cocoa beach pier, november 2011

Soldiers & Sailors Monument, Cleveland

A few photos of Cleveland's Soldiers & Sailors Monument, the Civil War memorial in Public Square. Wikipedia's extensive "Ohio in the American Civil War" article should give some idea why the city built such a large and ornate monument.

These were taken on a cold, windy day back in March, but I wanted to post some Cleveland photos today for the city's 216th birthday (216 also being the local area code, you see).

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vegas, june 2012

Photos of the Strip from Mandalay Bay. The gold leaf on the windows gives daytime photos a sort of blue-green cast; I've never quite figured out how to correct for that, and I've never quite decided whether I want to.

mt. hood & clouds, march 2012

snowy plateaus, eastern oregon

washington cascades from 10000 feet

From a recent flight out of Portland. Above: Mt. St. Helens & Mt. Rainier. Below: Mt. Adams.

Shoshone Falls

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A scanned photo of Shoshone Falls, just east of Twin Falls, Idaho. I took this during a family vacation en route to Yellowstone, circa 1987, using my semi-trusty Kodak 110 film camera.

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