Eye River

Eye River sits in front of the Portland Community College CLIMB building at SE Clay St. & Water Avenue, part of something they call the "Stormwater Education Plaza":

The Eye River is a sculpture that refers to the working waterfront of the past and looks toward an environmental future. It functions as an autonomous icon within the Storm Water Education Plaza and as a link to the flow of water and people toward the Willamette River.

The form references the historic ‘log dog,’ a tool used to bind together log rafts that floated down the river to the Inman Poulson Lumber Mill on the nearby riverbank. Although the mill is no longer there, the Central Eastside continues to have a vibrant commercial and industrial component that mixes residential, recreation, and business.

Eye River is not simply an historic marker; it is also integral to the citizens with a vision of a sustainable future. This particular sculpture is the first in a series of three to be placed along the SE Clay “Green Street,” a corridor that leads bicyclists and pedestrians to the river. Each sculpture in the series will have the same cast steel form but the central oculus is specific to each site. The Water Education Plaza is the closest to the river and the pattern of blue and green fused glass alludes to the flow of water with its flickering light.

This project was a joint effort of PCC and Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services. The latter is the polite-society name for the local sewer agency. I was going to say it's more "tasteful" but I'm pretty sure that's not the word I want to use here. In any case, they obtained a federal grant under the the EPA's Innovative Wet Weather Program (which seems to have since ended) to turn SE Clay between 12th and the river into an educational "green street". And because this is Portland, a certain percentage of the green street money goes to art that's sort of related to the concept of rivery greenness.

BES provides one of the core services that allows modern civilization to even exist. Pretty much everyone acknowledges this; it's just that for the most part we'd rather not think about it at length, lest we end up thinking about the composition and sheer volume of what's gurgling along under our feet, and what it probably smells like. Eew. Typically people don't want to hear from BES at all about any topic, because it's rarely a good sign when you hear from them. With any luck, they're merely raising sewer rates again. Otherwise it's because your basement is filling up with... something... and hopefully you didn't have anything valuable stored there.

Anyone who's lived here for a few years has already gotten the memo about stormwater, which is what this Green Street PR effort wants to teach us about. The city and the media harp on it roughly every time the sewers overflow, which still happens every so often. It seems the BES agency's distant forebears back in the 19th century did a very silly thing, and designed our storm drains and sewers to flow into the same pipe, because it was cheap and they didn't know any better. This design sort of works ok until there's a rainstorm, because when one overflows, both of them overflow, and they both overflow straight into the river, untreated and unfiltered. And it turns out we're in a part of the world where it rains every so often, to put it mildly. The BES just spent two decades on the $1.4 billion Big Pipe project to kinda-sorta address the problem. But they'd still like us to know that if less rain went into the sewers, that would be awesome, and they'd like to share some Important Tips about how you can be a better person, at least where stormwater is concerned. I'm not sure they offer actual sewer rate discounts for being a better person though.

Anyway, here are a few items about the project as a whole, and where Eye River fits into it:

• City fact sheet about the Stormwater Education Plaza
• City PR for the project
• PCC PR for the project
• SE Clay Green Street Project
• Next phase starting construction, August 2013
• CSO (Combined Sewer Outfall) outlet at the foot of SE Clay, and another nearby at SE Hawthorne. This may be a reason they picked Clay as their prototype green street. Though I'm completely unclear on whether this green street is supposed to be an operational thing, or a symbolic, educational measure.
• Artist's page about Eye River
• Some interesting photos from the local firm that fabricated it.
• Presentation about Eye River and related works, to the US Green Building Council in March 2013.

Rico Pasado

A few photos of Rico Pasado, the cute bear sculpture on the NE side of Jamison Square. Awwww, it's so cute! It feels like overkill to say anything about it besides "Awwwwww...", but this humble blog specializes in overkill, sadly. In that spirit, the RACC page about Rico Pasado has this to say:

Mauricio Saldaña’s Rico Pasado was donated to Jamison Square by the Portland Rotary Club. Rico Pasado, or “rich past”, references both the brown bears that used to frequent the area and the 100 years of service provided by the Rotary Club. Rico Pasado was Saldaña’s first solo public art commission, but he has become well known in Portland for his facility in granite and has worked with public artist Fernanda D’Agostino on a number of projects.

Saldaña also created Vida y Esperanza, the cute squirrel sculpture at Mt. Talbert Nature Park. RACC's database also returns a couple of recent book-themed works of his up in the Kenton neighborhood. I'm not familiar with those, but I'm willing to say he's 2 for 2 in the cute animal department. (This is about as sophisticated as the art criticism ever gets here, in case you were wondering.)

He also has a photo gallery at Stone NW, showing these & other projects he's been involved with, including two Fernanda D'Agostino sculptures for the TriMet transit mall: Urban Hydrology and Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action. Also shown are some sculptures up at Smith & Bybee Lakes that I'm fairly certain I have photos of, lurking somewhere in the depths of iPhoto. I may have to go track those down now, or soon.

SE 15th & Alder

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A couple of photos of the intersection at SE 15th & Alder, which is home to one of the many "street graphics" created by Portland's City Repair Project. A street graphic is just a large design painted on a city street, usually in an intersection, with the painting (and periodic repainting) done by neighborhood volunteers. Each design is different; this one has a sort of vine motif, I suppose because the intersection also hosts a City Repair-designed compost site.

I'm not sure how many of these there are around town, total. The first one was Share-It Square, the intersection of SE 9th & Sherrett (hence the name), down in the Sellwood neighborhood. As this was a strange new thing back in 1997, the neighborhood first had to convince the city that painting a lightly used residential intersection wouldn't be the apocalypse. The apocalypse didn't happen, and street graphics have multiplied since then. Probably the best-known of them is the one at Sunnyside Piazza, the giant sunflower design at SE 33rd & Yamhill. That was the first one I ran across and I immediately thought it was a great idea. I don't automatically think that about everything the City Repair people do; I tend to roll my eyes when they try building structures out of mud and sticks and hay and so forth. But the street graphics are great.

I'm thinking it might be fun to take up these street graphics as a new blog/photo project, actually. It feels like this humble blog needs a fresh new project. I was doing local bridges for a while, but I've done the major ones, and a lot of the interesting minor ones. Same goes for fountains and city parks. I'd love to travel enough to keep this humble blog in business just with travel photos, but I never seem to be able to pull that off. The ongoing public art project is rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns as well; I'm already having to wander further and further afield (relatively speaking) to locate increasingly obscure (and often mediocre) artworks. I often wonder whether this is interesting to anyone other than me, to be honest. And the thing with the public art project is that it's difficult to talk about publicly-funded art in Portland without talking about art-world cronyism and gentrification. That's kind of unavoidable, but I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately -- often about the same narrow list of topics -- and generally taking a rather negative attitude about the world and whatever part of it I'm writing about. I really don't intend for this to be that sort of blog, if I can help it.

The missing element here, so far, is a list or map of street graphic projects. That's bound to exist somewhere, since a single group seems to be behind organizing all of them, and each one requires a city permit. So far I've run across a list of 2013 projects, and a map of 2012 projects, but not a complete list or map or guide or whatever. If anyone out there in Gentle Readerland has a pointer to something like that, I'd appreciate it.

A secondary motivation here is that these street graphics are fairly huge, and camera phone photos (like the ones in this post, & most other recent posts here) don't really do them justice. Phone photos are easy. I always have the phone with me, it takes reasonably ok photos, and I can upload to Flickr directly from it, without any intervening USB tethering + iPhoto + GIMP + Flickr Uploader steps. But the results are never as good, and a project like this would be an excuse to dust off the ol' DSLR and probably its ultra-wide angle lens. That looks like the best option outside of using a quadcopter camera drone, and that just feels sort of un-neighborly.

The formula for a street graphic blog post is probably going to look something like this: Photos, obviously; probably an embedded Google map, if it shows an overhead view of the thing; an explanation of what the graphic is about, or whatever else I can dig up about it; and (since the previous item probably won't be lengthy) I'll probably check the Oregonian database on the off-chance that something newsworthy happened at the intersection at some point.

As for today's intersection, far as I can tell the corner of SE 15th & Alder has appeared in precisely one news item since 1861: A purse-snatching reported on March 4th, 1928. The victim was relieved of a purse containing $3 in cash, a checkbook, and keys. So yeah, be careful when visiting. There could easily be malevolent purse-snatching ghosts, or vengeance-seeking wronged ghosts whose purses had been snatched, if you believe the nice people on cable TV.

Carter Road Bridge & Railroad Bridge

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Today's installment in The Bridges of Cuyahoga County is a two-fer: The Carter Road Bridge, in Cleveland's Flats district, and an adjacent disused railroad bridge. At this point you might be wondering just how many bridges Cleveland has, since this occasional series has been going on for about a year and a half now. The answer is many, many bridges, and I really only have photos of a few of them, and I've already posted most of those. Once I've worked my way through all of those, I suppose it'll be time for me to go back and take more tourist photos. But maybe not during the winter next time. Lingering around to capture interesting angles and details of these bridges just didn't seem like a really sterling idea, given the cold and wind and impending snow. I just sort of strolled by and snapped a few quick photos on my way back to the Terminal Tower Rapid station, so I could head over to Ohio City to hit the West Side Market and then decide which brewpub to visit.

So, a few tidbits I was able to dig up about the road bridge:

• Bridges & Tunnels has an extensive history piece about this bridge. It notes that this bridge was built in 1939 and is the fourth Carter Road Bridge. The first bridge, built in 1853, collapsed when it was overloaded with cattle.
• HistoricBridges.org gripes that the bridge's central span was replaced at some point, and the replacement uses bolts instead of rivets, which (we're told) lacks historical integrity.
• The bridge's BridgeHunter entry includes the usual collection of geeky bridge facts. As of 2011 the bridge actually had a sufficiency rating of 91 out of 100, which is the highest I've seen in a long time. So that's great, assuming this bridge goes somewhere you want to go.
• Cleveland Memory has a number of historic photos of the bridge.

The abandoned railroad bridge next door was built in 1955 as the "Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railroad Bridge Number 5" -- the Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge was once the same railroad's Bridge Number 4. This bridge replaced a previous 1902 rail bridge. I can't find a lot of info about it, which is pretty common with railroad bridges, but HistoricBridges.org finds it sort of interesting:

This bridge is interesting because it is of decent length, but the truss span is not a polygonal Warren; it features parallel chords. Its towers do not taper in toward the top either, giving this bridge a boxy appearance. The bridge appears to retain good historic integrity.

So at least it has that going for it, I suppose.

Fourth Avenue Plaza

This post, unusually, is about a public space that no longer exists: The former Fourth Avenue Plaza, an odd park-like area on SW 4th Avenue at Hall. Several years ago, in a very early post about bad local art, I went a bit over the top while snarking about the place:

... a tall cylinder covered in ceramic tiles, all in the same burnt orange color. It was set in a small grassy plaza, with a long series of steps leading up to it as if it were some sort of edifying monumental work. A formal setting, but with mute, soul-crushing emptiness at the center: Instead of a winged Victory, there was a parking garage pillar, encrusted in tiles swiped from a groovy 70's-era public toilet. It's gone now, plaza and all, replaced by Portland State University's new CompSci building. I'd have to call that a real, quantifiable improvement. No word on what happened to the old "sculpture". Perhaps it was dynamited.

I didn't manage to get any photos of the place before they tore it out, so I left it at that. Vintage Portland recently did a post about the place, which was once known as "Fourth Avenue Plaza", and the post included a color photo of the plaza. So I kind of wanted to pass that link along, and I figured I could at least snap a few quick phone photos to show you what the area looks like now. The key thing to understand is that it was never a city park; it was a landscaped area on top of the underground parking garage for an adjacent Pacific Northwest Bell office.

It won a number of awards when it was created in 1976, including a Community Improvement Award from the Portland Chamber of Commerce, and an award from the Portland Beautification Association, whatever that is or was. They called the plaza "perhaps the most skillfully disguised parking structure in this city" and raved "in a place where (the company) may have built just another highrise, landscaped parking lot, we have instead a stunningly handsome space." So, tastes vary widely over time. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. The rest of the Beautification awardees are a fascinating slice of mid-1970s Portland aspirations: The KGW Neighborfair (an annual festival in Waterfront park that ran through some time in the late 80s or early 90s.), the new Galleria mall (before all its stores cratered), and McCarthy Park on Swan Island.

The column may have been dubious mid-70s art, or it may have been a decorated vent for the underground garage, I'm not really sure which. There's a similar, surviving column a bit further north on 4th Avenue, which may be a second garage vent, or a second of whatever the first one was. I'd been kind of hoping it was the same column, just relocated, but the surviving one looks smaller, and it's brown instead of orange. I guess because it was the 70s and you had two of anything, one of them had to be brown and the other one orange.

If I'm understanding old versus new photos correctly, Fourth Avenue Plaza was roughly in the spot of the present day TECOTOSH sculpture, and the "Gerding Edlen Development Plaza" it sits in. Maybe PSU had to agree to build a new plaza here as part of the building permit process, sort of like what developers have to do with wetlands mitigation. Or it just sort of worked out that way.

Arlie

Today's public art thingamajig is Arlie, yet another whatzit by Lee Kelly, the same guy behind (deep breath) Leland One, the Kelly Fountain, Memory 99, Friendship Circle, Nash, Howard's Way, and a bunch of others. This one's on the grounds of the Portland Art Museum. I don't think I'm going to do posts about every single sculpture outside the art museum, just due to the sheer number of them, but I never pass up a chance to sigh melodramatically and roll my eyes at yet another Kelly creation.

If this post seems snarkier than usual, it's not that Arlie is particularly worse than the others, but that I've already looked at a few too many giant rusty sculptures of his, and this is another one on top of them. This may be sort of unfair in a way, since this one was created back in 1978, and by all rights I should be more exasperated by mid-2000s ones done in basically the same style. It's also reasonable for the reader to go, hey, he's going out of his way to track these down and be annoyed by them. And the reader would be correct. I like to think this occasional quest is at least mildly entertaining. It is to me anyway. And I'll readily admit these things aren't actually a public menace, unless maybe you're standing next to one when an earthquake happens. It's just that, if there's still such a thing as an art historian a few centuries from now, they'll realize how many of these things there are around town and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Assuming post-apocalyptic metal-scavenging mutants don't get to them first.

So, a few links about Arlie, because I care about fairness, and I imagine you might be interested in some less-biased and more informative sources:

• A blog post at 52 Pieces
• An Oregon Arts Commission profile of Kelly
• Artscatter
• A mention in a Portland Public Art post

So on one hand Arlie looks like one of the monstrous alien machines from the Tripods trilogy (a young-adult SF series from the late 1960s), which is not a plus in my book. But one of the legs forms a sort of bench, and I've actually seen people using it occasionally. So it's not beautiful, but it's at least a little useful, so I suppose it has that going for it.

Split Ring

Today's local public art object is Clement Meadmore's Split Ring, at SW 10th & Jefferson on the grounds of the Portland Art Museum. This may be my favorite sculpture in the whole city. I realize monumental abstract stuff isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it's not exactly the fashionable thing these days, and there are certainly a lot of abstract public artworks I don't care for. But Split Ring just seems right somehow. Maybe it has something to do with the museum, rather than the city, buying it. It's possible the museum curators have better taste (you'd hope so), and don't feel the same pressure to buy locally.

Back in college, I used to wait for the bus home at the old 10th & Jefferson TriMet stop, which was right next to Split Ring. I never got tired of looking at it. I was about to say there's something clean and mathematical about it, and then discivered there was a post about it (and a few other Meadmore works) at Ivars Peterson's excellent Mathematical Tourist blog. So it's not just me. I guess that's the key point here.

Like a lot of modern sculptures, this is one of a small series of identical pieces. I'm not sure how many exist total, but here are a few sightings I came across on the interwebs:

• Another Split Ring graces the Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, Michigan. No, really.
• A third one sold at auction in 2008 in Melbourne, Australia, fetching a cool $81,000 (Australian dollars, presumably). Which is actually somewhat less than I would have expected.
• A Split Ring appears on the cover of a recent book LARGE SCALE: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. The photo credit indicates it might be the Portland copy before it arrived here. The link goes to an interesting and non-art-jargony interview with the book's author.
• Apparently the sculpture later gave rise to Meadmore's Split Ring 2D, a related abstract silkscreen print design.

Albina Triangle expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to the little triangle formed by N. Mississippi & Albina Avenues & N. Prescott Street, commonly known as the "Albina Triangle". Except by its owner, the Portland Development Commission, which likes to call it "4500 Albina", I guess because they prefer names that sound like condo towers.

These photos are actually from wayyy back in 2007 when the place was under construction. I couldn't find enough info about the place back then to make a blog post worth doing, at least according to my standards at the time. Then I forgot about the place until just recently, when I ran across these photos in an old iPhoto library. I debated whether I needed to go back and take a few updated photos, since obviously the park doesn't look like this anymore. It feels like that would've been the responsible, journalistic thing to do. But I didn't feel like making a special trip just to do that, so Google Street View is your friend if you want a more contemporary look at the place.

Links-wise, we have a handful of items from across the interwebs:

• A a 2005 Portland Tribune story about the project
• A photo at the designer's website
• A mention in a paper about the City Repair Project (which was heavily involved in the Albina Triangle project, as well as the Arleta Triangle out in outer SE Portland, which is confusing, but hey.)
• A mention in a Trust for Public Land doc about interesting new (as of 2008) public spaces.

The library's Oregonian database doesn't have a lot to say about this spot. An item in the May 27th 1910 Oregonian mentions that Mississippi Avenue was soon to be a paved road all the way north to distant Prescott St., and the newly paved segment would even get a modern underground water main. I'm not sure Prescott was exactly the northern border between civilization and howling wilderness in 1910, but the city didn't see an immediate need for modern city services beyond that point. It's possible there was a wall of ice and dragons on the north side of Prescott back then, although the article fails to mention that detail. In any event, I like to think this justifies using the word "expedition" in the title of this post.

The rest of the items in the database consist of real estate ads, lost pet notices, and a string of auto accidents thru the 1940s and 1950s, with people repeatedly failing to negotiate the gentle bend between Mississippi and Albina avenues, and crashing into houses and telephone poles and so forth. None of them were reported as DUI accidents, but considering the era it just sort of stands to reason that at least some of them were. The string of car crashes might also explain why there was no longer a house on the site when the new park went in. The newspaper historical record is unclear on that point. The idea's appealing because it makes for a nice tidy historical anecdote that way, but I have zero actual evidence on hand.

A park owned by the PDC is kind of odd, but it's not the only example I've seen. Block 47 near the Convention Center is also PDC-owned, but it was also intended to be a temporary space, and the Albina Triangle doesn't look temporary. It's hard to see anyone building condos or an office block on this little triangle, and boosting property values of existing buildings isn't usually what the PDC does, so I'm not sure what their endgame is here. Maybe they're stuck with it because the Parks Bureau didn't want it or couldn't afford to adopt it. Dunno.

Street Twig

Today's obscure public art adventure takes us outside of downtown Portland for a change. Street Twig is at the corner of NE 16th & Weidler, a few blocks north and east of the Lloyd Center mall, next to a mid-2000s condo complex. CultureNOW describes it briefly:

The Big Leaf Maple tree, Acer macrophyllum, is represented here as a single branch with abundant seedpods. There are some impressive specimens of this Northwest native in the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood. Big Leaf Maples have great breadth and support a quantity of life forms within their branches. These tree-born gardens are suggestive of the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood, which is evolving organically, layer upon layer.

The RACC page for Street Twig leaves out the melodramatic, booster-ish last sentence of that description. That last sentence is key, though, as it gives a little insight into how a public artwork ended up outside the I-405 loop. Over roughly the last 20 years, the neighborhood around NE Broadway & Weidler has been promoted on and off as the Next Big Thing, but it's never really taken off the way places like the Pearl District and Mississippi Avenue have. They keep adding urban amenities that did the trick elsewhere, but this area is somewhat more immune than other parts of the city. It's kind of an odd and interesting part of town, with wide busy streets, the Lloyd Center shopping mall, and a number of big national chain restaurants. There are a lot of small local businesses too, but the area still feels like an island of quasi-suburbia planted in the middle of the city.

Portland has a reliable formula for gentrifying old industrial areas, and a similar formula for gentrifying working class and minority neighborhoods. Taking an area that's already somewhat upscale -- but upscale of the wrong sort -- and making it more "urban" is something they've had less success with, not only here but in areas like SW Macadam south of downtown, or the Gateway area around the I-84 & I-205 interchange. Thanks to these ongoing efforts, at this point the Broadway / Lloyd / Sullivan's Gulch / Irvington area now has condo buildings, public art, and a shiny new streetcar, but still has a Toyota dealer, a very suburban-style McMenamins, a Taco Bell drive thru, and the only Red Robin & Applebees outlets anywhere near downtown. (The next closest locations of both chains are at, you guessed it, Gateway.) And you typically get to all of these places by driving. I actually think this is great; it would be terrible if every business district in town was hip and trendy in exactly the same way. I don't often get a hankering for a platter of chain restaurant mozzarella sticks and a Coors Lite. Ok, that pretty much never happens. But it's somehow reassuring that the option still exists.

Before the condo building went in, this block was home to the original Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour. Farrell's, which later grew into a national chain, traded in 1890s nostalgia, kid-friendliness, and noise, and several generations of Portlanders have nostalgic fond memories of the place. We went to the Washington Square location a few times when I was a kid, but never for a birthday that I can recall. The ice cream was ok (though strictly of the vanilla-or-chocolate-with-wacky-toppings variety). The noise and commotion maybe not so much. After the demise of the national chain, the original location stayed in business as The Original Portland Ice Cream Parlor, but was eventually sold to developers in 2001; in 2009 the new owners of the Farrell's trademark announced a new restaurant was coming to town, but this doesn't seem to have happened yet.

The bigleaf maple turns out to be an interesting sort of tree. I admit I've never paid a lot of attention to the local maple trees. Growing up in the Northwest, one is sort of conditioned to think of forests as a mix of commercially valuable conifers and "everything else", aka "junk", and maple trees are obviously in the latter category. If you can believe this, I did not even realize there was a distinct species of maple tree endemic to the West Coast, much less that it has (supposedly) the largest leaves of any maple variety.

The really surprising thing is that bigleaf maple trees can be used to make maple syrup. We don't have a commercial maple syrup industry here, even a small artisanal one, and (according to Google) the only Portland business with "sugar shack" in the name is a notorious strip club. Wikipedia says that bigleaf syrup has a somewhat different flavor than the classic East Coast maple syrup everyone's used to. That might explain why you never see it in stores, but it just piques my curiosity./p>

There's an annual Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival on Vancouver Island, BC; I guess it's logical that the country with a maple leaf on its flag pays a bit closer attention to this sort of thing. The US Forest Service published a detailed article about syrup production back in 1972, and I've come across a couple of personal accounts (both dated 2013) of people trying their hand at making syrup. The latter reports that the finished product was "superb". So I'm going to add this to my list of native Northwest foods that I'd like to try but can't find, along with camas root (which is supposedly fermentable too), wapato root, and lamprey. (Yes, I'd totally eat lamprey. They look like they have it coming.)

Sabin HydroPark expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to Northeast Portland's Sabin HydroPark, at NE 19th & Prescott. A "HydroPark" is, sadly, not a park with waterslides, a wave pool, or that sort of thing; it's simply a Portland Water Bureau water tank site that's open to public access. Until a few years ago, Water Bureau sites were typically closed to the public, resulting in a bunch of fenced off park-like areas, often in neighborhoods with few "real" city parks. The first HydroPark opened in 2006, and the city has seven of them now. I've covered two of them here before: Marigold HydroPark in the West Hills, and Pittman Addition in North Portland near Swan Island.

The huge water tanks are obviously the distinctive feature of the park. I hesitate to call it an attraction, since all you can really do is take a few photos of the tanks, and try to imagine how much water is looming over your head. Maybe you don't want to think about that, I don't know. I thought it was kind of cool. Although I'm not sure I'd want to live across the street from the place.

The Sabin location wasn't entirely closed to the public like some other sites were, and the Parks Bureau has run a playground & community garden on the south side of the HydroPark for quite some time. Lots of normal city parks have those, and I didn't spend a lot of time looking at the ones here, but they do exist. The HydroPark itself doesn't have a lot of visitor amenities -- I could swear I didn't even see a drinking fountain, oddly enough -- but the Master Plan for it does envision adding some public art here someday. Recent controversies over Water Bureau spending, and a new city commissioner in charge, make it unlikely they'll spend any ratepayer money on art anytime soon, though. At least if they have any staffers with any political sense at all.

A post at Vintage Portland points out that the current two water tanks were not the original ones on this site. A smaller, cylindrical standpipe once, uh, stood here. It was moved to make way for the older of the two current tanks, and to this day serves the St. Johns area.

One other unusual detail to pass along: You might notice there's also a small Pacific Power building here. It turns out that the Sabin tanks host a micro-hydroelectric energy project, which generates electricity from water flowing through the city water system. Not a huge amount of electricity, but apparently enough to make the project worth doing. There aren't any obvious signs or indications of this when you look around the park, although I admit I have no idea what a micro-hydroelectric system looks like.

Westmoreland Park

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Here's a photoset from Westmoreland Park in SE Portland. The usual formula for a blog post here states that I should also do some semi-extensive research and write something interesting about the place, to go along with the photos. I'm not sure I need to do that this time around, though. Westmoreland Park is one of the highlights of Portland's city park system, so it's not exactly obscure. The city's page about the park (see previous link) includes a few paragraphs about the history of the place, which is unusual. I did a cursory search of the library's Oregonian database to see if I could find anything else of interest; nearly all of the search results are about baseball and softball at the park's Sckavone Stadium. There's probably a book to be written about the long history of baseball in Portland. It would have to be written by someone who knows and cares more about baseball than I do, though. It's possible this book or article already exists; I haven't really checked extensively.

I did run across a fun 1909 real estate ad for land in Westmoreland, promising 10% off any lot in the neighborhood, first 50 customers, limited time only. That's over at pdx tales, this humble blog's local history Tumblr sibling, if you're interested. Every time I see early 20th Century real estate ads, I'm reminded of early 21st Century (pre-2008) real estate ads, exhorting people to get in now while the bubble's still inflating, and property can be flipped for an easy quick buck. There's just nothing like a land rush to bring out the baser aspects of human nature.

These photos were taken on a cold November day several years ago, a time of year when the park's Crystal Springs Creek tends to flood. Much of Westmoreland was a wetland area before developers and park planners laid their hands on it, so the area's natural inclination is still to fill up with water in the winter. Depression-era flood control efforts in the Johnson Creek watershed not only didn't prevent flooding, but also made the "improved" creeks very bad places to be a fish. I wrote about this a while back in a post about nearby Tideman Johnson Park, so I'm not going to rehash the whole situation here. The short version is that people screwed the area up, the city's on the hook to unscrew it somehow, and it'll probably be expensive. The city's 2004 Master Plan for the park talks about addressing the park's water problems, and a current project aims to restore Crystal Springs Creek to something resembling a natural state, to be completed some time in 2014. So we'll see in a few years whether the current plan works any better than the previous ones did. The surprising thing in all this is that, back in 1909, someone had the foresight or good fortune to leave the area as open space, and not build houses here. Now that would be an expensive mitigation project.

Mimir

Today's obscure public art excursion takes us to NW 27th between Thurman & Upshur, where a mysterious bust sits on a pedestal, seemingly a monument to some important (but nonhuman) historical figure. This is Mimir, another sculpture by Keith Jellum; several other works of his have appeared here previously: Electronic Poet, Chimney Swift, Portal, and Transcendence,.

A 2007 Stumptown Stumper in the Portland Tribune wrote about the mysterious bust:

The piece is grounded in Norse mythology. According to one legend, the god Mimir was sent by Odin to rival gods to help resolve a dispute, but Odin received his envoy's head in return. Since Mimir was noted for his wise counsel, Odin mounted the head as an oracle for his Aesir gods.

'I'm not sure where (the image) came from,' 67-year-old Jellum told Stumper. 'It's just at the time I was doing a whole lot of drawings, and it just popped out and sort of appealed to me. It's part fish, part space creature.'

Jellum said he added the hieroglyphic inscription on the plaque as a 'play upon plaques. You see all these plaques around and they give all this 'important' information. I thought it was just irrelevant to the piece. I like the idea of putting something up there that didn't have any information on it.'

The Smithsonian Art Inventory description is terse but intriguing: "Decorative obelisk with a mask mounted at the top. The mask has a cone-like nose and tusks. It wears a layered breastplate with shoulder pads".

The Smithsonian page also mentions that the statue is "administered" by the city Parks Bureau, which caught my eye because I was curious about the little plaza where Mimir is located. Because, well, that's the sort of thing I tend to wonder about. The plaza's essential to selling the gag: It looks like a whole city park dedicated to the memory of a heroic yet mysterious fish alien. The experience is not unlike visiting a strange foreign city, with parks and statues and cryptic inscriptions honoring people you've never heard of. I guess fittingly, the plaza isn't actually a city park; Portland Maps says the parcel is connected to belongs to the Upshur House Apartments, a large affordable housing complex immediately east of here. The property as classified as a "subsidized garden", whatever that is, and apparently it's been exempted from property taxes since 2009.

A 2010 Daily Journal of Commerce story about renovations at the then-dilapidated apartment complex mentions that it was originally built and later renovated by Walsh Construction, the same firm that commissioned several of the other Jellum sculptures that I've covered before. So that seems to have been a fruitful long-term partnership. I'm starting to think I should just track down random projects of theirs and look around for the art.

Superior Viaduct

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Today's installment in the occasional series about Cleveland bridges takes us to the Superior Viaduct, the monumental remains of a former bridge. The remaining stone arches suggest the bridge was ancient and served for centuries, but in fact it had a remarkably short life. It opened in 1878 as the city's first high-level bridge, i.e. a bridge that didn't have to open for every passing ship on the Cuyahoga River. The over-water part of the bridge was a swing span, though, because the bridge still wasn't quite high enough to let all ships pass beneath without opening. This turned out to be the bridge's Achilles heel. In 1918 the higher Detroit-Superior Bridge opened and effectively replaced it, and the Superior Viaduct closed to traffic soon afterward. The bridge was condemned in 1920, and demolished by 1923.

The part I haven't gotten a clear idea about is how the arches survived another 90 years after the rest of the bridge was torn out. The viaduct's considered a beautiful historic landmark today, but I imagine that in 1961 or so it would have been seen as an ugly relic and an Obstacle in the Way of Progress, and things tended to get bulldozed back then if they stood in the way of Progress. In any case, here are a few links about the viaduct, with more history and more photos:

• Cleveland Historical
• Cool History of Cleveland
• Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
• Cleveland Memory
• BridgesTunnels.com
• Builders Exchange Magazine
• 'my arranged marriage to cleveland...'

Falling Light

Today's installment in obscure public art is actually one of the newest and largest ones I've covered. Falling Light is a huge (108' by 22') installation of glazed concrete blocks on the side of the Pearl District's MachineWorks building, at NW 14th & Marshall.

Falling Light was announced as a "defining feature" of the building, and was funded by the building's developers rather than using public funds. (Which is worth remembering in case your crazy Tea Party uncle ever catches wind of this.) This episode of public-spirited arts patronage makes a lot more sense when you realize that the developers received a generous floor area ratio bonus for including public art in their project. This meant they could put in a few extra floors of premium Class A office space, thus recouping their investment in public art in fairly short order. Because this is a town where art greases the wheels of commerce, at least if you know the right people.

Things didn't go quite as planned, though; the building was built in 2008 and it opened in January 2009, shortly after the national real estate bubble imploded. The building had what was generously termed "a tough opening", and later sold for $40.7M in 2011. I haven't seen a figure for what the building originally cost, so I don't know whether the original developers made their money back or took a bath on the deal.

One thing puzzles me a little about Falling Light. It's on a windowless side of the building, which usually means the adjacent quarter-block is expected to host its own high rise tower someday, instead of the colorful single story building that's there now. When that happens, I imagine Falling Light either gets removed or permanently covered by the new building. Logically, if the art goes, the floor area ratio bonus goes with it, and whoever owns the building at that point has to lop a few floors off the top to keep the building legal. Obviously that never happens in real life, and I'm not saying it would be a good idea. Although the building does host the local Microsoft office these days, and removing those floors off might prevent the next Clippy or Windows Vista or something. So I'd hope the wise and noble commissioners of our fair city won't simply reject the floor-lopping idea out of hand. There could be an upside, that's all I'm saying.