Kelly Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Portland's "Kelly Fountain", at 6th & Pine on the once and future transit mall. These were taken back in August, while the fountain was still running. Like most public fountains, the city shuts it off for the winter in case we get a spot of freezing weather (and probably to save money, too). This is kind of hampering the nascent fountain project I recently semi-embarked on. There can't be any new photos of fountains in operation until next spring, so I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I've already got lurking in the archives. It's like the old saying goes, you have to blog with the fountain photos you have, not the fountain photos you wish you had. That may not be exactly how the old saying goes. It's been a long time, or at least it feels like it's been a long time, thankfully.

I put "Kelly Fountain" in quotes because it isn't quite the official name. The water bureau page linked to above says its true name is "Untitled Fountain", one of several untitled fountains here in town. Which is dumb. The Smithsonian's public art inventory has a page about the fountain too, and they insist it's actually called "Anchor". Which is the first time I've ever heard that name. Why is this so complicated?

The "Kelly" in the name is actually the fountain's creator, local sculptor Lee Kelly. He happens to be the auteur behind the notorious Leland 1, or as I always call it, "Rusting Chunks #5". He's the auteur behind a lot of cheesy public art around town, actually -- besides this fountain and the Chunks, there's the fountain up at the rose garden in Washington Park, the tall spindly stainless steel thing in Waterfront Park next to the Steel Bridge, and a few assorted stainless steel bits at the new "Howard's Way" plaza, between a couple of new residential buildings next to PGE Park, as well as smaller gallery works.

As you might have gathered from the last paragraph, I'm not a huge fan of Kelly's work. In fairness, though, the fountain is better than Rusting Chunks #5 in a number of important ways.

1. It's a fountain. The running water helps a lot. Without running water, it's just another big inexplicable hunk of metal looming over the sidewalk. Although that's exactly what it is when the fountain's not running, which is most of the year, actually.
   
2. Stainless steel is always better than rusty steel. This is inarguable. The 70's fondness for rusty metal is yet another example of that decade's pathological aesthetics, just like macrame and blue ruffled tuxedos.
   
3. It's further away from home, so I don't see it all the time. As much as I like fountains, I'd probably tire of this one rather quickly if I had to look at it every day.
   

So, ok, it's not a very long list, and it's kind of a glib list, but my point remains. The fountain's fine, I guess. It can stay, as far as I'm concerned.

Going by the dates on Mr. Kelly's public artworks, it looks like the 70's were his heyday, but his stuff at "Howard's Way" is less than a year old, so clearly he's still got a few eager customers out there. I find it remarkable that, in all this time, he really hasn't changed his style all that significantly. At some point in the late 70's he switched from rusty Cor-Ten steel to stainless, and then recently he started welding inane Zen-esque affirmations to his creations (about which, see this First Thursday post of mine from August '06). That seems to be the sum total of his creative evolution over the last 30 years. Despite that, the local art-world Powers That Be seemingly can't get enough of his stuff. I've never seen the point, really. While trying to get a handle on how this public art racket works, I ran across a few articles about Mr. Kelly. A Willamette Week article mostly fawns over him, but it contains a telling passage:

The type of work he makes belongs to a past not much revered these days. Steel sculpture has gone the way of innocuous corporate decoration. You see it now and again in public parks, plopped there by some now-defunct committee. "Clearly, I'm old hat," muses Kelly. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether I fit in. I'd like to stay around long enough to see how this all pans out. I am curious to see if we'll come back to appreciate some sort of object that's more or less permanent."

An Art in America piece about a 1995 show of his insists that "Kelly's structures radiate an appealing warmth and sense of humor, qualities not usually associated with large-scale metal sculpture". I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. A PNCA profile contains what may be the secret of his success:

When asked what advice he could give to young artists, Kelly jokes, “Maybe I can come up with a half of an advice: If you’re trying to do it as a livelihood, it’s really tough. I’ve just worn the bastards down after all these years.”

As shown in the above photo, there's a sort of low beveled lip around the base of the fountain, I suppose to help keep the water in. It's only a couple of inches, but for some reason skateboarders seem to find it irresistible. I always see skaters hanging out around the fountain, and I just can't figure out the attraction. It seems like they just sort of mill around, as if they all have a gut feeling the fountain's got to be good for something, but they can't work out what it might be. Kind of like the opening bit with the apes in 2001. Occasionally you see someone try out a move, but it's never anything very impressive. Maybe the fountain is the beginners area or something. Beats me. I actually searched to see if I could find any mentions of the fountain in a skate context, but I couldn't find anything on the net. Maybe they call it by a different name or something. On what I'm sure is a completely unrelated note, the RACC's page on public art conservation has a photo of someone removing graffiti from the fountain.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, the Waymarking page for the fountain comes with a bunch of photos. There's at least one photo of the fountain on Picasa, and on Pbase there's a very cool detail shot of part of the thing. But all in all, there's less stuff on the net about it than I would have expected. Which, in all likelihood, means that once this post goes live, if someone searches the net for useful/interesting info about the fountain, they're likely to end up at this humble blog instead. That's the interwebs for you, I guess.

Skidmore Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Skidmore Fountain, yet another of our local icons here in Portland. Like most local icons, the fountain has a quirky legend about it. As the story goes, when the fountain went in, Henry Weinhard offered to run a pipe down from his brewery, so the fountain could run with beer instead of water. The city fathers turned him down, to our eternal sorrow.

That's the story, at least. I've long suspected it was a publicity stunt, not a serious proposal to actually do it. I mean, we're talking a half-mile long, unrefrigerated, underground beer line. There's no way you could keep the thing sanitized properly. Sure, you could do a fountain full of beer, but it'd be sour, flat, spoiled, unpalatable beer. But then, maybe people's quality standards were lower at the time. Maybe it came out of the brewery already sour and flat, for all we know.

When the fountain was renovated a few years ago, the powers that be got everyone's hopes up briefly, implying that the fountain might run with beer for real for the grand reopening. Well, it turned out that, like the original proposal, this was just hyperbole and PR, and they actually gave out free beer next to the fountain. Now, I realize one should never whine about free beer, I mean, it's freakin' free beer, you know? But still, they got people's hopes up and then sort of dashed them, the bastards.

While I've never heard of anyone else doing a beer fountain similar to this, I understand that once upon a time, the historic Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki sported a pineapple juice fountain. Pineapple juice is very sweet and acidic, so if anything it's probably a lot harder on pipes and plumbing than beer would be. My mother stayed there once back in the 60's, and she insists that they had pineapple juice piped into every room, but I find that kind of hard to believe.

One other thing to point out -- people love this story because the idea of a beer fountain seems patently ridiculous, and everybody gets a nice giggle out of it. But it's not as absurd as you might think. For most of recorded history, up until the advent of chlorine and modern water treatment, it was a lot safer to drink beer than water, especially in cities. Beer can certainly go sour, but it's not going to give you cholera. Water from the local well? That's a roll of the dice every time.

So, well, that's about all I've got. I don't have a lot of photos of the fountain, and they're a bit repetitive, as you might've noticed. For some reason, I have trouble getting a handle on the thing, photo-wise. There've got to be other angles to take, but I always end up with statue, statue, spouting lion, spouting lion. I suppose I just need to slow down and stare at it a bit more, but in that part of town if you stop and stare for too long, someone will come along and want to sell drugs, or buy drugs, or just babble insanely, or try to steal your camera. Officer Friendly might get suspicious and want to search a few body cavities. Or maybe a MAX train will come along and hit you. There are a number of complicating factors, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.

So mostly I'm not posting this to show off my cool, original photos of the fountain. Mostly I'm posting this as an excuse to talk (and think) about beer.

Mmmmmmm.... beeeerr....

Pics: Vista House from Portland Womens Forum

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A few of my attempts at the ur-prototypical Oregon tourist photo, "Vista House from Portland Womens Forum State Park".

I really don't see a need to do a full-on informational post about the place, since it's a contender for the least obscure location in the whole state. That's probably why I didn't bother doing a post about the place at all until now.

Then I was rifling through my photosets on Flickr and saw these, and figured, you know, these would look ok on the ol' humble blog, probably. So voila, here they are.

Pics: Bridal Veil Falls

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Since I'm raiding the Flickr archives again, here are a few pics of Bridal Veil Falls, in the Columbia Gorge. I did a post almost exactly a year ago about the scenic river overlook next door to the falls, but I never got around to posting photos of the falls themselves. So here you go.



I keep thinking I ought to go ahead and make another photo foray out to the Gorge and take some nice DSLR-o-licous pics of a few spots, Bridal Veil being one of them. But really, these photos aren't bad, at least as far as handheld photos with a compact digicam go.

Pics: Latourell Falls

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It's time to raid the archives again, it seems. I noticed yesterday that although I had a photoset about Latourell Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, I'd never actually done a post about the place. It got a cameo in an semi-omnibus waterfall post, but that's all. Since this happens to be one of my favorite Gorge waterfalls, so it's time to rectify that a little.



The one thing I'm not going to attempt here is an exhaustive catalog of everything on the net that concerns Latourell Falls. There's no shortage of it, and you can probably search the net as well as I can (or almost as well -- my Google-fu is the stuff of legend in some quarters). More to the point, I just don't feel like doing it, so I'm not going to. It's right on the Gorge Highway, the first waterfall you encounter on your way out from Portland. Go see it for yourself, if you're that interested. Sheesh.



One minor pedantic bit: The falls are in Guy W. Talbot State Park, technically, although if you told people you were going to Talbot State Park, nobody would have any idea what you're talking about. Next door there's a second state park, George W. Joseph State Natural Area, which is only accessible by trail (hence the "Natural Area" bit). This second park is home to Upper Latourell Falls. It occurs to me that I don't think I've ever actually been to Upper Latourell Falls. I think I've just sort of never gotten around to it. So that may be a new TODO item for whenever the weather improves.

Willamette & Bryant

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So here's another of those little triangular nano-parklike bits I've been going on about lately, this time up in North Portland where Willamette Blvd., Bryant St., and Wabash Avenue meet up. You might be wondering why I keep doing this. I often wonder the same thing, quite honestly. I think it's because of the pure absurdity of the undertaking. Driving across town to track down one deservedly obscure non-place after another, taking a bunch of really mundane photos while I'm at it. Followed by a bit of research on the interwebs, mostly to verify that there's nothing much on the interwebs about the place, followed by writing about it as if it was a serious, legitimate topic, and voila, a new blog post is born. It amuses me, I guess.


This particular spot seems to be officially known as "N. Willamette & Bryant", as that's the name it appears under on various official maps of the city. I suppose that's really more of a description than a name, but hey. It's basically a leftover bit where the city's street grid collides awkwardly with the bluffs above the river. This parcel was just a little too small to build on, so it ended up as a ward of the state instead.

Or that's my theory, in case anyone cares. There's nothing much on the net about the place. For all I know, somebody donated it for the site of a huge equestrian statue of some long-forgotten pioneer-era politician. But then the funds were embezzled, and then a meddling historian uncovered the scandalous secret diaries, and to make a long story short, this little park is all that remains of the once-grand project. That's one (remote) possibility, anyway. Feel free to come up with your own alternate theory, if you like.

So the, uh, park is home to a few trees and shrubs, and TriMet stop #6260. The triangle does show up as a park on their map of the area.

The big feature here, though, is the view (or it would be, if it was sunny, which it wasn't when I visited). Across Willamette Boulevard, the bluffs drop sharply and (in theory) there's a nice view of Swan Island, the river, and the West Hills. The bluffs, incidentally, are also in public ownership, and seem to bear the official designation "Bluffs above Swan Island". Which again is more of a description than a name. That is, the chunk of public land is called that; the bluff itself is "Waud Bluff", as a commenter noted below. I guess the bluffs would be another spot worth visiting, if only I was a mountain goat or something. Which I'm not, as it turns out.

dreamer in the rain

Woods Memorial Natural Area

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Photos from a brief jaunt to Woods Memorial Natural Area, one of several large, but little-known, nature parks scattered around the hilly southwestern corner of Portland.

Woods Memorial is your basic forested canyon type of place. There's a bunch of these in town, and they're all basically variations on the same theme, so you'll have to forgive me if none of the photos show anything particularly unique to this one park. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it; it's quite nice actually, and I'm sure it's nicer when the weather's better.

The cynic in me is quite certain that the real reason we have all these woody ravine parks around town is that the city always ends up with all the unbuildable bits nobody else wants. This particular park was donated, sure, but it's possible that happened after someone realized it was unbuildable and they might as well get a tax writeoff for it. I don't really know. The park sure looks unbuildable, at least.

The park's crisscrossed with trails heading off in all directions, so you could easily get lost if you don't have a map or know your way around. They seemed to be just out of maps on the day I visited, and I didn't know my way around, and I had a meeting at 10:30 and couldn't afford to get lost (as fun as that can be at times), so I didn't wander quite as far as I otherwise would've liked to. That might've been for the best, though, as it was also pretty cold that morning, and numb fingers tend to drop cameras, which would be Very Very Bad. Although it's also true that the shiny new Canon 50D is out now, and it offers a number of compelling technological advances over my old (as in year-old) 40D. So, you know, if I was somehow forced to buy a replacement, it wouldn't be all bad.

The city's vegetation survey page rates much of the place as having "Poor" ecological health, with a few areas rating "Fair" and others coming in as "Severely Degraded" (I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than "Poor"). And here's a recent invasive species report about ivy in the park. Although it hasn't completely taken the place over like it has in other areas around town, like Marquam Nature Park for example.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service has a doc about restoration efforts here that occurred back in the 90's. And I've come across at least one report of an elk sighting here. So I imagine the place can't be too degraded, if you get elk showing up now and then. Unless maybe they come to eat the ivy. I'm not really sure how that works.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• ExplorePDX has a trail map and a couple of pages on trail construction, with a few photos. The park also gets a mention in the site's "Jay Walk #5" through the surrounding neighborhood. If you ever think I tend to get a bit obsessive and pedantic at times here, I suggest you go to ExplorePDX and check out the pages on map errors. I always come away from that feeling that I'm relatively normal and well-adjusted in comparison, although I'm also pleased that someone's doing this, and I can see how one could easily get sucked in to that sort of undertaking. It's a slippery slope, I tell you.
• An old 1987 Oregonian article, "City May Have Money Tied Up In Land Holdings, mentions the park as a potentially surplus chunk of land the city could sell to raise money. I don't recall what sort of budgetary straits the city was in back then that would've put this idea in play, but it obviously didn't go far. The parks director at the time is quoted as saying the bureau doesn't have any surplus land, just undeveloped parks. This may explain why they now use the term "Natural Area" instead of "Park" for places like this, to convey the idea that the place has been left "undeveloped" on purpose, so (in theory) nobody at City Hall will get any funny ideas about selling the land to their greedy developer friends. Ideally.
• The park and a few others like it are explored in a post on Around the Sun, "Exploring SW Portland on Foot With Ten Toe Express".
• A cool photo in someone's portfolio on photo.net.