T'Sung

Today's stop in our mini-tour of Honolulu public art is T'Sung, on the pedestrian mall along Nu'uanu Stream, at the edge of Honolulu's Chinatown. It's a tall boxy structure with Chinese inscriptions around it; the overall effect was of a blend of traditional Chinese design and 1970s Logan's Run modernism. The city arts office describes it:

A Sculpture by Edward M. Brownlee. Five rectilinear slabs pierced by a massive column resting on a low horizontal base. Chinese calligraphy are inscribed into the surface, they translate as follows: one side "Forever Spring," another side "The eagle flies and reaches heaven; the fish leap in the deep," a third side "Myriad years of health and happiness," the last side "Within the four seas, all men are brothers." Each quote is from a separate historic Chinese poem. The River Street Mall borders both sides of the Nuuanu Stream and encompasses part of Chinatown. The sculpture reflects the history of the site, where immigrants from the Orient first entered Hawaii. Located at Sun Yat-Sen Mall.

It also gets a mention in an Esoteric Survey "Report from Honolulu". The post has lots of photos of interesting art and design stuff from all over the city, so it's definitely worth a look.

This stretch of the pedestrian mall includes quite a few picnic tables, and the tables near T'Sung have become a popular local gambling spot. There was a crowd of least several dozen people there, entirely male and Asian as far as I could tell, and I couldn't see what game they were playing. Hawaii is one of only two states with no legal gambling of any kind (the other being Utah), so I figured it would be considered rude to photograph the proceedings. This area is supposedly the rough part of town, and by Honolulu standards I imagine it is, but it's certainly no Old Town Portland, much less circa-1987 Philadelphia. Even aside from that, I had zero interest in being a mainland haole tourist who wanders around gawking at the exotic locals and their exotic folkways. I'm not that sort of photographer. Some would argue I'm no sort of photographer at all, but that's a discussion for some other day.

Shifting Assets

Some photos of Shifting Assets, a collection of both real and concrete rocks along the Springwater trail's Willamette River segment. I ran across these while tracking down the city's very obscure Riverside Park several years ago. I took a few photos but I wasn't really doing a public art project at the time, so I just filed them away.

Then last year I wrote posts about Portals and Eye River, a pair of recent public artworks located between the Hawthorne Bridge & OMSI. Both were by local artist Linda Wysong, and the (semi)-trusty RACC database mentioned she'd also created Shifting Assets. I vaguely remembered I had photos of it/them somewhere in iPhoto, and made a mental note to go dig them out. I finally got around to doing that, so here they are.

Shifting Assets has two RACC pages for some reason; both offer the same description:

This work consists of two "stopping places" along the trail. The rocks have been retrieved from the Willamette River and are glacial erratic from the Missoula Floods that occurred during the Pleistocene Age, two million years ago.

The sliced stones refer to the layers of time that are part of the area’s geology and history. The acrylic layers are metaphors for the natural environment. The cast concrete stones with layers of steel reflect the mix of natural and industrial influences in this section of the trail.

This isn't the only way to see glacial erratic rocks around here, obviously. In fact there's an Erratic Rock state park in the rural Willamette Valley that protects a very large example of the genre. I've never been there, although it's on my legendarily big todo list. I'm fairly sure there will be a blog post about it someday, at whatever point I finally get around to visiting. What I do have right now, Missoula Flood-wise, are posts about the spectacular Dry Falls and Sun Lakes area of Eastern Washington, where the floodwaters spilled over a 400 foot cliff, forming an enormous waterfall three miles wide. NE Portland's Alameda Ridge is far less spectacular, but apparently the ridge is an ancient gravel bar left over from the ice age floods. This likely precludes building a proper Batcave or Bond villain lair deep beneath the streets of Alameda, but hey.

Tree

When I visited the Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu, I noticed a small-ish abstract sculpture next to the garden's parking lot. I was there to take photos of trees, mostly, and this happened to be called Tree, so I snapped a couple of quick phone photos before heading in. The city arts office's page has a rather matter-of-fact description of it:

A Sculpture by Charles Watson. A square plate metal base supports a vertical trunk with rebar branches to which are attached cast forms. The sculpture is widest at the center, tapering at top and bottom. A square concrete pedestal accompanies the sculpture. Located at Foster Botanical Garden.

One thing I should point out is that this is a bit less abstract than it looks. As a Pacific Northwest native, I saw it and unconsciously assumed it was a purely abstract work, because real trees don't look like this. After wandering around the botanical garden I realized Tree sort of evoked some of the garden's more exotic tropical trees. (Go look at my slideshow in the botanical garden post if you don't believe me.) This is still an abstract sculpture, obviously, but it makes sense here in a way it wouldn't if you picked it up and moved it to New York or Portland or somewhere else.

Seasonal Waterfall, Columbia Gorge

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I was browsing through some old Columbia Gorge photos and remembered I had a few of the little waterfall you see here. It's a seasonal (and as far as I know, nameless) waterfall just east of the Shepperds Dell area. It's right next to the Gorge Highway so it's hard to miss when it's flowing, which is probably just in the winter and early spring. There's a large but unsigned parking lot on the north side of the highway a short walk to the east, which is where I parked when I took these photos. The stream flows into a culvert under the road, and there's a sort of vertical metal grate at the opening, I guess to keep rocks out of it. Look for the grate shown in these photos; if you see it and there's no waterfall, it's gone dry and you'll just have to come back in a few months. Alternately look for GPS coordinates 45.541525, -122.204661. It's not exactly at the watefall, but it's between the parking lot and the waterfall. I think it was the closest spot my old Blackberry's wimpy GPS could get a fix. The falls themselves are on street view here.

These photos are from 2011, I should point out. I drove by back in December and the falls were dry, because until the last month or so it's been an exceptionally dry (albeit cold) winter. Dalton Falls was dry too, and it usually always runs in the winter. So this waterfall might be running right now, but then again it might not, so don't take that as a legally binding promise. I suppose it all depends on exactly when you're reading this, doesn't it?

Updated 1/9/2021: When the Gorge has one of its (increasingly rare) cold snaps and seasonal waterfalls start freezing, this spot becomes an ice climbing spot called "Water Heater", so named because of a very old tank of some sort right at the base of the falls. You can actually see the tank in some of the photos in this set, it turns out, though I hadn't noticed it was there until just now. I was about to suggest calling this spot "Water Heater Falls" during the times it's running and not frozen, but Google Maps now says there's a "Huerta Falls" either right here or on one of the immediately adjacent streams. I have never heard that name before and it looks like there's absolutely nothing else about it on the net besides that one placemark. It doesn't even have any Google reviews attached to it, so it's possible some random internet person added it to the map quite recently. User-added items like that don't always stick around on a long-term basis, so if that link doesn't work for you that may be why.

Skygate

I was riding along on a Honolulu city bus when I noticed an huge black pipe construction in a park along King St., just down the street from city hall. I snapped a couple of quick photos, and eventually figured out what it was after a bit of google-fu. This is Skygate, a 1975 sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, who is probably best known for designing the iconic midcentury Noguchi table. The city arts page for it has a brief description:

An abstract nonrepresentational steel sculpture composed of three equidistant straight steel pipe legs connected at the top by a horizontal undulating tubular form. The steel of the sculpture is painted black overall. At groundlevel at the center, the space is defined by a stepped two-part circular concrete platform. Located at the Honolulu Civic Center.

What this description doesn't tell you is that Skygate also figures in a fun astronomical phenomenon. You may have heard of New York City's "Manhattanhenge", the twice-yearly event in which the setting sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid. In Hawaii's twice-yearly Lahaina Noon, the midday sun appears exactly overhead, such that a flagpole (or a person) casts no shadow. At this time, Skygate casts a shadow directly beneath itself, forming a perfect ring on the concrete circle below. This typically happens in May and again in July. I was there in September, though, so I couldn't have seen it even if a.) I'd gotten off the bus, and b.) I'd known about this phenomenon when I was over there. I mean, this isn't exactly the Map Room scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark; you'll get a roughly similar shadow any time of year, it just won't be perfectly circular or aligned with the concrete disc beneath. So it's admittedly less spectacular than the movie, but you also don't need to go to Nepal first to fetch the headpiece of the Staff of Ra before Hitler's minions find it. So there's that.

A 2008 Honolulu Magazine story has a photo of Skygate at Lahaina Noon, and a July 2005 Star-Bulletin article includes a photo with the ring a bit off-center, probably from a few days to one side of a Lahaina Noon. I also ran across someone's pinhole camera photos of a Lahaina Noon in May 2010; the photos demonstrate that the shadow is circular even though the center ring of the sculpture itself is sort of triangular. The third photo includes the city's then-mayor photobombing the shot.

An article at DesignIntelligence points out that Noguchi was an associate of Buckminster Fuller, who had created an early (and now demolished) geodesic dome for the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki.

Wisely, Bucky and his associates on geodesic dome structures (sculptor Isamu Noguchi and structural engineer Shoji Sadao) decided to create a very special unprecedented work-of-sculpture for the landscaped oasis surrounding state and city government buildings. It symbolically resembles one unpaneled hexagonal spine structural system within a typical geodesic dome that was planted in the mid-‘70s. On an AIA Honolulu city walking tour, I spent more than 20 minutes at Noguchi”s “Skygate” with a group of perceptive and knowledgeable chemical and bio-phys-chemical engineers who were vitally interested in the geometrical assemblage and fascinated with its imagineering, macromolecular architectural form and content.

A 2012 Durability+Design article about art conservation efforts on Skygate claims it has "astrological" significance, and asserts that the sculpture is the only place in the US where the sun ever stands directly overhead. This is not actually true; Lahaina Noon happens all over the inhabited Hawaiian islands, though the dates vary by a few days from location to location. The US mainland is too far north to ever have the sun directly overhead, however. In sort of the same vein, a few years ago a local contemporary dance company performed a piece beneath Skygate, and the description goes on about the sculpture's "sacred geometry", whatever that is. It's a cool and interesting design, and personally I don't see how dreaming up supernatural mumbo jumbo about it really adds anything of value. Although I did find a vintage photo of Vincent Price posing next to Skygate, believe it or not. A celebrity endorsement like that has got to be worth some serious mystical street cred.

Art Wall, Tanner Springs

I've already done quite a few posts about Tanner Springs Park, such that I have a blog tag devoted to it. Initially I didn't like the place at all, and snarked about it endlessly. I may have rushed to judgment slightly though; in recent years it's begun to grow into its role as an urban nature area. I mean, apart from the pond, which still has trouble with algae and introduced goldfish. The latter seem to attract herons though, so even that part counts as a sort of ecosystem. After looking over those old posts I realized I've never done one specifically about the art portion of the park, the recycled rail and fused glass wall along on the east side of the park. I figured it merited a separate treatment, given the ongoing public art project I've been so big on lately. So the rusty rail wall is called Art Wall, by Herbert Dreiseitl, whose firm designed the park as a whole. Its RACC page says:

The concept of the Artwall integrates the concept of the park itself. In one urban block the skin of city is peeled back to reveal the landscape before its industrial development. The wall is an element which thrives on the polarity between the site’s industrial past and the purity of its new nature. It is composed of 368 railroad tracks set on end and integrates 99 pieces of fused glass inset with images of dragonflies, spiders, amphibians and insects, like animals captured in amber—creatures of times and habitats long gone. The images were hand-painted by Herbert Dreiseitl directly onto Portland glass, which was then fused and melted to achieve the final effect.

If we want to nitpick, it looks like the city's been calling it "Artwall", while the Dreiseitl firm seems to call it "Art Wall"; I tend to go with the designer's name when sources disagree.

Assorted artsy links about the Artwall, and the park in general:

• Art on File
• Landezine – Society for Promotion of Landscape Architecture
• Forecast Public Art
• Atelier Dreiseitl

Sandwich Isle

When I was at Honolulu's Foster Botanic Garden a few months ago, I was wandering around looking for the local baobab tree when I ran across Sandwich Isle, a 1970s sculpture tucked away in a far corner of the garden. It was raining pretty heavily so I only got a pair of photos, but I figured I had enough material for a short blog post. The Honolulu arts office's page for Sandwich Isle is on the terse side: "A Sculpture by Bob Flint. Ceramic sculpture of five curvilinear forms of assembled ceramic pieces, terracotta on concrete bases. Located at the Foster Botanical Garden Economic Garden."

The artist's Wikipedia bio mentions that he originally moved to Hawaii in 1960 for the surfing. Maybe I've watched The Endless Summer one too many times, but that seems like one of the cooler ways to end up in Hawaii.

Goose Hollow Goose

Portland's Kings Hill MAX station (around SW 18th & Salmon) includes a roughly life size statue of a goose. Because this is part of the Goose Hollow neighborhood, therefore geese. TriMet's art guide for the MAX Blue Line just says "A bronze goose by Rip Caswell was commissioned by the neighborhood association". Which is TriMet's polite way of saying the goose wasn't their idea. As I recall, the whole Kings Hill stop wasn't exactly TriMet's idea; the original plan for the westside Blue Line had a stop at the stadium, and a stop at 18th & Jefferson, and nothing in between. But richer heads prevailed, and the final design also included this new stop next to the swanky Multnomah Athletic Club. And then there was a fundraising drive for the goose, and donors got their names semi-immortalized in bricks at the MAX station. I'm going to guess that these donations came via some sort of high society fundraising gala, dutifully reported on by the Oregonian's society page, because that's how rich person projects always work here.

If the artist's name sounds familiar, it might be because he also created Strength of America, the weird little 9/11 memorial at SW 35th & Belmont. I'm not really a fan of that 9/11 whatzit, but this goose is ok. It's anatomically accurate, at least. I'm not sure what to say about it really. It's certainly 100% less homicidal than actual geese, so there's that. The goose is officially titled Goose Hollow and it seems you can get one of your very own for a cool $10k or so. His website indicates he primarily does animals, deer and elk in particular. I don't claim to be an expert on bronze ungulates, but it would be interesting to see one of those elk next to Portland's famous Thompson Elk fountain/statue, just to see how they stack up. My sneaking suspicion is that one of these contemporary elk would come out ahead, and we'd realize that our locally famous mid-street elk is actually not that great, and for the last 114 years nobody's been willing to come out and state the obvious. Which is entirely plausible in a conflict-averse city like this. It's worth pointing out that the local Elks Club -- people who probably know more about elk than I do -- refused to help dedicate the Thompson Elk, calling it "a monstrosity of art". Much later, they commissioned a Caswell elk statue for the OHSU eye clinic just a few years ago. The two events are many decades apart, to be sure, but it still seems like an interesting data point.

Drawing on the River

In Cathedral Park, next to one of the St. Johns bridge supports, a mysterious steel wall stands in the middle of a grassy lawn. This is Drawing on the River, a relatively recent (2008) addition to the park. Its RACC page has this to say:

This sculpture was conceived as a tribute to industrial ingenuity in the St. Johns area. Like the Saint Johns bridge above, it is a suspension structure anchored at each end. The hull-like end pieces allude to the shipbuilding that went on nearby and were constructed using standard steel shipbuilding techniques by Peninsula Iron Works, a third generation firm adjacent to the park. “Drawing on the River” reflects back on a century of industry in St. Johns and is an homage to both the mills and the workers who ran them. The piece also invokes the river itself, which powered the mills and is the reason the workers settled here.

What the description doesn't tell you, and what I didn't realize while I was visiting, is that the wall has a variety of interactive features too. (If you can get close to it; it seems like the lawn sprinklers around it are always going full blast whenever I visit Cathedral Park.) The artist's website explains:

Also within the sculpture’s end forms are a looking and a music box listening device, designed with longtime [Donald] Fels collaborators Rob Millis and Ed Mannery. To listen, a button is pushed winding a spring that turns a music box. One of the music boxes plays Hoagy Carmichael’s “Up a Lazy River”, which topped the hit-parade in 1931, the year the bridge was dedicated.

The other music box plays “Amazing Grace”, a tune played by fiddlers who accompanied Lewis and Clark, who camped there in 1805. The explorers used music to communicate with the natives they encountered on their journey. The viewers in the sculpture feature historic photos, one of a hot air balloon that was featured in the Lewis and Clark Expo in 1905, the other of the world’s first plywood mill, also once on the site.

One of the music box collaborators has a few close up photos on his website. The music boxes were mentioned in a November 2013 OPB article about RACC art maintenance & conservation, as they were experiencing a bit of rust. There could be other reasons behind the rust, but I'm inclined to blame the sprinklers. The wall's also needed pressure washing for graffiti at least once so far. The pressure washing company's Facebook page is actually kind of interesting. More than I would have expected anyway.

Another fun detail is how Drawing on the River was funded. Since the 1970s, the city's "1% For Art" program has mandated that publicly funded construction projects should devote one percent of the total cost toward public art. The wall here is no exception, but looking around you won't see any circa-2008 public buildings nearby. In fact, it was created with surplus 1% For Art funds from the still-unopened Wapato Jail, in the far corner of industrial North Portland. It turns out that the rules only say how much project money goes for art, and they don't specify exactly where the art has to be. The jail cost $58 million, and 1% of that is still a big chunk of money, and the then-sheriff felt it was a waste to spend it all at the jail where law abiding citizens would never see it. So some of the money went here, and (as a snarky Portland Public Art post points out), some also went to nature-themed stuff around Smith & Bybee Lakes, and a sort of river piling-themed piece at the jail itself. Naturally the whole thing got the talk radio crowd all riled up about the gol-durned commie gummint spending money on highfalutin' art. Even though the rest of the money went to an enormous jail, which you'd think they'd be pretty stoked about. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

Front & Curry Community Garden

Here are a few off-season photos of the Front & Curry Community Garden, at... ok, the address is actually Curry St. and Naito Parkway since this part of Front Avenue was renamed in 1996. The city hasn't gotten around to renaming the garden itself yet, for whatever reason. Anyway, I realize gardens aren't that photogenic in mid-January, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, but I happened to be in the neighborhood. I was fetching a pizza from Caro Amico nearby, if you must know. I guess it's mildly ironic to take photos of the neighborhood vegetable garden while loading up on pepperoni and cheese, and then crashing on the sofa to watch the Olympics.

The city parks website says the land here was acquired in 1952, but the city's community garden program didn't officially begin until the 1970s with the first one at Sewallcrest Park in SE Portland. So I'm not really sure what was here in the intervening time. If I had to guess, I'd guess it was a vacant lot left over from the Front Ave. widening circa 1940, and the city ended up with it later but never did anything with it until hippies arrived and wanted to go back to the land without leaving the big city. I'm speculating here because the historical record (by which I mean the Oregonian database) doesn't have a lot to say about the area.

The few historical items I've found, none of any particular consequence:

• The 1892 Mayor's Message mentions there was a fire hydrant here back then, at a time when city fire hydrants were still something of a novelty.
• Rosie the Riveter got a DUI here in March 1943.
• An October 1946 DUI with a twist: The offender was arrested here while driving home after her husband had been arrested for a separate DUI incident a few blocks north at First & Sheridan.
• An ugly land use conflict in August 1958: A landowner right around here was trying to appeal the denial of a zoning change, which led her realtor representative to go off on a two hour angry conspiracy-laden rant in front of the city council. Councillors stated they generally favored the landowner's position but were quite put off by her representative's manner. I haven't found a follow up article stating what the council eventually decided, though all the buildings here look heavily pre-1958 so I would guess the proposal didn't go through.
• The one and only mention of the garden, in a March 1979 article about community garden sites. It's just describes as an unnamed lot at SW Front & Curry, so I'm guessing it was new at the time.

Angle of Repose

If you've been following this humble blog in the last few months, you've probably noticed that many posts here have resulted from me noticing a place or thing in one of the databases I tend to peek at. Lately it's been the RACC (Regional Arts & Culture Council) and the Smithsonian art inventory, with a smattering of Bridgehunter/Structurae and Portland city parks items as well. A thing I've noticed about these lists is how arbitrary they can be about what's included and what isn't. I've lost track now of how many city parks I've run across that the city neglects to list on its website, and as far as I can tell the main criteria for whether a bridge goes on Bridgehunter is whether a site administrator likes the bridge or not. The RACC database criteria seem to be a.) it's inside Portland city limits, despite the 'Regional' in the name; b.) it's either old and well-known, or new and funded with 1% for Art funds, channeled through RACC. In the latter case, the resulting product isn't always something you'd automatically think of as capital-A Art.

Which brings us to the subject of today's post. Angle of Repose is a little gazebo on the lawn of NE Portland's Matt Dishman Community Center. It's in the RACC database, I suppose thanks to how it was funded; its RACC page has this to say:

This covered seating area is located in front of the Matt Dishman Community Center and acts as an outdoor focal point for community members. The artist combined traditional porch designs based on historic Victorian architecture in the area with an urban plaza where people are encouraged to meet and interact.

It seemed a bit weird to show up and take photos of the community center's little gazebo, but it was in the database, and I was on my way between two colorful painted intersections, so I figured I'd stop briefly and take a look. So here it is. The city's probably gotten a lot more public use and enjoyment with the gazebo than they would have if they'd added the usual big bronze salmon or something. It's just kind of sad that useful items have to masquerade as decorative items because the funding picture is better that way.

"Angle of repose" is a technical term from physics, by the way. Wikipedia defines it as "the steepest angle of descent or dip relative to the horizontal plane to which a material can be piled without slumping". Which I imagine explains the steep pitch of the gazebo roof. I can't say one way or the other whether the name is accurate or not; it was just starting to snow when I walked by, and it hadn't begun to accumulate yet, so I have no idea whether the snow ended up sticking or sliding off the thing.

Arcade Ceiling, Justice Center

I've said a few times that this blog project around Portland-area public art was close to completion, and that hasn't quite happened yet. I've long since covered the well-known and popular public artworks here, so I'm left with increasingly obscure stuff, assorted odds and ends that I've come across in various databases. Which is actually an interesting place to be the project, because these remaining items are generally things I wouldn't have ever noticed or taken an interest in otherwise. Case in point: The previous post covered the travertine columns outside Portland's downtown Justice Center, which I'd never paid any attention to before. It turns out the Justice Center's ground-floor arcade has a glass tile ceiling that's also considered capital-A Art; I didn't realize it was even there until recently, since I've never had any business at the Justice Center, and I don't think I'd ever even walked up the front steps before. Its RACC page says:

In this piece, artist Liz Mapelli responded to the need for artwork that would emphasize Portland’s history, the beauty of its natural setting, and the Justice Center’s community role with this harmonious design of rose-and-gray Venetian glass tiles set around her own richly colored glass pieces. Working from her studio, a renovated dairy barn, she fused the glass using a rare, time-consuming process that may have been developed in ancient Egypt.

The checkerboard rose, grey, black & white pattern is possibly the most 1980s thing I have seen in a long, long time. I mean, it's the tasteful kind of 1980s design, maybe even too tasteful for a building that includes the city jail. It's just that there's no mistaking what era it's from, the same way that ugly orange and brown tile screams mid-1970s until someone sends in a wrecking ball.

Mapelli also created the circa-1991 giant handbag design on the side of a Lloyd Center parking garage, which also appeared on this humble blog quite recently, and which -- again -- I'd paid precisely zero attention to until I blundered into this current project. Speaking of the project, I still think I'm closing in on closing it out. Either I'll run completely out of things to track down, or more likely, the scattered remaining items would all involve driving out to Woodburn or Battle Ground for yet another example of Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream, and I'll finally decide the diminishing returns aren't worth it. And then we can move on to some other thrilling project that I can bore the world about for a few months.

The Portland Columns

Photos of The Portland Columns, the two travertine pillars outside the entrance to Portland's downtown Justice Center. I hadn't immediately realized they were Art, and not just architectural details of the building, but that's what all the databases say, so who am I to argue? The RACC page says this:

The “Portland Columns” by Walter Dusenberry were installed in 1983 as part of Multnomah County’s Percent for Art Program for the Justice Center. The travertine columns were carved in Pietrasanta, Italy, where Dusenberry works 9 months out of the year. He chose travertine for their golden color and because the semi-crystalline limestone becomes more intense when water hits it, “almost like it is illuminated from inside” which is significant in Portland’s heavy rain. The Italians, who use it for fountains, say travertine “has muscles and nerves”. The columns are slightly asymmetrical, “like justice, they arrive at the same conclusion by different paths.”

The artist's website has a few photos of the columns, taken in sunny, dry weather, for comparison. I do like the idea of something designed to look its best when wet, since that's more or less our default weather situation here. Off the top of my head it's the only example I can think of. I suppose doing this is the sort of concept that seems perfectly obvious once someone else has thought of it. The endless coping-with-stormwater artworks don't count; that's a whole other genre (and a weirdly popular one here). Anyway, it would probably help if the columns looked less like the building they adorn; you'd get roughly the same effect with travertine lions or caryatids or something, and then people would at least notice them a bit more.

Memorial Column, NE 13th & Burnside

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A few years ago, the city of Portland finally did something about the accident-prone intersection of East Burnside, Sandy Boulevard, and 12th Avenue, after a few decades of the public complaining about it. Not everyone loves the resulting Burnside-Couch couplet, but at least the one crazy intersection isn't so crazy anymore. The change involved closing the 2 block diagonal stretch of Sandy between 12th and 14th, as well as one block of NE 13th between Burnside and Couch. The resulting two-block area is supposed to be redeveloped someday, presumably into upscale condos or something. The couplet was the previous mayor's baby and the whole thing seems to have lost momentum after the last election. So for the most part the traffic flow shift is the only thing that's changed so far.

One thing they've managed to do here is jackhammer up part of the former 13th Avenue and turn it into a meandering bioswale, thanks to the city's ongoing obsession with stormwater management. At the Burnside end of the bioswale is a tall metal sculpture with a series of stainless steel fins projecting up from a concrete block. You may have guessed from the post title (and from the general artsy theme I've been running with lately) that this sculpture is why we're here. I noticed it when driving past on Burnside a while back, made a mental note of it, and later tried the usual sources to see what I could find out about it. Searching RACC, the Smithsonian art database, and the library's Oregonian database all came up with nothing. No news stories, no press releases from the city, nothing. When I went to take these photos, I looked all over for a sign giving a title, maybe an artist, something explaining what it's about. I couldn't find a sign, so no luck there either.

So after searching the entire internet, I've found precisely two city documents that mention it. Because we're a deeply process-oriented city, the city's Transportation Bureau had to get a permit from the Bureau of Development Services (a.k.a. the city planning department) before proceeding with the bioswale project. The first pdf (containing the city's official approval of the plan) includes a diagram that calls it Memorial Column, and credits it to Lloyd D. Lindley and Nevue Ngan Associates, while the second (the city's permit application) includes detailed schematics. I see that the sculpture was created by urban designers and landscape architects, so it looks like the local public art community wasn't involved here. Which I guess would explain why it's not in the RACC database. The approval doc explains that the bioswale might be only temporary, assuming the eventual swanky condo towers come with bioswales of their own, but the sculpture has to stay, regardless. The approval further explains "The tall vertical element reveals this important place from a few blocks away" and "As a memorial to a PBOT employee, the proposed column integrates Portland as a theme". The phrasing there is because the city planners have to explain how the design furthers their design goals, and "integrating Portland as a theme" (whatever that means) is apparently one of those goals.

So that's all I know. There are some obvious open questions: Who is this a memorial to? And why? There's obviously more to the story, but for the life of me I can't seem to answer those questions. You'd think there would have been a press release, a dedication ceremony, maybe some news stories, adoring quotes by former PBOT coworkers praising the honoree perhaps. But I can't find any record of any of these things. That seems like an odd oversight, if it was an oversight. And if it wasn't an oversight, but an attempt to downplay the whole thing, that would raise additional questions. I have no idea. As always, if you happen to have the missing puzzle pieces in your possession, feel free to leave a comment below and help sort out the mystery. Thx. Mgmt.