palms, fourth avenue

Here are some of the palm trees the Portland Development Commission planted in Old Town a while back. They're supposed to be of a cold-tolerant variety, by palm tree standards. As far as I know they haven't died yet, though they haven't exactly become an invasive species either.

These palms were supposed to help gentrify the area, I guess by making the rich Californians feel at home and want to buy luxury condos right here. Sadly (for the project), gentrification sort of hit an invisible barrier at NW Broadway, and nothing much ever happened further east between Broadway and the river. Maybe someday the area will transform into a sleek, upscale enclave, but I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. It's been Skid Row since the days when sailing ships docked at the foot of Couch Street, after rounding Cape Horn to get here. A coat of paint and a few anemic palm trees won't be enough to erase 150 years' worth of bad mojo. They keep trying, and nothing ever seems to pan out, almost as if there's a curse at work here.



On the bright side, the puny little trees mean that the interesting parts of the tree are easier to photograph, so I guess that would be one upside.

Pics: Monterey Bay Aquarium

Some old vacation photos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, from February '08. I'd just gotten my current camera, and I didn't really have the hang of taking low-light photos, so relatively few came out decently. The aquarium itself is very cool, even if I can only show you a few bits of it. I'm sure one or two other people out there have taken photos and put them on the interwebs, if you want to see more than what I've got here.



A while back I went through and picked a few out that I thought were acceptable, and even got to the point of uploading them, but I never quite put a post together. I think I just forgot or something. So I thought I'd just go ahead and remedy that now...

vegas: the view from the deuce

Although Las Vegas's Deuce bus mainly serves tourists, it turns out that taking photos from the bus is kind of a problem. If you manage to get a seat at the front of the upper deck, you get an unobstructed view facing forward. Otherwise you'll be peering through a sort of mesh over the windows. Seems that the outside of the buses are covered with large ads, and this is what they look like up close, from the back.

There's nothing you, as a passenger, can do about this. So you can either grouse about it and be unhappy, or you can choose to regard it as a "special effect" and see what you can do with it. Hence the photos you see here.

From the archives: Peninsula Park

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A few oldish photos of NE Portland's Peninsula Park. They're old photos (July '07) and not really that fabulous either; in my post on "Disk #4" (a small modern sculpture in the park), I griped that all the other photos I'd taken of the park totally sucked. Since then I've learned enough about tinkering with photos to bring them up from "Teh Sux0r" all the way to "Meh". Or possibly I'm just fooling myself. Either way, here they are. I took the photos for the "River Spirits" post the same day, and if I didn't gripe about the light in that post, I really ought to have done so.

The main reason I'm posting these now is the fountain, actually. And now I can cross it off my todo list. It's pleasant but not really that fascinating as far as fountains go, and I figured I wouldn't end up with substantially different images if I went back, so I went ahead and used the old photos.

Don't let my lack of enthusiasm give you the wrong idea, though. I thought the fountain and rose gardens and the park as a whole were quite nice, and reviewers on Yelp seem to adore the place, for whatever that's worth.




One historical tidbit: The parks bureau website refers to the park's previous owner, one "Liverpool Liz", as a prominent local businesswoman, while failing to note exactly what business she was in. Others, less coy, have taken up running historical tours based on the life and business pursuits of a certain lusty Liverpudlian. It's one of those things everyone can have a nice chuckle about so long as it happened in the distant past and involved people with colorful nicknames. The same people would probably not be thrilled if someone tried to open a new horse racetrack + bordello megaplex in their neighborhood. It's weird how the passage of time takes the gritty edge off just about anything. Like the whole business with Shanghaiing sailors in Old Town. That's the one I really don't get. I take a fairly libertarian view of the other stuff, but romanticizing kidnapping is kind of a stretch.




Back during the 80's, the surrounding neighborhood was extremely sketchy. Or at least the local media presented it that way, with constant Blood vs. Crip gang warfare, and crack dens on every street corner. I assume it wasn't quite so lurid in reality, although it sounded scary enough that we never ventured in from suburbia to come see for ourselves and look at the roses and so forth. Which we probably would've done otherwise, as we were always being dragged to the more famous rose garden up in Washington Park. I seem to recall reading (but can't currently find) a contemporary description of the place that gave it the full Mad Max treatment, saying something to the effect that this was a historic but run-down rose garden, sadly located in the heart of a Beirut-like 24/7 no-go zone. If you really must go, only go during the day, and in a large group, preferably with an armed escort, and definitely update your will first. I may be exaggerating slightly, but only slightly.




So I have to wonder how society, a century from now, will look back at those days. I wonder if the 1980s will someday get the same treatment we now give to the rough-and-tumble bits of the 19th century. Maybe there will be a museum, meticulously restored to look like an authentic crack house circa 1988, with period music and decor. Possibly there will be historic reenactors, sort of like those guys who get a thrill out of putting on Civil War costumes and pretending to shoot each other. I mean, say what you will about the 80's, but the Civil War was wayyyy more nasty and bloody. It would be ridiculous to argue otherwise, no matter how fancy the clothes were back then. So if we can gloss over that, we can gloss over anything. Giving the 80's this treatment sounds ridiculous now, but someday when nobody's left who remembers the era, and people's imaginations are free to roam and focus on the colorful parts and just make stuff up out of thin air, it's anyone's guess how things will turn out.

Portland Dog Bowl

Taking a break from Milestone Madness for a moment, here's an entirely different (and even tinier) object to talk about. This little guy is the "Portland Dog Bowl", a tiny fountain in the North Park Blocks. It's supposed to be a sort of Benson Bubbler drinking fountain for dogs, designed to look like a regular dog bowl. You will not be completely surprised to learn it was created by William Wegman, the Weimaraner guy, for the short-lived Pearl Arts Foundation.

Btw, I'm not even going to bother with a Google map this time. The Dog Bowl is just way too small to even show up on satellite photos.



I've always thought it was kind of cute and clever. I tend to get annoyed at our fair city's obsession with all things canine, but I still think this is kind of cool. Portland Public Art dismisses it as "silly", and you can't really argue that it isn't silly. But still, "silly" is better than a lot of the stuff that gets funded and built here.

Also worth passing along is this 2002 WSJ story about the then-new fountain. You might note the page lives at the University of Oklahoma rather than the WSJ. It seems this story was one of several pieces that inspired a university benefactor to endow a literary prize to reward quality writing. So go, read it.



I guess I ought to point out that a number of other fountains around town have facilities for horses and dogs; the Skidmore, the Thompson Elk, and the Horse Trough Fountain all come to mind immediately. And you don't have to wander around downtown for long before you see someone's pit bull drinking from a Benson Bubbler. Which isn't technically allowed, but go ahead, you tell them to stop.

Milestone P6

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The latest installment of the ongoing milestone adventure takes us to the 9800 block of SE Stark, just east of I-205. There's no 98th Avenue at this point, so milestone P6 isn't on a street corner like many of them are. The few accounts out there simply describe it as "near the Elmer's Restaurant". Precise directions are important when tracking down anything this small and this grey, so let me expand on that. Just east of Elmer's is a small one story office building with a 60's-ish mansard roof. Between its parking lot and the parking lot for Elmer's, there's a small landscaped bit with a few trees and shrubs. Milestone P6 is tucked in there, a few feet off the sidewalk, lurking behind a big conifer tree. Believe me, this one was hard to find. I didn't see it when driving past (several times, on two separate occasions), and when I stopped to look for it, I walked past once before finding it. The Google map here is centered on it, if that helps at all.



The surrounding area isn't quite as cute as Montavilla, a mile west of here, but it's next to the freeway, and it's got everything. As noted, Elmer's is right next door, so there's a convenient source of bacon nearby. Which is crucial, obviously. Also I think they have a bar section with video lottery if you're into that. A couple of blocks south is Mall 205, with a Home Depot, a Target, a mostly-empty indoor mall part, and a McMenamins. The lighting in my condo uses a variety of dodgy little halogen bulbs that only Home Depot seems to carry, and this is the closest location to home, so I actually know this area reasonably well. Also, Kelly Butte is a few blocks further south past the mall, so I have this part of town to thank for a large percentage of visitors to this humble blog.

Being near the freeway there are the usual fast food outlets, which I won't bother to list. And just east of the milestone are a couple of, er, "gentlemens clubs", if that's more your speed. Also just east of here is Sayler's Old Country Kitchen, home of the 72 ounce, eat-it-in-an-hour-and-it's-free top sirloin steak. I used to know a guy who kept threatening to have a go at this monster, back when there was also a westside Sayler's location. We lost touch some years ago, so I don't know if he ever worked up the nerve. Perhaps the steak is to blame for us losing touch. It would've been a hero's death, to be sure.



A curious thing I've noticed: Despite all the "gentlemen's clubs" along Stark (and there are quite a few of them), it doesn't appear that any are named "Stark Naked", even though that would seem to be the obvious choice. Maybe that industry has a desperate shortage of clever people or something, I dunno. So, maybe, if this whole software thing doesn't work out, and I can't make a go of it in subsistence agriculture, or as a gentleman jewel thief or housesitter-to-the-stars, and I can't bring myself to take money for blogging or photography, then perhaps, just perhaps....

Milestone P4

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So I'd like to announce the achievement of another milestone. This time it's P4, at the corner of SE 61st & Stark. It's at the NE corner of the intersection, next to the Tabor Heights Methodist Church parking lot. I'm rather pleased about finally finding this one. I tried and failed to find it maybe 3 or 4 times before, albeit strictly from a moving vehicle each time. This time I noticed it right away -- seeing milestones gets easier after you've seen a few others -- and this time I stopped and took a few photos. The stone's not extremely prominent, and there are a bunch of juniper bushes around it, but someone was nice enough to trim out a cozy little niche for the milestone so passers-by can see it. Aww, how cute...



Across the street is Cooper's Coffee, which (according to one Yelp reviewer) also has a tasty beer selection. And wifi. So despite being 4 miles, or over 21 thousand feet from downtown, we still haven't exited the civilized world just yet.

Of course we're still on the west slope of Mt. Tabor at this point. All real Portlanders know for a 100% truthy fact that there's nothing on the far side of Mt. Tabor except meth labs and pit bulls as far as the eye can see, and you won't see another trace of the civilized world until roughly the Hudson River. And even then, there are a few parts of Manhattan we aren't too sure about.

Well, except for Montavilla. As I've already mentioned, Montavilla's quite cute. Which means of course that as soon as the real estate market comes back to life, we'll have to tear out large chunks of it to put up condo towers for the rich Californians, because that's just how it is, and resistance is futile.

Oh, and Ikea. Ikea's civilized too, although a bit less so of late. You have heard of Verdanagate, right? Right?



All snarkitude aside, I do have a few more links and items to pass along:

• I just discovered that someone has put together a custom Google map pointing out all the milestones. So check out the "Baseline Road Mileposts" map, and send props to whoever put it together.
  
• A couple of Gresham Outlook stories to pass along, profiling a local retiree who investigated the milestones well before we interweb folk ever heard of them: "Marking the miles of history" and "Retired administrator takes up local history".
  
• And the latest two milestone posts over at the ZehnKatzen Times (although unlike this humble blog, he does actually cover stuff besides old rocks with numbers on them.) "The Stark Street Milestones" references my P5 post, so it's only fair to return the linky luurrrve. And "More Portland Milestones" mentions those Flickr photos of the other P7 on Capitol Highway.
  
• At the end of my P7 post, I mentioned the existence of additional milestones along the Historic Columbia River Highway, suggesting them as a project for some ambitious soul out there. A commenter then asked if the numbers on those milestones might be a continuation of those on Stark. I was completely skeptical, but I just so happened to be out that way this afternoon, and just south of the Stark St. bridge (over the Sandy River) I noticed a mile marker with a "17" on it. Which meant it was at least plausible. And then, I just tracked down the nomination form for adding the Gorge Highway to the National Register of Historic Places. Right there, on page 5, is this tidbit:
  

  
  Historic Mile Posts (HMPs) on the Columbia River Highway
  Mileposts were established along the CRH at the time of construction. According to a “Mile
  Posting Data” log of the entire highway that the Oregon State Highway Department (OSHD)
  prepared in 1924, HMP 0.00 was established as the intersection of SW Washington Street and
  SW Broadway in downtown Portland. The route leading to the beginning of the CRH and
  nominated district, followed Portland’s arterial system for about six miles before picking up the Base Line Road (also known as Stark Street) or the Sandy Road (later known as Sandy
  Boulevard). Stark Street intersected the CRH on the Sandy River (Stark Street) Bridge, at HMP
  16.7. The Sandy Road crossed the Sandy River two miles downstream over the Sandy River
  Bridge at Troutdale before heading into the county’s road system. The roadway between the
  Sandy River Bridge at Troutdale and the Sandy River (Stark Street) Bridge was added as a
  second access route to the CRH, a few years after work originally began on the highway.[1]
  The Sandy River Bridge at Troutdale is 2.5 miles northwest of the Stark Street structure, so its HMP has been calculated as 14.2. For purposes of this nomination for the CRH, and the 1983
  NR nomination for the CRH Historic District, HMP 14.2 was determined as the western most
  point of the nominated property.
  
  [1]See the entire section of F. N. Drinkhall, “Field Notes: Mile Posting Data, Upper Col. River Hwy., Lower Col. River Hwy., and Old Oregon Trail,” Oregon State Highway Department, Salem, 1924, devoted to the “Upper Col. River Hwy.”
  

  
  It's not clear whether the document was written by the National Park Service or by ODOT, but either way it sounds fairly definitive. Although I'm still not sold on the fabled P0 point being located at SW Washington & Broadway. That would put it a few blocks north of the actual Willamette Baseline. Although I've never actually seen any reference saying P0 was on the baseline; I just keep assuming that was the case, because all the others line up so nicely, and it would be a shame to break up the pattern.
  

Milestone P7

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The latest installment of the milestone series takes us to the corner of SE 117th & Stark, home to Stark St. milestone P7. This one isn't hard to find; it's in a reasonably prominent location at the SE corner of Ventura Park, which is on the north (westbound) side of Stark. There's even a historical marker next to the milestone explaining what it is and what it's for.



I don't know this part of town that well, except that nearby 122nd Avenue is lined with car dealers. So for a bit more local flavor than what I've got here, check out this ZehnKatzen post with a few photos of the surrounding area as well as of P7 itself. I did take a few photos of the park, but I think I'm going to hold off on those for right now, since sorting through photos of roses usually takes freakin' forever.

Updated 9/10/11: Thanks to the library's Oregonian db, I have a bit more info to share about milestone P7, how it was rescued, and how it ended up in Ventura Park. In an article lamely titled "Milepost 'tells' story about Portland history" (quotes theirs), the December 12th, 1978 Oregonian explained:

Craig Decker was reacquainted with an old friend last week, expressing satisfaction that his pal was set in concrete and could wander no more.

"It's good to see it back in the neighborhood," Decker, 30, said.

Decker grew up with milepost 7, which, during his childhood, was in place on the south side of Southeast Stark Street neer 117th Avenue, its hand-carved basalt rising to a pyramid and the obscure horizontal markings that read "P 7" etched into its face.

"It was over there, near the old neighborhood grocery store," Decker said last week as Multnomah County crews were placing the marker in concrete at the corner of Stark Street and 117th Avenue in Ventura Park. Right between those two trees. It took me a long time to figure out what the P and 7 meant."

...

Milepost 7 was found only recently by students of John Woodward, an anthropology professor at Mount Hood Community College.

The 500-pound marker was being ravaged by bulldozers, so the students rescued it and offered it to the county.

Milepost 13 is housed in the Gresham Historical Society and milepost 14 is on the campus of Mount Hood Community College.

Various things I've learned so far, and other things I still don't know, plus some guesses:

• As mentioned on the Stark Street Mile Markers mini-blog, there's another milestone P7 in SW Portland, seemingly marking the course of Taylors Ferry Rd. / Capitol Highway / Highway 99W. I haven't tracked that one down yet, but I did run across someone's photos of it here, along with photos of a newer-looking marker that just says "5". I'm not sure what its significance is.
  
• The sign at this P7 indicates that distances are measured from the old Multnomah County Courthouse, on the west side of the river -- so that spot would be P0, although it's not clear if there was ever a marker to that effect. The current county courthouse was completed in 1914, and it's several blocks south of the baseline. More or less. The downtown street grid isn't aligned with the baseline, so it isn't always obvious how things line up.
  
• Which brings us to a mystery: Where exactly was this P0 point? This page at the Oregon Historical Society asserts that the old courthouse was at the same location as the current one. If true, that would rule out the courthouse, even though that would be a logical place for a P0 mark. So then I thought the reference to the old courthouse might refer to the Pioneer Courthouse instead. It does seem to lie on the baseline, but it's a couple of blocks west of my best estimate, and it's also a federal courthouse, not a local one. Pioneer Courthouse Square is closer to the right spot, but it didn't exist until the 1980s, and prior to that it was a hotel and then a parking lot, so I think we can rule it out as a candidate. So as far as I can determine, the P0 point should be located inside the parking garage between 10th & Park, near the Galleria MAX stop. But I'm not a pro surveyor, and I could easily be mistaken. And I haven't been able to determine if anything important was on this site before it was a parking garage.
  
• As long as we're doing best estimates (which included the help of this Google Maps distance calculator, it looks like this putative P0 point is 4 miles due east of the Willamette Stone. My actual number was something like 3.92 miles, but that's so close to 4 that I'm inclined to fault my estimating powers. If the actual value isn't 4, it would be fair to assume that was at least the intended value. So any milestone you see is that many miles to downtown, and 4 more to the Willamette Stone.


• Although once you're past P4, the road deviates from the baseline briefly. At that point, the baseline runs over the north end of Mt. Tabor, and traffic gets routed around the steepest part on SW Thorburn St. instead of straight over it. There's a disconnected stretch of Stark St. through part of the bypassed area, and the milestones seem to be measuring distance along that direction, not along the street you'll actually be on. So it's a decent bit greater than a mile between milestones P4 and P5.


• Oh, one more fun estimate to pass along. The missing P3 stone is supposed to have been at or around 42nd & Stark, in a quiet mostly-residential area. I'm enough of a math dork to immediately wonder where the mythical Pπ milestone should be, being ~3.14159 miles from downtown Portland. In a delightful coincidence, Pπ seems to be very close to 45th & Stark, and thus near Belmont Station. And if it's not an exact match, you can always change the value of π to make it fit better, like the Indiana Legislature allegedly once did. So there aren't any actual milestones nearby, but you could always drop by their cafe and hoist a pint in memory of the lost P3, and in honor of the Pπ I just made up. Some would call that ridiculous, others might call it stupid. But they're assuming there's such a thing as a bad reason to hoist a pint, and I'm going to have to disagree with that basic premise. Mmmmm... beeeer....


• Ok, one more guesstimate while we're at it. Being the math dork I just mentioned I am, I also had to wonder about mythical milestone Pi, which is not the same thing as Pπ. Pi is genuinely imaginary, rather than merely made up. It would be a mile due north of P0, and I think that means somewhere around 9th & Naito, near the police mounted patrol horse barn. And P-i (that's -i miles from P0) should be just south of 405, in the Duniway Park area.


• The historical marker at P7 says Stark was once called Base Line Road. The only road by that name in the present day is Baseline Rd. in Washington County. The name's an accurate description in parts of Hillsboro & Cornelius where Baseline follows the actual baseline. Elsewhere, the name is just a name.


• So far we've been talking strictly in terms of miles. The mayor and others keep insisting we're a thoroughly European city, with the idea that saying it all the time will make it true. So it's curious that they've never gotten around to trying to have the city go all metric and stop using miles, pounds, gallons, etc. Switching would likely fail miserably and just annoy people in the process, but the Powers That Be always prefer to do a bit of conceptual art and send a symbolic message rather than ever taking any real action. So this might be a good place to tell the world how much we adore the metric system without the expense and inconvenience of actually trying to use it for real. We could just put up a set of shiny new Euro-licious kilometer stones along Stark to go along with the existing milestones. The P_Km24 marker would be just a touch west of where P15 ought to be.


• While we're at it, the same area would also host the 13 nautical mile mark, if we were counting those. The nautical mile markers could look like little buoys, or maybe lighthouses. Since this is Portland, if you're going to be whimsical you probably ought to give your stuff a dour, educational side, so that people can tell you're a Serious Artist. So the buoys would be to let people know it would be 13 miles by boat to the sunken ruins of downtown, if somehow the whole world flooded due to global warming, a la Waterworld.


• But wait, there's more. From the Willamette Stone to P15 is 19 miles, or 30.57 km. Or, roughly, one picoparsec (about 30.85 km). Add in the distance from P15 to the Sandy River, and it's a very close fit indeed. In other words, take the distance along Stark from downtown to the Sandy River, and simply go 1.29 trillion times that far (i.e 1.29 parsecs), and you're at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star (other than the sun). There, that was easy, wasn't it? And simply go 800 quadrillion picoparsecs (or 800 kiloparsecs), and voila, you're at the Andromeda Galaxy.


• Oh, and once you hit the Sandy River, you're on the Columbia Gorge Highway, which has its own system of milestones stretching from Troutdale all the way to the Dalles. Which would be a substantial project, if I (or somebody else) decided to take it on. It sounds kind of tedious, but it would be a good excuse to spend a lot of time wandering around the Gorge. So I'm not going to completely and permanently rule it out. Not today, though, and probably not tomorrow either.