cyclotram

Monday, November 16, 2009

Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial

At the corner of NE Sandy, Thompson, and 48th Avenue, out in the Hollywood District, is Portland's Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, a small monument with a very tall flagpole. I'd never heard of it until I ran across a brief mention of it in this brief document from the Parks Bureau, in which we learn when they did maintenance of some sort on various obscure spots around town. I was actually looking for info on the park at Hall & 14th, and the doc didn't tell me anything useful about that place, but it's full of other places I haven't covered yet. When I saw there was some sort of obscure memorial in town that I'd never heard of, I knew I had to track it down.

Or at least I started out by assuming it was obscure, since I'd never heard of it before. But as it turns out, it has a fairly prominent role once a year. Every year, Portland's Veterans Day parade winds through the Hollywood District and ends up right here, and the flagpole serves as the backdrop for speeches by various dignitaries and elected officials, generally including the mayor. This year marked the 35th edition of Portland's parade, the first coming in 1974 -- coincidentally when the Vernon Ross memorial was dedicated. As for the identity of Mr. Ross, the plaque here indicates he was the instigator of the memorial, rather than its subject as I originally assumed. The memorial itself doesn't explain who Vernon E. Ross was or why he was involved, but right across the street is the Ross Hollywood Chapel funeral home, which happens to be the longtime primary sponsor of the Veterans Day Parade. So I think that answers that question.

Updated 3/29/11: Thanks to the magic of the library's Oregonian historical archives, there are a few more details to relay. A July 12, 1974 article is titled Smallest block in city location for memorial. No, really, this spot is legally a platted city block, and it's our smallest, or at least it was in 1974. 48 square feet. The article says Ross bought the plot in part to prevent signs from being erected there. Ross also states that the plot is dedicated to the memory of Louis M. Heinrichs, a fellow World War I veteran.

A followup article on September 18, 1975 covers the donation:

Ross ... said he purchased the 7-by-15-foot piece of land for $3,200 and paid $19,000 to erect the flag memorial.

"The patriotism of our country has gone to the lowest level that it's been in our history," he told the City Council Wednesday.

Mayor Neil Goldschmidt praised Ross' efforts to improve the land as being "in the best tradition" of the city.

Ross died in November 1983. His obituary says he suffered a heart attack during the Hollywood Veterans Day Parade.

For a time the memorial was referred to by name as either "Ross Veterans Memorial" or "Ross Memorial Park", but both had fallen out of use (at least by the Oregonian) by the mid 1980s.

KATU has a short video clip of this year's parade, and there's an article with a photo slideshow at Salem-news.com, although neither piece shows the memorial.

One of the questions I often try to answer about various places is "Who owns it, and who runs it?" Ok, maybe that counts as two questions. Anyway, a few references around the net (like this one) refer to the place as the "Ross Hollywood Chapel Veterans Memorial Flag Pole", but the tiny triangle of land actually belongs to the city. Although my guess is that someone comes over from next door rather than from city hall when it's time to raise or lower the flag here, or tend to the roses. That might explain why the city barely mentions it anywhere on their website. The Parks Bureau doesn't list it in their inventory, for one thing. Also, a few years ago there was a proposal to erect a new war memorial on Mt. Tabor, and as part of the process the city compiled an extensive list of existing veterans memorials across Oregon. It mentions small monuments in the far corners of the state, but fails to mention this one. So we can assume the place isn't exactly on everyone's radar at city hall. Not that veterans monuments are the city's cup of tea, really. The monument, you may note, went up in 1974, at the tail end of Vietnam, and I wonder if it went up in part as a way of shaking a fist at the dirty hippies or something. And then the dirty hippies went on to take over the city and they've been running it ever since. Also, since January we've had a mayor who'd be quickly booted out of the military on account of being gay, and despite that it's still part of his job to put in appearances at events like this. His official blog doesn't mention the event at all, so I don't know how he felt about it, but it must've been deeply weird.

In any case, PortlandMaps knows the place as R259400, 48 square feet of land officially owned by the City Auditor's office. (Although I think that's just a way of saying it's general city-owned land not belonging to any particular department, or they just haven't bothered to record which department it belongs to.) In any case, 48 square feet is pretty tiny, but it still comes to 6912 square inches, compared to 452 square inches of Mill Ends Park. That's 15.3 times bigger. FWIW.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

an ex-tulip

Taken at Riverplace, downtown Portland, late April '09.

Also featuring a second, soon-to-be-ex tulip:

renyming and other miscellany

If a.) you read this blog on a recurring basis (unlikely) and b.) you pay attention to the man behind the curtain (more unlikely), you might notice that the green profile box on the right has changed. The big deal is that I finally dumped the annoying old "atul666" nym, after mulling it over for quite a while. I recently realized I could just change the display nym, without having to figure out how to switch Blogger accounts or anything ugly like that. So it's done, and something similar has been done on the Flickr side of the house too. Its replacement is a bit, well, generic, and at some point I may tweak it again to make it more distinctive, just in case someone ever needs to refer to me by name.

The profile image has changed too. The new photo is of a Cyclotram, a fictional but very swoopy mole machine from the 1951 SF movie "Unknown World" (and this humble blog's namesake, obviously). I've wanted to use it here in some capacity, and since I was tweaking my profile anyway, I figured I'd just make it my new profile image. Although it comes out smaller than I'd prefer this way. And now there isn't a splash of yellow-orange in the upper right corner like there was with Evil Bendy.

Another item on my TODO list has been to move with the times and update this blog to a New Blogger template. I've held off so far because I've tweaked my current template rather extensively and don't want to lose my precious, precious changes. So what I just decided to do was create a shiny new New Blogger blog and tweak it to look as much like this humble blog as I can. Once I'm happy with the result, I'll do the upgrade on the "real" blog here and use the template from the test blog. So you probably aren't interested in looking at the test blog, and I don't intend for it to ever be very interesting, but it lives over at "cyclotram beta" in case anyone's curious.

A second experiment has a more uncertain future. I've long thought that the chronological view of things that Blogger gives you isn't the most useful format sometimes. In my case, it would often be more helpful to have posts displayed on a map instead. I've attempted to create just such a map via Google Maps, known simply as the cyclotram map, but it's still not quite what I have in mind. Maintaining it is a pain, and I still haven't added all my old posts to it yet. And, more importantly, it's all backwards. By which I mean, it's a map with points plotted on it, most of which target posts here. When what I'd really like is to have the posts themselves geotagged individually, and then be able to generate a map based on that geotag data. Blogger In Draft has a geotag feature that doesn't quite work yet, and maybe an auto-generated map will be doable once they've got the geotag thing sorted out. In the meantime, enjoy the tedious gruntwork version of the map for this blog. And if you don't see an entry for somewhere that you know I've covered already, I can only say that I'll get to it later, maybe, if I feel like it at some point. I mean, I guess you could always mail me and complain and see if that helps, but I'll probably just think it's weird if someone does that.

Friday, November 13, 2009

infrapink

as seen on the interwebs

A fun thing about putting your photos under a Creative Commons license is that you never know where they'll show up out on the Series of Tubes. You don't automatically know when this happens, so it's nice when people email you about it, but that's not required. And when that doesn't happen, tracking photo usage becomes a question of Google-Fu, and maybe Bing-Fu for the sake of completeness. I admit there's an element of vanity here along with the pure idle curiosity, and as a result I sort of feel the need to share what I've dredged up, not that anyone other than myself is likely to be even remotely curious. In any case, here's what I've found so far:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

three flagpoles

giant enemy crab

Looks more like a lobster actually, but then it wouldn't be a slightly-out-of-date interweb meme, would it?

If I was slightly more cynical, I'd announce this was the Virgin Mary (possibly wielding the little-known Holy Crab Claw of Righteousness), and let pareidolia and Fox News do the rest. And soon I would have all the money, mwhahahaha...

The Revenge of "Next Blog"...

Way back in the mists of time, Google/Blogger used to do a thing where, when someone arrived at this humble blog via the "Next Blog" button (see the very top of this page, toward the left side), you'd get a chunk of referrer info so you could see where the visitor was at just before they came here. So over time you end up with an appealingly random list of other blogs out there, things you'd probably never run across otherwise. After a while, something changed either with Blogger or possibly with Sitemeter, and the Next Blog hits eventually dried up.

So just a couple of days ago the trickle of Next Blog visitors started up again. I'll probably never know why, or why it stopped earlier for that matter. But I do have a nice new list of referrers to pass along. So without further ado, and for good or ill, here's the list so far:

Updated: Actually it turns out here's the reason. They decided to make "Next Blog" nonrandom, supposedly, although the list here seems fairly random to me. They argue the change was needed because "your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog", as if that was a bad thing. I thought the whole idea was to pull you out of your comfy corner of the interwebs and show you something completely different. I dunno. Maybe I just appreciate randomness more than most people do. In any case, here's the list: