Aurora Bridge

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The ongoing bridge project heads north this time, to Seattle's Aurora Bridge. This is the first Seattle bridge I've done; it's not a topic I'm overly familiar with, despite having lived in Seattle until age 6, which really ought to make me an expert. And I'm only managing it now because I had some pictures floating around in the archives from back in 2006, the same trip that took me to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I wasn't actually doing a bridge project yet, at least not that I was aware of, so I didn't try walking across or anything exciting like that. I was actually in the area to track down the Fremont neighborhood's infamous Lenin statue, and the enormous Volkswagen-eating troll who lives under the north end of the Aurora bridge:



My relatives in Seattle always point to the troll to illustrate just how quirky and alternative their city is, even if they themselves are a rather non-quirky bunch of engineers and accountants. So the troll has civic aspirational value, if nothing else.



The Aurora Bridge has made a cameo here once before, in a post about Portland's Vista Bridge, since unfortunately this is Seattle's favorite suicide bridge. A recent WSDOT project put up a nine foot fence to deter jumpers, at the cost of (I'm told) uglifying the bridge and messing up the view. I haven't been back to Seattle in a few years and haven't seen it for myself. And with that I'm going to stop talking about that particular topic, because (as I've learned with the Vista Bridge) jumpers result in a flood of page hits, and it creeps me out. That's not really the kind of web traffic I'm looking for, thanks.



The bridge does bear an obvious family resemblance to Portland's Ross Island Bridge, as they're both cantilever truss bridges. The Ross Island is significantly longer (3649.1 feet vs. 2945 feet) and slightly older (1926 vs. 1932) and the Aurora is wider (70 feet vs. 43 feet), higher (163 feet vs 123 feet), and has more trolls (1 vs. 0). More exciting vital statistics can be had at the bridge's Structurae page, if you're so inclined.



The last photo also shows a bit of the Fremont neighborhood's Sunday Market. Which, as you might imagine, was aggressively quirky. I took a walk through out of curiosity, but I don't recall actually buying anything, now that I think about it.

Typewriter Eraser, Scale X

A few photos of Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (official website). This piece is located outside of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at CityCenter, Las Vegas.

Oldenburg & van Bruggen are famous for their sculptures of everyday objects scaled up to enormous size, including a giant cherry & spoon in Minneapolis, a giant clothespin in Philadelphia, a giant safety pin in San Francisco, another giant safety pin in New Orleans, and several giant typewriter erasers. There are at least two others on public display besides this one: One at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and another in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Garden.



Elsewhere on the net, I came across a PBS video about the piece, and restoration photos of the Vegas copy.

One -- it's not clear whether it was the Vegas copy or yet another one -- sold at a 2009 Christie's auction for a cool $2,210,500. For comparison, you can buy a much smaller -- but functional -- vintage typewriter eraser online for just $5, and Amazon has new ones for about $2.

And while you're busy buying retro technology, it turns out that you can still buy a shiny new typewriter to go along with your eraser. A recent Daily Mail story claimed that the world's last typewriter factory had closed, but it turns out that it wasn't really the last typewriter factory. In fact New Jersey-based Swintec has a range of models available in the $150-$900 range, including clear ones for use in prisons (so inmates can't hide contraband inside). Amazingly, they also offer a classic 80s-style word processor, complete with 15" monochrome monitor and floppy drive, for a mere $1,678. The info page for it points out that it can't be used to access the internet or play games. Assuming these machines aren't just unsold inventory from 1989, there must still be a niche market out there for dedicated word processors. I can only speculate what that niche might be. My guess would be curmudgeonly mystery writers who've used this exact word processor since 1982 and absolutely refuse to move with the times, to the eternal dismay of their long-suffering agents and publishers.



In any case, I generally like Oldenburg's work, but I see a couple of problems with this piece, neither of which are/were under the artists' control:

1. The whole concept behind Oldenburg sculptures is that they're ginormous oversized versions of everyday objects. If the giant typewriter eraser is itself dwarfed by ginormous oversized skyscrapers all around it, it just doesn't have the same impact.
   
   
2. The other problem is that a typewriter eraser is no longer an everyday object. How many people in 2011 know what the hell a typewriter eraser even is, or what size it's supposed to be? As far as I can recall I've never used one, although I may have seen a real one once or twice. Actually I don't think I've used a typewriter at all since my freshman year in high school, which was about 25 years ago. Oh, and while I'm telling you how incredibly old I am, did I mention that our school had manual typewriters? And they replaced them with shiny new Macintosh Plus computers the year after I had typing class? It's true.

So it's not a huge surprise that it's already been spoofed (along with the other works scattered around CityCenter), in a recent show at the county government center titled CountyCenter (more photos here).

"Backspace Key, Scale X". Heh.

spring maple

gas & coke

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

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Here are a few circa-2006 photos of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Tacoma, Washington. I was rummaging around in the, uh, archives (i.e. iPhoto) recently and realized I hadn't posted these, and there was obviously a bridge post (as well as a non-Portland post) to be had here.

The second bridge (under construction in these photos) has has been open for several years now, but I haven't been back to Tacoma since I took these, so these are all the photos I have. As you might imagine, I don't have any photos from walking across either the old or new bridge, since I hadn't yet dreamed up this silly bridge project at the time. Hell, this humble blog was in its infancy at the time and I was still trying to figure out what it might be useful for. Some would argue I still haven't figured that out, but that's neither here nor there.



I can't very well do a post about the current bridges without mentioning the ill-fated original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1940 and collapsed just a few months later. Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, here's the video of the collapse, which is just jaw-dropping no matter how many times you watch it:



I like to believe that, if I'd been around in 1940 and blogs existed outside of pulp SF magazines (they probably didn't exist there either, come to think of it), I would have dropped by and taken a bunch of digital photos and filmed an exciting video clip of the bridge flapping around using my phone, and maybe live-tweeted it if it was really exciting, and then fled before the G-men could show up up and confiscate my futuristic space-man gadgets, thus altering the timeline with untold consequences.



If that happened, most likely the Manhattan Project wouldn't be necessary, therefore families wouldn't move from the Midwest to work at Hanford, and one thing wouldn't lead to another, and my parents would never meet, causing a classic time loop similar to those you've seen in a million cheesy Star Trek: Voyager episodes. Except in real life this probably destroys the universe or something, and remodulating the phase inverters with a new particle the writers just invented doesn't do bupkis to stop it.



Which brings us to the obligatory "not dying" angle: Don't go back in time and blog about the original bridge instead of the current one. As it turns out, having the bridge collapse beneath your feet may be the least of your worries.

Munson Creek Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Munson Creek Falls, a few miles south of Tillamook where the Coast Range meets dairyland. It's a surprising place to find a 319 foot waterfall, at least if you're accustomed to Columbia Gorge waterfalls.



The falls are a state park, so there's a fairly large and visible sign for the turn off US 101 (which is a left turn if you're heading south from Tillamook). But the road you'll turn onto doesn't look like a road to somewhere you'd want to go. It's paved, at first, but it's quite narrow and is in very poor condition, with ginormous potholes all over the place. There are houses on either side of the road, and as far as you can tell you're just driving around on some random rural road out in dairy country.

(Technically the place is a "state natural site" rather than a "state park". I'm not sure what that's supposed to indicate, but my gut feeling is that it means they aren't going to spend any state money improving the road anytime soon.)



Once you're past the last houses the road turns to gravel, and it looks like you've wandered onto a random Forest Service road in timber country. It's not any wider than the paved portion, and there are a few big potholes here and there, including one in the middle of a bridge (!), but for the most part the gravel part of the road is in better condition than the paved portion. It's effectively a one lane road most of the way, so you need to watch for oncoming traffic. I didn't encounter any log trucks, but it definitely looks like a road where log trucks are a serious possibility, so pay attention.



There are also a couple of intersections to keep an eye out for. The route to the falls is clearly marked (so long as nobody monkeys with the signs), at least. There's no cell service out here to distract you while you're driving (at least if you're a T-Mobile customer like me), so you'd have to work at it a bit to get lost, unless you planned on using Google Maps for directions. If you do manage to get lost somehow, I have no idea where you might end up if you take the wrong turn.



It's a short drive, at least, and pretty soon you'll end up at the parking lot for the falls. From the lot it's an easy 1/4 mile walk to the falls viewpoint. The trail itself is well maintained, in much better shape than the road, and almost as wide. You still won't be right next to the falls at the viewpoint, and there's a railing with a sign saying it's super dangerous, prohibiting you from taking a step further. In practice you can go a bit further ahead without heroic efforts, but the view of the falls is actually better back at the viewpoint. And if you're carrying a mini-tripod like I was, the "none shall pass" fence at the viewpoint is a good place to set up and start taking longer exposures of the falls (which is what you do to get the classic silky water effect people often do with waterfalls).



Speaking of photos, the main problem I ran into was that, on a sunny day, the foliage in the foreground was bright, while the falls remained in shadow in the background. I expect this happens a lot in this location, so getting exposure and colors right can present a challenge. A cloudy day might be an asset in this case, which is nice since the coast has no shortage of cloudy days.

Thor

The occasional tour of Transit Mall art continues with Thor, yet another of the original 1970s pieces, now located at SW 6th & Taylor. This is one of my favorites from the original crop, with an interesting and pleasant shape & texture to it. TriMet's Green Line Public Art Guide is, as usual, quite terse in its description of the thing:

Melvin Schuler, Thor, 1977, Copper on redwood

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The redwood part is not obvious from looking a it, so I assume it's somewhere under the copper plating. I'm not sure why it's redwood, specifically, since nobody can see it. I'm inclined to blame it on the 70s, when everyone wanted to make everything out of redwood because it was "natural". Pencils, hot tubs, groovy rustic furniture, and apparently abstract sculptures too. Then the 80s came along and people (myself included) looked at all the stumps and went "oh crap", and there were protests and lawsuits and on and on. But I digress.



As is often the case with 70s Transit Mall art, there's almost nothing on the net about Thor. Portland, OR Daily Photo has a post about it, obviously with a couple of photos. A forum thread at AskART includes a couple of people saying how much they like Thor. And a couple of references show up in the library's Oregonian Historical Archives:

An article on the front page of the Metro section on September 20, 1977 includes a photo of Thor being installed at its original location between SW Washington & Alder. An October 9, 1977 editorial about the controversial crop of new Transit Mall art mentions it briefly:

Look at the copper-sheathed work by Melvin Schuler between Alder and Washington. See the curve and balance and accent, the melding of shape into shape? Or do you see an off-balance rock about to crash upon you?

And that's about all I've got on this one, I'm afraid. If you know any interesting stories or anecdotes about it -- even completely fictional ones you made up just now -- feel free to share 'em down in the comments.

Thx. Mgmt.

crows, se 8th & yamhill

irises, tanner springs (may 2011)

boat name win

no admittance, east burnside

hops, may 2011

curb, sw 10th

Sunshine, Willamette River

A short video clip with the sun reflecting off the river. It's not something you see very often in this part of the world.

backlit tulips