Cutest. Echidna. Ever.

Awwwww.... The original SMH story is here.

Governors Park expedition

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Some photos of Governors Park [map], in the West Hills right next door to downtown Portland. I'd seen this place on city maps before, but I'd never been there, and I'd never heard or read anything about it. I figured it was a short walk from the office, so I'd pop up there on my lunch hour-or-so and check it out. Well, it's a short but rather steep uphill walk, but hey, I'm young and healthy and all that. If you take the most direct route from downtown, it's also a steep uphill walk along a narrow single-lane one-way street with no sidewalks. Maybe that's your idea of fun, but if not, avoid SW College Street.





As with Kelly Butte, the city parks department has very little to say about the place. It "includes natural area", and has been owned by the city since 1894, when the land was donated by Gov. Sylvester Pennoyer [also see here and here] and his wife. So the city's owned it for over a hundred years, and they've done basically nothing to the place in all that time.

This large pdf from the city describes the park thusly:

Governors Park, located in the northern part of the site, is six acres in size and has a stand of mature Douglas fir. This park provides wildlife habitat, marks the top of the hill and creates a gateway into the neighborhoods on each side of it. All of these elements contribute to the urban design and quality of the area.

The "gateway" bit is just design-junkie blather, but the Douglas fir trees at least are real, for whatever that's worth. Several are right on SW Davenport, so if you're from out of town and you've never seen a Douglas fir before, I guess you could drive by here and take a quick peek. Or you could go to any of half a million other locations around the city. Ok, so maybe if you were from out of town, and you wanted to see a Douglas fir, and you were staying with friends in the neighborhood, and had to catch a flight in a few hours so you didn't have time to go anywhere else, maybe this would be your ideal spot. Possibly. If you are, in fact, a Douglas fir, this might be a decent place to put down roots. In case you needed advice on that subject from a clueless mammal, I mean.



Once you get there you'll notice that, like Kelly Butte, there's no sign from the city parks department letting you know you've found it. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd probably just assume it's another unbuildable vacant lot like you see all over the West Hills. If you stop and take a look around, like I did, you'll quickly realize that it is basically an unbuildable vacant lot, just one that happens to be owned by the city parks department. There's a trail, probably unofficial, leading into the park from SW Davenport. I followed it a short way into the park before deciding I'd really rather not slip and tumble down the slope. See the slope in photo #4? As far as I was able to tell, the whole park is like that: Extremely steep, forested hillsides, choked to the gills with invasive ivy. Unless there are undiscovered urban delights somewhere in the park that I didn't get to (which I doubt), it looks like Pennoyer saddled the city with a white elephant (albeit a small and obscure one) which it can neither use nor dispose of. The city's response over the last 112 years seems to have been to spend as little money as possible on the place, and send city resources anywhere but here. That's my guess, at any rate.

A trails guide at ExplorePDX describes the park this way:

Undeveloped park has no good routes within it, but the routes in both directions on Davenport have many nice loops with spectacular views of the city and many small parks and long sets of stairs.

Which is true. The surrounding neighborhood is actually much more scenic and interesting than the park itself. I think the phrase "the journey is the reward" is really trite, but it does sort of apply here.



This all begs the question: Why did our esteemed governor donate the land? Did he honestly think it was going to be useful to the city somehow, someday? Or was he shedding a piece of "junk" land he couldn't use, and taking the tax writeoff? Or perhaps he had a house nearby, and the donation was to ensure nobody would ever build a house there and block his view. Or possibly one of his many archenemies lived next to the park, and Pennoyer donated the land so its trees would be protected and eventually grow to block so-and-so's view. That sounds like something he'd try to pull. Perhaps someone knows about this, but it doesn't seem to be on the net anywhere.

After doing a bit of reading about the guy, I'm not inclined to think he acted out of noble, selfless civic-mindedness. His usual M.O. consisted of populist appeals to the baser instincts in human nature, most prominently his anti-Chinese campaign [Also see the telegram his note is in reply to.]. Chinese-bashing was 1890s Oregon's version of today's Mexican-bashing, with the same arguments about the jobs of US citizens being undercut by cheap foreign labor.

In his inaugural address, Pennoyer touched on a wide range of subjects, including such uncontroversial ones as preventing the fraudulent sale of margarine as butter, and restricting salmon fishing for conservation purposes (which we didn't listen to, of course). But then he has to go and say this sort of thing about Chinese immigrants:

Irrevocably devoted to their paganism idolatry, superstition and practices, they are entirely unassimilative with our people, blind to the progressive spirit of our race, unappreciative of our institutions and deaf to the demands and influences of Christianity, and their presence amongst us is only corruption of society, debasing to morals and degrading to labor. Can the State do anything toward ridding itself of these undesirable aliens?

Throughout his career, he combined vicious racial attitudes with relatively progressive, anti-elitist rhetoric about monopolies, labor, the railroads, and so forth. This mix seems odd to us today, but it wasn't at all unusual in 19th and early 20th century politics. Even into the 1960s you'd see this sort of thing in Southern states -- see Orval Faubus for one well-known example. It's sad to say this, but up until quite recently our Democratic Party was often not a party of high and noble sentiments.

Some articles about Pennoyer's peevish, vindictive meddling with the police and water bureaus, his efforts to block construction of the first Morrison Bridge, and even his partisan feud with President Benjamin Harrison. He was also the first to propose a state income tax, which you can regard as good or ill, depending on your own inclinations. He litigated a couple of feuds all the way to the US Supreme Court: Pennoyer v. McConnaughy, and Neff v. Pennoyer. The latter case is apparently a dreaded law school staple, and it's been feared and reviled by generations of aspiring lawyers. The judge in both cases was prompted to give him the nickname "Sylpester Annoyer".

I wouldn't have voted for the guy back then, and granting him any form of official commemoration in this day and age is kind of an iffy prospect, IMHO.

The park's merely called "Governors" park, plural, no apostrophe, so the place is not really a monument to ol' Sylvester, specifically. Although as memorials go, a useless, misbegotten scrap of land with a weird story behind it would seem to be a fitting tribute. The Annoyer does, however, have a small street named after him. Pennoyer St. currently runs for about a block in the Corbett neighborhood, but another segment of the street will open in the South Waterfront area, so in the near future a lot of rich people will boast Pennoyer St. as their ultra-ritzy home address. The surrounding streets are named after early governors of Oregon 1845-1877. Pennoyer's the exception here. In fact, he was governor at the time. Eugene Snyder's authoritative Portland Names and Neighborhoods suggests that city officials were trying to suck up to the esteemed governor. No word on whether it worked or not.

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Updated 9/1/06: I was at the Central Library downtown today and among the reference books I came across an unwieldy set of binders containing the city's Historic Resource Inventory, dated May 1984. Here's what the book had to say about Governors Park:

0-204-01292 [I imagine this is an ID number of some sort.]
1292 SW Davenport St.
Grover's, Tax Lot 32, 5.32 acres
Quarter section map # 3227
Negative 762-22 [the id of the photo on the Governors Park page, I assume. The copy in the binder is b/w and grainy, but perhaps the original is more high-res. Still, the photo showed trees and grass, maybe less overgrown than what's there in 2006, but not hugely different.]

The park item gives a mini-bio of Gov. Pennoyer, and then continues on about the park:

Pennoyer was Pportland's mayor from 1896-1898 and donated a six acre tract in the West Hills for a city park in 1894. Another acre was given by the couple in 1898, and another in 1901. Governor's Park (named after Governor Pennoyer) was deeded to the city under five deeds all for park purposes only. Three of the deeds were from the Pennoyer's [sic], thr first of which restricted the property to a public park only and the other two deeds were additions to said park. It was further stipulated that the park was to be named "Governor's Park". The fourth deed was from the First National Bank of Portland, Oregon as an addition to Governor's Park. The County subsequently conveyed the same property to the City for park purposes only. There is no reversion clause in the deeds.

This still doesn't answer the question of what the park was intended to be for, and raises others. For example, if the city's math is right, the total acreage donated adds up to be at least 8 acres, significantly more than the 5.32 reported in 1984, or the 5.41 reported on the current Parks website. The discrepancy is not explained. The only clue is the "no reversion clause" bit, which tells us that even though the deeds restricted the land to be used solely for park purposes, the land wouldn't revert to the previous owner if the city didn't abide by the deed restrictions. Either the city's math was wrong back in '84, or some of the land is now under some of the surrounding houses. The latter wouldn't really surprise me. Otherwise, why would they bother mentioning reversion at all?

It's interesting to note the use of the apostrophe in "Governor's", and Pennoyer's insistence on the name. Looks like the first donation was a gift to the city shortly before he ran (successfully) for mayor, and he insisted it be named after his recent, very powerful position, so everyone was clear on who had provided this wonderful new park for the public's enjoyment. Talk about a self-serving donation. Sheesh. The city and the mapmakers no longer use the apostrophe, suggesting that it honors all governors, not jut the one weird bigoted wingnut who donated the land.

At least that's one way to read this. The description I quoted above also wrongly adds an apostrophe when referring to Pennoyer and his wife, calling them the "Pennoyer's". So I'm not sure how much faith we can place in the apostrophe in "Governor's" either.

The city's notes on some surounding properties include these tidbits:

• The area was "originally" part of the Thomas J. Carter donation land claim. There's a Carter St. in the vicinity, honoring the area's first European landowner.
• The park spans the address range between 1291 and 1411 SW Davenport.
• At one time, the area was part of a farm operated by the Sisters of the Holy Name, who also operated St. Mary's Academy.
• The area was developed as single-family housing in the late '30s thru 1942.
• Before development, the area was full of fruit orchards.
• The area was developed by Milo McIver, who purchased the land from the nuns.
• McIver also extended SW Davenport, extending it east from its original terminus at the park.

Amusingly, Milo McIver (a one-time state highway commissioner) has a park named after him as well. It's a state park out near Estacada (which this humble blog visited in 2007), and is vastly larger than Pennoyer's pet project here, although the state refers to the place as little-known. It's perhaps best known for hosting 1970's Vortex I hippiefest, sponsored by the state government to get the hippies out of town during the American Legion convention. They could have all the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll they wanted, so long as they didn't protest the war. And the hippies fell for it, and even now they go on about what a wonderful event it was. Stupid hippies.

---

Updated 7/7/08: I was looking back over some of my old posts, and it occurred to me that the photos for this post didn't really measure up, by my present-day standards. So I figured I'd hoof it up to the park and take a new batch, and generally take a look around, and update this post accordingly. So, ok, the new photos are here now and I think they're a big improvement. (The original two are still here, right after the first paragraph.) Not much new to say about the place, though. Nothing's changed, as far as I can tell. I didn't go any further into the park than I did last time around, although not for lack of wanting to. Unless there's a still-undiscovered secret way into the place, I just don't know how you'd go about it without tumbling down a steep ivy-choked hillside. Then you'd have to call for help, whether by mobile phone or that old-fashioned "shouting" business, and wait to be rescued, and then have to explain to the waiting TV news cameras that you were at the park either a.) blogging about it, or b.) visiting because you saw it on some random blog out on the interwebs. Either way, it would be awfully embarrassing. In any case, the rest of the photos are on Flickr here.

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Updated 3/14/11: Thanks to the Multomah County Library's magical Oregonian Historical Archive, a bit more info about the park can be relayed. We're at least going to learn more about the stated reasons behind the park, whatever the actual ones might have been.

A September 9, 1898 article describes the then-new park. The article isn't very legible due to the page not being entirely flat on the scanner, but it describes the park as "very sightly", with great views of the city & the Cascades, with occasional glimpses of Pennoyer himself toiling away on his farm next door. The article predicts the park will become a favorite, and suggests it will get streetcar service in the near future.

A few days later, on September 11, 1898, the paper ran a long article giving an overview of the city park system. It describes the park:

Governor's Park is quite a recent addition to the city's public lands. Two acres of this were presented by Sylvester Pennoyer, December 29, 1894, at the time he went out of office as governor, and he added another acre to it June 28, 1898, just before he left the mayor's chair. It is a small but sightly piece of land on Portland Heights, sloping toward the north, with a tiny view of the city and the river from its summit. Cedar and maple are scattered over the hillside, crimson-berried dogwood crowd downward into the gulch, and one towering fir rises grandly toward the clouds. In order to reach this park one must take the cable up Portland Heights, getting off at Spring street, where the car turns westward, walk two blocks east, one block south, and take the winding path that goes around the hill toward the east. Then turn south and descend to Davenport street, which ends abruptly at a big gate. On the other side of this gate is Governor's Park.

October 28, 1911 saw a proposal to rename the park "Pennoyer Park" after the now-late governor. The article mentions that a daughter of his proposed to donate a memorial fountain in his honor should the name change be accepted. Previously, on February 17, 1909, the proposal was listed along with various others that have mostly not come to pass: Renaming City Park to Jefferson Park (after rejecting Lewis & Clark) -- the park later became Washington Park. The Park Blocks would have been called "the Park Way North" and "the Park Way South". The Plaza Blocks got their current names at this time, and the little parks in Ladd's Addition were proposed to be Ladd Circle, Maple Square, Cypress Square, Orange Square, and Mulberry Square. Other than Ladd Circle I don't know if these names were adopted or not.

November 1, 1911 saw a rather hysterical article titled "RUIN OF SITE FEARED", subtitled "BOARD TO TRY TO SAVE GOVERNOR'S PARK". There was a proposal to extend Davenport through the park, and people were afraid the park would soon be carved up by additional streets. Subsequent articles indicate that the proposal was denied at the time.

By January 5, 1912, local residents were becoming impatient with the city's inaction with regard to the park:

PARK IMPROVEMENT ASKED. - Citizens of Portland Heights and vicinity have petitioned the Park Board to take immediate action to improve what is now known as Governor's Park. Nothing has been done with this property, which was given by the Pennoyers years ago. The petition is signed by H.D. Chambers, L.B. Menefee, and W.D. Mercereau as a committee from the Heights Club.

There's no record of the city acting on this petition, and mentions of the park taper off after 1912. An overview of the city park system on July 30, 1933 describes it as "Four acres, picnic grounds, underbrush cleared out for hiking, beautiful view, overlooking city to east". So not much happened in the 21 years after the petition, but the park appears to have had more amenities in 1933 than it does now.

There are only two mentions of the park in the Oregonian after that. One is -- supposedly -- on April 29, 1939, but I don't see it anywhere on the page, which is mostly devoted to religion stories. And then it appears on October 25, 1970 on a combination parks map and Frank Ivancie campaign ad. And after that, nothing.

It's really kind of a sad story. It appears that hopes were really high for the park in the beginning. But then the city never got around to improving the place, and within a few years it fell off everyone's radar. And it's remained there ever since, over a century at this point.

Squirrel & Butterfly

The best squirrel yet (compared to these two, anyway), plus a subpar photo of a butterfly. The butterfly happened to fold its wings up a split-second before I took this. Stupid bug.

The squirrel at least had the sense to hold still. It even held still after my flash went off. (Note the glowing eye. I'm trying to pass this off as if it was due to Pure Evil on the squrrel's part, but really it's just the flash.) That's what happens when you have no natural predators, I guess.

The title of this post is not to be confused with "Dog & Butterfly", the old Heart song (& album). Nor should it be confused with "Moose & Squirrel". If you came here looking for "Iron Butterfly", I don't have much to offer you here either. You also shouldn't confuse it with "Butterfly & Panda", supposing there was a reason to.


Do you get the sense that I'm stalling here? That I'm playing for time by sticking to the very lightest & fluffiest of subjects? Like there's something I ought to say but I'm not looking forward to saying? You'd be right about that, and I'm very reluctant to go there, so let's try to get this over with. I'll try to keep it to a paragraph, or at most two paragraphs, and then I'm done talking about it. (I hope.)

I'm concerned about the current Israel-n-friends vs. Hezbollah-n-friends conflict. I honestly don't see any solution to it. The status quo ante bellum was unsustainable. The fact that it eventually broke down is all the proof we need about that part. In the current conflict I see no viable way for either party to "win", or to reach a stable ceasefire deal. When it's not hardline apocalyptic rhetoric, it's tired decades-old ideological slogans. And they all mean the same thing: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people will die for no good reason. Maybe another generation or two or ten down the road they'll finally get sick of killing one another. Or at least stop enjoying it so damn much.

You wouldn't think the preceding paragraph would be controversial stuff, but any mention of the Middle East, no matter how innocuous, always attracts the psycho crazies. Sometimes you get bloodthirsty Nile-to-Euphrates neocons who want the US to nuke Iran right this minute, and maybe Syria too, and the Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia too while we're at it, and you're a goose-stepping Nazi if you disagree even a little. (Curiously, these people only seem to exist on the net, and on talking head shows on TV, and in a few magazines nobody reads outside the Beltway.) Other times you get apocalyptic Bible-thumpin' fundies who know for certain that the End is near, for real this time, honest, not like last time around, and you're going to Hell if you disagree even a little. I haven't gotten any wild-eyed crazies from the other side here just yet, but I know they're out there, squatting in their caves, plotting to behead every infidel on the planet, or at least as many as they can before their arms get tired. So basically we're replicating the current war (well, the nutty, pointless rhetoric of the current war) in the blogosphere. I'm on nobody's side. I really, really have no interest in "debating" any of these people, so I think that for the first time I'm going to check the "No" box for "Allow New Comments on This Post". If you fall into any of the above categories, go get your own damn blog. It's so easy these days, even you should be able to figure it out.

There. I'm done now. Rant over. Maybe you'll want to scroll back up and look at those cute animal photos again. I know I will.

Apolitical Beastie Roundup

I know I ought to be writing about the Middle East, but I just don't have the heart for it, and I don't have any helpful suggestions just now. So instead, here are some cool, cute, amazing, and/or just plain weird animals for your enjoyment. Have a nice day.

• Yet another cute echidna photo. Awwwww....
  
• Rosy-lipped batfish I wonder what the creationists would make of this beastie?
  
• King-of-Salmon (note: not a salmon)
  
• Three new species of mouse lemur
  
• From Cute Overload: Baby Turtle! Awwww....
  
• More turtles, this time with a local connection.
  
• In other reptile news: All Your Snakes Are Belong To Us!!!
  
• In even more kinda-reptilian-ish creature news, Exclamation Mark has a piece up about "It! The Terror from Beyond Space".
  
• In the not-yet-a-monster-movie department, Japanese researchers are working on a robotic giant squid. Why does Japan always get all the coolest gadgets, and we don't?
  
• From the amazing and definitely not cute department: I don't know what sort of animal Floyd Landis is, but I sure wouldn't want to be in his way. Still, as someone who spent the last few years rooting against ol' whatsisname from Texas and his whole marketing juggernaut, it's nice to have a "normal", likeable person win for once. Chapeau, Floyd!
  

Friday Surrogate-Post Blogging

This week I've been doing long-ish posts every other day instead of nice bite-sized-ish daily ones. I don't know why this happened, it wasn't part of the plan or anything, and I'm sure it's somehow 100% not my fault.

What's worse, today I've fallen even further off the already slackened pace. I've been working on a shiny new bad movie post, and it's sort of taken on a life of its own, and to make a long-ish story short-ish, it's not done yet and probably won't be done today, period. I may even have to break it up into manageable post-sized chunks. So I figured I ought to get on here and write something, so this blog's Gentle Reader(s) -- yes, both of you -- don't start fretting that I've fallen off the edge of the flat earth or something.

[Updated: The bad movie post I mentioned is here. I guess it could've been a bit shorter, but like I said, it took on a life of its own.]

It's nudging 100 degrees outside and I'm not feeling very ambitious, so I think I'm going to cheat a little here. You know, because a blogger can really work up a major sweat coming up with original material -- even really lame original material -- and on a day like this there's the danger of heatstroke to consider. So instead, here are a few mostly light-n-fluffy items from my Sent Items folder in Outlook. That's the unifying theme today. It's all stuff I found somewhere, and forwarded on to someone, usually because I thought it was funny, or cute, or interesting somehow. You've probably seen a few of these before, and I humbly apologize. (What, you want me to work harder at this, in this heat? Are you freakin' crazy?) Also, I apologize if some of these seem a bit out of date. That's because they're from old Sent Items. So again, if that bothers you, sorry, I guess. So here we go:

• An account of recent progress in the study of the mating habits of wombats.
  
• More about wombats.
  
• A fantastic and useful new invention: the Babycage!
  
• "The Top 100 Things I'd Do
  If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord".
  
• A NYT story from February praising Oregon beer, notable (& unusual) because it mentions the True Center of the Universe, a.k.a. Tugboat.
  
• A McSweeney's exclusive about the shiny(?) new iPod zepto, because the nano is far too huge and clunky and non-microscopic.
  
• A post at Y! SCOX about poorly named websites. I imagine this is one of those forwarded email things, but this is where I first saw it.
  
• A great way to tell loved ones how you really feel: A Valentine's card featuring Gollum.
  
• The ritual sacrifice of an Xbox 360. To some, this was a tragedy, but I'm arguably the world's biggest non-gamer, and I just burst out laughing when I read about it.
  
• In France, people will apparently do just about anything if you tell them it's for an art film.
  
• Classic tech from last October's El Reg, the mp3 breast implant.
  
• Brew better beer with FreeBSD.
  
• Keep your beer cool with a CPU fan and some fiddly electronic bits.
  
• And BeerAdvocate's "You Know You're a Beer Geek When..."
  
• And a bit of beer history for ya: A History of Malt Liquor, I kid you not.
  
• Moving right along, here's a BBC piece about the amazing Millau Viaduct in southern France. If a programmer (such as myself) ever tries to convince you he or she is a "real engineer", point them at the Millau Viaduct and ask if they can pull off something even 1% as cool. Someday they really ought to run the Tour de France over this thing.
  
• A nice cozy article from the Helsingin Sanomat: What does Finland really look like?
  
• All About Frogs. Because if anyone ever asks "What about frogs?", I know to say "I like frogs".
  
• 2 photos of a long-nosed monkey. Yes, that's the official name. Click the link and see why.
  
• The original link is gone, and the video itself has disappeared from the net entirely (AFAIK), so instead here's a funny "film review" of the infamous Wendy's "Grill Skill" video.
  
• A 2004 innovation in Scottish cuisine: The Stonner, a pork sausage wrapped in doner kebab meat, battered, and deep fried. Mmm!!!!
  
• A bit about trash talking Mars rovers.
  
• Maybe they were just in a bad mood after Spirit got mugged by that sneaky Beagle 2.
  
• And a non-satirical but quite funny Jeffrey Bell rant about Beagle 2, while I'm on the subject.
  
• You can now (or could at one time) purchase a nice, proprietary, fascist-DRM-protected e-book copy of the U.S. Constitution. Irony died once and for all the day this hit the market.
  
• The greatest news headline of all time: "Zombies Drive Jesus From Top Of Box Office".
  

There's plenty more where that came from, naturally, but I'm tired of looking at old email, and it's taking a while, and today's post is all about not overexerting myself, you know, due to the heat and all.

So, well, there you go. Enjoy, or not. Whatever.

Time Barbarians

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time (which you probably haven't), you already know about my weakness for cheesy 80's sword and sorcery movies. And yes, Gentle Reader(s), I've got a new one for you today, one so low-budget and obscure that even I hadn't heard of it until recently. I present to you... Time Barbarians, an entry in the little-known but important subgenre of time-travelling barbarian films.

A scant few online reviews of the film have appeared.
The New York Times sums it up thusly:

When evil wizard Mandrak kills the wife of Doran, the warrior king, he immediately escapes through a time portal to modern day Los Angeles in an attempt to escape Doran's wrath. Doran follows him, however, and now the barbarian stalks Mandrak through a world that he does not understand. He will stop at nothing to have his revenge against the sorcerer, but who know what havoc he will wreck on the fragile city along the way.
Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide

MK Magazine is less charitable:

“Time Barbarians” is a low-rent “Conan the Barbarian” with all of the compulsory trimmings; swords, sorcery, warriors, forces of evil, crystal amulets, kings, wizards, muscle men and near-naked barbarian babes. In a feeble attempt to pull his film away from the glut of others, that are completely superior to his, director Barmettler threw in a time travel subplot that drives the film from inept to sheer silliness. Scenes of our leading man hulking along the sidewalks of L.A., in a loincloth, getting into fights with a local street gang calling themselves, of course, The Gladiators is a sight to behold, but it certainly doesn’t save this amateurish mess. Barmettler went on to direct “Witchcraft 8.” - Christopher Curry

And At-A-Glance Film Reviews has a longer, even more uncharitable review here, giving the thing one star out of five, and wishing he could give it even fewer than that.

Pshaw, I say. It's clear from all of this that most reviewers just don't get the whole S&S genre. Zero stars out of five? Ridiculous. In a vastly superior ratings system I invented just now, Time Barbarians rates three furry boots out of a possible six. Decent, not a classic perhaps, but good for an evening of fun if you're in the right mood. Which, in the end, is all we can reasonably ask of this type of movie.

A few gems from the film, plus various comments about it:

• Our story begins with a bit of scrolling text, a la Star Wars:
  

  
  "In an ancient time of swords and sorcery lived a remote tribe of barbarians who battled the forces of evil. These barbarians were protected by the power of a crystal amulet
  
  This is a story of their king."
  

  
  
• Ok, that isn't precisely the beginning of the film. The DVD really begins with a typically atrocious intro by that Troma guy. This isn't actually a Troma movie, thank goodness, they just got the video rights to it somehow, same as Wizards of the Demon Sword. So that Lloyd guy really has no business introducing the movie. He annoys the hell out of me. When you see the guy with the bow tie, skip to the next chapter on the disc. As an aside, I'd like to take this opportunity to declare holy jihad against all men who wear bowties. They're a plague on our society, and I hate them all.
  
• The amulet everyone's fighting over is a very ordinary-looking chunk of glass. In a belt, no less, very much not hanging around anyone's neck on a string. Which to me makes it a non-amulet, but hey. I'm not an SCA medieval costume geek, I could be wrong here. Also, other than shooting people forward in time to 1990 L.A., we never see any sign of the awesome powers it's supposed to possess. We don't even get a good explanation of what these powers are. It does have a nice rainbow twinkle visual effect, though, so that's something, I guess.
  
• Right at the beginning, Doran vanquishes a baddie (who keeps hooting insanely throughout the whole fight) but doesn't kill him, a shockingly un-barbaric act that comes back to haunt him later, somewhat. Instead, he takes the baddie's mask and has a bit of swordplay with Lystra, his lady friend. She's pretty handy with a sword, by S&S movie standards, and has the crystal amulet for protection, and thinks he's an evil barbarian. Not smart, Doran. One false move here and this could've been a very short movie.
  
• After the fight and inevitable tender moment, he gives her the amulet, which she was already wearing just a few minutes earlier. She acts all amazed, like she's never seen it before. If we play S&S movie geek and assume it's not just a silly continuity error, perhaps they've just been married for a long time, he's fallen into a giftgiving rut, and she's pretending it's a neat new gift in order to spare his feelings. Hey, I know people like that. It could happen. Usually in this situation people don't say "The power and strength fill me. It is as if I too were a great warrior." like Lystra does, but I'm chalking that up as just a matter of personal style.
  
• A bit of deliciously bad dialogue about that pesky amulet:
  

  
  D: "My vow is to use its power to protect my people. To teach them honesty and bravery. To seek the truth. And if this is done, then the people of Armana shall be protected by its power."
  L: "So you have done. They worship you, doran"
  D: "That is not what i seek, for I am not a god. All i ask is that they listen and follow. Their lives then are their own."
  L: "You become wiser with each day. I am honored to be your queen."
  D: "My grandfather gave me fair warning. And you too must beware its power. For with one thought, one can make great journeys, to lands never seen by thine eyes, a land where one may never return. So dream not of lands other than this, or you shall leave me forever. The power shall make us great warriors. And with it we shall build a new world for our children."
  

  
  
• S&S movies ought to have at least one scene in an idyllic barbarian village. If you don't have enough extras to film one, it's ok to lift some stock footage from some other S&S movie. It's fine. It's all good. You can probably recruit local renaissance faire types to be extras, free of charge, for this sort of thing. Very often they even come with their own props. The village scene in TB is not the best you'll see. It looks like maybe a dozen hippies in a state park campground, which is pretty close to what was actually going on. But that's ok. All you really need to do is suggest a pastoral paradise, and your viewers' overactive imaginations will fill in the blanks. Geek or anti-geek, moviegoers all know the boilerplate S&S plot by heart. You're just giving them basic visual cues, and they'll do the rest.
  
• Doran's buddy Bartaga shows up and wants to go "hunting" with his king, spurning the advances of his would-be lady friend. He and several other characters are skinny, hairy little people with wild eyes. They work pretty well as barbarians, but I can't help thinking they look like junkies desperate for a fix. I mean, this was made in L.A., at the end of the 80's, so that's not much of a stretch here. Bartaga swills from his wineskin every chance he gets, so the druggie angle is almost too easy.
  
• You could probably get a term paper out of the homoerotic angle, too. Let's be honest, every S&S movie has that to some extent. I mean, furry boots and loincloths? And when Doran embarks on his quest to find Mandrak, he expresses his fear for Doran's safety, whining "Who will I hunt with?" in the event Doran dies. It never gets totally overt, of course, because that would make the core audience nervous. There's just enough there to make the movies properly campy. Bartaga & Doran, Mandrak and his #1 henchman. We see more of these relationships than we do Doran and Lystra/Penny, and these guys bicker like old married couples. I'm not up on the latest academic phraseology or anything, but it's obvious what's going on under the hood here. Beyond that, well, write your own damn term paper, already, don't expect me to do all the heavy lifting for you. Sheesh.
  
• Doran & Bartaga are wandering through the forest, bickering, when suddenly the Gatalite bandits (the bad barbarians) attack! There's a big swordfight with half a dozen bandits or so, including one female bandit. The crazy hooting guy is back, he's a bandit leader. Doran ko'd, so B. fights the other guys, and hooting guy kills him.
  
  The bandits' lair: fog, skulls on sticks, but looks like one of the other areas in the same campsite we saw before.
  
  The lair sequence goes on and on. Yawn. The Gatalites decide to sacrifice him to Moltar, their god of the underworld. They tie Doran up, he chats with a fellow inmate briefly. There's a female captive nearby too, who apparently doesn't get rescued.
  
  The baddies sacrifice the fellow inmate first, by pretending to cut the guy's throat from behind. You can see the "priest" squeeze the fake blood packet under the inmate's neck. Great stuff.
  
  Then hooting guy threatens Doran: "Tonight you meet Moltar. Strip him to the skin" and henchmen arrive to do it, cackling.
  
• The big Deus ex Machina:
  All hope appears lost, and it looks like Doran's going to be Moltar's next sacrifice... But then!
  In a bit of magical music and heavy fog, a wolf trots past the camera. Suddenly, a woman in white appears! It's the wizard! And she's dressed in a transparent white outfit.
  
  The scene's not long, but it's worth it for the wizard's exquisite scenery chewing. After a brief bit of small talk, she demands
  "Where is my crystal amulet???"
  Doran lowers his eyes and responds "I lost it", like he was 8 years old and had lost his math homework.
  She berates him for this, and gives him a quest to travel to the future and bring the amulet back to her, or else his tribe will be cursed.
  She orders him: "Find the man who belongs to that hand on your belt."
  Suddenly, a magic sword appears. She tells Doran: "It will take it to your destination, and for the love of gods, don't lose it."
  
  There's a thunderclap, some cheesy "lightning", and Doran pulls the sword from a stone. He quickly kills the bandits, and then tells the hooting guy
  "Your evil Shall end. By my hands!", and kills him barehanded.
  Doran then holds the sword aloft, goes "huaaaagghhh!!!" and gets teleported to 1991 LA.
  
• We cut immediately to L.A., where intrepid TV reporter Penny and her cameraman Bryce are in front of a run-down warehouse, doing a report on local street gangs. Penny looks just like Lystra, with big 80's glasses and one of those womens' business suits from that era with the frilly bit instead of a tie, and humongous shoulder pads.
  
  Seems the street gang "The Gladiators" has a protection racket going, and they've been extorting money from the warehouse owner. Suddenly, the gang appears, attacking Penny as she's trying to do a report. Bryce runs away, of course.
  
  The head Gladiator is a chubby guy with a peroxide buzz cut and a tie-dye shirt, who giggles insanely all the time. Just as they're about to get rough with Penny, Shazam! There's a thunderclap and a bit of lightning and some fog, and Doran appears. He immediately sees what's happening, and shouts "Free her!"
  
  The Gladiators confront him. He punches giggle guy, who stumbles back and jumps (very obviously) into a dumpster.
  
  Giggle guy tells his henchmen: "Get out your blades.", and they whip out their switchblades, like this is some sort of 50's juvenile delinquent film.
  Doran sees their little knives and says "Your swords match your manhood!". He whips out his magic sword, which materializes on his back when needed.
  Giggle guy's henchmen immediately run away. Giggle man stays a moment, thinks it over, folds his knife...
  and shouts "You SUCK!" and runs away. This is great stuff, I tell you. Probably the best moment in the film.
  
  Penny gets in the van and switches into a convenient little black dress, and stands there staring, drooling at Doran. Cameraman Bryce has an unrequited crush on her. Puny little guy in a lemon polo shirt. I can see why she hasn't noticed him. She convinces him to go back to station w/o her, while she chats up Doran:
  
  P: Wait. What's that thing you carry around on your belt?
  D: A hand.
  P: I kinda figured that. Whose hand is it?
  D: Mandrak's. Iv'e come to find him.
  P: Why do you have his hand? And what are you going to do when you find him?
  D: Battle!
  
  
• The severed hand bit isn't bad. Mandrak gets his hand cut off by Bartaga's lady friend, who gives it to Bartaga as a "trophy of battle" as she dies. Doran carries it around on his belt for the rest of the movie, and when he finally confronts Mandrak, he beats him with his own severed hand. Mandrak falls, and Doran tosses it to him. Mandrak says "My hand!" with a disgusted look of "get it away from me", and cringes and flings it away, since the hand's a bit, um, overripe at this point. In the meantime, Mandrak starts out with a black glove as a replacement hand, and then has some sort of big metal clawlike hand during the final battle. This is never explained.
  
• Oddly, neither Doran nor Mandrak really figures out that Penny and Lystra are played by the exact same actress. Mandrak seems puzzled for a moment and wonders why she looks familiar, but that's about all.
  
• The movie's not without its flaws. (Well, duh!!) Mandrak appears far too late into the film. Once he vanishes into the future, the movie really takes its time getting Doran there, and spends far too long resolving the conflict with the evil barbarian tribe. If Mandrak had been the tribe's leader, it might have made sense.
  If you look at early 80's S&S movies, they tend to clock out at a touch over 80 minutes, while TB runs 96. My theory here is that the boilerplate S&S plot has a natural, inherent running time of about 80 minutes, and if you get too much beyond that, you need to start trimming the fat. If you're making an S&S movie, you'd do well to go back and read Aristotle's Poetics, in particular the chapter about dramatic unity. I mean, the very word "barbarian" comes from ancient Greek. Those guys knew all about barbarian adventures.
  
• Mandrak is a classic, campy baddie, forever shouting "Silence!" and punching his underlings in the face for no apparent reason. We get far too little of him in the film. Other great Mandrak lines:
  "Tell me more of the amulet's powers! Tell me, or you will die by my sword, jackal!"
  "Give me the women or I'll cut your tongues out!"
  "Perhaps you can put me on the televison, make me famous, like ... movie stars."
  "Allow me to introduce myself. Mandrak the Magnificient, at your service."
  Also, he has a great, classic evil laugh, but we only hear it when we first meet the guy.
  
• The music is pretty typical for this sort of movie. Someone noodles away on a synthesizer in a vaguely martial fashion, with a bit of hurdy-gurdy music during the renaissance faire bit. Once we hit the mean streets of L.A., we get someone noodling away on a guitar. You'd think a heavy metal soundtrack would be a natural here, but I can't recall any S&S movies actually doing that.
  
• TB has a lower budget even than most S&S movies. Deathstalker II looks like Lord of the Rings in comparison. In the budget department it's right down there with Eyes of the Serpent, another three furry boot movie from the early 90's. For one thing, TB doesn't have a creature, not even a kid in a teddy bear suit like in Barbarian. This is the most surefire way to tell, because S&S movie makers always add a creature if they have the money for it, even if it's completely gratuitous.
  
• Low budgets are a good thing in S&S movies. Throwing money at a S&S story doesn't make it a better movie. Look how Krull turned out. At best, a big Hollywood budget might get you some cool sets, but the movie as a whole won't be better, and it may well be worse. The first half of Time Barbarians was shot in Arroyo Seco, outside of LA, in what looks like a state park campground. You see the same stream and same trees over and over again, but it's all good. You know they're really different places, because sometimes there are a few fake skulls lying about, or the fog machine is hidden behind a different rock, or sometimes it's even nighttime. The second half is set around modern day LA, in vacant lots and empty warehouses where you don't need an expensive permit from the city to film.
  
• Bad acting is par for the course in S&S movies. Bad acting is almost obligatory, in fact. I mean, of course they don't know how to act -- they're barbarians fer chrissakes. The good guy ("Doran") in Time Barbarians is played by Deron Michael McBee, who you might have seen as "Malibu" on "American Gladiators", back in the day. If you're casting an S&S movie, you want to hire your male lead primarily for the beefcake factor. How does he look in a loincloth? Can he wave a costume sword around without hurting himself or others? If he passes those tests, then figure out whether he can act or not. If not, just make his lines simple and easy to remember, and you'll be fine.
  
• Casting female characters is just as easy: What do they look like? How do they look in a skimpy bikini top with jingly metal tassles? Couple of notes here, though. It's fine to have ugly male minor characters, but all your female characters need to be reasonably attractive, with the possible exception of the wise old woman who lives in a hut somewhere (and for her you can really overdo the ugly, with ridiculous costume warts, etc.) Also, to stay faithful to the genre you probably want to go easy on the silicone. I don't have any particular objections to that, let's be clear here, it's just that this was far less common in 1982 than it is now, and in the classics of the genre the uh, "natural look" is the rule, with fairly few exceptions.
  
• Gratuitous nudity is very important. Since S&S movies are supposed to appeal to the 15 year old nerd demographic, a great way to get in some gratuitous nudity is to have a bunch of women lounging about in the altogether, thinking no men are around to watch, similar to the Porky's shower scene. If you can afford a harem scene, that's ideal. If not, you can do a bathing-in-a-forest-pool scene like TB does. If you're a weirdo, you could do a silver-mining scene like in Slaves of the Realm, a crossover S&S / women-in-prison tale that merits a pathetic one furry boot, because it's boring as hell unless it hits your personal fetish button, and for me it doesn't. Anyway, if you're going to have an outdoor bathing scene, you also need some catty gossiping, and some giggling and splashing water around, just because. Them's the rules.
  
• Hair is very important, too. Your male barbarian needs long hair, but not Aragorn-style realistic long hair. No, he needs primped, permed, glam-metal hair, the pinnacle of 1980's hair care technology. Everyone's hair looks really great in Time Barbarians. Whatever else you say about the movie, it's got that going for it. You just know Doran and Lystra are made for each other, because they in fact have the Same. Exact. Hair. Same color, same style, feathered up the same way and everything. Identical. And each has a headband of course, just because it's the 80's. Mandrak, the baddie, has the inevitable dark hair, with a nice 80's-baddie ponytail, and once he hits the modern era he looks just like a tough-guy baddie straight out of Miami Vice. As usual, side characters typically get dark hair, so they don't distract too much from our blond hero and heroine.
  
• In the present day, Mandrak also smokes, has an earring, has the fashion sense of a classic 80's Colombian drug lord, and knows how to drive shoot an assault rifle. He even knows some of the local slang: When he shoots the head of the Gladiators gang, he says "Have a nice day!" Pretty adaptable guy. You've got to give him that, at any rate.
  
• And yet, he and his henchman came to the future to obtain a huge fortune, but they wind up as common thugs, robbing yuppies in back alleys and blowing the cash in the local skanky dive bar, with nobody but crack hos for company. The amulet doesn't work for bad guys, despite transporting them to L.A. (don't ask), and now they're stuck in the future. Mandrak laments to his henchman over a round of booze "Destiny has cursed us both, my friend", who reproaches him "You said the crystal would make us rich." When Doran kills Mandrak at the end, Mandrak finally gives him the amulet, laughs, and says "There is no way back for you, barbarian! Welcome to hell!". In a better movie, with a better script and actors, this could be touching, full of pathos and irony and all that art film crap. But here, not so much.
  
• Speaking of the final battle bit, isn't it cool how magic swords can deflect bullets? That rocks.
  
• Also, Doran says to Mandrak at the end: "Your evil shall end! By my sword!". Which echoes the bit earlier on when he did in the hooting Gatalite guy, he said "Your evil shall end! By my hands!" before doing him in barehanded. Who says these movies aren't fine art?
  
• Doran isn't in the future for all that long, but he starts to adapt as well. He at least figures out how to work a TV. doran At one point Penny's in the shower, and he bides his time first watching war footage, and then MTV, and then, well, we here some cheesy music but don't see the screen, and we see Doran smile, so apparently he's just discovered porno.
  
• The costumes aren't bad. Well, if you exclude the stuff Penny bought for Doran. Our barbarian hero ended up in a pink "Local Motion" t-shirt, tight acid-wash jeans, and a grey Members Only jacket. But I guess everyone thought that looked tres sexy back in 1990. S&S movies can be real time capsules sometimes.
  
• Mandrak's henchman fares less well, and goes about in LA wearing a beige trenchcoat and a Batman baseball cap. Doran appears to kill the guy but later says he isn't dead and claims "he dies when I say so". But he does look really dead, lying there on a sofa with his eyes open. I suppose Doran never went to medical school. After that, we just never see the guy again, so it's anyone's guess what becomes of him. Possibly he snaps out of it, and is left marooned in the future, without even Mandrak for company.
  
• Some of the other decorative elements are a bit less, um, professional. There is what I guess is supposed to be the flag of Armana, which is someone's fantasy sketch done in charcoal on white fabric. Everyone had a friend in 8th grade who did designs just like this, doodling on a pee-chee during math class. The rest of the Armana "look" is basically just antlers stuck on stuff, as opposed to the Gatalite (evil barbarian) look, which is fake skulls stuck on stuff. Although, I mean, they are barbarians and all, so I guess we should cut them some slack in the decorative arts department.
  
• TB doesn't overdo it on fog machines like Conquest did, but they're very, very obvious here. What, other than a fog machine, would cause fog to billow out from behind a rock? But hey, things like that are why S&S movies are so great.
  
• Despite the stars lining up, etc., Doran and Penny don't end up together at the end. Instead of that, we get this bit of silly speechifying:
  

  
  D: "I wonder if hope is lost for all mankind"
  P: "No, it's not. You and I are no different. It doesn't matter when it is or where we are. We'll both make sure hope stays where it belongs. In our hearts forever."
  

  
  He then gives her a little scrap of string or leather off his arm as a token of his eternal love, and says "Our love shall be for an eternity", and walks off down the railroad tracks, and eventually disappears.
  
  After he leaves, she tells Bryce to turn the camera on and keep it rolling, no matter what, and starts doing a news report. Fade to credits.
  

Updated 11/8/2010: Someone actually linked to this humble movie "review". It's in this forum thread on a site out of India called eXBii. Definitely not safe for work. You weren't seriously reading this post at work, were you? You were? Seriously?

Saturday Market saved (maybe).

Seems the city's decided to pull the plug on their goofy plan to mess around with the Ankeny Square area. The plan was to get rid of an unsightly, non-upscale fire station, and replace it with a trendy, taxpayer-subsidized condo tower for the idle rich, and then dispose of the adjacent Saturday Market (far too hippie-70's for modern "creative class" tastemakers) and replace it with a taxpayer-subsidized grocery store (also known as a "public market"), also for the benefit of the idle rich. I wrote about this back in January, when it still seemed like a done deal, explaining in detail why this was such a godawful stupid idea.

The reaction across Bloglandia has been pretty predictable. Jack Bog is happy, for once, temporarily, while the Portland Architecture guy and local foodies are livid, sputtering with rage. How dare you refuse us our new shiny baubles? Don't you know who we are?

One of Jack Bog's commenters is outraged as well, saying

I am amazed at the lack of foresight here. With this kind of thinking, Portland looks to be immitating Orange County, California. Does everyone think that projects like Pioneer Courthouse Square, Pioneer Place, Waterfront Park, Eastbank Esplanade, The Brewery Block, & The Pearl District would have just "happened" if left to the open market. The City of Portland and PDC has had a hand in shaping all of the above projects. Take a look at the public investment and see how it leverages private money (which translates to jobs, revitalization and liveabilty).
I am very disappointed to see the Firestation project go away, and with it the Portland Public Market.

That's the same argument as always: "Give us everything we want, or else you'll turn into California!" Now, I loathe California as much as the next guy, or probably more so, but at some point (i.e. now) this just becomes naked extortion. Funny thing, the idle rich in Orange County somehow manage to scrape by without huge public subsidies. Astonishing!!! I wonder how they do it?

I mean, this is all aside from the fact that 3 of the 6 PDC "miracles" listed (Pioneer Courthouse Square, Waterfront Park, Eastbank Esplanade) are city parks, not development projects, per se, and they were only funded through the PDC because it was easier than crazy stuff like, you know, making them part of the regular city budget, or whatever.

I'm not calling the PDC, their developer chums, and their devoted foodie / design-geek fanboys a bunch of crooks. Oh, no, certainly I wouldn't do that. They've all made it very clear, both to themselves and everyone else, that they're only doing this for the highest and noblest of reasons. The fact that they all get extraordinarily rich in the process is just.... well, it's a remarkable coincidence. I'll leave it at that.

I'm also not saying the city should never, ever do this sort of thing. I'm just saying that maybe there are other priorities to consider. Call me crazy, but I'd argue that maybe, just maybe, the city ought to have a go at a few of the classics, such as more jobs & healthcare, and less poverty & crime, and maybe some paved streets in outer SE Portland, while we're at it. Once we've solved those, I'd be more than happy to have a nice long fireside chat about our fair city's desperate shortage of million-dollar condos and doggie day spas.

This isn't the first stupid PDC idea to bite the dust. Remember the ice skating rink they wanted to stick in Pioneer Courthouse Square? Or the plan to demolish a bunch of beautiful historic buildings to put in more park blocks? And let's not forget the (shelved for now) Tanner Springs-style redesign of Watefront Park, which was intended to keep the design junkies happy (and employed) and keep the riffraff out, at great public expense. So it isn't unprecedented for the bad guys to lose a round or two. But win or lose, every time around the strategy for selling their latest scheme to the taxpaying rabble is the same: Plan in utmost secrecy, unveil it as if it's a done deal, then hold extensive public meetings so the public can argue over unimportant details and feel their opinions count for something, the poor saps, and then disregard all that so-called "input" and follow the original plan religiously, for good or for ill.

And guess what? A fresh new stupid plan is already afoot. Seems the "development community" now wants to gentrify the area near downtown that they (and they alone) like to call the "West End". Only problem is that there's a city-owned parking garage in the area, which is, like, totally not upscale. So the genius plan now is to tear the thing out, and replace it with... wait for it... a super-expensive condo tower! Built at taxpayer expense, no less. Who could have guessed?

Bastards.

---

Updated: According to the Portland Architecture guy, killing the plan was a terrible idea because of all the hard work the poor architects had devoted to this latest outpost of Pugtopia. All that time and taxpayer money spent, slaving away over a hot CAD program, all for nothing. Our job, as taxpayers, is to dutifully throw good money after bad, no matter how much it costs in the end. We need to go on signing those blank checks, because our city oh-so-desperately needs to gain the approval of the world's professional architects. That needs to be our highest priority, period.

Also, we need to build million-dollar condos for the idle rich because of 9/11. If we don't go through with the plan, the terrorists win!!! This is because the proposed replacement fire station (sited a few blocks down the street) would have had a shiny new firefighting museum, which would be a great local memorial for those poor New York firefighters. Never mind that the city already has a firefighting memorial -- with a local connection, no less -- at 18th & Burnside (and they're already building a new condo tower right next door).

The constant "Do X or Portland turns into L.A." we've been hearing is really just the local version of the "Do X or the terrorists win." we get on a national level. The idea is to prevent debate: If you talk publicly, or even think about such things, you're actively helping to cause an unimaginable disaster. Now the developers have stooped to playing the terrorist card locally so they can keep wallowing at the public trough. I'm sorry, but that's just despicable. I'm sure they see it as just another sales & marketing tactic, and I'm sure they don't actually believe the latest crap they're spewing (although they're hoping you do), but this is just way, way over the line.

Spooky, Mysterious Kelly Butte

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's Kelly Butte [map], a city park in outer SE portland between Division & Powell, just east of I-205. Very few people know about this place, and it appears the city likes it that way. I visited on a warm sunny afternoon, in the middle of summer, on a weekend, right in the heart of a 2-million-strong city, and saw exactly two other people, plus one dog. They were as surprised as I was to run across other living souls in the park.

The city parks department refers to the area, very briefly, as "Kelly Butte Natural Area". Which I guess is supposed to indicate that there aren't any public facilities here. Not anymore, anyway.

Kelly Butte is visible from downtown Portland and all over the east side, and and is bordered on three sides by some of the busiest roads in the metro area, but it's not really obvious how to get a closer look at it. First you have to find your way to the park entrance. (I used to say "[a] Blackberry with Google Maps is a real help here", which gives you some idea of how old this post is.). Having been here before in the park's better days is an even bigger help than just going by phone maps. What you want to do is turn off Division St. onto SE 103rd Ave., going south. There aren't any signs pointing to the park, and it's not, umm, an overly affluent area; this may deter many prospective visitors before they ever find the place. Just block out the ominous banjo music you think you're hearing, stay on 103rd, and it'll soon turn into a narrow, rutted road winding up the hill. You'll come to a battered, rusting gate with a heavily vandalized sign listing the park hours. The usual, distinctive wood Portland Parks sign is absent here, and nothing here even gives the name of the park.

So if you leave your car here (locked, of course) and walk past the gate, the road continues to the top of the hill. There you'll find a couple of weedy, abandoned parking lots, cordoned off with lengths of chain link fence. The fences stand ajar, unmarked, neither inviting nor forbidding visitors. There's a stop sign here, for some reason, again heavily vandalized. Next to one of the parking lots is a small meadow area with a nice view of Mt. Hood (top photo photo #2), with unmarked trails leading off into the forest in all directions. On the surface, the whole area looks like the city simply forgot it had a park out here, or they lost the keys to the front gate one day, or something, and nobody's been here for years, maybe decades.

If you look closer, you can see that a (very) minimal level of maintenance is going on. The grass in the meadow has been mowed recently, and if you wander down to the lower parking lot, there's a pile of dirt with fresh bulldozer tracks in front of... what on earth could this be?

>

Congratulations, you've just stumbled across the park's big forgotten secret. It's not much to look at these days, but this was once the main entrance to the city's Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center. Built in 1956, the city describes it as having been "designed to survive a 'near miss' by up to a 20 megaton bomb and to be self-sustaining for up to 90 days." Here's a 1960 photo of the city's nuclear doomsday bunker, from the Oregon Historical Society. A bit more history at Stumptown Confidential and Urban Adventure League. This page mentions the Kelly Butte bunker as well, while discussing the area's "civil defense" preparedness efforts. Seems they made all these elaborate emergency plans, and then the 1962 Columbus Day Storm hit. That storm, a remnant of a massive Pacific typhoon, was one of the worst natural disasters to hit the Northwest in modern times, and it revealed the Civil Defense Center was not quite the impregnable fortress it had been advertised as.

The bunker figures quite prominently in the 50's CBS docudrama "The Day Called 'X'", which portrays the city evacuating due to an imminent Soviet nuclear attack. It's also a fun time capsule showing what parts of downtown looked like back then, including parts of Broadway near where Pioneer Courthouse Square is now, and the old Morrison Bridge.

Later on, this Cold War relic evolved into the city's emergency/911 dispatch center, until that moved into a new, above-ground building in the mid-1990s. So it's actually only been empty for about a decade or so. I understand the place was never popular with the people who worked here. I remember seeing news reports about workers' "sick building syndrome" complaints about the place, and the inside walls were (and presumably still are) covered in lurid and disturbing murals painted in the late '80s by the local artist Henk Pander.

Once the 911 center moved out, the city tried to find new users for the place, but nobody wanted it. A Oregonian piece back in December 13th, 1992 put it this way:

OLD BOMB SHELTER AVAILABLE AS 9-1-1 CREW MOVES OUT

For Sale or Lease: One concrete bunker.

With its current tenant about to move, one of Portland's most despised properties is about to become available -- the 9-1-1 center at Kelly Butte.

Originally designed as a Civil Defense bomb shelter, the 18,820-square-foot center offers many uniquely unattractive features. Largely underground, the dark and gloomy center has no view. Employees work under a weird mural of partially standing columns.
``It reminds me of what's left over after a major nuclear attack,'' said Marge Hagerman, a secretary who also thinks the mural is ``sort of tropical. I don't know what the intent was.''

Last spring, a ``sick building syndrome'' felled workers in droves with nausea, headaches, sore throats, rashes and a metallic taste in their mouths.

Despite ventilation changes and special cleaning, another wave of sickness hit months later, bringing ambulances to the center four times.

So far, the city is marketing the property internally. In a memo to bureau officials, Fred Venzke, facilities manager, suggests the center might make a good records warehouse, indoor shooting range, community activity center or computer center.

``Facilities Services would be happy to show you the site and discuss its many possibilities,'' he said, noting the center has a 110-ton air conditioning capacity, emergency power and showers.

If the city can't find any takers internally, the center could end up for sale to the general public.

And the price?

``We haven't even addressed that,'' said Diana Holuka, city property manager.

At one point in the early 2000s it was possible to sneak into the bunker and do a little urban exploration, and there was even a public page of photos hosted on Myspace(!?) for a while, but that's been down for over a decade now & I haven't found a good mirror or replacement for those photos. IIRC it looked wet and gloomy and there seemed to be records and office equipment there that didn't move when the city moved out of the bunker, and were slowly decaying in the elements.

While scanning the interwebs for interesting stuff to share about the place, I came across a document titled Portland: The World of Darkness, which is a guide to the city for some sort of fantasy/horror RPG. It says, of the Kelly Butte bunker and the era that spawned it:

In this time of Cold-War paranoia, vampires were able to increase their holdings within the territory, constructing backalley deals with the local politicians and constructing secret “bomb-shelters” that became havens that would potentially last a thousand years; delightfully, most of these constructions were kept secret. When the paranoia revolving around nuclear weapons settled into a more fatalistic attitude, the shelters (and the vampires who inhabited them) were forgotten by the public.

So someone's finally outdone the "Shanghai tunnels" guys in trying to give our fair city some exciting urban mythology. It doesn't seem all that farfetched when you look at the thing up close, either. The place would be a perfect vampire lair, and you're surrounded on all sides by an area the city's basically written off. You could do whatever you liked and it almost certainly wouldn't make the paper. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the undead. But maybe I've just watched too much Buffy or something. Still, vampires or no, you will want to visit during daylight hours only. It's probably really creepy here at night, plus the park technically "closes" at dusk. I think. There was spraypaint all over that part of the sign.

When I was little, my dad's company installed systems inside the bunker for the city's emergency communications bureau. I'm not sure now whether I ever actually went inside or not, but I remember the outside area pretty vividly. Back around the time the 911 center moved, around 1994-95, I was living in SE Portland and thought I'd visit the park as an adult to see what it was like. It's changed far more since 1994 than between then and the 70's, and it hasn't changed in a good way. In '94 the upper parking lot was open to park visitors, there were picnic tables here, and other park amenities, I think there were basketball hoops, or maybe a horseshoe pit. Nothing fancy, and the place wasn't exactly overrun with visitors, but it felt like a regular city park, and didn't have the derelict, back-of-beyond feel it has now. I don't know what happened here. Maybe this is the place where the parks department absorbs its budget cuts, so they can keep the fountains on in the Pearl District. It's like they've put the whole place in suspended animation, waiting for the condo tower crowd to take an interest in the surrounding area. Here's an angry letter to the Portland Tribune by an eastside resident infuriated about the ongoing decline in local park facilities in SE Portland. The "Division-Powell Park" he mentions is another (older?) name you occasionally see for the park.

[Updated 12/29/06: The Mercury's Blogtown has a couple of posts about the butte today. Post #1 links to this humble blog (yeehaw!), while the second post has actual photos from inside the bunker. Kewl. For the record, I didn't take those inside-the-bunker pics, but whoever did, I doff my hat to you, good sir / ma'am. It's a real shame that Cheney wasn't home, though.

I've been meaning to go back to the butte for a while now. I half-seriously considered going up there a few days ago, on the winter solstice, to maybe set something on fire or whatever. I'm not a religious person, or even a spiritual person, but I thought it might be cool, and by cool I mean photogenic. Sadly, I'm far too law-abiding for my own good, plus it was nothing but meetings all day at the office, plus it was cold and dark, plus I don't really like fire very much, plus I decided it was a stupid idea, so I stayed at home and watched TV instead. But hey, it'll probably be a bit warmer on Walpurgisnacht, April 30 - May 1, so there's still time to organize a proper event. No Morris dancing, though, please. Thx. Mgmt.]

It's not hard to come up with fun ideas for what to do with the bunker. If I was to become a James Bond villain, or a superhero, it might make a good lair. It's not all that huge, so it'd be more of a starter lair, or a pied a lair, so to speak. Or if we're going to stop being geeks for a moment, one obvious possibility is a museum of the nuclear age. It could explain how the bunker worked, do a bit about Cold War paranoia, and present nice Portland-friendly platitudes about why The Atom Is Not Our Friend. Sure, you'd occasionally lose a school bus or two off the narrow windy road to the top, but the survivors would get a good education.

One other thing looked different when I visited in 2006, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Until late 2005, there had been a rather tall communications tower right near the bunker, but the city had stopped using it and recently decided to remove it due to, you guessed it, vandalism trouble. The local reaction seemed to be along the lines of "Hmm, something looks different. Oh, the tower's gone? Huh. Ok. Whatever."

In truth the spooky Cold War stuff only occupies the eastern half of the park, while the western half is host to an obscure Portland Water Bureau facility holding a huge underground tank. This is part of how Portland was able to just take the Mt. Tabor reservoirs offline a few years ago and just keep them around to be decorative. I don't know whether this half of the butte is open to the public or not. There are similar tanks in operation on Powell Butte and visitors don't seem to be a problem over there, but I've also never heard of people going there and haven't seen any photos from there, and I don't see anything on the map that looks like an obvious main entrance, other than a little driveway that connects into the parking lot of the huge megachurch at I-205 and Powell, which is bound to deter a lot of potential visitors. Or at least it deters me. The water tank area obviously doesn't have trees on top of the tank, so that spot may have a nice view of sunsets toward downtown. Except that after the sunset you're on Kelly Butte at night, which could be a problem.

Years ago I came across a couple of brief mentions of the water facility here, here, and here, back when the tank was above ground and smaller. And the water bureau's website had a few photos of deer at the facility, which is kind of cool, I guess, unless you live next door to the place and have a garden. I haven't checked those links in years though and don't know if they're still valid.

[Updated 9/13/06: A new post on the Water Bureau's blog talks about the bureau recently repainting the Kelly Butte Tank. The post includes a photo of a few people standing in front of the freshly painted 10M gallon tank, which gives you an idea just how big it is. Seems the previous paint job on the thing was done with lead paint. On a drinking water tank. Nice. Granted, it was on the outside of the tank, but still...]

In years past, Kelly Butte also hosted a jail and an associated rock quarry, not to be confused with the similar and much-better-known facilities further north at Rocky Butte. The Rocky Butte jail didn't close until some time in the 80's, IIRC. This page from the county Sheriff's Office indicates the Kelly Butte jail was operating at least as late as 1924. Another page I saw (which I can't locate now) stated the quarry was on the west side of the butte, so a long time I thought the water facility might have taken its place, as that seemed eminently logical. I recently (2022) figured out that the old quarry was actually located I-205 runs now, which is also a logical thing to do with an old quarry, just one that hadn't occurred to me previously. And the jail was right there at the quarry, so that seems to rule out the existence of an intact abandoned jail or extensive gothic ruins hidden in the forest, as cool as that would be.

Directly to the south of the park proper, between it and SW Powell, there used to be an old drive-in theater. Like most of its brethren, the 104th Street Drive-In has been gone for a long, long time, but the cool old 50's era sign is still there, looking just a little more rusty and weatherbeaten every year. The theater's old screen, meanwhile, lives on down at the 99W drive-in down in Newberg. These days part of the area is a large RV dealership, and part is devoted to some sort of industrial use.

Oh, and did I mention the butte's an extinct volcano? It's true. It's just one part of the extensive, and amusingly named, Boring Lava Field (named after the nearby town of Boring), which is responsible for a large number of old lava domes and cinder cones across the wider metro area. The USGS has more here. More recently, the butte was also affected by the area's repeated ice age floods as recently as 13000 years ago.

This last photo was taken on one of the many unmarked, unmapped trails crisscrossing the forest. The forest is quite dense, and you could easily get lost if you don't keep track of which way you're going. A few spots look like someone has been camping there recently, fire pits and everything. I imagine this would be a good, and extremely secluded, place to have a homeless camp. The forest here is great and everything, but it doesn't take long before you start to feel like leaving. It's not that it feels unsafe, exactly, it just feels like you're intruding into someone's living room. So it's back down the path, trying not to get lost, and back through the broken fences and rusty gates, down the overgrown old road to where you parked, and you're off to your next adventure. Assuming your car's still there.

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Notes

• [Updated 9/26/06: This post had a lot of pics from Kelly Butte, but didn't actually have a photo of the butte itself. I thought I'd fix that, so I drove out to Mt. Tabor this morning before work and took the new (properly spooky & mysterious) top photo. Kelly Butte is the dark forested hill in the foreground.]
• [Updated 1/1/07: Another batch of photos of the place here.]
• [Updated 7/1/09: Yet more photos, this time in semi-glorious infrared.]
• [Updated 8/25/09: And even more photos, this time presented as a fancy Flash slideshow, no less.]
• [Updated 8/27/11: And a long history post (no photos) I did about the erstwhile Kelly Butte Jail, circa 1906-1910]

Friday Aimless Blogging

• Here's some proof that I'm the secret power behind the local media. The Oregonian's A&E section waxes poetic about the hidden joys of Washington Park, following up on this post of mine from a couple of weeks ago. And today's Trib rants about Tanner Springs Park, doing a great job of echoing the sentiments I expressed here. The Oregonian even saw fit to point out those weird crumbling stairs I wrote about, although they refer to them variously as "stairs to nowhere" or a "stairway to heaven", proving once again that the MSM just doesn't get it.
  
• It's been an entire week, which is an eternity and a half in Internet Time, and I still don't have a catchy friday blogging gimmick. The Countess has a cute cat up today. Here are two more Friday cute cats. And another two. And here's one of the blogosphere's inevitable cat carnivals It's clearly a trendolicious trendy trend that's sweeping the interwebs, but sadly I don't have any cute cat photos of my own to post. So in lieu of that, this post contains a bunch of random crap, as usual.
  
• So that last item was about cats, and this one is about fish. Here are three recent items about newly discovered species of fish that were already in the aquarium trade before they were even recognized as new species. This is just bizarre and creepy, and I'm not just saying this as a b-monster movie fan. People are bringing into their homes and businesses creatures that science knows next to nothing about. Nobody knows how abundant they are in the wild, whether they're endangered or not, or what they eat in the wild, or how to care for them in captivity, or what would happen if they got loose in your local rivers and streams, or anything. But so long as there are people with money who want them, who cares? The Invisible Hand says this is a Good Thing, and that's all that matters, dammit. What are you, some kind of hippie tree-hugging commie?
  
• I keep getting search hits here from people looking for info on Ms. Merche Romero, the Portuguese TV personality. Seems she's the GF of Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays (or played) for Manchester United, and who knocked England out of the World Cup on penalty kicks in the semis. Turns out he's been getting death threats ever since, so now the couple doesn't intend to go back, because they don't think it's safe anymore. Um, it's just a freakin' game, everybody. Killing people over a soccer game is maybe not such a super-smart idea, ok? Am I really the first person who's ever told you that?