shelter, 3rd avenue

From the archives: Photos from one of the temporary bus shelters that used to be on 3rd Avenue, in downtown Portland. Also starring streetlights, neon signs, and a touch of rain.

at broadway & burnside

broken

The Ideal Scout

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A few photos of one of the obscurer (is that a word?) statues around town, a statue of a Boy Scout outside local Boy Scout HQ, between 1st & Naito just south of Lincoln. I probably wouldn't mention it all -- I probably wouldn't even know it existed -- except that a.) it's in my neighborhood, so I see it now and then while walking to or from work; and b.) sometimes that happens after dark, and I see it out of the corner of my eye, loitering there in the streetlit gloom, and the primitive parts of my brain go on mugger alert. No other statue does that to me. Most real live people don't do that to me either. I can't really explain it. It's not like he's brandishing a hatchet or anything, even thought that would actually be a legitimate scout thing to do.

In any case, about the statue: It's called The Ideal Scout or sometimes just The Boy Scout, by the sculptor R. Tait McKenzie. Like a number of other statues around town (Umbrella Man, The Promised Land, Joan of Arc, etc.) it's just one of several copies scattered about the globe. The original statue dates to 1915, and the life-sized version shown here was created in 1937. Portland's copy only dates to 1972, though. Probably about the same vintage as the building it's next to. Which would also be the vintage of much of the surrounding area, come to think of it.

When I covered the Joan of Arc statue, I mentioned the notion of travelling the globe to visit all the copies. (I mentioned something similar re: the Willamette Stone as well, although that's not strictly art.) You could, in theory, do the same for this statue too, assuming you were possessed to do so for some reason. The Wikipedia page about McKenzie (linky is above) lists a bunch of locations of copies. If it's a complete list, you'd be spending an inordinate amount of time in Pennsylvania, which cannot be recommended. Trust me on this. And I'm not sure what the point of such an expedition would be, unless your kid's doing it as a project and will get a writeup in Boys' Life for his efforts, or at least score a merit badge or something. I was going to add "or one of those metal belt loop 'Skill Award' thingys", but apparently those were discontinued way back in 1989. Who knew?

Of course, back in my day going camping meant using our fins to slowly drag ourselves up onto dry land, and then we'd just sit there and watch the earth's crust cool. Ok, we'd also try to sing Kumbaya sometimes. What can I say, it was a dark and primitive time. You could get a merit badge for discussing what fire might be like if it existed. They added a badge for the wheel a few years after I quit, so I missed out on that one, which is too bad since I've always liked the wheel. The knot-tying stuff, though, is exactly the same all these years later. It's just that kids have it so much easier now with their opposable thumbs and all.

Pittman Addition expedition

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Today's fun adventure takes us back to North Portland, to our fair city's kinda-shiny, kinda-new Pittman Addition HydroPark, just north of Going St., and across an ooky skybridge from tiny little Stanich Park. I actually mentioned this place briefly in the Stanich Park post, under the name "Roy Beach Park". That's what a 2002 parks levy doc called it, and this now-vanished doc was the only mention of the place on the interwebs. I mean, apart from this humble blog. And now that the levy doc has exited the series of tubes, this humble blog seems to be the one mention of the place anywhere, at least by that name.

And now the Water Bureau's running the place as part of its growing HydroPark system, as they have some sort of underground "vault" (whatever that is) located here. So they're putting in some paths and a little art and generally sprucing it up a bit -- none of which you can see in the above photo because it's an old photo from 2007, taken along with my Stanich Park pics. Actually the park's official grand opening is this coming Saturday, September 26th 2009, if anyone out there happens to be interested.

FWIW, PortlandMaps indicates that the west half of the park does belong to the water bureau, while the east half belongs to the ultra-glamorous "Bureau of General Services". That's what PortlandMaps says, although in 2000 the Bureau of General Services was merged into the equally glamorous "Office of Management and Finance", and its "Facilities Services Program" is likely responsible for the land here. In case you were wondering, I mean. I know I was.

vegas (and bust)

Here we have some photos of a few defunct casinos around Las Vegas. First up, the former Hotel Nevada and Casino, on Main St. in downtown Vegas, a bit south of Fremont St. It looks like it's been vacant for many years, but according to the only review I've found of the place it was still open in August 2005, and was a complete dump. The review's titled "Welcome to the Bates Motel", and suggests that sleeping there would make for a good "Fear Factor" episode.

For photos of the Hotel Nevada in (relatively) better shape, I ran across photos from before and shortly after it closed.

All in all, this one's probably no big loss.









Next up is this ghostly sign for the former Silver City Casino, just off the Strip near the Convention Center. The casino itself was demolished a few years ago, but the sign lingers on.




I'm actually not sure this next one is really defunct, since I just glimpsed it from the taxi on the way to the airport. The Key Largo certainly looked like an ex-casino, but I ran across reviews here and here dating to late 2008. The small attached hotel is/was a Quality Inn, but the Quality Inn website doesn't contain any mention of the place, so it may be a recent casualty of the economy or something.




And finally, a couple of shots of the Lady Luck, which stands tall, dark and vacant just north of Fremont Street. It was one of the larger casino hotels in downtown Las Vegas until closing in February 2006. That was supposed to be temporary while the buildings were renovated, but then the developer ran out of money, and here we are going on four years later. Still, the hope is that the place isn't permanently defunct. The city's offered various incentives to the owners to renovate and reopen the place, but nothing's happened just yet. Maybe things will turn around once the economy improves. With any luck.

houndstooth & lucite

This is, um, the lid to the ice bucket at our swanky Vegas hotel.

It would be fun to say these were taken during a wild alcohol-fueled photo binge, but that wouldn't be true. At least not strictly true. Not that I recall, I mean.

shelter, 5th avenue

Rain pooling up on top of Portland's fancy new bus shelters. This is what we encountered upon returning from sunny Las Vegas. It was not a "Yay, Portland" moment.

Neon: Paris Las Vegas

More Vegas photos, this time some night pics of Paris Las Vegas. The Eiffel Tower shown here is not quite as tall as the original, but is still just short of the tallest building in Portland, despite serving no strictly practical purpose.

I'm aware these photos are exactly identical to everyone else's night photos of the place, other than the fact that that they're mine, but hey. FWIW, these were taken from the Deuce bus, as we sat there stuck in traffic for an extended chunk of time.

During our first Vegas trip, wayyyyy back in February, I discovered that Paris Las Vegas is a great (and probably the only) place to obtain a clear plastic Eiffel Tower full of strawberry daiquiri, which you can then walk down the street with, perfectly legally. I didn't get one of those this time around; if you have plans for the day beyond consuming a ginormous daiquiri, the ginormous daiquiri is not an asset, as it turns out.

flamingoes @ the flamingo

A few tourist photos of the flamingoes at the Flamingo Las Vegas. We were actually there mostly in search of parrots, but no such luck, possibly due to the extreme heat that day. The signs asserted that the parrots were away while their cages were being polished, but I didn't see anyone actually polishing any cages. So I'm going to chalk that up as silly PR -- unless the cage polishing team was on break when we were there -- union rules, and all that.

Flamingoes aren't really the most fascinating of birds unless you're an avian taxonomist, and they seem to spend much of the day sleeping, and they don't do much in the way of mugging for the camera. But they do have a certain visual appeal. And since I've been semi-typecast as just a photoblog, a mere source of transient visual stimuli, I think I'll just step aside and let you enjoy the photos, or not, or whatever.

cascade haze