East Park Blocks: Firland Parkway

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This stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks takes us to Firland Parkway, along SE 72nd Avenue between Holgate & Foster. This is the first chunk of East Park Blocks that I visited, because it's the only one on the list that appears on most city maps. I searched the net a little about the place, and came across a thread in the Foster Powell Neighborhood group on Flickr: "An Olmstead designed park in FoPo?". Which intrigued me, as you might imagine. I'm still not 100% sold on the Olmsted connection, but any parkway like this can at least be fairly called "Olmsted-inspired". For whatever that's worth, I mean. That's the sort of term you use when you're trying to sell real estate, or lure a Starbucks to the neighborhood. Sort of like "FoPo", come to think of it.

After reading that thread and researching further, I came to realize there were a bunch of other stretches of park blocks around town, and a new project was born. It seems these things always start small...



Anyway, Firland Parkway seems like a pretty quiet place, in a (perhaps surprisingly) quiet neighborhood. I did come across a couple of posts about a plant swap held at the north end of the parkway. That's about it for excitement. Which I imagine is how the neighborhood likes it.



I was initially puzzled about why Firland Parkway shows up on maps when the other don't, but I think I've finally figured out the reason. After consulting PortlandMaps, it seems that most of the East Park Blocks are just part of the rights-of way of the streets they're on. Legally speaking, they're merely extremely wide medians, and aren't "properties" in their own right. Firland Parkway is one exception. Why, I don't know, but here are the PortlandMaps pages on the two long blocks that comprise the place. While we're being pedantic and tedious about this, I should note that the city auditor's office is listed as the legal owner of both parcels, rather than the Parks Bureau. This isn't actually all that unusual. You also see the city property manager listed as owner a lot too. Again, I don't know why; it just sort of is that way.

East Park Blocks: Reed College Parkway

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This stop on our tour of the East Park Blocks takes us south, to Reed College Parkway, which as you might imagine is right next to Reed College. And the parkway runs the length of SE Reed College Place, in case the location was still at all unclear.

Well, you'd think it'd all be very clear, but the city sometimes mistakenly calls it the "Reedway Blocks". Reedway is an entirely different street, east-west instead of north-south, and which doesn't have any park blocks along its entire length, as far as I can tell.

Of all the East Park Blocks around town, Reed College Parkway may be the closest to how they were all intended to turn out. Large, genteel houses line both sides of the street, and stately old elms run the length of the parkway. It's really quite nice, although I don't know what you'd have to do to afford a house here. The parkway isn't the only thing that gives the area such a patrician, old money feel, but it certainly helps.

Of course, being next to a rather, er, alternative-minded college, it's not all tea and crumpets on Reed College Parkway. Or rather, when it is tea and crumpets, it just might be performance art, like this 2007 TBA event. (In the article, the parkway is described as a "tree-lined expanse of grass", not as a park. FWIW.) An OregonLive blog post has more about the conceptual art tea party, with photos.

I can answer the perennial "who waters/mows the grass" question this time. Recent meeting minutes for the Eastmoreland neighborhood association shed a little light on the not-quite-a-city-park, not-quite-a-street-median status of this and the other East Park Blocks around town. Like most of them, Reed College Parkway is owned by the city's Transportation Bureau, and in this case they're responsible for watering the grass, but the Parks Bureau has the job of mowing the grass. It's all clear now, yes?

An East County News piece about area residents unhappy with the current arrangement. Our mayor-elect suggests that the locals form a "Local Improvement District" and tax themselves extra to help maintain the place, because the city just doesn't have the money.

Miscellaneous other bits:

• someone else's photo of the place
  
• A tidbit in the Sellwood Bee about tree pruning along the parkway
  
• city-sponsored walking tours
  

East Park Blocks: Intro

Every tourist guidebook to Portland blabs on and on about the Park Blocks downtown. As a result, they aren't really prime blog material here, photogenic as they may be. But as it turns out, the downtown Park Blocks have a number of vastly more obscure cousins scattered around Portland's east side. I've never seen any collective name used for all of them, so I thought I'd go ahead and christen them the "East Park Blocks", by analogy with downtown's North & South Park Blocks. (Although now I'll probably run across another one, on the west side this time, and it'll be back to square one again...)

Most of the East Park Blocks are in residential areas; I think the idea was that a stretch of park blocks makes an area a bit more genteel, and creates a boulevard suitable for promenading about in one's horse and buggy, wearing one's Sunday best. Which doesn't happen much anymore, and doing the equivalent from a car just isn't the same. Still, I figured since they're designed to be enjoyed from a moving vehicle, that's what I'd do. I made a big loop around town, driving up and down each stretch of these park blocks in turn. Most of these photos were taken while I was driving, which isn't exactly "safe", and Legal says I can't encourage anyone else to do it, but I think it captures the effect properly this way.

I've seen indications that at least some of these park blocks are the scattered remnants of an early 20th century master plan, a plan that for the most part went unimplemented. From the city's Recreational Trails Strategy:

The historic foundation for this trail system strategy is the 1903 plan developed for Portland by John C. Olmsted. He identified desirable sites for parks and proposed that they be connected by parkways and boulevards. Although many of the sites were eventually secured, Terwilliger Boulevard (which he helped design) is the only substantial parkway that was created. Some fragments of boulevard (Ainsworth and Reedway Blocks, Firland and Roseway Parkways) were constructed as parts of subdivisions, but most of the Olmsted vision of interconnected parks was not implemented.

I'm not totally sure this is accurate, though. Another two docs, also from the city, discuss the 1903 Olmsted plan, and the various parkways and park blocks do not appear anywhere in the text or in any included maps. I suppose they could've originated in the 1912 Bennett Plan, but I couldn't find enough detail about that to be sure one way or the other. I'd imagine the Oregon Historical Society would have copies of the original plans, which would settle the matter definitively. I haven't gotten around to doing that, though, so I'm going to have to call this a "maybe" for now.

If there was a master plan, it's hard to argue it was a realistic master plan. Now, I realize it was the early 20th century, the days of all-out civic boosterism and Teddy Roosevelt-style bravado, but two of the existing stretches of park blocks are way out on 72nd Avenue, one in NE Portland and the other in SE, separated by a few miles. If the original plan was to have a continuous Olmsted-esque parkway the whole distance, that would've been a pretty damn expensive undertaking, way out at the far edge of the city. To give you some idea, the Portland city limits only extended to roughly 82nd avenue as recently as the 1980s. (The 1980s expansion further east is still bitterly resented in some quarters, but that's a story for another time.) I'm not convinced it would've been a good idea to build out the full plan anyway (again, assuming there was a plan). If the intent was to create leafy, green, stuffy, respectable upper-middle-class neighborhoods, that idea met with mixed success, at best. These days the parkways' surrounding neighborhoods are all gentrifying to varying degrees, but most were decidedly blue-collar areas for much of the 20th century. Which is fine, of course; it's just not what the original planners intended. Given John Olmsted's comments about Milwaukie's "sordid little houses", which I mentioned in my Elk Rock Island post, I think it's fair to assume that urban planners of that era were a snobby, elitist lot, with little care for the needs of the icky toiling classes.

In the present day, the whole parkway concept has kind of fallen by the wayside. The idea of setting aside public space to look at but not actually use is deeply unfashionable now, and we don't do it anymore. (Well, with one notable exception that we'll get to later on in the tour.) The Portland Parks website has little icons on the page for each city park indicating what features are available: For "hiking", there's a couple of people hiking. For tennis, a guy with a tennis racket. For "natural area", there's a duck, a maple leaf, and a magnifying glass. They don't have pages for any of the places we're visiting on this tour, but if they did they'd need to cobble up a "genteel" icon, maybe a couple promenading in Victorian garb, the man in top hat and tails (and perhaps sporting a monocle), the woman in an elaborate period gown with an enormous hat made of endangered birds.

In any case, the list of parkways in the Recreational Trails doc isn't completely accurate. They missed a couple, and got the name wrong on another one. A doc explaining the city's 2002 Parks Levy does a better job -- understandable, I guess, since there was actual money on the line. But they still missed one, for reasons which will become clear a bit later on.

I was initially going to stuff everything into this post, but six embedded Google maps in a single post seemed excessive, so I decided to break it up into a multi-post series instead, so this post is just an intro.

Here's the list, starting at the southernmost and proceeding counterclockwise into North Portland:

• Reed College Parkway
  
• Firland Parkway
  
• Stanley Park
  
• Roseway Parkway
  
• Ainsworth Blocks
  
• Omaha Parkway
  

Updated 2/3/21: I ran across two more of these back in 2014: The Sandstone Park Blocks in a subdivision just over the city boundary into Gresham, and the Waverleigh Blvd. Blocks in inner SE Portland north of Powell.

Elk Rock Island expedition

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Today's adventure takes us out to funky little Elk Rock Island, in the Willamette River down near Milwaukie. I don't do islands very much here, since I don't own a boat (not yet, anyway), but this one you can actually walk to. Elk Rock Island is really just a part-time island, when the river level's high enough. The rest of the year it's sort of a peninsula, connected to the mainland by a stretch of weird undulating bedrock. But even then, it still kind of looks like an island.

Getting to the island is a little confusing, and it doesn't help matters that there aren't any signs for it. Not any that I noticed, at least. Although it's a Portland city park, you'll need to head down to Milwaukie if you plan to get there by land. It's a bit south of where River Road branches off from McLoughlin. If you're coming from the north, when you veer off toward River Rd., you're initially on 22nd Ave., and you briefly cut over on Sparrow St. before you're on River Rd. proper. Where everyone else turns left, you want to turn right. Continue down the hill on Sparrow. You'll go under a low trestle, and shortly after that Sparrow ends where it joins with 19th Ave. The not-very-grand entrance to the park is here. But before you park here, check out all the “No Parking” signs. I get the distinct impression that someone (neighbors? the city?) really, really doesn't want you parking here. So you can go park somewhere else and walk back, now that you know where the entrance is. Or you can do like I did, and somehow manage to not notice all the scary “No Parking” signs, park here anyway, and wander off into the forest. Maybe you'll be as lucky as I was, and only realize you were parked illegally just as you're driving off. Or maybe you won't be.

Updated 2/3/21:The island is now a Milwaukie city park as of 2016, which hopefully is a more workable arrangement, as much as I'm a fan of weird legal oddities. There's a discussion of the pre-2016 situation further down in this post; I kept it around as a historical curiosity, and for context since the rest of the post describes the island as it was circa 2008. Although as far as I know nothing's really changed since then except the name on the deed to the place.

Anyway, let's assume that you're at 19th and Sparrow now, and not in a car, by whatever means. Perhaps you biked here, and spent the last paragraph sneering at my vehicular travails. There's still no sign of any island at this point, so you just need to get on the trail and walk a bit further. There really is an island (or semi-island) here, honest.

Incidentally, the ho-hum forested area you're walking through here is called “Spring Park” (or very rarely “Keller Park”, as on the above Google map). Unlike the island itself, Spring Park is part of Milwaukie, and a pair of official maps indicate that the North Clackamas parks district runs it. If you're curious about the place for some reason, or you just can't get to the island because the river's too high, here's a 2004 Oregonian article on Spring Park, and a more recent article at the Oregon City News. Also, here's a photo from Spring Park, with a typical bit of the foliage:

But I digress. Once you're out of the woods, you'll see either a.) something like the top photo, or b.) something like the top photo but with more water. If it's option a, you've come to the weird undulating bedrock I mentioned earlier.

Apparently this little plug of land here is a remnant of a very old volcano. "Very old", by local standards, means about 40 million years. Most surface rocks around town are a "mere" 10-20 million years old. These rocks, known as Waverly Heights Basalt, (see this doc from the state, "Geology of the Portland Area"). are about the oldest rocks you can see without leaving town and driving a fair distance, or digging down a fair distance. Which is kind of sad really; just like recorded human history doesn't go back very far here, the oldest rocks we've got aren't too impressively old either. You won't find any dinosaur bones here, because they died out a good 25 million years before the aforementioned volcano appeared and then eroded away. Well, this is all true unless you're one of those creationist wingnuts, in which case the Waverly Heights Basalt rocks are 6000 years old, just like everything else, and all of modern geology is a godless commie liberal pinko gay terrorist plot, and modern geologists hate freedom. In which case you probably ought to leave this blog immediately and never come back. And do it quick before you read anything else that upsets you. And you probably ought to leave the island too, while you're at it, and go build yourself a Y2K bunker in some godforsaken, faraway red state.

If you're still here, and you can pick your way across the mini-moonscape, you'll get to the island proper. As you can see, it's not really all that big. The city says it's 13 acres, although I don't know if that's at low water or high water. The city classifies it as a “natural area”, and it's supposedly home to herons and bald eagles, although I didn't see any while I was there. Like most city parks, has trouble with invasive species, so the city conducts controlled burns from time to time. I didn't see any evidence of that either. A couple of recent Oregonian articles about visiting the island, in which we learn it's a nice place to enjoy winter wildlife, if the river doesn't kill you. There's also a 2003 article, "Saving an Island Oasis", and the island also featured in an Oregon Field Guide episode a few years back (which sadly isn't available online).

The center of the island is densely forested and crisscrossed by a number of trails, but I found it much more interesting to walk the circumference of the island, which is quick and easy and you're much less likely to get lost that way.

As you're walking around, you might notice a low stone wall right on the water, along the western shore of the island. You can kind of make it out in the above photo – I'd have tried to get closer and take a better picture if I'd known what it was. The island's a quiet place these days, but it was quite the happening spot way back in the early 20th century. The stone wall is all that's left of the Rock Island Clubhouse, a rowdy "dance hall" that used to, uh, grace the island, back in the old days. Sounds like it was quite an operation, complete with booze, broads, police raids, the whole deal. And then the whole place burned to the ground.

The Milwaukie Library's list of newspaper stories about fires & fire departments mentions the November 23rd, 1916 fire that destroyed the "Clubhouse" on the island. The land bridge was probably underwater that late in the year. I don't know if the place was operating at the time, but just imagine being all-out sloppy drunk on a scrubby little island in the Willamette, during a dark and probably wet late November, and then the whole place catches on fire. That doesn't sound like very enjoyable.

Nothing anywhere near as exciting happens on the island these days (that I'm aware of), although there does seem to be an occasional paintball problem here. (Note that the state legislator behind that proposed law is also a founder of the Friends of Elk Rock Island.) Oh, and there was a stabbing back in 2001 after a drunken party got out of hand. Also, the The Portland Spirit ran aground near Elk Rock Island back in 1997, which the Coast Guard blamed on sloppy navigation and a misplaced buoy. FWIW.

The neighborhood on the Milwaukie shore (back where you may or may not have parked) is still called "Island Station", named after a long-vanished streetcar stop, which presumably was here for people heading to go drinkin' and dancin' and carryin' on. A page about a current rails-to-trails project mentions the old Island Station streetcar stop, and includes an period photo.

For more history and background and tales about the island, you really want to check out a really excellent post about the place, at Wobbly Little Legs. Quite honestly, it's much more interesting than the post you're reading now. It's even got a cool ghost story. If you're only going to click on one link in this post, this is the one you'll want to click on.

More photos at Fidgets by Jeff. A local newspaper article about the annual Audubon bird count, with a mention of the island. Someone mentions they'd lived in Portland for 38 years and never knew Elk Rock Island was here. It hasn't quite been 38 years for me (yet), but I know the feeling. A mention in a pdf about "Portland's Forgotten Greenspaces". And a mention from a dog's perspective, sorta, with photos, at To Aire Is Divine.

Also, there's a letterbox around here somewhere, if you're into deciphering cryptic clues, which I'm not.

Across the river, you might've noticed the high cliffs that drop straight down into the river. Those cliffs are Elk Rock proper. The island gets its name from being near Elk Rock, not from being Elk Rock. That probably confuses a lot of people. As for the "Elk" in the name, a Native American legend holds that this was a good spot to stampede a herd of elk over the cliff.

On the left (=south) side of Elk Rock is what looks like a dry waterfall. Apparently that is a real waterfall, albeit a seasonal one. I had no idea there was a waterfall this close to town. It may be that when it's flowing, the river is also so high you can't walk out to the island, and so the falls don't get a lot of exposure. I don't really know. I've only come across a couple of photos so far of the falls, in this recent newsletter from Willamette Riverkeeper, and it's just a small black-and-white photo on page 10. There's a better photo of the falls on Flickr, apparently taken from the Portland Spirit around this time last year. But last year was an especially wet autumn. It certainly wasn't going when I was there. So clearly, this calls for further investigation on my part, at some point when the falls are flowing.

In the present day, the area across the river is part of the Dunthorpe neighborhood, an ultra-ritzy old money area that's home to the city's power elite, along with a number of pro basketball players, a couple of privacy-obsessed Hollywood actors, and even, supposedly, Linus Torvalds himself. Along with the Riverdale neighborhood a bit further north, the Dunthorpe area has so far managed to avoid being annexed by the city of Portland, or any of the other surrounding cities. Because, you know, only the little people pay property taxes. (No offense intented, Linus, if you read this.) So you have a weird situation where both the island and Elk Rock itself belong to the Portland Parks Bureau, but lie well outside Portland city limits.

Perhaps, if you read this humble blog regularly, you've noticed my tendency to get all nitpicky about exactly who owns a given chunk of land, what the place is officially called, and that sort of thing. It seems the Elk Rock area is really kind of a wonderland for my pedantic tendencies. There's the ownership vs. city limits thing I just mentioned. And as I noted earlier, the park on the Milwaukie mainland side goes by two different names, for reasons that remain unexplained. Then there's the island itself, which is called either "Peter Kerr Park" or "Elk Rock Island Natural Area". And then there's a 3 acre parcel across the river that includes Elk Rock itself, the near-vertical cliffs high above the river. This is called either "Peter Kerr Property", "Peter Kerr Natural Area", or even "Peter Kerr Park", or (according to PortlandMaps) plain old property ID# R331706. I don't have a property ID for the island itself, since on top of being outside Portland city limits, it's also over the Clackamas county line, and so the city doesn't have useful GIS data for it.

The city parks bureau doesn't have a lot to say about either the island or Elk Rock proper. They do appear as part of the city's Natural Vegetation Survey, wherein we learn that the terrain at Elk Rock is officially "Extremely Steep". That page refers to both parcels as the "Peter Kerr Property".

Calling the whole area the "Peter Kerr Property" is not entirely off base, actually, since the whole area once belonged to Mr. Kerr, a Scottish immigrant and Gilded Age grain magnate. Besides these nature bits the city eventually ended up with, he also had a formal house and gardens up on the bluff. Those now belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon and are known as the Bishop's Close. The house is now the bishop's official residence, and the grounds are open to the public. I think I was there once as a kid. Maybe I'll go take a look around sometime, I imagine probably not until next spring when the flowers return. The Oregon Historical Society has an extensive Kerr family collection, with a bunch of old photos and so forth, and if I was a real historian I'd probably go use that as a resource.

Fortunately, the Kerr estate does get a mention in a book by a real historian. A book I actually own, no less. MacColl's The Growth of a City spends a few pages on the Kerr estate, including a telling quote from John Olmsted, the designer of the estate. In a letter to Kerr, Olmsted explained why the planned manor house shouldn't be located on the bluff's edge, as Kerr had originally intended:

With respect to the new house site, my feeling was that in spite of the manifest advantages of a site close to the bluff, the distant view would be more agreeable from a site further back from the bluff, because in that case you could provide a picturesque foreground on your own place and could so manage the plantations as to conceal the sordid little houses of the town of Milwaukee across the river, while still retaining in full view the wooded hills beyond the magnificent view of Mount Hood.

"Sordid little houses". Ugh. And he didn't even spell "Milwaukie" right. I have no idea whether Kerr himself shared these sentiments, but when it came time to donate parts of the estate for park purposes, the land went to Portland, not Milwaukie, which would've been the geographically obvious choice.

So you can't see the ex-Kerr digs, but a number of huge houses are visible across the river. One of the more prominent ones, located slightly downstream of the island, has a ghost story associated with it.

Also across the river, and invisible from here, is Elk Rock Tunnel, a 1/4 mile railroad tunnel under Elk Rock that's currently used by the Willamette Shore Trolley. The idea behind the Willamette Shore Trolley, as I understand it, is not simply to give old people something to get all nostalgic about; it also keeps the rail right-of-way alive in case they ever decide to run the Portland Streetcar down to Lake Oswego. More on the trolley/streetcar situation at Portland Transport.

Speaking of elk, here's the Wapati IPA from "Elk Rock Brewing", which I understand is a store-brand label for either Fred Meyer or Safeway, I can't recall which. Either way, I'm told that the beer's brewed by Pyramid here in town. So the name probably refers to this Elk Rock, although it's not depicted on the label. If you were going to bring a six pack and hang out here (which is technically illegal, this being a Portland city park and all), this would be the logical beer to bring along, assuming it's any good. Mmmm.... beeeer....

Um, in any case, once you're done circling the island, the way back is the same way you came in, and then it's off to the next adventure (or in my case, off to the office and the next fun meeting). That is, unless the city towed your car while you were out wandering the island, or the river rose in the meantime and now you're marooned here, possibly until spring. In which case the adventure is just beginning....

Autumn, Tualatin River Bridge

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The ongoing bridge series ventures south once again, this time to a rather obscure location. The bridge you see here carries Highway 99W over the Tualatin River, out in the 'burbs between Tigard & Tualatin. It doesn't appear to have a proper name, as far as I know. It's often called "Tualatin River Bridge" (for example Structurae and Bridgehunter), although that's a bit silly considering how many other bridges there are over the Tualatin. Other sources call it "Highway 99W Bridge", which is also silly since this is far from the only river 99W crosses. It probably doesn't help that when you drive over it, you barely even notice you're on a bridge. The St. Johns it's not, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.

The original reason I thought I'd go check it out was that at least one source indicated it's a Conde McCullough bridge, which is a big deal if you know who he is, otherwise not so much. Ok, so that source is merely a caption on a Flickr photo, but the photo's by a local author who's written a number of bridge books and who runs a well-known Bridge of the Month Quiz. So I imagine the attribution is more than just a wild guess. I mean, I could just go down to the library or the historical society, or possibly check with ODOT, and find out for certain. I really ought to do that, probably. I'll update this post if I ever get around to doing that, but for now I'll just call it a "could be". At minimum, we know it was built by the right agency (the state highway dept.), at the right time (the 1920's). Whoever designed it, it's fair to say it probably doesn't number among their signature works. It's your basic steel truss bridge, nothing too remarkable about it. And the old bridge just carries the southbound lanes of 99W these days. The northbound lanes travel on a concrete bridge of unknown (but much more recent) vintage. Again, nothing terribly remarkable about it.

I do like the setting, though. Autumn leaves, a still river, the bridges, the morning light... It was kind of fabulous. I'm almost afraid to go back. I'm sure it wouldn't be the same.

It turns out there's a bit of history to relate about this spot. There's been a river crossing at this location since pioneer days. If you've ever driven Taylor's Ferry Road and wondered about the name (while you were waiting at a light or whatever), here's your answer. The ferry was replaced with the first bridge at this location way back in the 1860's (not too surprising, as the Tualatin isn't a very big river). Yet the name of the road has persisted to the present day, although the name's no longer used anywhere near here. All of this comes from "A Bridge over Time", a fun history poster from the City of Tualatin, with a bunch of old photos of the area.

The poster has a photo of something called "Roamer's Rest", a long-vanished river recreation spot once located right around here somewhere. Here's a local newspaper article reminiscing about the place.

I didn't actually walk across the bridge this time. I didn't see anywhere I could park and walk across the southbound (i.e. old) side, and it didn't seem really necessary anyway. The spot I took these from is primarily a canoe-launching site on the south bank of the river. When you drive over the bridge, it's not obvious that there's any public river access nearby, as there aren't any signs or obvious turnoffs.

Directions, from a page at the Tualatin Riverkeeper site:

99W Bridge & Hazelbrook Rd., Tualatin (RM 11.5 RB)
From 99W turn south onto 124th. Turn east onto Tualatin Road. Turn north onto SW 115th Avenue. Turn left (west) onto Hazelbrook Road. There are four parking spots at the
put-in. No restroom. More parking at Hazelbrook Middle School, two blocks east. This was the historical site of Taylor’s Ferry. Pilings from an old wooden covered bridge
are still in the river here.

If you look at the map above, the tiny parking lot is right at the sharp bend in Hazelbrook Road, and from there there's a short path to a viewpoint & put-in, right between the two bridges.

A local newspaper did a piece about this bridge, in the wake of that nasty bridge collapse in Minneapolis: "Highway 99W bridge old but 'in good condition'". So I suppose if you were going to walk across it, or I was going to go back and walk across it, it's at least not going to collapse under you, which I suppose is a relief, unless the idea of collapsing bridges hadn't occurred to you until just now, in which case not so much, and I humbly apologize for bringing it up. Or whatever.

Portland Memory Garden

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As you may have noticed, this is generally not the most personal of personal blogs. It's usually city park, waterfall, city park, bridge, bridge, blah, blah, occasionally with a cheesy monster movie or a brewpub thrown in to liven things up. And in a way, this post is yet another "city park" post, although with a bit more personal significance than usual.



These photos are from the Portland Memory Garden, located in Ed Benedict Park in outer SE Portland, just south of Kelly Butte. The garden was designed as a safe, quiet, peaceful place to take people with Alzheimer's: Circular paths so they won't get lost; high walls and a gate to keep them from wandering off. They've even made sure to plant only nontoxic, edible plants, apparently.



I've mentioned before, in passing, that I have a family member with Alzheimer's, now in the later stages of the disease. It's difficult to talk about, and impossible not to talk about. When he took a major turn for the worse a few weeks ago, I started writing a post about the situation but couldn't finish the thing. (What's more, the initial bit I'd written wasn't really the tone I was aiming for -- I'm kind of a perfectionist about these things, although I'm not certain this is always obvious in the finished product.)



So a bit later, I remembered reading about this Memory Garden thing, and it occurred to me that I might want to go check it out. Not for his sake, really; he's a couple of hours away, and anymore he's a bit too far along to really appreciate the place. No, it's more that I thought, hey, here's a place I can go and take a few photos of, and post some strictly factual links about, and maybe also include some informational links about the disease itself. That way I can feel as though I've said or done something semi-constructive about (or at least in relation to) the situation. Which is preferable, I think, to simply wringing my hands and wallowing in pathos.



So here are those strictly factual links I mentioned:

• Gresham Outlook: "Portland Memory Garden refreshing all year long"
  
  
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Memory gardens offer hope to Alzheimer's patients". Actually I think the right word would be "comfort", not "hope". Alzheimer's is not like, say, cancer, where you probably understand what's going on, and there may be a nonzero chance of getting better.
  
  
• CityVoter.com has a page about the garden with a number of photos.
  
  
• Center of Design for an Aging Society, a group that helped design the garden, writes about it here.
  
  
• Another page concerning the design of the garden.
  
  
• The Portland garden is cited in this proposal to build a similar garden in the UK.
  
  

While I'm at it, here's the original text of that post I couldn't quite put together. ..

A while back I asserted that Alzheimer's was officially the worst medical condition in the world. As it turns out, I was slightly premature about that. Alzheimer's plus broken hip is even worse. Way worser than worst. Not so many years ago, there were no good options for dealing with a broken hip. If you got one, you were screwed, basically. You tended not to live much longer after that, whether due to the injury or subsequent complications. Now there are a number of surgical options, including partial hip replacement, which is the option we settled on. Hip replacement is a marvelous thing in most cases: People who'd otherwise be dead or debilitated can be back on their feet, doing the whole "active senior" thing for years to come. But in our case it means another six months, or a year, or maybe two, of progressive dementia. At best, he'll just regain the ability to try to wander off to Chicago again. So no big increase in quality of life here. And did I mention that partial hip replacements aren't cheap? Still, doing nothing wasn't an option. That would be inhumane. Even idly thinking about cost/benefit equations verges on inhumane. But if you've ever been curious why health care is so expensive in this country, well, I've got a data point for you right here.

Oswego Creek Bridge

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Ok, time for another bridge. This time we're looking at Lake Oswego's Oswego Creek Bridge, which carries Highway 43 ( == Macadam Ave. ) over, uh, Oswego Creek on its brief journey from Oswego Lake to the Willamette River. I don't usually bother with bridges over mere creeks unless the bridge is especially unusual or interesting somehow. The previous one was a (sorta) covered bridge. This one is a 1930-vintage Conde McCullough bridge... I think.

It's taken me a while to post this, because there's a bit of a mystery going on. If you look at the Bridgehunter & Structurae pages for the bridge, or this old photo from the City of Lake Oswego, the bridge you see there doesn't look quite like my photos. At first I thought maybe I'd gone to the wrong bridge, but that didn't seem possible. Then I thought maybe the bridge had been replaced in recent years, since the photo shown there is dated 1991. Although in that case you'd think there'd be some mention of the fact somewhere, and there isn't.

This painting of the bridge might explain what's going on. Assuming the artist didn't take extreme liberties, it sure looks like the bridge was widened at some point, so that the northbound lanes are old, and the soutbound ones are new, and I just happened to be on the southbound side. The bridge railing looks kind of old, much older than the visible supports, so I expect they either reused the original, or made a new one to match the other side. If that's what's really going on here, I mean; I haven't seen the other side, so I don't know for sure. I suppose I could go back and take another look or something. And while I'm at it, maybe try to take some better photos than the ones you see here, which I'm not entirely pleased with.

Anyway, I think that's what's going on here. If it turns out that I'm totally off base, I can always come back and rewrite this post if I have to.

If it turns out this is another McCullough bridge (which is pretty much the only reason I came to check it out), that brings us to at least 3 in the Portland area, even though sources often claim the Oregon City Bridge is the only bridge of his anywhere in town. But the McLoughlin Bridge and this one appear to be his too, and I've read that he designed a couple of Hwy 99 bridges nearby (over the Tualatin River near Tualatin, and over the N. Yamhill near McMinnville). So there may be at least 5, depending on how you define "Portland area".

The obligatory "not dying" angle, this time: Take care to not crane your neck out too far while looking for the damn bridge arches that aren't there, thereby losing your balance, falling off, and plummeting to an untimely demise somewhere in the ravine far below. Also, don't learn the hard way that the bridge is probably not quite high enough for bungee jumping (or base jumping, for that matter), and the creek isn't anywhere near deep enough to dive into from the bridge. Not that I expect people to listen to little ol' me out here on the Interwebs if they're inclined to try any of that stuff. But hey. Whatever.

Autumn, Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge

A few photos from Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge, a Metro-run wetland area out in outer SE Portland. Metro's info page about the place insists you need to visit twice to really appreciate the place -- once in the winter, to get the full wetlands experience, and again in the summer, to experience the wildlife and plants and so forth. So naturally I showed up in autumn instead.

I parked at the south end, next to the Springwater Corridor trail, and wandered in for a look around. I didn't go all that far, actually; the wetland parts weren't completely wet yet, but they were muddy enough to convince me not to go any further. I think there must be another entrance somewhere further north that gives more access to the place. I haven't yet found a detailed map of the place showing trails and so forth, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also, it looked as though homeless people might be living in the refuge somewhere, and there weren't any other visitors at the time I was there, which gave me another reason not to wander blithely off into the underbrush.

The rather off-putting name of the place has a very prosaic explanation, as it turns out. A "Beggars-tick" is a type of plant, various species of the genus Bidens. It's considered an invasive weed in many parts of the world, but here it's a native plant. I didn't know what it looked like before I went, and I don't recall seeing anything that looked like it while I was there. So, in short, I don't have any photos of the refuge's eponymous plant. Sorry.

It seems the refuge hasn't been a refuge all that long, roughly 1992-93. Here's an interesting doc about the wetlands restoration project, from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

All in all, I'm not sure this was my most successful "expedition" ever. I just saw one corner of the place, and took some decent but rather generic fall photos that could be from anywhere. Oh, well. There's always next time, I guess.

Cedar Crossing Bridge

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Here are a few photos of Portland's Cedar Crossing covered bridge, over Johnson Creek out in east Multnomah County. It's just south of Foster Road -- turn south at 134th Avenue, which turns into Deardorff Road, which crosses the bridge.

Despite how it looks, it's not actually very old. It was only built in 1982, replacing a non-covered predecessor, because a local politician thought it'd be cool to have a covered bridge somewhere in Multnomah County.

The state's page about the bridge asserts that it isn't really a "true" covered bridge. Apparently there's far more to it than just being a bridge with a cover over it. At least if you're a purist, I mean, which I'm not. I'm not even a covered bridge fan, really. My mother is, however, so as a kid I was dragged here and there all around the state to visit the silly things. At one point she had a guidebook to all of the covered bridges around the state, and the Cedar Crossing bridge was relegated to an appendix. So I gather that true purists think it's an impostor and scoff at it. I can sort of see their point, in a way, since it's more or less a small standard-issue bridge with a wooden canopy tacked on top. Purists want their covered bridges made entirely of wood, like in the old-timey olden days of yore. And really, I'm not sure any new bridge would measure up in their eyes, since covered bridge fandom is all about sentimental nostalgia for rustic old-fashioned stuff. Covered bridges are cultural touchstones for some people, so being a fan isn't strictly about the bridges, sort of like how NASCAR isn't just about auto racing. And I suppose how Grateful Dead concerts weren't really about the music, to pick a blue-state example. Or the way British people get worked up over crappy oil paintings of hunting dogs, come to think of it. If the underlying cultural stuff doesn't resonate with you, you're bound to be confused and wonder what all the fuss is about.

But regardless, the fact remains that it's a bridge and it's covered. So there.

So, for whatever reason, I never actually saw the thing until much later. My wife and I had just moved back to Portland after being away for a few years, and we almost rented a house just a stone's throw from the bridge. We decided against it partly because I was working in Tigard at the time, which would've been a hell of a commute, and partly because the Foster Road area just north of here has, uh, persistent issues with poverty and crime. So I'm sure that was the right decision, but still, it would've been kind of interesting to have something like this in the neighborhood.

I was in the area looking for something else, and I remembered this was here, and since I've been on something of a (non-covered) bridge bender in the last few months, I thought I'd go check it out and take a few photos.

Some links, mostly of interest to any diehard fans who stumble across this post (in which case you've probably seen them all already):

• ODOT's Oregon Covered Bridges page.
• A small photo of the Cedar Crossing bridge at in the county library's Branches and Byways guide.
• The Oregon Covered Bridges Directory.
• Covered Bridge Society of Oregon
• Wikipedia: List of Oregon covered bridges
• Photos of many of them at Worldisround.