Fountain, Union Bank of California Tower

A few photos of the groovy modernist fountain in the underground parking garage of the equally groovy & modernist Union Bank of California Tower, in downtown Portland. Longtime Gentle Reader(s) might recall one of these photos showing up here before, in this post from August 2006. And the other two photos here are from the iPhoto archives and are almost as old. I also mentioned the fountain and promised to take photos of it way back in March 2006, when this humble blog was just a few months old. But somehow, even though public fountain photos show up here a lot, I've never quite gotten around to doing a post about this one. The main problem being that I was never able to find any info about it. (But I did later; please see the "Updated" section, below.)

The library's Oregonian database is a little help once again. If the fountain has a name, I haven't discovered it, nor do I have an artist's name to pass along, but I do have a fun vintage argument about it to pass along. In a famous 1970 article about downtown Portland, the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable singled this little fountain out for criticism:

The Bank of California building even put a fountain below grade in its garage at the incongruous corner where the cars turn around it onto the exit ramp, a switch Bernini never dreamed of. In the age of the automobile, it has a kind of ludicrous logic.

William Allen, one of the building's architects, wrote a letter in response, and defended the fountain:

Miss Huxtable's one specific criticism of the Bank of California building is of the sculptured fountain set in the curve of the exit ramp on the first parking level, which she speaks of as "incongruous" and "a switch Bernini never would have dreamed of," yet with a "ludicrous logic".

Perhaps Miss Huxtable has never conceived of the idea that a space for the automobile, used for parking and drive-in banking, deserves an attractive architectural treatment and the enhancement of a work of art. Futher, we consider her allusion to Bernini a compliment. Historically he is considered a great architect, and is perhaps most noted for the great curving arcades which embrace the plaza in front of St. Peters in Rome.

May we say in all modesty that the curving exit ramp embraces the fountain with a similar felicity. Obviously Miss Huxtable likes neither Bernini nor curves. Degustibus non est disputandum.

Updated: I was wandering through the Oregonian database again (3/23/13) and found one more tidbit. From an article in the November 4th, 1977 Oregonian, "Wet your whistle with a tour of Portland's fountains":

Another courtyard fountain is in the center of a glassed-in garden court, part of the lobby of the Bank of California. A five-foot mushroom shape, it was designed by an Australian, Robert Woodward, a famous fountain sculptor.

But while there, one must really look at perhaps Portland's most unlikely fountain located at the exit of the underground parking garage of the Bank of California. This gusher was entitled "Untitled," by the San Francisco designer Aristides Demetrios.

It's not every city that has a fountain underground.

Now that we have a name, additional details are available to us. He has an extensive Wikipedia bio, for one thing, which even mentions this fountain briefly, as one of his earliest major commissions: 1969 FOUNTAIN, Bronze, 6' x 6' x 4', The Bank of California, Portland, OR. His personal website includes many photos of various fountains he's created, with even more photos in a Picasa album. None of this particular one, but you can see an obvious family resemblance in several of the others.

So I'm going to go ahead and declare this mystery solved.

art, pdx linfield campus

From the archives, photos of various sculptures on the Portland mini-campus of Linfield College, at NW 22nd & Northrup. I haven't been able to find any info about any of these pieces, so I can't do the usual "who made it, what else did they make, what's this all about" stuff I usually do with public art posts. If you're interested in seeing them, be aware that the bear and the shiny abstract thingy are in the sunken courtyard behind the St. Francis & ravens sculpture, so they aren't visible from the street. Or at least that's where everything was in 2007 when I took these photos. I admit I haven't checked more recently than that.

Updated: The St. Francis one is "St. Francis and His Friends", by Berthold Tex Schiwetz, which I bumped into by browsing the Smithsonian Art Inventory of "all" outdoor art in Portland. Don't tell me I don't do the heavy lifting for you guys, ok?

art friday, downtown crossing, boston

A few photos I took while wandering through a recent Art Friday in Boston's Downtown Crossing district. Note the late, lamented Filene's department store.

driving thru downtown orlando

[View Larger Map] A few low-grade photos of downtown Orlando, taken last November at the tail end of my trip to Florida for the Mars Science Lab launch tweetup. Before driving through, I wasn't entirely sure there was such a thing as downtown Orlando, and even now I'm pretty sure I couldn't describe the skyline to you. I didn't actually stop; I just drove through on my way to the airport and took a few photos at stoplights. So I'd be lying if I said I had any sort of feel for the place. But I do have a few photos, and here they are. Being from Portland, I tend to assume the downtown core of any city is the important part. I automatically head there first when visiting, and I judge the whole city by its center. I have a feeling that by doing so I missed the whole point of Orlando. But still, now I know that downtown Orlando exists, and this is more or less what it looks like.

mt. tabor, november 2007

Back in November 2007 I did a little experiment in which I hauled a variety of cameras over to Mt. Tabor and took photos until their puny batteries died, their puny memories were full, or their film ran out. Which didn't take very long, this being 2007 and all. I posted the Holga, JamCam, and Sears TLS (a vintage film SLR) photos here shortly thereafter, but never got around to posting the photos from my little Canon PowerShot A520, which was my main camera at the time. I ran across them while poking around in an old iPhoto library, so here they are, for comparison or whatever.

There are a lot of photos of the reservoir jets here, you'll notice, which is because they'd only recently been restored to operation after being out of commission for about a decade. I thought that was pretty great, plus this humble blog was still pretty new, and I was just getting into the whole photo thing, and there was all sorts of enthusiasm going around. I admit I kind of miss that. Granted there was other, less fun stuff going on right around the time I did the bag-o-cameras expedition, and I certainly don't miss that part. But still, overall it was kind of an interesting time. Sigh...

Upper North Falls, Silver Falls

Couple of photos of Upper North Falls at Silver Falls State Park. It's a quarter mile upstream from the North Falls trailhead, a quick side trip after you've seen North Falls (the main event here) if you aren't doing the loop trail. By "quick side trip" I mean it turns out I only took a handful of photos of the falls, and I didn't bust out the mini-tripod for them, so no tasty long-exposure motion blur goodness. Which illustrates a problem I keep running into: Creating a post is a lot easier when you have half a dozen photos you really aren't that fond of, versus a hundred photos you love and have to choose between. I'm not sure what to do about that, since taking fewer photos doesn't appear to be a realistic option for me.

Don't get the wrong idea here; it's an attractive waterfall, and it's a short, easy, pleasant walk from the trailhead, and you already paid $5 to park there anyway. So unless you're really pressed for time, you might as well make the side trip.

Roses, Orange Square

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A few rose photos from Orange Square, one of the five tiny parks in Ladd's Addition that the city collectively calls "Ladd Circle Park and Rose Gardens". Ladd Circle is the traffic circle at the heart of the neighborhood; it turns out the four squares have individual names too, although they've fallen out of common use: Orange Square, Maple Square, Cypress Square, and Mulberry Square, all named after adjacent streets. Or at least this was the naming scheme the city proposed in February 1909. It's not clear whether this was ever officially adopted, as a number of the other names in the proposal weren't, like "Jefferson Park" for what we now know as Washington Park, and "Pennoyer Park" for Governors Park.

The whole neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, and the official registration document refers to the parks by both these names and generic location-based terms ("South Park", "West Park", etc.), which aren't so much names as a way to tell the squares apart since the actual names never really caught on with the general public The neighborhood organization that maintains the gardens is probably the only group that needs to refer to the parks individually very often, and I have no idea what names they use for the squares. In any case, here's what the city told the National Park Service about this square in 1988:

Description: South Park is a diamond-shaped parallelogram, measuring 100 feet on each side, bounded by S.E. 16th Avenue, S.E. Orange, and S.E. Tamarack. The major organizing scheme, which adheres to the original plan, is a pair of wide turf paths bisecting the parallelogram. They meet in the middle, forming a small parallelogram. Diamond-shaped rose beds are located between the paths; these each have been subdivided by eight narrow turf paths meeting in a circle at the center of the bed. The varieties have been updated over the years, consistent with the intent of the designer, E.T. Mische, who, in 1912, reported to the park board that "...so rapidly as the newly introduced varieties ...may be propagated in sufficient quantities...they will find a location here in a representative mass. After they have grown here several years they are to give way to later or better introductions." At present, the park has over thirty varieties of hybrid tea roses, ranging from Etoile de Hollande, introduced in 1919, to American Pride, introduced in 1974. Cultural Data: Park superintendent E.T. Mische designed the planting scheme for the secondary parks, of which this is one, in the fall of 1909. In 1910 water systems were installed, turf walks laid, and roses planted. The parks have served, since 1910, to display various varieties of roses.

pod, june 2012

fog, vista house

French Prairie State Park

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This is the grand entrance to French Prairie State Park, an obscure little state park on the Willamette River, just downstream of Champoeg State Park and upstream of Wilsonville. The is one of the state's many obscure Willamette Greenway sites; they don't appear on most maps, the state parks website doesn't list them, and the only road sign indicating you're in the right place is the tiny one pictured above. I'll cover the Willamette Greenway park system further in a later post about a place I was actually able to visit. This one was "Closed for Winter" when I stopped by, even though it was after Memorial Day. The sign doesn't give any indication about when winter ends in these parts. In reality it's probably closed due to the state's budget woes, or maybe vandalism, and all they had was a "Closed for Winter" sign.

But suppose winter really has persisted into the summer months in this one small area, and there's a sheet of glacial ice here that isn't visible from the front gate, and ice floes on the river, plus drifting snow and so forth. What supernatural cause might be responsible for all this? Does a Snow Miser live here? Or maybe a white dragon from D&D has taken up residence. I lean toward the latter hypothesis, because white dragons are always chaotic evil, and that would explain why the gate is closed locked and visitors are quietly discouraged and the place's very existence is not exactly shouted from the rooftops. And the state certainly wouldn't undertake all these dragon-mitigation measures if dragons didn't actually exist, which to me is kind of a big deal even apart from the whole state park thing. It all makes perfect sense, right?

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

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Another Florida slideshow, this time from the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which borders and sort of overlaps the undeveloped parts of Kennedy Space Center. The tourist-friendly parts of the area ended up in the Canaveral National Seashore next door, so the wildlife refuge is mostly salt marshes and palmetto thickets, with no shortage of alligators, and mosquitoes beyond measure. I wasn't feeling much like a wilderness adventure that day, so these photos were all taken along the nature walk at the refuge's visitor center. Yeah, yeah, I know. Go ahead and make fun of me if you want.

One photo I want to point out is the taxidermied bird in a glass case. This is a Dusky Seaside Sparrow, which lived only in the Merritt Island area and went extinct in the late 1980s due to DDT and habitat loss. The bird on display looks outraged, and I can't say I blame it.

Mallory Meadows Park

View Larger Map A few photos of NE Portland's tiny Mallory Meadows Park, right on Killingsworth a few blocks west of MLK. The city describes it thusly:

Formerly a parking lot, Mallory Meadows is one of three parks in the King neighborhood financed in large part by a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. Completed in 2002, neighborhood volunteers built it with grants, donations, and hard labor. One of the park's elements is a low, undulating wall faced with glazed tiles containing self-portraits of elementary school children from the neighborhood.

The city did a great job of making a .15 acre lot look bigger than it is, with little hills and winding trails, like a miniature version of downtown's Pettygrove Park, which itself is pretty small. The design also does a great job hiding the busy street next door. Still, you can't totally escape the small size of the place. The first time I drove by to take photos, someone was sitting in a swing, obliviously texting away. Maybe it's just me and my antisocial tendencies, but somehow it felt like there wasn't room in the park for a second person, so I bailed and came back another day.

NE 33rd & Clackamas

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So here are a couple of photos of the sorta-but-not-really city park at NE 33rd & Clackamas, just south of I-84. The city's full of tiny, unmarked, sorta-nondescript city parks -- they're sort of this humble blog's stock in trade, in fact -- but this area's owned by ODOT (the state transportation department). I imagine it was probably acquired as part of a freeway expansion many years ago, and PortlandMaps shows that even now it's still platted out into several house-sized tax lots. If the city owned it there might at least be some swings or a rose garden or something here, but ODOT really isn't into that sort of thing.

In case you're wondering how I even knew this place existed, it was once the subject of an Urban Adventure League picnic (and subsequent blog post) way back in 2007. I didn't actually participate in that, but I ran across it on the net later and figured the place sounded extremely obscure and therefore blog-worthy, and it went on the TODO list, albeit nowhere near the top. And, well, I'm reminded yet again that lots of obscure places and things are obscure for good reason. But hey, this place is finally off my TODO list now. So, mission accomplished and all that.

Roselawn Park expedition

Here are a couple of photos of of NE Portland's tiny Roselawn Park, at the corner of NE 13th & Roselawn, hence the name. It's ok if you think the photos are boring. That was my impression of the place when I was there. The official photo on the city parks website is just as boring as these, and says nothing about the place except the location and standard operating hours. Which makes sense as there really isn't much here. The park's landscaped as if there ought to be something here, but at the present time it's just a bit of grass, some roses, and a mural on the side of an adjoining house that may or may not be part of the park, officially.

I stopped by on the same day I visited Sumner-Albina Park, making a swing through and visiting a bunch of tiny city parks in that part of town and taking photos for blog posts like the one you're reading right now. Roselawn Park is probably the least impressive of the lot, and there are close to zero mentions of it anywhere on the net, or so sayeth Google. Although the one Yelp review of the park tells the story of rescuing a sick, abandoned cat here. So three cheers for Roselawn Park just on the strength of that alone.

Sumner-Albina Park expedition

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Here are a few photos of North Portland's tiny Sumner-Albina Park, at the corner of NE Sumner St. & Albina Ave. It really is tiny: The city says it tops out at around 0.08 acres, or roughly 3400 square feet. It also doesn't have the usual city parks sign out front, and it looks very much like it's a small lawn attached to the Cherry Sprout Produce store next door (which has a lot of rave review on Yelp). But I checked the city's GIS system just to be sure, and the land is definitely a city park. So don't be shy, feel free to use the park even if you aren't shopping.

The park has exactly one Yelp review, which claims that the fence around the park is made with recycled bike parts. I didn't take much notice of the fence at the time, so this might be true as far as I know, and it would be completely unsurprising here given how hipster-ish the neighborhood is. I neglected to check out the produce shop next door, but it has a bunch of rave reviews as well.

A little patience for the conceits of Portland hipsterdom (i.e. things like decorating a ridiculously small park with recycled odds and ends) will go a long way here. If that's not really your thing, you'll probably be happier going elsewhere; here you'll be sighing a lot, and rolling your eyes, and muttering about how terribly precious everything is, and people will see it and think you're just being a big jerk for no reason, and they'll probably assume you're a tourist. So don't be That Guy, ok? Or if you're going to insist on being That Guy, at least please don't mention this humble blog by name. Thx. Mgmt.

reflected, whitaker ponds

Here are a few photos that didn't make it into an earlier post about NE Portland's Whitaker Ponds Natural Area. So yeah, I took these about two years ago and I'm only getting around to posting them now. You won't be surprised to hear that I have just a bit of a backlog I'm trying to work through. I still think this is better than running out of material, or running out of readers. Although some would argue both of those things happened here years ago...

Canaveral National Seashore

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A slideshow with a few photos from Florida's Canaveral National Seashore, immediately north of Kennedy Space Center. It's a fairly untouched bit of barrier island beach, at least compared to most of coastal Florida, but in the distance you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building and both of the Launch Complex 39 launch pads (used for the Space Shuttle, and Saturn V rockets before that).

If the original plans for the launch complex had come to fruition, there would have been between one and three additional Saturn V launch pads in the area, and pad E would have been right about at the point where I took these photos, if I'm reading the old maps correctly. Longer-term, less definite plans envisioned additional launch pads further north for the Nova rocket, a cancelled, even larger successor to the Saturn V. So this area would likely be very different if we'd ended up sending people to Mars back in the 70s or 80s. It wouldn't necessarily be less natural; much of today's Kennedy Space Center, other than the actual launch pads and support buildings, is still in more or less a wild state. But you certainly wouldn't be able to drive in and wander around on the beach.

march magnolia

april rosemary

april tulip tree