Monday, November 10, 2008

Abernethy Bridge


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Couple of photos of the Abernethy Bridge, the rather nondescript bridge that carries I-205 over the Willamette, down in Oregon City. I took these from the much more photogenic Oregon City Bridge, just upstream.

Abernethy Bridge

There isn't much to say about the Abernethy Bridge. I'm not about to try walking over it, whether it's technically legal or not. There isn't anything particularly distinctive, historical, or beautiful about it. It does have a Structurae page, if you're really interested. PortlandBridges has some photos of it here. And here's a photo from river level. Plus a few more photos, taken underneath the bridge, on somebody's MySpace page. Oh, and the bridge shows up in a poem, which is either about nuclear war, or uses nuclear war as a metaphor for something else, I'm not 100% sure which.

A recent "Tourism Action Plan" for West Linn says simply "Abernethy Bridge viewed as detriment". It doesn't go on to explain why it's a detriment; it just says it is, and moves on. Maybe they figured it went without saying. I dunno.

So why bother posting this? Mostly I just figured I needed a post about the Abernethy for the sake of completeness, vis a vis my ongoing bridge series. So here it is. Yay.


Abernethy Bridge

Abernethy Bridge

Thursday, November 06, 2008

some autumn leaves

autumn, portland

autumn, o'bryant square

autumn, portland

autumn, portland

autumn, portland

autumn, portland

autumn, portland

autumn, portland

The Quest


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A few photos of The Quest, the notorious, goofy sculpture in front of the Standard Insurance Center, in downtown Portland. Very few people know it by this name, but it has plenty of nicknames: "Three Groins in the Fountain", "Family Night at the Y", "Quest for the Breast", or just "The fountain with all the naked people".

I've never pretended to be an art critic, and I wouldn't presume to speculate about what (if anything) its aesthetic or political meaning might be. So I'll just call it "eyeroll-inducing", and leave it at that.

Notice that the woman on the right has a fading "NO" circle crudely painted on her torso, so obviously someone was deeply offended by the sculpture. This being Portland I'd imagine the "NO" was put there on feminist grounds, and not conservative religious reasons, but I'm not sure they ever found out who did it. If I remember right, this happened in the early 90's, and I was either still in college or had just graduated. This was back in the heyday of identity politics and "political correctness", so it's not really that surprising that it happened. I'm not sure would happen now or not, but I'm quite sure that no business would, uh, erect something like this outside their offices anymore. At the, uh, bare minimum, the kid would absolutely, positively have to go.

The Quest

  • Everything2 has a nice, informative article about it. Portland Public Art (see below) speculates that the author "Strawberry" is actually Chuck Palahniuk. You know, the "Fight Club" guy.
  • A page at Health Heritage Research is mostly about a mosaic by Count von Svoboda, but has a section about The Quest and a companion piece(!) titled Perpetuity, both with interesting vintage photos. The companion piece is a section of a redwood tree, with bronze sort-of energy rays shooting through it. It used to be on the other side of the building, but Standard Insurance donated it to the World Forestry Center after they took over the building from Georgia Pacific. So it's up in front of one of their buildings now. Andy Kerr mentions it in passing here:
    A couple of years before I moved to Portland, Georgia-Pacific moved its headquarters back to Atlanta. Orange trucks are now more prevalent in the Deep South than in the Pacific Northwest. They took the G-P sign off the building now called the Standard Insurance Center. Mercifully, they also hauled Perpetuity, a work of "art" depicting a young seedling growing in the center of a huge and hollowed old growth log, to the Western—er, now it's the World—Forestry Center, up by the Portland Zoo.
  • Portland Public Art calls it "Corporate Schlock". Which, I think, is inarguable. The post also calls it a "great piece of las vegas funky splurt". Which is more debatable -- I mean, it's far too restrained for Vegas, if you ask me. Someday, when Vegas gets a Portland-themed casino (to go along with the existing New York and Paris ones), their "improved" version of The Quest will be ten times this size, the guy will have a Mr. Universe body and the face of the casino's owner, the ladies will all go up to at least a double D cup, and at the top of every hour there'll be a huge extravaganza with flames, a fog machine, lasers, and cheesy pop music. Also, there might be tigers.
  • Pin-ups from Portland and Visual Rendering both have more photos.
  • Photomic has a couple of nice old photos he took back when The Quest was new.
  • Delenda est Carthago mentions it in passing as part of a photo walking tour of downtown.
  • Roadside America mentions it too, not as Art but as an oddball roadside attraction. Which may be the right way to look at it, now that I think about it.
  • A couple of other mosaic works by Svoboda are at the abandoned Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. The hospital is supposed to be demolished soon, and it's not clear what the future holds for the mosaic.

The Quest

The Quest

The Quest The Quest The Quest The Quest The Quest

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

my best guess.



I'll put $1 down on 338...




Updated: Looks like Indiana went blue this year, so we're at 349. Wow. Who'd a thunk it? And a couple more states still too close to call, too.

Still, this is why I never gamble with real money...

Um, so there's this election today...

...and I figured, you know, maybe I might say a word or two about it. There was a point a couple of years ago when I thought this humble blog ought to be a humble political blog, and I sort of had a go at it for a while. I soon realized a few things about political blogging.

  1. It's very time-critical. I thought I was pretty good about staying on top of current events, but you're basically screwed if you ever miss a day. No vacation, no sick days, no sleeping through any part of the 24 hour global news cycle.
  2. It's a lot of work. On top of the writing, you have to spend a lot of time reading, looking for new stories.
  3. It quickly becomes unrewarding, due to the echo chamber effect. There are only so many ways to say "me too". And even if you come up with a new, hilarious, and extremely persuasive way to say it, you're still saying "me too".
  4. To keep it up, you have to stay angry all the time. And I don't like me when I'm angry.
  5. It attracts trolls, and trolls suck.
  6. Others are a lot better at it, and some even make a career of it. They've got all the time in the world, they've got money, they've got a critical mass of contributors and commenters, they get more readers every second than I'd get in a week or more. Not only are you part of the herd, you're a very small part of the herd.


Eventually, I realized I was done talking about Bush & cronies. I felt I'd made my point to my own satisfaction, and nobody was exactly begging me to say "Bush = bad!" one more time. It occurred to me that I was past being angry, and I was now simply waiting (impatiently) for the 2008 election, and for inauguration day, 2009. And then I just put politics in a box, taped it up, and put it in storage for a while. Or at least I stopped posting about it. For about the last month or so I've been obsessively watching polls, reading news, following a bunch of blogs by the aforementioned people who are good at this stuff. The long-awaited 2008 general election is tomorrow. Finally. I'm out of practice at actually writing about politics, but I thought I'd have a go at it, this being a special occasion and all.

It's a bit late to really call this an "endorsements" post. Oregon's a 100% vote-by-mail state, and if you're the sort of person who cares about politics enough to wonder what people are saying out here in the far corners of blogospace, you've probably voted already. So instead, I'll merely say that this is how I voted. If you're still an undecided swing voter on any of the candidates or issues of the day, and somehow you managed to end up here, maybe you'll find something persuasive here. Or not.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a swing voter. I wonder what it must be like to have trouble choosing between D's and R's every two years. I wonder what it must be like to vote one way one election, and do the opposite the next time. I imagine that would make elections more interesting, and in a way I'm almost jealous. But as I said, I really am puzzled about what it must be like. I even get party-line Republicans more than I do genuinely undecided people.

As I've explained many times on this humble blog, I'm not much of a joiner, and I'm not much of a herd animal, and I recoil at the idea of just voting a straight ticket on all the candidates and ballot measures. As part of this, I play an occasional game of looking for "Republicans Who Don't Suck". I feel like I'm trying to be responsible that way, holding out the theoretical option of voting for someone if they met my (admittedly high) standards of non-suckage. Which is not to say that I necessarily would vote for such a hypothetical R; to be honest, I still probably wouldn't. But I do think we'd get a better crop of Democrats in office here in Oregon if they had to face an occasional, genuinely competitive race. As it is, every four years they put up another repulsive flat-earth wingnut in the governor's race, so we can nominate a useless doofus like Kulongoski and win, time after time. In general, I'd like to see the Democrat in the race win, but only by a few percentage points, to keep them from getting lazy and arrogant. And if a really bad Democrat came along, which is not as uncommon as I'd like, I'd like to have at least one other viable option on the ballot.

There was a time when I thought McCain might be one of these semi-mythical Republicans Who Don't Suck. Even as recently as the primary season, I remember telling someone that if he was the obvious choice if, for some reason, I was forced to vote in the Republican primary. I may have even said something about giving him a serious look if Hillary was the D on the ticket. Which was silly, of course; in the end I'm not really going to vote for someone who's wrong about just about everything, no matter how sincere and likeable they might seem to be. Whether it's about Iraq, or choice, or healthcare, McCain fails pretty much every litmus test out there. All the wishful thinking in the world won't make the R's nominate anyone remotely centrist-esque. Not now, and I imagine not anytime soon. And about the whole "maverick" thing -- his campaign this time has been your generic paint-by-numbers Republican campaign, riling up the base and spending 98% of the time bashing the other guy. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether his earlier public image was nothing but smoke and mirrors all along.

As for Obama, I admit I initially wasn't sold on the guy. Cynic that I am, I figured that every election cycle has an "insurgent" campaign or two, and they rarely go far, and pinning any hope on one is a recipe for disappointment. Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Mike Huckabee, the 2000 version of McCain... those are just off the top of my head. So I made what turned out to be a dumb call, and decided I was for Edwards. I liked what he was saying, although I wasn't sold on the guy himself. Which just goes to show that the nation is fortunate that I'm merely one voice among millions. Edwards was out (fortunately, as it turns out) by the time the Oregon primary rolled around, so I went with Obama. In the beginning it was strictly for anyone-but-Hillary reasons, but I warmed up to the guy after a while. It occurred to me that if he'd been on the ballot when I was 18 or 24 or so, I'd have been completely stoked about him. It's just that I've gotten more cynical since then, from getting burned one too many times. Even now, just hours from the polls closing, with Obama way ahead in the polls, I still can't quite believe he might pull this off. When I play with one of those clickable interactive electoral maps (the year's most horribly addictive videogame), my best guess is Obama 338, McCain an even 200. Which sounds promising, but my immediate reaction is to scale that back, and point out that 270 is the magic number, and anything beyond that is gravy. It's all about not getting one's hopes up too high.

As for state races, we've got an exceptionally boring set of contests this time around. I may be unusual in calling the Smith vs. Merkley contest "boring", but you know, there wasn't any way I was voting for Smith. Everyone says he's a really nice guy, and I don't doubt that. I'm sure he'd be great as a next-door neighbor, if you could afford to live next to him. On a strictly personal level, he probably is a Republican Who Doesn't Suck, but he's still a very conservative politician, so that's that, then.

We do have a semi-interesting state treasurer race, which pits Democrat (and recent ex-Republican) Ben Westlund against current Republican Allen Alley. Much of the print media's endorsed Alley. I think they're nostalgic for the days when we had moderate Republicans here, and they figure he might be one. I suspect they also think an R is the default choice for treasurer, since the job involves handling money. Which suggests to me they haven't thought it through too well; after the events of the last few months, I think we can summarily dismiss any idea that Republicans have any special talent at finance or can be trusted with our money.

Elsewhere on the ticket, my Congressman (David Wu) and my state Senator (Ginny Burdick) face only token opposition this year. I don't care for either of them, so I voted for the token opposition in each case. I've never cared for Wu, as I've explained in previous years' election posts, and his speech a while back about Iraq and "fake Klingons" was just freakin' embarrassing. He's yet another useless doofus who has a safe seat in what ought to be a competitive district, strictly because the R's -- when they nominate anyone at all -- generally nominate someone from the wacky "black helicopter" wing of the party. As for Burdick, two years ago she ran unsuccessfully for Portland City Council, with the backing of the local business community, with the goal of tearing down the city's new public campaign finance system. I still hold that against her. She's also the legislature's #1 advocate of strict gun control laws, which I disagree with -- and which are probably unconstitutional under the state constitution anyway. So that's two strikes, and I decided I didn't need a third. It's not that I'd actually prefer to have an R in either job, because I don't. But sometimes you just have to register a protest vote.

We've got a raft of ballot measures again this year, but the majority are the usual Sizemore/Mannix crap, and I'm not going to waste any time on them. The only two "interesting" ones for me are #56 and #65. Measure 56 would repeal the current double-majority rule for tax measures on the ballot. At present, if a tax measure is up for a vote, to win it needs to get a majority of the votes cast, and the turnout of registered voters must be at least 50%. The only exceptions to the voter turnout requirement are primary and general elections in even-numbered years, which generally pull in that many voters anyway. Measure 56 would expand this exemption to May & November elections in any year. Which sounds like a small tweak, but as a practical matter it's a nearly complete repeal. We'll be back to the old situation where there's one property tax levy up for a special election, and it wins narrowly with just 17% of registered voters bothering to vote. I'm sorry, I don't usually go for Republican tax-limitation ideas, but this strikes me as more of a basic good-government measure. Rather than doing away with it, I'd actually like to expand the double-majority rule to cover all ballot measures, not just tax levies. The state legislature can't do business without a quorum of members present. Everybody agrees it would be unfair to do otherwise. If the public's asked to pass any sort of law directly, I think there ought to be a similar "quorum" requirement. And besides, designing the measure so it looks like it's just a partial repeal is sneaky, and I'd be inclined to reject it on those grounds even if I agreed with its premise. So I voted NO on 56, but I expect it to pass anyway, since the political establishment, the media, pretty much everyone except the hardcore anti-tax crowd, have all come out in favor.

Measure 65 switches us to an "open primary" system, in which all D & R candidates are in the same pool in the primary election, and the top two go to a November runoff, regardless of party affiliation. So if the top two votegetters are both Democrats, there's no Republican on the ballot when the general election rolls around. The idea is that this would somehow reduce partisanship and polarization, and force all candidates to seek the political center. The measure's backed by a couple of former Oregon secretaries of state, one of whom was one of our last moderate Republicans to hold statewide office. Actually she was one of the last Republicans, period, to hold statewide office, and I gather she's nostalgic for the old days before the crazies took over the party. The days when the two parties were fairly similar, ideologically, which made bipartisanship that much easier. Proponents argue that the current closed primary system rewards hardline ideologues and encourages party-line polarization, and by changing the law we can push the voters into picking moderates instead. Two arguments against that: First, it's a poor idea to change election law because you don't like who the voters keep picking. Second, I'd argue that they've got their causes and effects all wrong. Voting patterns have changed because the voting public has changed, not because the election laws are picking the "wrong" winners. The voters here and across the country are more ideology-driven than they once were. When some hard-left or hard-right candidate gets the nod, it's because that's who at least a substantial chunk of the electorate wants. For good or ill, the ideological divide in this country is real, and changing the law to try to paper over it is an ill-conceived idea. It will satisfy nobody, and will reward candidates nobody's particularly wild about. Partisanship is not all bad, you know; remember how people used to complain that you can't tell the two parties apart? Haven't heard anybody say that for a long time, have you? So vote NO on 65.

Oh, and there's a trio of tax measures on the ballot. Portland Community College wants some cash for construction projects, the Zoo wants money for new exhibits, and the city's "Portland Children's Levy" wants money for a smorgasbord of Commissioner Saltzman's feel-good pet projects. I voted for the PCC measure, and NO on the other two. The Zoo's asking for money now because they have an adorable new baby elephant, which features prominently in all of their ads. The ads are odd, actually, going on and on about how substandard the facilities currently are. They're practically running negative ads about their own zoo in the hope of getting more money. That's weird, but the main problem is that I'm not convinced elephants belong in zoos. Wildlife sanctuaries, maybe, but not zoos. It's widely understood at this point that keeping elephants in such cramped, unnatural surroundings causes all sorts of health problems. The zoo isn't proposing to give the elephants a large chunk of acreage to roam around in, and even if they did, there's no room for that up in Washington Park. The situation's similar for many species of bears and big cats, which tend to go utterly insane in this kind of captivity. It pains me to say this. I've enjoyed going to the zoo for as long as I can remember. But at some point you have to accept that certain things just aren't humane, and there's no just way to make them humane within the context of a traditional zoo. When parents have to try to explain to their kids why the polar bear spends all day pacing around its enclosure, endlessly following the same route over and over again, that should be a sign that things are seriously awry. I could go on and on about this, but the bottom line is that I don't want to give them any more money if they're just going to continue their current practices with shiny new cages.

I also object in principle to the "Children's Levy", for a variety of reasons. By standard practice, social programs are the responsibility of the county and state governments, not cities. But somebody (i.e. Saltzman) figured the public could be manipulated/guilt-tripped into coughing up additional money "for the children". It's a bad way to fund programs even if they're desperately needed (which I'm not sold on either). Associating a program and its funding too closely with one politician is a bad practice too -- the program is, in effect, one particular guy benevolently handing out cash to "good causes". It smacks of old-school, East Coast machine politics, and I don't mean that as a compliment. Besides, the campaign signs for the levy are made to look like a kid made them with crayons, although it's pretty much a given that some top-flight graphic designer actually did the job and made a ridiculously large pile of money in the process. I'm sure this is true because I know Portland, and this is what always happens.

So anyway, there's other stuff on the ballot, but these are the interesting races this cycle. We're getting a very promising new attorney general too, but it's not much of a race. Kroger won the Democratic primary, and when nobody ran in the Republican primary, he ended up winning it as well due to write-in votes. We have a long tradition of asleep-at-the-wheel, do-nothing AG's, and he really looks like he'll change that. But in the meantime, it's not exactly a suspenseful race.

So that's about it for now. It looks like the polls will start closing in some eastern states at 3PM Pacific time, and I already have a bunch of political sites open in different Firefox tabs so I can sit there and hit refresh every few minutes, ok, seconds, and see how this goes. Maybe I'll do another post about the results tomorrow or so, if I decide I've got another political post in me.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery


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A few photos of Portland's Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, in the West Hills right next to Greenwood Hills.

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

The grandiose, George Lucas-esque name comes from the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War. (The Wikipedia article claims that Lucas did rip off the name, big surprise there). I do so hate to ramble on about zombies all the time, but it is Halloween, you know. And if (as I mentioned in my Burnside Bridge post a while back) we're ever besieged by horrific Confederate zombies, the next logical step would to raise these guys up somehow, and send them once more unto the breach. Honestly, I have no idea why people accuse me of thinking in B-movie plots all the time. I'm really just trying to help, honest. Someday you'll all thank me. I'm sure of it.

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Anyway, the GAR vanished with the last Union veteran, and although there are successor groups of Sons & Daughters of Union Veterans, they're pretty small and obscure groups. Because this is a Northern state, and we got over the Civil War a long, long time ago, unlike certain other parts of the country I might name. So these days Metro owns and cares for the place instead, and they have an info page about it. Graveyards.com and Find-A-Grave have a few more photos, and there are a few more in someone's Flickr photoset.

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

There's a pedestal here that once held a statue of some sort, but it's apparently been gone for quite some time. Metal thieves, probably, or rabid Civil War memorabilia collectors. So if you're on eBay or Craigslist and run across something that really looks like it goes here, let Metro know, ok? (It'd help if I knew what the statue was supposed to look like, but I'm afraid I don't.)

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, Portland OR

Greenwood Hills


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Just in time for Halloween, here are a few photos from Greenwood Hills Cemetery, a circa-1851 pioneer cemetery in the West Hills, south of downtown Portland. I think visiting on a foggy fall morning worked out a lot better than it did on the recent trip to Nansen Summit. I mean, I suppose cemetery photos with fog and autumn leaves and cobwebs can be, I dunno, a bit formulaic. But still, I think some of them turned out ok.

The monuments here are generally not as extravagant as some you'd see over at Lone Fir, for example, and it's not full of famous people. But Greenwood Hills is kind of interesting in that for a time it was a Masonic cemetery, and a lot of the headstones carry Masonic symbols. I'm told that when one joins up, one swears a rather gory oath not to divulge the secrets of the society, something about having one's throat cut, tongue cut out, etc., etc., rather than spill the beans. And when you move up the ranks, the oath gets even gorier, or so I've heard. History doesn't record whether any of that actually happened to anyone here, but if you happen to be near Greenwood Hills when the zombie apocalypse comes, you can be sure it won't be pretty. Although they might leave you alone if you know the secret handshake, assuming they still have hands.

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

There's more about Greenwood Hills at Graveyards.com and Find-a-Grave.com. Seriously, those are both for real, I swear I'm not making this up.

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

See also "So, You're Dead Already" at Blogging a Dead Horse, and someone's extensive Flickr photoset, and a page of transcribed headstone inscriptions.

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Holly, Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Somewhere here is the recently restored headstone of a an early 20th century Bosnian Muslim immigrant who died in 1951. I think that's what the story says; the Google translation is a bit rough. If you read Bosnian, or Serbo-Croatian, or whatever the language is called these days, the original article is here.

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

And no old cemetery is complete without a ghost story (scroll down a bit to find the Greenwood Hills tale). Ok, so if you're as jaded as I am, you're probably going, "oh, a ghost story about a graveyard, now that's a first". But it's a fun tale, with various spooky goings-on, and a bit of history thrown in. Now, I have to say that nothing weird happened when I was there (granted, this was during the day), and the only things stirring here were a few people walking their dogs and chatting on mobile phones. And I certainly don't really believe any of this stuff anyway. But still, what's the point of sneering at ghost stories on Halloween? Where's the fun in that?

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Greenwood Hills Cemetery

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Laurelwood Park


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As I was driving around while putting together the East Park Blocks series, I also stopped to check out tiny Laurelwood Park, at the corner of Holgate, Foster, & 63rd Ave., in SE Portland. I thought I'd take a look and see if there was anything interesting about it, maybe get a bonus post out of the excursion.

Old Masonic Lodge, Laurelwood Park

Well, it didn't turn out to be that fascinating of a place. It's a little triangular wedge with trees and grass and a few tables. Right next door, though, there's a cool old Masonic lodge building which is now the union hall of SEIU Local 503. Probably because of that, the park sometimes hosts events of a political bent, like a Food Not Bombs event every Wednesday evening. There was also an antiwar protest held here around the time the Iraq war started.


Old Masonic Lodge, Laurelwood Park

Also, there are a couple of tables set up for playing chess, if you're into that, which I'm not. People are often surprised by that -- on a number of occasions I've essentially been told, hey, you're a pretty smart guy, you must be really into chess, right? And I'm not. I think it's mostly that I don't like losing, and I don't like having to study a lot and lose a lot just to be good at a game. That may be why I'm not into video games at all either. The park shows up on at least two lists of regional chess venues. So it sounds like the place really gets hoppin' (by chess standards) on summer evenings, 4-8pm. And as an added bonus, I can offer you an ironclad guarantee that I won't be there, not even as a spectator.

Chess Table, Laurelwood Park

A archive page on the local neighborhood association's site mentions the existence of a "Friends of Laurelwood Park". Most "Friends of" orgs around town have elaborate websites explaining what's so great about their little corner of the world. I can't find one for these guys. Which is too bad, because I'm a bit low on material, and it might've given me more to go on here.

The June 2005 newsletter of the Oregon Brew Crew said their annual picnic would be here. They actually meant Laurelhurst Park, which is much larger and has group picnic areas. It's an understandable mistake, though; no doubt the writer had Laurelwood Brewing on the brain -- although sadly, there aren't any Laurelwood outposts anywhere near here, at least not yet. Mmmmmm..... beeeeeerr........

Nansen Summit expedition


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Here are a few third-rate photos from Nansen Summit, a tiny park at the very top of Mt. Sylvania, down in Lake Oswego.

Sometimes I just say "third rate" to be self-deprecating, but I really am disappointed in how these turned out. The view is supposed to be the main event here, and I showed up on a glum, foggy morning. It was sunny the day before, and I might've gotten some glorious shots then, but I just didn't have any free time that day. It's doubly disappointing because I was motivated to go track this place down after seeing a number of cool photos of the place. So I'm sure it really is photogenic if you're lucky, and/or know what you're doing.

Here are some selected images from across the interwebs, so you can see what I mean:
Nansen Summit Park

A curious thing about Nansen Summit is that it's not a city park, or any kind of public park. Instead, the Mountain Park Homeowners' Association owns and runs it, as part of an extensive network of parks and trails. Mountain Park is an exceptionally large subdivision, primarily developed back in the 70's and 80's. (Their website has a slideshow of groovy "vintage" photos from when the area was under construction.) The fact that this is part of a subdivision also explains the heroic-sounding name of the place. Since this is the extra-swanky part of Mountain Park, all the streets are named after heroic historical figures: Hidalgo, Garibaldi, Juarez, Bolivar, Becket, Masaryk, with Nansen at the very top. Nansen being Fridtjof Nansen, the famous polar explorer, humanitarian, scientist, diplomat, and winner of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize. It's unclear how being the rich guy with a house at the top of the hill equates with heroism, but there you go. I do think it's kind of ironic that so many of the streets are named for heroes of Latin American history, so that the neighborhood's groundskeepers, maids, and nannies are far more likely to get the historical references than the residents themselves are. Go figure. So anyway, the whole area is private property, but it's not a gated community, and there aren't any big scary signs saying "Residents Only, Violators Will Be Waterboarded", like some of the more fierce subdivisions out there do. Someone put Nansen Summit on their list of 5 Best Places to Picnic in Portland, When It's Not Raining, and they don't seem to have gotten a cease & desist order over that. So you'll probably be OK if you decide to visit, unless you get lost among the winding suburban streets, or you try to put up any political signs, which is Seriously Frowned Upon. I've never really understood why homeowners' associations are so big on banning political signs. I can't see how they reduce property values or otherwise lower the tone, and as "clutter" they're quite temporary and not really unsightly (except the ones for Republicans, obviously). I suppose they just do it because they can. Mountain Park did have a UFO sighting last year, which I guess just goes to show that even the most control-freak homeowners' association can't control everything. If UFOs actually existed, I mean.

Nansen Summit Park

Ok, so forget about UFO's, that's not the only excitement to be had here. Being the top of Mt. Sylvania, it turns out Nansen Summit is the business end of a large "dormant" shield volcano, one of many volcanoes and lava domes in the amusingly-named Boring Lava Field (Others include Mt. Tabor, Kelly Butte, and Rocky Butte.) An article titled "The Catlin Gabel Lava Tubes of West Portland, Oregon" (which first appeared in the September 1974 issue of The Ore Bin, a journal run by the state Department of Geology & Mineral Industries) describes the area thusly:

The Catlin Gabel lava tubes occur among a cluster of cinder cones and associated lava flows of Pliocene to late(?) Pleistocene age (between about 5 and 1 million years old) that occupy an area of approximately 25 square miles on the west side of the Portland Hills (Figure 1). Lava tubes have not previously been described in Oregon lava flows older than Holocene (last 10,000 years). Mount Sylvania is the largest of the Pliocene-Pleistocene volcanoes in the map area, but at least four and possibly as many as eight other volcanic vents and associated lava flows lie to the northwest as far as Germantown Road, 12 miles north of Mount Sylvania, and one other lies to the southeast. These volcanoes are probably the westernmost of this age in Oregon. The area covered by lava flows and vents was first mapped by Trimble (1963), who assigned these rocks to the Boring Lava, a geologic unit first named by Treasher (1942) after a cluster of volcanoes around the town of Boring about 10 miles southeast of Portland.
While we're at it, the summit, or perhaps just the northeast corner of the summit, is the top end of the Arnold Creek Watershed, from whence the creek flows until it joins Tryon Creek, which flows into the Willamette, then the Columbia, then the Pacific Ocean. Which you can't quite see from here, even when it's sunny. Nansen Summit Park

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

East Park Blocks: Omaha Parkway


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This stop on our tour of the East Park Blocks takes us to North Portland's Omaha Parkway, on N. Omaha Avenue between Killingsworth and Rosa Parks Way. If you look at a map of the city, it appears that Omaha Parkway is actually slightly to the west of the park blocks downtown. It's still on the east bank of the river, though, so I'm going to assert that "East Park Blocks" is still a reasonable name. Otherwise I'd have to try to think of a different name, and I don't want to.

It's possible that Omaha Parkway doesn't share an origin with the others, which would explain why it's not on that list. A page at Rootsweb describes it like this:

Omaha Ave. Albina addition, (1891) From Killingsworth Ave. north to Portland Blvd. [until 1891, known as 1st & 2nd Aves.]. before 1915 became N. Omaha Ave.

N. Omaha Ave. Albina addition, (1915) From 157 Killingsworth Ave. (1932) 5 east of Greeley north from Killingsworth to Winchell. [until before 1915, known as Omaha Ave.].


This indicates that the street (or some parts of it) existed prior to 1891, when Portland absorbed the old city of Albina. Doesn't mention anything specifically about park blocks though.

When I'm feeling pedantic (which is regrettably often), I sometimes wonder about a place, "Who waters the grass?" This 1989 Oregonian article says the Parks Bureau waters the grass at Omaha Parkway, or at least they did 19 years ago. And they almost didn't then, due to the Parks Bureau's perennial lack of funds. The place used $2500 worth of water over the course of the summer, in 1989 dollars. Article describes the parkway as a "median strip".

East Park Blocks: Ainsworth Blocks


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The Ainsworth Blocks (our next stop on the East Park Blocks grand tour) are on NE Ainsworth St. between MLK & 37th, the only east-west set of park blocks in town that I know of. They're narrower than the others, almost just a glorified median, but they're also much longer than any of the others, roughly two miles in total. If the Ainsworth Blocks extended much further west, they'd intersect with Omaha Parkway, and the east end is not-quite-due-north of Reed College Parkway. Which may be evidence of a plan, or it may just be basic Euclidean geometry -- any lines that aren't absolutely parallel will eventually intersect somewhere. So whatever.

The place is also known as the Ainsworth Linear Arboretum, the brainchild of a local group called "Friends of Trees". They've got a great deal of info about all the diverse trees that have been planted along the Ainsworth Blocks. Some in the blocks themselves, some along the street on either side, even some in yards facing the blocks.

Beyond that, I haven't found a lot of references to the place. There's one related Oregonian story, indicating that the Ainsworth Blocks lost some trees in a big 1997 winter storm. That story refers to Omaha Parkway as "Omaha Blocks", which also lost trees.

East Park Blocks: Stanley Park


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The next stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks takes us to Stanley Park (or "Ralph Stanley Park Blocks"), running the length of NE Cascades Parkway, due east of the airport. The east end is the little traffic circle right next to IKEA, you can't miss it. These are really the odd blocks out, as far as East Park Blocks go. I almost didn't include them at all, but I figured, what the heck. The main thing is that they're quite new, only created in 2001, which could make them nearly a century younger than some of the others. They're also the only ones in a commercial area, all the others being in residential areas. It's not a remnant of an incomplete early 20th century urban plan, like at least some of the others seem to be. Instead, it's part of an early 21st century urban plan ("CascadeStation"), one that's only recently started to bear fruit.

As a recently escaped longtime suburbanite, I have to say there's nothing about Stanley Park that really grabs one's attention. The area looks like any other chunk of modern big-box suburbia, and the park itself looks like standard-issue strip mall landscaping, not much different than what you'd encounter outside a Barnes & Noble in Tualatin, say. If I didn't know already, I wouldn't have guessed it even had a name, much less that it's considered a "park".

I first heard about the place in an was Urban Adventure League post from 2007. Those guys always seem to be a step or two ahead of me, and it beats me how that keeps happening.

But at least I can tell you a bit more about the place, in case you're interested. The Port of Portland owns Stanley Park, since the whole area started out as sorta-surplus airport land. You wouldn't expect the port district to have a "park system", and I doubt it's their intent to have one, but they have at least two parks anyway: Here, and McCarthy Park out on Swan Island. I suppose if you own and develop enough land, as they do, you're inevitably going to end up landscaping bits of it here and there.

CascadeStation was created to cash in on the new MAX Red Line, so far with mixed results. Here are two stories about the park from around the time the Red Line opened, in which we learn the park's named in honor of the project's lead developer, who died shortly before the Red Line opened.

And then the new MAX Red Line to the airport opened on, umm, September 10th, 2001. If I was superstitious, which I'm not, I'd almost wonder if there was a curse or something.

East Park Blocks: Roseway Parkway


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This stop on our tour of Portland's East Park Blocks is Roseway Parkway, on NE 72nd between Sandy & Prescott, which places it due north (wayyy north) of Firland Parkway. That sure doesn't seem like a coincidence, although I don't have concrete evidence that this was part of a plan.

These are the widest East Park Blocks out there. I'd guess they're about as wide as the park blocks downtown, although I'm notoriously bad at guessing sizes and dimensions of things. The trees are smaller, and the place has a curiously orchard-like feel to it.

Forget connecting the north & south park blocks downtown, you urban visionaries out there -- if you want a real challenge, try hooking the Roseway & Firland Parkways together. Actually no, I'm not seriously proposing that. I'm not sure what the point would be. Even if there was a good reason, it'd cost way too much, which I think is the same reason it didn't happen to begin with.

Some links about the place:

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...

Firland Parkway

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.

Firland Parkway

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

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:

East Park Blocks: Intro

Reed College Parkway

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:

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.