Reading the Street

Today's stop in the ongoing tour of Portland transit mall art takes us to SW 5th & Oak, right in front of one of Portland's famous food cart pods. Reading the Street is the low railing with the glass panels that you leaned against while waiting for your pad thai last week, without even realizing it was Art. Don't be embarrassed; everyone does this, myself included. TriMet's Green Line public art guide describes it thusly:

Mark R. Smith's Reading the Street consists of a series of glass panels with images of silhouetted figures arranged in horizontal rows. Through body language and gestures, the images are meant to be read and deciphered like text, as the work addresses the complicated nature of human interaction in crowded urban thoroughfares.

This post illustrates one of the things I enjoy about doing this blog: It makes me stop and look at things I've walked past (or leaned against) countless times without ever really noticing. I tend to think these "Hey, wait, what's that?" moments are interesting and worth sharing, which they may or may not be. And if not, I still enjoy taking the photos and doing what passes for research here, so there's that.

It seems the artist behind Reading the Street is an instructor at PCC Sylvania, and had a show last November at Portland's Elizabeth Leach Gallery. I've run across less than a handful of mentions of Reading the Street on the interwebs, but I did come across an interesting article about a 2004 commission of his at Lewis & Clark, so I figured I'd pass that along.

CultureNOW does have a photoset on Reading the Street, but my photos are better, quite honestly. I wish they'd written a bit more about it instead; I'd actually be interested in the design process & requirements around the thing. The food cart pod was there first, years before MAX and the accompanying art arrived. The heavy railings above the panels seem to indicate they were designed assuming that people would lean or sit on them. Which fascinates me, because although this cart pod has been around for over a decade, it's still just a collection of mobile carts on a parking lot, an ephemeral thing that could be gone tomorrow if City Hall or the lot's owner suddenly took a dislike to food carts. So it's entirely possible the railings could outlast the reason they're here. A decade from now, once the parking lot's been replaced by a condo tower for rich Californians, or an anti-zombie fortress, or an Applebee's, or some other dystopian horror, people may glance at the railings and wonder what they were originally for, while fleeing for their lives.

cherry blossoms, portland center park

cherry blossoms, terry schrunk plaza (ii)

cherry blossoms, terry schrunk plaza (i)

cherry blossoms, justice center

Conduit

Today's adventure in transit mall art takes us to Portland State University's fugly University Services Building, on SW 6th between Mill & Montgomery. Don't worry, we aren't going inside. We're just here to look at Conduit, on the otherwise blank concrete wall of the building's parking garage, facing 6th Avenue. Conduit was created by Emily Ginsburg (a professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art); her website describes it:

This is an outdoor site-specific commission for PSU and TRIMET. It is using the act of traveling as a metaphor for the transmission and exchange of ideas and the perpetual space between thinking and communicating tied to learning, living and working.

For whatever reason, TriMet's transit mall art guide doesn't mention Conduit anywhere, but it does show up on the big Travel Portland public art map, which is where I came across it. I only mention this because I've sort of clued in on that map as a new source of things to take photos of, and the post you're reading now is far from the last item on that map. Thing is, I'm not totally convinced my usual formula for art posts results in interesting or useful content. I post some photos of the piece, tell you where it is, and if I can find descriptions of it on the net somewhere, I quote liberally from those rather than trying to describe or analyze it myself. I have no pretensions around being an actual art critic; if I particularly like or loathe something, I'll usually say so, but I'm not going to offer an extensive theoretical justification for it either way.

On the other hand, I'm pretty good at finding things on the interwebs, and some of my photos turn out ok. I suppose that's a good description of what I usually do here: Seize on some obscure subject, aggregate whatever I can find about it on the net, and add some original photos. Is that valuable? I dunno. I just know I've been doing it for mumble-mumble years now, to a continuous trickle of search engine traffic and the occasional return visitor. Anyway, enough handwringing for one post; you're probably just wading through this waiting for the aggregation part. I only came across a couple of items this time around, but they're both sort of interesting:

• You might also be interested in this interesting profile of Ginsburg at {rainboeliza}.
• PNCA's Flickr stream has several photos of Conduit.

OHSU Skybridge

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The ongoing bridge project makes another detour into Portland's West Hills, with a visit to the big pedestrian bridge up at Oregon Health Sciences University. The bridge provides a route between the main OHSU hospital and the Veterans Hospital that across a deep ravine from OHSU proper. Some sources insist this is the world's longest pedestrian suspension bridge, but I'm uncertain whether that's actually true or not. Structurae points out this is actually a cable-stayed bridge, not a suspension bridge; an engineering firm connected with the bridge's construction merely claims it's the longest bridge "of its type", whatever that means.

This had been on my bridge to-do list for quite some time, but I never had much of a reason to trek up to OHSU and wander around the hospital looking for the skybridge. But back in January, my mother was hospitalized at OHSU for a couple of weeks, and at one point I wandered out to go find bottled water on a Sunday afternoon, when just about everything at OHSU is closed for some reason. As I wandered around I finally saw a sign for the skybridge and figured, hey, I'll take a couple of extra minutes, and walk across (since the bridge project involves walking across whenever possible) & take some phone photos. It's a longer walk than you'd think; at 690 feet it's only a bit shorter than the Morrison Bridge (775'), so you walk and walk and the far side just doesn't get closer very quickly. Still, there were some interesting views from the bridge, and I've checked it off my list now, and it was certainly a nice break from hanging around the neurology ICU. I even found bottled water eventually (it turned out to be another seven stories down from the bridge level), and -- most importantly -- my mom's out of the hospital now and has made a great recovery.

Loyal B. Stearns Memorial Fountain

At the Burnside entrance to Portland's Washington Park, near NW 24th Place, there's a curious curved monument featuring a trio of drinking fountains. It's dated 1936, and is dedicated to the memory of one Loyal B. Stearns, a one-term Republican state legislator from Portland (if you can believe that), who later went on to hold various judgeships over the next two decades. Despite what you might think, this isn't a monument from a grateful city thanking him for his tireless public service. The Smithsonian's art inventory says this of the Loyal B. Stearns Memorial Fountain:

The fountain was funded with a bequest of $5,000 given to the City of Portland by Judge Loyal B. Stearns (1853-1936) for a drinking fountain on upper West Burnside Street. A contest for the design of the fountain was held, and the design by A. E. Doyle & Associates was chosen. Loyal B. Stearns was a politician, attorney, and jurist in Oregon. He was a member of the Oregon House of Representatives and he served as judge for the police. In 1882 Stearns was elected county judge and in 1885, he was appointed circuit judge by Governor Moody. IAS files contain related articles from the Oregonian, Dec. 30, 1983 and Aug. 22, 1983 and citations to the Oregonian, Sept. 16, 1956 and the book, "Portland Block Book," Oct. 1891.

Via the Oregonian historical archives at the Multnomah County Library, we learn there's a bit more to the story. Stearns's will specified that the fountain must be sited along Burnside, somewhere between 15th and 23rd avenues, or failing that, somewhere nearby if his preferred range didn't work out. Which it obviously didn't since the fountain ended up a few blocks west of 23rd. This was an oddly specific bequest, but one with a rather prosaic explanation: . After retiring from the bench, Stearns had a real estate office in downtown Portland, and lived somewhere around 23rd. He walked to and from work every day, and the stretch of Burnside between 15th and 23rd was part of his daily commute. It had occurred to him that there really ought to be a drinking fountain somewhere along that route, and there wasn't one. So he put it in his will, possibly thinking that it's hard for a city to refuse a prominent citizen's final request, especially if there's cash attached.

But of course giving things to the City of Portland has never been quite that straightforward. A suitable site would have to be found, and then a fountain would have to be designed and built for not a penny more than $5000. The city first wanted to build the fountain in front of Multnomah Stadium, today's Jeld-Wen Field, but could not come to an agreement with stadium management. One of the concerns about the stadium site was that the city was considering widening 20th Avenue as part of the proposed Foothills boulevard, an idea that later evolved into Interstate 405 (sited between 14th & 15th Avenues) several decades down the road. The eventual fountain site was the city's Plan B, placing it at the old Washington Park Zoo's former seal pond, which had closed some years prior and had become an eyesore. Stearns's granddaughters hated the new location; it wasn't part of their father's daily commute, they argued, which violated the spirit of the gift. This delayed the siting for some time. The granddaughters went off to search for a better location themselves, but eventually realized there were very few places one could build a fountain right along Burnside, and resigned themselves to the seal pond site. An Oregonian photo shows the site before the fountain was constructed, if you're curious to see what it looked like at the time.

Design and construction presented a problem as well. The city's arts commission seems to have felt that Stearns's bequest was not an overly generous gift for what he had in mind to build, and announced the contest would be to design for the city "the most attractive fountain that it can get for $5000 in place". The prize money for the design contest, architects' fees, and construction costs would all have to come out of the gift, as the city was determined to spend no taxpayer money on the fountain. In fact they looked into underspending on the fountain and keeping the balance. This stinginess makes a bit more sense when you recall that this gift came in the middle of the Great Depression, and the Arts Commission didn't exactly have a lot of extra cash lying around in case of cost overruns. The contest was launched in October 1940, limited to Oregon residents who were US citizens. Entrants were given just one month to submit proposals. The competition was eventually won by the prominent A.E. Doyle firm, whose proposal envisioned "a curved screen of granite, with dimension of eight feet by 12 feet, as the background for a fountain for dogs on one side, and a series of three fountains for persons on the other side." For this they received a princely $250 prize; the fact that they competed for this rather small award is another indicator this was the middle of the Depression. The Oregon Historical Society's research library has at least one of the competing proposals on file, but sadly the design sketches don't seem to be online.

Once the design was finalized, construction was delayed waiting for granite to arrive from Minnesota. (The same granite was used for the base of the Theodore Roosevelt statue in the South Park blocks, for you trivia fans out there.) The Oregonian dutifully reported when construction finally began, but after that we see no further mention of the fountain (assuming the database search function is up to snuff) until a "historic fountains of Portland" article in 1983. If there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony, it seems to have gone unreported-on by the paper. We also aren't told what the eventual cost of the fountain ended up being, despite all the handwringing earlier; some money must have been left over, though, as a "Loyal B. Stearns Foundation Trust" fund was set up to maintain the fountain, until it was merged with various other city parks trust funds in 1981.

The thing I'm really curious about, which again the Oregonian didn't report, is what Stearns's heirs thought of the finished product. For all the cost-consciousness and handwringing, we ended up with a rather attractive fountain, in an Art Deco style that's uncommon in Portland. On the other hand, his granddaughters had a legitimate point about the location; not only was it not on Stearns's daily commute, it isn't really on anyone else's daily commute either, and the fountain is lightly used and rarely noticed. I didn't think to check whether the drinking fountains were working when I visited. The dog fountain on the reverse side didn't seem to be functional at all, and probably hasn't been for quite some time. You'd think that local dog activists (which we have more than a few of here) would have demanded the city fix the dog fountain. They probably just don't realize it exists.

Holon

Hey, it's time for yet another installment of me wandering around taking photos of obscure public art around town. Today's adventure takes us to the south end of the South Park Blocks, where we find a small piece titled Holon, by Don Wilson, the same guy who created Interlocking Forms, a much larger, but similar-looking sculpture along the Portland transit mall. We're told Holon is a recent (2004) addition to the Park Blocks, and there isn't a lot about it out on the interwebs. The few descriptions of it I've come across seem to be taken from a single source via a game of telephone:

• PortlandOnline:

  Installed in 2004, this work made of white Indiana limestone by Oregon sculptor Donald Wilson is entitled Holon. The word comes from the Greek holos which means whole, entire, complete in all its parts - something that has integrity and identity at the same time as it is a part of a larger system.

• CultureNOW:

  Holon is the most recent addition to Porland's famed Park Blocks. Holon comes from the Greek word "holos," meaning whole or complete in its parts. Oregon sculptor Donald Wilson intended his piece Holon to be whole, with integrity on its own while being a part of a larger system.

• Regional Arts & Culture Council:

  “Holon”, originally commissioned in 1979, was dedicated to the late Dr. Gordon Hearn, the first dean of the School of Social Work at PSU, and reflects the school’s holistic design.

I frankly have no idea what "holistic design" even is. The word "Holon" is a technical term in philosophy, and the above descriptions seem to be trying to give a definition of it for a general audience, with little success. I'm not even going to have a go at that; if you're interested, just go read the Wikipedia article.

The RACC page I linked to gives an original date of 1979 and notes it was "re-carved" in 2003. The 1979 date would explain why it looks so much like its 1977 sibling on the transit mall. I'm not sure what "re-carved" means, but a 1981 "In Memoriam" piece about Mr. Hearn, and a mention of Holon in a human behavior textbook both indicate Holon was somewhere on the PSU campus as of the late 1970s. So re-carved could mean repaired, or replaced, or updated to reflect its creator's true vision, like with the first 3 Star Wars movies. Dunno.