don't know anything about it, and it's not for lack of searching.

My one and only hypothesis goes something like this: The park was originally created in 1973 by the Port of Portland, after dumping a bunch of soil there from a dredging project. I bet the anchor dates to around that time, before the city took it over in 1984. I bet they just sort of thought the tip of the point deserved something decorative, and an anchor was the obvious choice for a park owned by the local port district. Maybe they just made the anchor in house & didn't really think of it as fancy public art, which would explain why it's not in any of the usual inventory databases. They may not have even kept records about it. That's just a hypothesis, mind you. If I ever find out what the deal is, I'll update the post, though I wouldn't hold my breath waiting around for that if I were you. And as always, feel free to leave a note here if you know anything more about it.

Tunnel Point

Ok, next up we're visiting Tunnel Point, a little scenic viewpoint on I-84 at the west end of the Columbia Gorge. It's only accessible to westbound traffic, so I've driven past it countless times on my way home to Portland from somewhere else. It just never seemed compelling enough to stop for, until I realized I'd never been there, and then it became a must-do. There's an interesting view of the Gorge from here, plus a navigational light, a railroad tunnel on the far side of the freeway (thus the name "Tunnel Point"), and an old historical marker that explains this is roughly the furthest point upriver that the George Vancouver expedition got to back in 1792. There aren't any trails starting here, so there's not much of a reason to stick around once you've taken in the view. Still, there's some interesting (at least to me) history here that that the marker doesn't mention.

Before the freeway went in, Tunnel Point was a huge rock formation jutting out into the river. Two photos shared by the Oregon State Archives show what it used to look like before it was deemed to be in the way of progress. Or more precisely, it was right in the way of a modern new highway route that became I-84. So the whole rock was dynamited and quarried and hauled away as building material for the new road. I'd never heard of this before and it isn't obvious (to me, a non-geologist) that the cliff face across the freeway is a recent creation. So I was skeptical at first. If you look at the area in Google Maps with terrain view enabled, though, it becomes clear that the landscape here isn't quite natural.

An odd thing about the original Columbia River Highway is that although it was a marvel of early 20th century engineering, it was also obsolete essentially from the day it opened. As the only paved road heading east out of Portland, it was quickly choked with traffic, and the road's twists and turns made it a white knuckle experience, not the relaxing scenic drive it was meant to be. Less than twenty years after it opened, Portland civic boosters were already calling for rerouting and modernizing the road. A May 5th 1935 Oregonian article explained the many benefits of a water-level route for what was then called the Bonneville Highway, in honor of the new dam. Costs were initially estimated at just under $5 million.

An April 4th 1937 article gushed about the proposed new water-grade highway route, and this time featured several sketches of what the modern highway of the future would look like. These generally resemble what was actually built, but the initial 1937 plan would have put a deep, narrow road cut through Tunnel Point rather than leveling it entirely. I haven't located a record of exactly when or why the plan changed, but it probably had to do with switching to a four lane design, or realizing the original road cut design was a recipe for near-constant rockslides. At this point the price tag had risen to $12 million.

Construction began in 1938, but was suspended in 1942, presumably due to World War II. So for the next five years, visitors to the Gorge were treated to the sight of a half-finished, semi-abandoned highway to nowhere. Construction finally resumed in 1947, and a October 5th 1947 article reminded the public that the new(ish) highway was going to be really great, and the state really was going to see it through to completion this time, honest. The article includes several photos, including one looking west from Crown Point in which you can still see Tunnel Point before it was completely leveled. (Though an October 1941 article mentioned that Tunnel Point quarrying was already in progress at that time.) This article did not mention a price tag.

The first new segment of the highway opened to the public in 1949. In an August 7th 1949 article, the Oregonian explained that the shiny new highway really was as great as promised, and tried to reassure concerned readers that the new road still offered scenic vistas and had not ruined the Gorge as feared. In fact, the article explained, a couple of new vistas had been created, including the Tunnel Point viewpoint. In total, around 150,000 cubic yards of rock were excavated from Tunnel Point to make it what it is today.

The navigational light was a later addition. It was built in 1965 to replace lights further upriver at Rooster Rock, which had been destroyed by the winter floods of 1964.

Gorton Creek Bridge

While I was visiting Gorton Creek Falls (which we saw in the previous post) I took a quick peek at the small, circa-1919 Gorton Creek Bridge nearby. One of my numerous ongoing projects here involves tracking down old bridges from the original Columbia River Highway, and this is yet another of them, albeit maybe not one of the crown jewels. Still, the project wouldn't be complete without finding it, so here we are.

As I mentioned in a post about the Shepperds Dell Bridge a while back, the state highway commission had around 4 bridge designers working on different parts of the highway. This one was designed by Lewis W. Metzger, who's also credited with the nice little arch bridge at Eagle Creek, and a larger one at Moffett Creek that I haven't gotten around to posting about yet, plus a few others I haven't visited, and a couple that no longer exist, like one in Hood River that was demolished & replaced in 1982.

The highway commission biennial report for 1916-1917 mentioned that this bridge was budgeted at $2500, which is about $53,600 in today's dollars. Which seems pretty cheap for a concrete bridge that's held up for nearly a century. (The most expensive item on the list was $250,000 for the now-replaced Center Street Bridge in Salem. Metzger worked on that bridge too, so I imagine the Gorton Creek project was a bit of an afterthought.)

A downside of building a no-frills bridge is that it was made just wide enough for early 20th century cars, and it lacks sidewalks. In practice this isn't a huge problem, as this stretch of ex-highway is lightly traveled and the bridge is short so you can just wait & walk across when nobody's coming. On the other hand, ODOT is in the middle of their big-budget Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail project, which aims to create a shiny new bike-friendly, tourist-friendly route from Portland out to the Dalles or so. This bridge is on the route, but ODOT felt it wasn't up to the job, bike-wise, so in 2015 they started looking at adding a new bike/pedestrian bridge next to the current bridge. Construction was targeted at fall 2016, but eventually began in August 2017, and it's not clear now whether they're adding a bike-only bridge in parallel, or replacing the whole thing. If it's the latter, it wouldn't be a major loss in terms of sheer beauty or historic preservation, let's be honest here. In any case, the latest project newsletter indicates construction is ongoing, so evidently this area wasn't heavily impacted by the Eagle Creek Fire.

Gorton Creek Falls

I was taking another wary glance at my vast Drafts folder and realized I had a number of unfinished posts about places around the Columbia River Gorge. I feel like I ought to finish them up now, as a small record of what the Gorge was like before the Eagle Creek Fire.

So first up are some photos of Gorton Creek Falls, in the Wyeth area east of Cascade Locks. I took these in July 2015; it was the first time I'd ever been to this particular waterfall, so I went by the OregonHikers.org description of the hike, and instructions on how to find the trailhead. (Note there's also a remote & difficult Gorton Creek Trail that goes nowhere near the falls, so it's best not to confuse the two hikes.) The one thing to watch out for is an intersection with the east-west Gorge Trail not far into the hike. There are signs for various trails heading off to the left and right at this point, but the trail going straight ahead is unmarked for some reason. The unmarked trail is the one to the waterfall. It starts out as a nice well-maintained trail, but before long you'll be clambering over rocks and tree roots as you make your way upstream to the falls. It's sort of the same category as Oneonta Gorge that way, except that you don't absolutely have to wade through the creek. I made it without getting my feet wet, but this was in late July during a dry summer, and your mileage may vary. It was kind of fun, and the falls were worth the effort. I didn't say as long as I'd have liked to, though, because a sign at the parking lot said a Northwest Forest Pass was required, and I couldn't figure out where to pay my $5, so I kind of rolled the dice and hoped I could get out & back before they ticketed or towed me. Luckily that turned out ok, but again, your mileage may vary.

There's no such thing as an undiscovered hike in the Gorge anymore, but Gorton Creek was surprisingly uncrowded when I was there, probably just because it's just that much further from Portland than the more famous Gorge attractions. If this was located where Oneonta Gorge or even Eagle Creek is, it would probably be packed all summer.

Hoyt Arboretum

Here are a few photos I took over the summer (or so) at the Hoyt Arboretum, part of Portland's Washington Park. I wasn't really taking these photos for a blog post, so they don't cover everything that's there; it's more that I realized I could take a long lunch, hop on MAX to the Zoo stop, and go wander around in a forest for a bit, either while thinking intensely about work or trying to avoid doing so. I used to go to the Arboretum all the time as a kid, but it had sort of fallen off my radar & I hadn't been there in years. I actually ended up there back in May looking for House for Summer, an art installation in the park that had just celebrated its 30th anniversary. It was a bit hard to find, so I ended up wandering around the area more than I'd expected, and after I finally found it I ended up wandering a bit more, and I've been back a number of times since then. Some parts looked familiar from mumble-mumble years ago, other areas I'm fairly sure I'd never been to before. (Btw you'll see the art in a separate blog post, because them's the rules.)

One bit I had no recollection of was at the north end of the park, where the Wildwood Trail winds down to a scary crossing of W. Burnside St., which is not technically a freeway but it might as well be. I suppose my mom was afraid we'd try to run across the busy street, or more likely she would totally have done it herself but didn't think my siblings & I were fast enough to keep up. So I got to the crossing, saw the cars whizzing by, and immediately noped out. So (as far as I know) I still haven't ever been on the portion of trail on the other side of Burnside. The crossing isn't safe here, and there aren't any sidewalks on either side of the street that would let you get to a crossing somewhere else, the bus doesn't stop here, and there's only a parking lot on the south side of Burnside if you feel like driving -- so you'd still have to run across the street. The trail continues north (and steeply uphill) to the Pittock Mansion, and then back downhill to NW Cornell & Macleay Park, so you could drive to either place (since Trimet doesn't serve either one) and do an out-and-back hike from there. Can't really do that on a long lunch break from the office, unfortunately. This is all about to change, though; a fundraising campaign just finished raising money to build a footbridge over Burnside to connect the trail in a less scary way. So I think I'll go ahead & wait for the bridge to go in next year. And yes, once it goes in there's bound to be a bridge blog post about it sooner or later. Though the way my drafts folder looks, I can't make any guarantees about when, exactly.

eclipse

So I woke up at 4am this morning and drove down to Molalla to watch today's solar eclipse in a minimall parking lot, between a 24 hour McDonalds and the local Safeway. I figured the scenery on the ground doesn't matter with eclipses, and a shorter drive there means a less tedious drive back, which turned out to be true. I missed the February 1979 eclipse here thanks to Oregon's usual February weather, which was quite disappointing since I'd basically memorized the big book of eclipses I'd been given a few months earlier. I could have bored you to tears talking about Saros cycles and Baily's beads and whatnot, and then I would've been sad that yet another grownup didn't share my enthusiasm. Anyway, I was fairly determined not to miss out this time. The one thing that didn't cooperate was my clunky old DSLR, which decided to somehow drain its battery down to zero on the drive down. So all I've got are phone photos, although several of them turned out ok. In truth, though, even the most perfect images from the world's most accomplished eclipse photographers don't really capture the experience. I think I may have said something similar about rocket launches a few years ago, and it's probably also true of auroras (though I haven't experienced that in person yet). If you ever have a chance to see a solar eclipse in person, you really should do it, and then you'll be able say this to other people. (Incidentally, today I wore my t-shirt from the last rocket launch I went to, because moon. Nobody asked me about it, because Oregon.)

The photoset includes a few photos from totality; none of them are going to make the cover of National Geographic anytime soon, but I would've felt bad if I hadn't at least tried. Molalla had just over a minute of totality, so there was just enough time to marvel at it, scramble to take a few photos, marvel at it again, and hurry to put the eclipse glasses back on to avoid going blind. If I could do today over again, I might have gone somewhere further south with longer totality, since a minute-and-change was not nearly long enough. Since I don't get a do-over on this one, I suppose I'll just have to go travel the world and see more eclipses.

Also included are a whole bunch of partial phase photos, since the partial phase seems fascinating until you see the total phase, and then you realize it's very much a secondary attraction. The parking lot had rows of leafy generic parking lot trees, so I got a few decent photos of the bizarre crescent shadows you see during the partial phase, created by images of the crescent sun peeking between the leaves. These were much stranger than I'd expected, and I felt compelled to point them out to people nearby & explain what was going on. I suppose once you've worked in a science museum, you never really and truly stop, even if it was 20 years ago.

There's also a short video of shadow bands racing across the parking lot just before totality. As far as I know this phenomenon is still not entirely explained; it's thought that it's an atmospheric effect, since it's different each time and sometimes isn't observed at all. I only saw it prior to the eclipse and not afterward, though I only looked for it briefly as people began driving home the moment totality ended and I didn't want to be roadkill before I could even tweet any photos out. Oh, and toward the bottom of this post there's also a video of the goofy animated cowboy outside McDonalds, at the intersection of state highways 211 & 213, which exists because Molalla is an old-timey rootin' tootin' Western rodeo town & don't you forget it.

A few things I didn't see, or saw but didn't manage to capture here:

• I'd meant to look for the four planets clustered around the sun, including Mercury, which I don't think I've ever seen. I was too busy looking at the sun to remember to look for planets, so maybe next time.
• Prior to the eclipse there were the usual little brown birds hanging around, chirping and looking for discarded fries or bits of McNugget. (Note: I am not a birdwatcher.) They seemed to get quieter as the eclipse approached, but I don't really recall whether I heard any during totality or not.
• I also didn't look at the horizon; you're supposed to get a brief 360 degree sunset effect, but again I was too busy looking at the sun to notice.
• Also no photos of Baily's beads or the diamond ring effect, because those are very brief phenomena and I just didn't time it right. This probably requires more eclipse photo experience, and possibly better (and more cooperative) gear than I had today.
• I do have photos of the parking lot & crowds watching the eclipse, but these don't capture the strange light during the partial phase, I suppose because the camera wants to auto correct for the low light situation. It's not like during a sunset. There's no golden hour, and no long shadows. Things just get progressively dimmer and greyer, until the great sky monster finally eats the sun, and civilization collapses. I was going to say the effect is like the dimness from a distant forest fire, but that's not really true either, since it's also not hazy at all. It's more like an underexposed photo happening in real life, which is more or less what's actually going on.
• The temperature dropped significantly on the runup to totality, and I put on a hoodie for a while. If you really want the full effect, I suppose you could simulate this by cranking up your AC while looking at these photos. This was the only weather effect I noticed, no sudden wind or absence of wind.

One more thing -- for comparison, at the bottom of this post I've embedded a photo I took of the transit of Venus back in 2012, which I unfortunately took with a crappy Blackberry camera. The transit had just begun so the planet's near the edge of the sun, toward the bottom of the photo. Transits of Venus are less impressive than solar eclipses, but much, much rarer, and I feel fortunate to have seen one. I dusted off my old sun-watching glasses from 2012 today to use as a phone camera filter. So keep those glasses around, kids: The next solar eclipse is in July 2019 in Argentina & Chile (assuming the winter weather cooperates), and then in November of the same year there's a transit of Mercury visible in the same region. (Those aren't quite as rare as transits of Venus, but I've never seen one.) The next eclipse in North America isn't until April 2024, and it makes a diagonal stripe from Texas up across the Great Lakes and over to Newfoundland. So that might be an excuse to go back to Cleveland, or maybe watch the eclipse at Niagara Falls, again assuming the weather cooperates.

howdy pardner

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0) on Aug 21, 2017 at 6:10am PDT

My not-overly-fabulous transit of Venus photo from 5 years ago, taken with a Blackberry. pic.twitter.com/VPJoSmLcU1

— brx0 (@brx0) June 5, 2017

West Multnomah Viaduct

The previous bridge post went on about the historic circa-1914 viaduct on the Columbia River Highway east of Multnomah Falls. I mentioned then that there was another similar viaduct just west of the falls, and a reasonably alert reader might have guessed that a post about it was coming, because when I'm doing stuff for the sake of completeness, I can't just do one of the two and leave it at that. It just wouldn't be right, you know?

In any case, the west viaduct is basically the same as the east one, but at 400' it's only half as long, and it's harder to get decent photos of the west one due to trees. On the semi-positive side, the photoset does have a couple of pics taken from on the viaduct, which I was able to do thanks to being stuck in Multnomah Falls traffic. Anyway, here are a few links about the west viaduct from across the interwebs:

• ODOT historic bridge inventory
• 'Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway' page
• Bridgehunter page
• A historic photo at the Oregon State Archives
• Historic American Engineering Record page at the Library of Congress

East Multnomah Viaduct

The next stop on the Columbia Gorge bridge project is not exactly a bridge; the old Columbia River Highway travels on raised viaducts for a few hundred feet on either side of Multnomah Falls, for the simple reason that there was nowhere else to put a road back then, as the only bit of flat ground was already taken up by the railroad line. (The area where I-84 runs now was filled in much later, and was just river or wetland a century ago). Like most bridges on this stretch of highway, the viaducts were designed by K.P. Billner, who wrote about them in a 1915 article:

Two long concrete viaducts, which stand against the hillside like steps, solved the problems existing near Multnomah Falls. Here the Oregon-Washington Railway & Navigation Co.’s road occupied all of the available space along the river. The cost of excavating a 24-ft. roadway along this railroad, and of carrying the excavated material across the track to the river, was practically prohibitive. Figure is a view of the 860-ft. viaduct located east of Multnomah Falls. The West Multnomah Viaduct is similar to that shown in Fig. 6. In the West Multnomah Viaduct, however, the the railing extends along the masonry retaining wall.

The roadways of these viaducts are carried on two parallel lines of columns spaced 17 ft. 6 ins. on centers. The longitudinal spacing of these columns is 20 ft. As protection agains possible settlement of the upper columns, inclined struts, following the slope of the hill, are placed between the upper and lower columns, these struts being capable of carrying the weight of the structure. A railing, consisting of cement mortar on metal lath reinforcement, is placed along the railroad side only (see Fig 6.).

A page about the east viaduct at Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway includes a few vintage photos, and notes that the east viaduct cost $22,520.83 in 1915 dollars, making it the second most expensive structure on the highway, second only to the Latourell Creek bridge. The east viaduct also has a BridgeHunter page, and the Library of Congress has a Historic American Engineering Record entry for it with a few old photos, which are mostly interesting because they're taken from angles you physically can't get to anymore, unless you feel like standing in the middle of eastbound I-84. Legal says I have to remind people not to do that, btw. The photos you see here were taken from the far eastern tip of the I-84 Multnomah Falls parking lot/rest area, which I think is probably the only way you can see underneath the structure now without being in a moving vehicle.

Given all that went into creating the Multnomah viaducts, it's a shame they're contenders for everyone's least favorite part of the old highway. They were engineering marvels of the Model T era, but they weren't designed with wider vehicles in mind, and it seems like there's always a giant RV with extra-wide side mirrors heading the other direction whenever you drive across one of the viaducts. In the last 10 years or so, it's also become rather likely you'll be stuck in a huge traffic jam all the way through the Multnomah Falls area, which doesn't really enhance the viaduct experience either. Widening the road is probably out; the viaducts are protected historic structures, and even if they weren't the rail line is still right next door & there's nowhere to put a wider road. I suspect that at some point they'll have to ban private vehicles along this part of the road, at least during high tourist season, and only allow shuttle buses along the road, sort of like what the National Park Service ended up doing in Yosemite National Park. This won't happen anytime soon, but in the longer term it seems inevitable to me. Then the shuttle drivers can tell their passengers the scary narrow part is coming up, and people can wave at the shuttle going the other direction, just inches away, and it'll just be another fun part of the show.

Multnomah Creek Bridge

Next up, here are a few photos of the historic 1914 highway bridge at Multnomah Falls. (Did I mention there's an ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project? Because there is.) The comprehensive Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon (1989) describes the bridge thusly (via ColumbiaRiverHighway.com):

The Multnomah Creek Bridge, near the 620-foot drop of Multnomah Falls, is a noteworthy short-span arch and is a significant component of the old Columbia River Highway. This reinforced concrete deck arch is 67 feet in length .The barrel arch has solid spandrel walls and is 40 feet in length. The bridge was designed by K.P. Billner under the supervision of C.H. Purcell, State Bridge Engineer, and S.C. Lancaster, Assistant State Highway Engineer. It was constructed [in 1914] by the Pacific Bridge Company of Portland.

Smith, Dwight A., James B. Norman, and Pieter T. Dykman. Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon. Portland, Or: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1989, page 143.

It's not the biggest or most innovative of the old highway's bridges; a 1915 Engineering and Contracting article by Billner describes various bridges along the highway and the engineering challenges they addressed, and the Multnomah Creek bridge only merited a brief mention: "Figure 7 shows two bridges of the arch type at Multnomah Falls. This view also shows the falls, which is one of the scenic attractions along the highway.". The other of the two arch bridges is the famous Benson Bridge between the upper and lower falls, so I gather the key design feature here is that the two bridges were meant to form a harmonious pair. Most of Billner's article is devoted to his bridge at Latourell Creek, and my post about that bridge has a bit more background on Billner (who still doesn't have his own Wikipedia bio, somehow).

Elsewhere around the interwebs, the bridge also has the usual Structurae and Bridgehunter pages, and the Library of Congress has a couple of vintage photos of it. And of course there are lots of other photos of it around the interwebs. The waterfall is obviously the main event here, but seeing as it gets multiple millions of visitors per year, a few of them are bound to take an interest in the old arched bridge they pass on their way to the gift shop. The bridge also gets a mention in a recent ODOT presentation about mathematical buckling analysis of arch bridges. It has a section on "Common Arch Bridge Types", and cites a few Oregon bridges for each type, since ODOT has lots of arch bridges and I gather they're rather proud of them. I dunno, I think stuff like this is interesting even if I don't completely understand it.

Questions for Humans: Dreams Wall

Next mural on the ongoing tour is Questions for Humans: Dreams Wall, on an industrial building at SE 10th & Salmon. This was created in 2015 by artist Gary Hirsch, and is one of a series of four Questions for Humans murals scattered around inner SE Portland; we visited Curiosity Wall a while back, so I still have to find Joy Wall and Relationship Wall to complete the set. As with the last wall, I sort of disobeyed the instructions by just taking photos to blog about later (almost a year later, as it turns out), rather than posting a selfie of myself with the mural. Technically speaking the last photo in the photoset includes a reflective RACC sign about the mural, and you can kind of see a silhouette of my hand holding my phone. That's about as much selfie as you're ever likely to see here; it's just not my thing, I guess.

While poking around the RACC site, I realized the artist behind these murals also created Upstream Downtown, the goofy salmon panels on one of downtown Portland's ugly parking garages, which were painted wayyy back in 1992.

The Guardian

Next up, we're taking a look at The Guardian, the big tiger mural on Water Ave. between Yamhill & Belmont, at the east end of the Morrison Bridge. This was created in 2016 by artist Ernesto Maranje, as part of the same project as Under the Same Sky in downtown Portland. The RACC page for the mural describes what it's about, beyond just being a cool tiger:

This mural was created through the AptArt (Awareness & Prevention Through Art) “Paint Outside the Lines” campaign, a multi-wall mural project where trans-global artists are engaging with marginalized groups in the Portland community. Youth from p:ear worked with Ernesto Maranje on this mural with the goal of addressing the reality of growing economic gaps and the impact that divide has on all of society. As the wealth divide in the United States grows, so does the number of people made homeless. The youth painted their identity and things of importance into the shapes of flowers. A larger than life tiger stands guard above the flowers, protecting them as they develop and grow in a dreamy world. Next to the tiger a bird takes flight representing the potential all humans have when nurtured and protected. Elements of coral and sea life adorn the tiger, bird and flowers, highlighting the connection we all share regardless of where we come from or where we are going.

Under the Same Sky

Next up, we're looking at Under the Same Sky, a huge mural at SW 2nd & Stark, created in 2016 by artist Kevin Ledo with help from a local refugee & immigrant youth organization. The RACC page for it includes a short description:

This mural was created through the AptArt (Awareness & Prevention Through Art) “Paint Outside the Lines” campaign, a multi-wall mural project where trans-global artists are engaging with marginalized groups in the Portland community. Students from David Douglas High School and R.I.S.E. (Refugee & Immigrant Student Empowerment) worked with artist Kevin Ledo to create stencils and words in Arabic, Swahili, English and Somali about belonging and diversity that were applied to the mural.

Since its founding six years ago, AptArt has facilitated workshops and collaborative murals with communities living in conflict-affected areas, including Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Jordan. Portland is the first U.S. city to be a part of this effort. Artists Kevin Ledo, Ernesto Maranje, and Ruben Sanchez are painting murals at four sites in Downtown Portland and the Central Eastside Industrial District as part of the program, which takes place in 2016 and 2017.

Lucky Lab mural

A little mural inside the Lucky Lab brewpub on NW Quimby, with an arrow pointing toward the restrooms. I don't usually do indoor murals, but this one contained dogs and hops, plus I was headed to the restroom anyway, so I figured I might as well take a couple of photos. The hashtag above the signature in a few of the photos points to the creator's IG profile & website, minus the hash symbol obviously.

Arts Base murals

Here's are a few photos of the Arts Base murals on a former upholstery store at N. Williams Ave. & Wygant, as seen back in December 2014 when I took these photos and promptly forgot about them in the Drafts folder. A 2011 Portland Street Art piece explains that a group of artists & local residents rented the abandoned store, covered the outside in murals, and converted the inside to studio space. City Hall, on its usual quest to seek and destroy all unpermitted fun, declared the murals to be graffiti and ordered them painted over. Eventually the city relented somewhat and agreed the murals could stay, but the artists & their studios in the building had to go, because zoning. So the end result was a brightly painted and now re-abandoned building, at least as of December 2014 when I stopped by. Through the magic of Google Street View, I see that the same murals were still there in November 2015, but by June 2016 they'd been replaced by a much more sedate -- even tasteful -- yellow and grey geometric pattern. I can't help but think the swanky new townhouses across the street had something to do with the murals being toned down.

She Flies With Her Own Wings

The next mural we're visiting as part of our ongoing project is She Flies With Her Own Wings, in the Alameda neighborhood at NE Regents Dr., Ridgewood Dr., & Alameda St. This is another one with an RACC description:

The inspiration for this mural comes from the Oregon state motto—”She Flies With Her Own Wings”—and displays the state bird, insect, flower, tree, and fruit. The creation of the mural involved the participation of nearby kindergartners, their teachers and parents, and neighborhood volunteers.

I have gotten the distinct impression that every weird blog project of mine eventually requires a trip to Alameda. First there were a bunch of tiny not-quite-parks to visit, thanks to the neighborhood's winding streets and tangled intersections. Then there were some public stairs that needed a visit, which I didn't visit the first time because I wasn't doing stairs then. And now there's a mural, which I didn't visit the previous two times because I wasn't doing murals then. As far as I can recall, I think these are the only times I've been in the Alameda area in years, so if you happen to run into me there, it probably means the neighborhood has painted a local intersection, or they've somehow gotten themselves a new bridge or something.

I think I've said before that I don't claim to be a journalist, nor have I ever been accused of journalism. While I was taking these photos, a woman jogged by, saw I was taking photos, and told me she'd worked on painting the mural. A real journalist would have seen this as a great interview opportunity. I just said something to the effect of "Oh cool, I like it.", and she smiled and kept jogging. A real journalist would have headed back to the office, filed a Pulitzer-worthy story just before deadline, and headed off to a nearby dive bar where the bartender calls everyone "pal" or "mac". I created a draft post and then forgot about it for close to a year and a half, and the closest thing I'll ever have to an interview here is being recounted from memory. In short, if you're looking for examples of the groundbreaking internet journalism of the future, this is not the place to look, and I'm not the person to ask.