Pics: Steel Bridge

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Next up, a few photos of the Steel Bridge, yet another downtown Portland bridge. Most of these photos were taken from the sidewalk on the upper deck of the bridge. Not everyone realizes you can walk across the upper part; the shiny new-ish walkway on the lower deck is wide and convenient, and connects directly with Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade. The upper deck sidewalks are perfectly fine, but they aren't as convenient, so they don't seem to get a lot of foot traffic. I know I don't go that way very often.



That's kind of a shame really; if you're interested in the bridge at all (which I realize is unlikely), you get a better view of it from above. And if you're interested in the view from the bridge (more likely, although still not super-likely), that's better too. There's even a guardrail between you and the cars on the bridge, which is a nice, and unusual, touch. Still, on the east side you're dumped off into the N-dimensional circus that is the Rose Garden transit center, with streets and MAX lines radiating off in all directions, and then some. And on the west side, well, it's Old Town. Which I'm not afraid of, but a lot of people are, and sometimes I admit they might be on to something.

(Note to this humble blog's surprisingly large (i.e. nonzero) UK readership: "Old Town" in the Portland sense means roughly pre-1900. Seriously. Feel free to giggle if you like.)




A few semi-interesting tidbits about the Steel Bridge:

• It's owned by the Union Pacific railroad, not the city, county, or state. Railroads aren't usually too concerned about aesthetics, which explains a lot about the Steel Bridge. It's a workhorse, not a show horse, as the saying goes. I'm not sure why it's painted black. Maybe they got a good deal on black paint, many years ago. Must've been a one-time deal, if so, since it hasn't been repainted in a very, very long time.
  
• The standard bridge links: Structurae, Bridgehunter and PortlandBridges.
  
• As the Wikipedia article (above) notes, the lower & upper decks raise independently, which is unique in the world, yeehaw. This relates to the next point:
  
• The bridge carries all sorts of traffic. It carries normal road traffic (it was the downtown bridge for US 99, back before I-5 existed), plus MAX trains, heavy rail (including Amtrak service), pedestrians on both the lower & upper decks, and I understand that it even caries a variety of utilities, although I'm not sure which ones. Which leads us to the next point:
  
• Thus, the Steel Bridge is probably a great chokepoint for the Evildoers. (If you're an Evildoer, please stop reading now. Thx. Mgmt.) We probably don't have any Evildoers here, but the security industry insists it's a concern, so we might as well have a cow about it. At least that way we'll get our fair share of that dee-licious Homeland Security pork spending.
  
  Don't believe me? Last October, our fair city played host to something called "TOPOFF4", a Homeland Security shindig that involved a simulated "dirty bomb" attack against the Steel Bridge. (A few stories on that from Indymedia, the Mercury, the Tribune, and OregonLive.) The amusing thing about this is that they actually did the thing up at Portland International Raceway, and just pretended they were at the Steel Bridge. Now, I've been to PIR on numerous occasions, and I can state with authority that there's nothing there that in any way resembles the Steel Bridge. One would think that would be an obstacle, but if you have a Homeland Security-style hyperactive imagination, I suppose anything can stand in for anything else. Invading Iraq can stand in for catching Osama, for example. But I digress. Alternately, well, "TOPOFF" is security-speak for "Top Officials", and this was a bigwig-centric exercise. Which probably meant there was a big freakin' bigwig party at taxpayer expense. Maybe afterwards, but maybe during. Probably everyone got a solid gold "Mission Accomplished" paperweight and a gallon of caviar. That's how these things go, usually. And all those out-of-towners would need to relax after a hard day of manly-man Homeland Security playactin' and simulatin', so naturally there'd be strippers, this being Portland and all. Gotta show the big boys from DC a little local color, right?
  
• A fun twist on the security angle involves the huge grain terminal that sits right next door to the bridge. You know, the one that used to have the ginormous Amazon.com ad on it. As it turns out, the common variety of wheat grown here in the Northwest is ideal for making pitas, naan bread, and other varieties of Evildoing baked goods, so a lot of our exports go to various corners of Evildoerstan. On several occasions I've seen grain ships docked here which had the ship's name in both English and Arabic, and at least one listed its home port as Alexandria, Egypt. Which is just one of those things that happens naturally when you're a major seaport, as we occasionally pretend to be, but I'm sure it's ulcer fodder for the security guys.
  

All that security theater nonsense leads us to today's obligatory "not dying" angle: When crossing the bridge, by whatever means, try to avoid Evildoers. Especially the ones with WMDs. Domestic Evildoers with mysterious but important-sounding government jobs bear watching as well. You may want keep this advice in mind while crossing other bridges too, if I may be so bold. Have I mentioned that I've got more photos on Flickr? Well, I do. FWIW.

Pics: Burnside Bridge

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The Burnside Bridge is next up in our hurried, semi-enthusiastic look at downtown Portland bridges. As I said in the last post, I figured I already had a bunch of photos of the bridges downtown, and they're right here if I needed to take more, so putting a post together shouldn't be a big deal.



Also, if I didn't do the post, I'd feel that the bridge project wasn't really and truly complete, and it would bug me and continue to bug me until I finally did it for completeness's sake, so I might as well go ahead and do it now and get it over with. Oh, and not whine and complain about it while I'm doing it, there's an additional thought. I mean, whose bright idea was this, again?



Anyway, I figured a Burnside post shouldn't be a big deal, since I don't really have much of an opinion about it either way. It's fine, I guess. The towers are distinctive, but I've never been able to decide whether they're cool or silly. We're told this is the only bridge in town where they employed an actual architect in the design process, rather than letting "mere" engineers do it all. As always, employing an actual architect made the bridge much more expensive, so there was a big scandal, and the entire Multnomah County commission was recalled over it. It's not a very juicy scandal by political scandal standards, but it's all we've got. Or at least it was one of the rare cases where official misbehavior a.) became public, and b.) something actually happened as a result.

Anyway, walking across is pretty uneventful, which is a good thing unless you need a hook to hang a blog post on, which I do. I did manage to dream up a "not dying" angle, although not a very credible one, so I'll get to it later.

One mildly unique thing about the Burnside, by Portland standards, is that around its west end there are a few parking spaces and meters on the bridge. Not on the part over the water, though. Hey, I said mildly unique, didn't I?



I'm not going to bail completely on trying to be informative, so here are the standard links about the bridge: Multnomah County, Structurae, Bridgehunter, and PortlandBridges.

And, naturally, I have a Flickr photoset about the bridge, with all the photos you see here and much, much more, or not.

One more thing -- the earlier 1894 Burnside Bridge lives on, in a way, and you can walk over it too, or at least parts of it. When the current bridge was built, the old bridge was recycled and became part of at least three other bridges. Some of it became part of the Sellwood; the almost-ready-to-fall-down part, in fact. Other pieces apparently became part of the Lusted Road Bridge and possibly the Ten Eyck Road or "Revenue" Bridge over the Sandy River, as well as the Bull Run River Bridge (none of which I've covered here, at least not so far) There may be others I'm unaware of.



The bridge is not to be confused with Burnside's Bridge, a small stone bridge in Maryland that figured in a major Civil War battle. If your friendly neighborhood search engine sent you here while you were looking for Civil War stuff, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sorry. Our bridge isn't even named after the same guy.



I don't even have any ghost stories this time around. Closest thing is a 2006 page about "Haunted Exhibition", a show at the late, lamented Disjecta art space. Not really the same thing. Surely that other Burnside Bridge has ghosts, or maybe brain-eating Confederate zombies. Woohoo, zombies! Ok, so you might find tweakers hanging around our bridge sometimes, and it's true they strongly resemble zombies in a lot of ways, but as far as I know they don't actually number among the legions of the undead, technically speaking. Not yet, at least.



Maybe that's our creative "not dying" angle this time around: Don't accidentally visit the bridge in Maryland instead, thus falling prey to the ghastly living dead. Yeah, that'll work. Laugh with incredulity if you like; that only goes to show you've never been to Maryland. And don't get me started about Delaware, come to think of it.

Pics: Broadway Bridge

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Yes, kids, it's bridge time again. I realize I said earlier that I probably wasn't going to include some of the downtown bridges in the ongoing bridge-meandering project, on the grounds that lots of people walk and bike over them every day, everybody takes photos of them, and therefore they aren't "interesting".

Then I figured, hey, I've already got a bunch of photos of most of them, and they're right here, and I'm unfortunately rather big on doing stuff for the sake of completeness. And really the hard part about a bridge post is the research, not the photos or the walking. I doubt there's any groundbreaking new research to be done on most of the downtown bridges, and I'm not that keen on doing any, so by dropping that it ought to make it relatively simple to complete the set, so to speak. In that spirit, here are a few photos of the Broadway Bridge.



The Broadway comes up a bit short in the grace and grandeur departments, if you ask me, although the latticework looks kind of cool in a steampunk sort of way. And it's a nice color, you gotta give it that.





The main interesting thing about the Broadway is that it's of an unusual design, something called a "double-leaf Rall-type bascule". Which, as Multnomah County's page about the bridge explains, is a type of drawbridge where the 1250 ton counterweight and most of the drawbridge mechanism sits above the bridge deck. We're told it's the longest remaining bridge of its type in existence, and furthermore it's one of only three remaining in the country.

When they say the design is rare, what they mean is that it's an evolutionary dead end, and for good reason. It seems our fair city did the usual Oregon thing, and picked the design that was cheapest in the short term. As it often does, that turned out to mean that the bridge was very expensive to maintain in the long term. And finding spare parts when it breaks down? Not so easy.

Also, the complex design means it opens and closes verrrrry slowwwwwly. If you know anyone whose daily commute includes the Broadway, ask them about it sometime. They'll either get livid about it and turn the same shade of red as the bridge, or they'll smile and tell you what a Zenlike experience it is. The former possibility is the more likely of the two.



Incidentally, the bridge used to be one of those scary open steel grate designs, which are, uh, challenging when wet, and become an, um, advanced challenge when icy. After the recent renovation, the new bridge deck is made of something called FRP, or "fiber-reinforced polymer". Which I think means plastic. Really strong plastic. I hope. The material's manufacturer notes that the Broadway now has "the largest movable FRP vehicular bridge deck in the world." Take that, Seattle! Ha!



I don't know which gets more bike traffic, the Broadway or the Hawthorne, but it does seem that cyclists on the Broadway are much more determined about it, and they're going a lot faster. So if you happen to be an itinerant blogger with a camera, or a photographer with a blog, and you decide to stop and take a photo of something, you'll want to be aware of your surroundings. Everyone on the bridge except you is going with the flow, and you're just standing around dawdling and making an obstacle of yourself. It's not really a "not dying" angle, but there is a real potential for bodily harm. So pay attention. Trust me on this.



A couple of other links:

• The PortlandBridges page on the Broadway has some good photos, as you might expect.
  
• The bridge's Structurae entry.
  
• And the equivalent Bridgehunter page
  
• My inevitable Flickr photoset about the bridge.
  

Alexandra Avenue Bridge

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So today's unusual adventure takes us to an obscure corner of Forest Park to what you might call Portland's own "Bridge to Nowhere". The Alexandra Avenue Bridge is a fairly long and substantial (although narrow) bridge over a deep forested ravine, with a creek somewhere far below. It seems like you've wandered into the back of beyond, although you're actually just a few blocks off NW Thurman St. As you go uphill on Thurman, turn right onto Gordon St., and follow it to where it turns right again and becomes Alexandra Avenue. The bridge is right there. But strangely, Alexandra Avenue dead-ends into Forest Park just a few blocks past the bridge, and doesn't connect to any other streets. The city clearly went to a lot of trouble and expense to build a bridge here, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and basically nobody uses it. So the obvious question is "Why?"






I haven't been able to find a definitive answer, but I have a couple of competing theories:

1. The bridge was supposed to spur residential development further north, and it just sort of didn't work out. Forest Park wasn't created until the late 1940s, and prior to that the whole area was platted out for more upscale West Hills houses stretching off to the horizon. Leif Erickson Drive was supposed to be the main drag through the future ritzy suburb, but there were problems with mudslides, and then the Depression came along, and eventually the city ended up with all the land due to unpaid property taxes. The bridge was built in 1922, which would be the right timeframe for this.
2. It's really more of a "Bridge to Almost Nowhere". There are two things at the far end of the bridge, and perhaps the bridge was always intended just for them. There's a huge Water Bureau tank on the far side, and if you look at the photos above you can see what looks like a large water main under the deck of the bridge. So possibly the water's the main thing, so to speak, and they just figured, hey, if we're building a bridge we might as well let cars use it too. So that's one possibility.

The second thing on the far side of the bridge is the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, which they describe as:

The Salvation Army White Shield Center has been located in Northwest Portland since 1917. The center began as a maternity home and hospital. We continue to serve the needs of pregnant and parenting clients between the ages of 12 and 18 but have added an additional program to serve the needs of adolescent girls who need a safe, secure, and nurturing environment. Clients are referred to the programs by state social service agencies or the juvenile justice system.

The term "maternity home and hospital" in this case meant it was the place where young girls who'd "gotten in trouble" would go to live for a few months until the baby was born and given up for adoption. The whole idea was to be quiet and discreet about it, given the extreme social stigma attached to unwed mothers back then. There'd be the usual cover story about the girl going off to visit Aunt Edna for a few months, and afterward everyone would act -- outwardly -- as if nothing had happened, and society could go on pretending this sort of thing didn't happen, at least not in our fair city. It was a very different time, I'll say that, all about keeping up appearances and "respectability" and false facades. I suppose at the time a "maternity home and hospital" was a way to treat the issue compassionately, while also helping to hide it, so that society could go on not facing facts as they really are.

So because of all that, you don't really want your maternity home to be located on a busy neighborhood street, with nosy neighbors and Model T's whizzing by constantly. If the dates are right, the center was here first, and then the bridge a few years later. So it's possible the bridge was built to serve this place, and Alexandra Avenue was never meant to extend any further than it does.

While researching, I came across the White Shield Project, a site dedicated to collecting memories and accounts about life at White Shield over the years. Here's a forum thread on the same topic, with a few responses discussing the place.

A bit more info via the Oregonian: November 2006 article, and this rather sad Margie Boule story from September '03.



So, in short, I still don't know why the bridge is here. At least I can try to explain how I came across the bridge. If you've read any of my recent posts here, you might have noticed I've been doing a local bridge thing for a couple of months now, on and off. It seems there are a couple of sites on the net that are just big databases of bridges and other structures from around the world. So naturally once I was done looking at the page for the McLoughlin Bridge, or whichever one took me there, I thought, hey, let's see the list of what they've got for the Portland area. From there, went (as I tend to do) hey, I've never heard of that one, what's the deal there? Looked at the photos on the site, decided it looked interesting. Then found it on Google Maps and figured it was reasonably nearby. And thus, a new TODO item was born.



So here are the bridge pages at Structurae, Bridgehunter, and Brueckenweb. You might notice that two of the three sites are out of Germany, for some reason. Also, they all seem to be working off the same master list. The bridge shows up almost nowhere else on the interwebs, but it does show up on the City Bridge Inventory, where we learn it has a "sufficiency rating" of 51.70 out of 100. Which is not great by any means, and it may rank as high as it does because it gets almost no traffic. One component of the sufficiency rating is whether the bridge has enough capacity to handle current & projected vehicle traffic. And on that count, at least, it seems to suffice quite well. The inventory also describes the bridge as in "POOR" condition, and also calls it "Functionally Obsolete" (along with a lot of other bridges in town). The bridge also appears on this list of bridges eligible for repair or replacement. In which we learn that rehab costs were estimated at ~$900k, compared to ~$1.2M to replace the bridge, so rehab it probably is, whenever they get around to it. We also learn that the stream it crosses is simply called "Unnamed Creek". One other little bit of trivia to pass along: According to PortlandMaps, if a neighborhood had sprung up around the bridge, it would have been known as "Blythswood", at least according to the tax rolls (example). If history had turned out a little differently, if the Depression hadn't come along, and possibly if there hadn't been a La Niña year at just the wrong time, (with the accompanying heavy rains and mudslides), right now we might be muttering and shaking our fists at the rich twits up in Blythswood, careening around the narrow streets in their monstrous luxury SUVs. Most likely there would be a "Friends of the Alexandra Avenue Bridge" organization, with big gala fundraisers every so often, and there'd be nature walks and assorted family-friendly activities. The creek below would have a name, and there'd be all sorts of public handwringing about watersheds and native fish species. I can safely say all this based on how the locals get worked up over Tryon Creek and Balch Creek, further south. In any case, as always I've got a few more photos in my Flickr photoset about the place. Updated 9/09: We have linkage from here, on a wiki page about White Shield. I haven't read much of the site, but the person/group/organization behind it appears to be very skeptical about teen programs such as this.

Mystery Fountain

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So here's a rare case where my Google™-Fu has utterly failed me. A while back, I took a bunch of photos of this groovy 60's fountain in my neighborhood, figuring that I'd then go dig up a bunch of info about it and put together a mildly interesting post about the thing, as I tend to do. And I would've done that, but I can't find anything useful about it anywhere on the interwebs.



The fountain interested me because it's in my general neighborhood (it's just off SW 1st Avenue, near Arthur St.), it's pretty large, and it's done in the same modernist style as the vastly more famous Keller and Lovejoy fountains further north. I don't know if it was the same design team, or an "inspired by" thing, or just that this was the way everyone built fountains in that era. I'm curious, but that info doesn't seem to exist anywhere, at least not in electronic form.



I think the main reason for this is that unlike the Keller & Lovejoy fountains, this one isn't part of a public park. Instead, it sits in a plaza between two rather forbidding office buildings, the Marquam Building, and the ADP Plaza. The Marquam Bldg. link includes a mention and photo of the fountain, which is the only mention of it I've found on the net, but there's no additional info about it there. The only other photo of it on the net is the Google map shown above, which shows is that the fountain is octagonal when seen from space.



Yes, that's a duck. There was a solitary male mallard hanging out in the fountain when I dropped by. I guess to a mallard the fountain must look like an ultra-mod swingin' 60's bachelor pad. Didn't seem to be helping him with the ladies, though.



At the time I took the photos I did look around for a plaque or sign or label or anything with the fountain's name or possibly the designer's name, but no luck there either. I suppose I could've missed that, if it was small enough.



Incidentally, according to this article, the ADP Plaza project figured in the genesis of Portland's high-powered, ultra-connected Gerding Edlen development firm. So make of that what you will.



The building's now owned by one of those "REIT" things that I barely understand. It does get a mention in a recent SEC filing of theirs, which notes the building was constructed in 1981. I imagine that would make it newer than the fountain, although the water from the fountain cascades down into the ADP Plaza parking garage, so it's hard to say for sure.



So I've basically concluded I've hit a wall here. I suppose I could go and call up the building management for either building and see if they know anything, but that's not really my way. I'm curious, but in the end I'm not quite curious enough to pick up the phone. If I did that, I suppose I'd have to explain I was some random blogger from the internet and I wanted to know all about their fountain, so that I could post about it and attract hordes of random blog readers to their surprisingly secluded little plaza. Which might lead them to say no. Or worse, laugh at me. Or most likely, not know anything more about the fountain than I do.



In any case, my Flickr photoset has a few more photos beyond what's here, in case you're curious or interested or whatever.

John McLoughlin Bridge, Clackamas River

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My semi-ongoing bridge-wandering project took me down to Oregon City the other day to check out the pretty, but sadly run down, Oregon City Bridge. On my way back, I thought I'd stop briefly and check out a second bridge nearby. This is the Dr. John McLoughlin Memorial Bridge, which carries Highway 99E over the Clackamas River.

I didn't really have high hopes for it, and I almost didn't stop. I vaguely knew there was a bridge here, but it's a busy street and not a very big river, and there's no big "oh, cool" moment while driving over it, if it registers at all. It didn't really sound like it would be very interesting, but I was in the neighborhood (for once), so I figured what the heck, I'd just stop for a few minutes and take a quick peek.

Turns out the bridge is rather nice, actually. The McLoughlin bridge dates back to 1933, and sports some nice Art Deco touches and has a light, open and airy feel to it. There's no bike lane, but the sidewalk seems wider than nearly all other bridges in town, and there's a guardrail (plus the structure of the bridge itself) between you and vehicle traffic. There's even an attractive view of the Clackamas River. It's really a very cool river. If, like many Portlanders, you turn up your nose at it because of the word "Clackamas" in the name, you're really missing out.

So it's kind of too bad it's not somewhere where it'd be more useful to me. I'm very rarely down in Oregon City, and I don't think I've ever actually stopped in Gladstone even once for any purpose, so walking between the two, just not a very common occurrence.

You might've noticed I didn't bother with the "not dying" bit in the title. The bridge itself is pretty decent, and the "not dying" theme just sort of doesn't work. Quite honestly, if you're walking or biking along Highway 99E, the bridge is probably the safest spot for miles around. On either side, it's wall-to-wall mini-malls, no bike lanes, narrow sidewalks with lots of curb cuts, people tend to be driving large trucks and SUVs, and they don't expect you to be there. So just stay on the freakin' bridge, and you'll be fine, probably.

The Structurae page about the bridge has more photos, including a cool award plaque for being named "Most Beautiful Steel Bridge, Class C" in 1933 by something called the American Institute of Steel Construction, which still exists -- although it looks like the prize stuff is now handled by a related organization called the National Steel Bridge Alliance. Their online list of awards only dates back to 1996, unfortunately, but I do see that the St. Johns Bridge renovation project won a prize in 2007. Strictly speaking, the McLoughlin bridge received an "award of merit", which seems to be one tier down from a "prize" in steel bridge parlance. But still. An award's an award.

Here's a 1933 color photo of the bridge when it was new. Looks pretty much the same, doesn't it? Wikimedia has a photo of the bridge from a different angle than mine, and you can see the 3 arch structure a bit better there.

There's also a confusing mention of the bridge in Best Places Portland:

More interesting [than the Interstate Bridge] is the OREGON CITY BRIDGE (1922). The only Portland-area span designed by Conde McCullough, this 745-foot arch bridge features fluted Art Deco main piers and hammered inset panels. Just north, McCullough's McLoughlin Bridge has been rated the most beautiful steel bridge of its kind in the U.S.

So first we learn that the Oregon City Bridge is the only McCullough bridge in town, and in the very next sentence we're told the McLoughlin bridge is his too. Go figure.

Other than that, there really isn't too much to say about the bridge. It has a cameo in a gory, unsolved 1940s murder case, in which part of the body was found near the bridge. Seriously, I'm not kidding about the gory part.

So does this mean I'm expanding the bridge-moseying project beyond Willamette River bridges? Well, no, or mostly no. I keep talking about the two Columbia River bridges, and I'll probably end up doing those at some point, eventually. And now that I stare at the map a little, it turns out there really aren't very many bridges over the Clackamas River. There's this one, obviously. There's a rail bridge and a bridge for I-205 further upstream that I think we can file under "not safe for pedestrians". There's also an old bridge around 82nd Drive near the High Rocks area that's supposed to be for bikes and pedestrians, but I understand it's been closed since 2006 due to a fire and subsequent insurance litigation. There are more bridges further upstream, around Carver, Barton Park, Estacada, and beyond, but I'm ok with filing those as "outside the Portland area". As in, maybe, if I'm in the area anyway, and it seems "interesting", and I'm in the mood for it, but it's a very low priority. In other words, I think this may be the only Clackamas River bridge that's within any reasonable project scope. So I'm going to go ahead and declare Mission Accomplished on river #2. Hooray, or whatever.