evening fog

Centennial Fountain, St. Helens

A couple of photos of the Centennial Fountain at the waterfront in St. Helens, Oregon, built in 1989 in honor of the city's 100th birthday. The town actually dates to 1847, but they didn't get around to incorporating for another forty years. Not shown in these photos are a time capsule at the base of the fountain, and a huge flagpole a few feet away, which I think was behind me when I took these.

So yeah, it's a goofy looking piece of folk art, and it's all puffed up with red-state patriotism, the usual frothy mix of war and religion. The plaque even references a bible verse, so legally the city would probably have to let other religions contribute monuments too, thanks to that pesky First Amendment thingy the ACLU keeps going on about. The fountain doesn't even have anything to say about the city, or the centennial it's supposed to be honoring. And the plaque says something about the flagpole flying an enormous 50 foot by 30 foot flag; I'm fairly certain the one it actually flies it much smaller. Plus the correct dimensions of a US flag are supposed to be 10:19, not 3:5, so a 30 foot tall flag should be 57 feet wide, not 50. Yes, I was a Cub Scout once, why do you ask? Normally I wouldn't care, but if you're trying to demonstrate how hyper-patriotic you are, you should really make an effort to get the fundamentals right.

All that said, there's something strangely appealing about it. It's just so damn sincere. It wears its heart on its sleeve. They didn't go out and hire a professional artist or architect, someone who would've created something a bit more tasteful and centennial-oriented. Instead they rounded up local donations and volunteers and cobbled this fountain together as best they could. So I imagine the end result is an accurate reflection of local values and priorities circa 1989. If nothing else, it's a historical artifact, in a way.

ʻAihualama Falls

Here are a few photos of ʻAihualama Falls, the little waterfall at the far end of Honolulu's Lyon Arboretum. A couple of people on the trail told me not to bother since the falls weren't running, and it's true that it wasn't that impressive to look at, with barely a trickle of water flowing over it. There'd been a huge rainstorm about an hour earlier, so I went to check it out anyway in case a surge of runoff from the storm had made it to the falls yet. Obviously I was either too early or too late to see that. Or maybe hydrology in Manoa Valley just doesn't work that way at all. It's outside my area of expertise and I honestly don't know.

In any case, I figured I'd go ahead and do a waterfall post about it anyway. I've already done waterfall posts about one that's been dry for thousands of years, and another that's been submerged by a dam for half a century, and a seasonal one in the Gorge that's never running when I visit. So it's a bit late to draw the line at a twenty foot rock face with a garden hose's volume of water flowing over it. I understand the falls are like this a lot, so keep your expectations modest if you visit, but even if the falls are totally dry you still get a nice walk through a tropical botanical garden on the way there. If you're only interested in waterfalls, you'll want to go to Manoa Falls instead.

Here are a few other trip reports in case you're curious:

• Punynari's Island Adventures (With cool photos of some other semi-secret waterfalls in the vicinity that I'd never heard of.)
• Morgan Hiking in Hawaii
• Koma & Kimi's Hawai'ian Adventures
• aiheart adventures
• Tammy's Hiking Blog

Nob Hill Pigs

Here are a couple of photos of the cast aluminum pig sculptures on NW 23rd. Apparently they move around now and then, and aren't always in front of the artist/owner's favorite bar, but there were three there at the time I took these photos. A little info about them from Sybilla Avery Cook's Walking Portland, 2nd Edition:

In front of the Nob Hill Bar & Grill on the southwest corner are three large metal pigs: Porky, Petunia, and Porklandia. Porklandia is the one with little piglets underneath. The artist, Joe Justice, lives in the neighborhood and visits them frequently.

The pigs occasionally editorialize on current events. They wore face masks during the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and lipstick when Sarah Palin was running for Vice President.

A colorful 2003 Oregonian article about the pigs mentions that the first pig was created by the late Seattle sculptor Richard Beyer, and he and Justice worked together on the later ones.

Other Beyer pigs are located at the Seattle Public Library's Madrona-Sally Goldmark Branch, where a pig costars with a panther in The Peaceable Kingdom; and The Man Slopping Pigs (which depicts a man slopping pigs) is outside a car dealership in Falls Church, VA, once owned by Beyer's brother. Beyer is best known for his Waiting for the Interurban in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, in which a group of six Seattleites waits patiently for an interurban train that stopped running in the 1930s. A 1987 Seattle P-I interview talks about a few of his Seattle-area works, his surprise at the public adoration of Waiting for the Interurban, and his outsider position in the Seattle art world.

Punahou Circle Apts.

A few photos of the Punahou Circle Apartments tower, in Honolulu at the corner of Beretania and Punahou Streets. I tracked this building down because President Obama lived here as a child. (I realize I'll probably get birther whackaloon trolls for saying that. But hey, that's why Blogger gives me a "Delete Comment" button.) A "Modernism + Recent Past" Google Map by the Historic Hawaii Foundation has this to say about the building:

Childhood home of President Barack Obama (from age 10-18); built by Emma Kwock Chun, who around 1936 became the first Asian to own and develop property in the exclusive Diamond Head area, and one of the first female real estate developers in Hawai‘i. The “Circle” in the building name is an homage to the Waikīkī Circle Hotel, which was developed by Mrs. Kwock Chun in 1962.

Honolulu is home to seemingly countless mid-1960s high rise towers similar to this. The Punahou Circle building has some groovy mid-60s details to it, but before its historic associations came along, it doesn't seem to have been considered an architecturally significant building. Even now, Emporis says almost nothing about it. Now, of course, it will likely be designated a historic landmark someday, thanks to its most famous former resident. For now, though, most of the search results you find for the building are actually apartment rental listings, and the place sounds fairly affordable by Hawaii standards.

One other odd item came up while searching for more info about the building. If you use Google Earth, someone went to the trouble of compiling a KML file of all Magnum P.I. locations around the state. I'm not sure why it came up in the search because the Punahou Circle building doesn't seem to have been used in the show. But I went to the trouble of downloading the file and checking, just in case, and I thought it was kind of fun even though it turned out to be a red herring, so I figured I'd pass it along anyway. So enjoy, or whatever.

Pods 15, 16, 19

Here are Pods 15, 16, 19, formerly located in Lake Oswego's Evergreen Park, at 3rd & Evergreen. Lake Oswego has an unusual public art program: Every year, a crop of new pieces is selected to go on display in town for the next two years. Typically they're also for sale, and the brochure even lists price tags. That would never fly in Portland; we like to pretend art isn't a commercial activity, and everyone here just does art purely for art's sake and people live off of grants, or trust funds, or working as baristas, or something, and they certainly don't sell things for cash money, like, eewww.

In any case, at the end of each two year rotation, the citizens of Lake Oswego are asked to vote for one piece to buy for the city's permanent collection; Pods 15, 16, 19 was up for a vote in May 2007, leading to the one terse description of it I can find on the interwebs: "Pods #15, 16, 19 by Kate Simmons, located in Evergreen Park, at Evergreen and Third.". Apparently the voters chose one of the other candidates, since the pods aren't there anymore. Which is a shame, I think.

The only other Pod I've seen on the interwebs is in a 2002 Seattle Times article, profiling someone's artsy Pearl District loft in Portland. In two of the photos, an unnumbered Pod can be seen leaning against a wall.

I was looking at these Pod photos, trying to figure out what they reminded me of. I think I've figured it out, but it's kind of an strange reference. They somewhat resemble birds' nests made of steel rods, which made me think of a car, oddly enough. The 1959 "Birdcage" Maserati Tipo 60/61 has an internal frame made with a ridiculous number of little metal tubes welded together. Which makes the car very light, and also very expensive and labor intensive to produce. Looking at photos of it now, I realize this frame structure looks nothing like a Pod, any more than it looks like an actual birdcage. So it's not really a useful reference or analogy or anything, but it seemed sufficiently off the wall that I figured I'd pass it along anyway, for entertainment value if nothing else. Plus this is going to be a very short post if I don't find a tangent or two to wander off on.

Speaking of which, a quick note on the location. Lake Oswego's parks department doesn't list an official Evergreen Park. This is just the mostly city-owned vacant lot behind City Hall, and "Evergreen Park" is sort of an unofficial term that's sometimes used for it. In 2011 it was considered but rejected as a site for a new police, court & emergency communications building. But the "park" could still go away if the city needs a site for something else that doesn't need quite so many parking spaces, access for emergency vehicles, or have requirements around "blast protection" (as if the Evildoers have ever even heard of Lake Oswego.) Anyway, there's different art there now than what you see here, and either next spring or the spring after that it'll rotate out in favor of something else.

Streetcar Stop for Portland

Here's a slideshow of Streetcar Stop for Portland, the shiny new structure at the NE Broadway & Ross streetcar stop (hence the name). This is one of two new public art pieces added as part of the Central Loop streetcar line, the other being Inversion: Plus Minus at the Hawthorne & Morrison bridges. From the RACC press release about it:

Jorge Pardo’s “Streetcar Stop for Portland” is located on North Broadway at the triangle of Wheeler Avenue and Weidler Street. Fabricated of steel, wood and fiberglass, the new shelter measures 35’ long by 18’ wide by 16’ tall. The multi-faceted structure includes over 300 individual panels in vibrant shades of orange, yellow, red and grey.

Jorge Pardo was born in Havana, Cuba, and emigrated to the United States in 1969. He studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena from 1984-1988 and has exhibited globally since his first solo show in Los Angeles in 1988. In 2010 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (see http://www.macfound.org/fellows/38/). Pardo lives and works between Merida, Mexico, Los Angeles and Long Island; currently his studio is in the Yucatan. This is his first municipal project in the United States.

PORT has an interesting (if somewhat fanboy-ish) interview with Pardo, with photos of Streetcar Stop (which apparently lights up at night) and several other projects of his.

I really like Streetcar Stop, in general. It's bright orange and has all sorts of interesting crazy angles, and it lights up at night, and generally looks like 1977's groovy idea of what futuristic 2013 public art would be like, except that it's not located on the Moon or in a dome under the sea, and it's next to a streetcar instead of a monorail.

The one detail I would point out here is that the name says "stop", not "shelter". The top is semi-open, and if you run to it to escape a sudden downpour, you're going to end up wet and disappointed. The thing is, the city's never going to approve something that would potentially keep rain off of homeless people. If it was dry inside, someone would sleep there, and that, apparently, would be the worst possible thing ever. Especially since the whole point of the streetcar line is to help gentrify the inner eastside. This is nothing new, of course; ever since homelessness got on the public radar, roughly the mid-1980s or so, cities around the country have worked to make their public spaces unwelcoming for the homeless. So you get things like park benches with an armrest down the middle so they're hard to sleep on, the removal of awnings over sidewalks, and so forth. And I get that a park full of sleeping or drunk homeless men and their shopping carts is going to scare "respectable" people away and make the space seem unwelcoming. I guess the thing that leaps out at me in this particular case is that both the streetcar stop and Inversion: Plus Minus allude to the idea of buildings and shelter but don't actually provide any. It may not have been intentional, but it just strikes me as a gesture of unnecessary meanness: We could've built a roof for the same money and kept you dry, but we chose not to.

Fountain for a Rose

Here are a few photos of Fountain for a Rose, the fountain in downtown Portland's O'Bryant Square. I don't have any photos of it running, unfortunately. Apparently the water bureau more or less abandoned it a few years ago, and the city's web page about municipal fountains doesn't bother mentioning it anymore It's a shame because it's quite attractive when it's running (its page at PortlandWaterFountains.com includes a photo). The city's page about the park as a whole still has a blurb about the fountain:

O'Bryant Square's dominant feature is a bronze fountain in the shape of a rose, fittingly titled Fountain to a Rose. It was made possible through a $28,000 bequest from Donald Card Sloan, who was a prime minister of the Royal Rosarians in 1953. Its inscription reads "May you find peace in this garden." The fountain is surrounded by 250 rose bushes and other plants. Beneath the fountain's jets an underground parking garage accommodates 90 cars, making it the first park with parking in the city. In 1976, O'Bryant Square received a national design award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

There seems to be some disagreement about whether the fountain is 'to' or 'for' a rose. The plaque on it says 'for', so that's what I went with, but the city's website says 'to', and 'to' is the name the Oregonian reported when the park & fountain were dedicated, on December 6th 1973. Incidentally, the date indicates the park celebrated its 40th birthday a week ago. No festivities were held as far as I know. I'm not sure the city even realized there was an anniversary to commemorate.

Back during the real estate bubble, O'Bryant Square was included in the Portland Development Commission's Three Downtown Parks master plan. The plan envisioned a new park at South Park Block 5 (which became today's Director Park), vaguely defined & unfunded renovations at Ankeny Park, and what sounds like a complete nuke-and-pave here. Various plans were offered, but they all seemed to involve tearing out the current park, removing the underground parking structure, and replacing it with something that hit all the buzzwords of contemporary architecture. Festival streets, LEED ultra-platinum sustainable green design, that sort of thing. This was supposed to happen at the same time Director Park was being built, circa 2007-08, but it's 2013 and nothing's happened yet.

A cynic might wonder if the master plan was only meant as a response to the "Let's tear down a bunch of buildings and connect all the Park Blocks" crowd, and they never really intended to build anything beyond Director Park. I'd actually be ok with that. Connecting the North & South Park Blocks is kind of dumb idea, and would involve tearing out a lot of old historic buildings. And I also don't think O'Bryant Square needs the proposed nuke-and-pave.

Over the past four decades, the park's acquired a bad reputation as a no-go zone full of hobos and junkies. I think this is outdated now; you may see a few teen skateboarders now and then, but they're harmless and they'll probably get bored and leave soon. But there may have been a kernel of truth to the stereotype twenty-some years ago. I was walking past the park one time, probably around 1990 or so, and a car drove past me slowly and somebody asked if I wanted to buy a (presumably stolen) car stereo. I was in college then and (in retrospect) may have looked like a potential customer for a stolen car stereo. But I also didn't own a car at the time. I explained this and got a "Dude, c'mon, twenty bucks." I also didn't have twenty bucks to spare, but I just explained I really genuinely did not own a car and therefore wasn't in the market for a stereo, no matter how awesome of a deal it was, and how cool and generous they were for offering it to me. So they drove off, dejected. The End. Ok, so this wasn't actually a scary story, but it's all I've got. If you have a better scary O'Bryant Square story, feel free to leave a comment below.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that I think they figured the whole park would be torn out soon, so there was no point in spending the money to keep the fountain running. The master plan has been neither implemented nor officially abandoned, so the fountain seems to be in a state of limbo these days. It probably doesn't help that the city's fountains were handed over from the Water Bureau to the Parks & Recreation Bureau recently, so Fountain for a Rose may not even be on the parks bureau's radar.

This is kind of sad because the park's taken on a new role in recent years, as a seating area for the popular food cart pod just across Washington Street. If the city's really so concerned about the park looking "blighted", you'd think leaving its fountain dry and apparently broken for years on end, in a spot where it will increasingly be seen by tourists, is not something they'd want to be doing.

Will Martin Hat, Pioneer Courthouse Square

Here are a couple of photos of the little bronze hat atop the fountain in Pioneer Courthouse Square. Extra credit Portland points are awarded if you've ever noticed the hat, decided to be a do-gooder and take it to Lost and Found, only to discover it's not a real hat. (This actually happened to me a few years ago, the first time I noticed the hat.) The hat was added to the square circa 1999, and honors Will Martin, the square's late designer. Martin died in 1985, when the vintage aircraft he was piloting crashed in the Grand Canyon. The square had been open to the public for just over a year at that point.

A September 1999 Oregonian article mentions that the hat had been stolen recently. I couldn't find a follow up article, but obviously it was either recovered or replaced at some point. The article mentions that the hat had been cast from Martin's actual hat, somehow, which cost about $1800. That's the closest I've come to finding title or artist info for the thing. I can see it not having an official title, but even if you're just doing a bronze cast of someone's hat, it seems like you still ought to be credited in some form. RACC and the other usual suspects don't say a single word about the thing, though. Feel free to leave a comment below if you know who created the hat or can tell us anything more about it. Thx. Mgmt.

Fortuna

Here are a couple of photos of Fortuna, the fountain in a traffic circle next to Lake Oswego's Millennium Plaza Park. The city arts council's current walking tour brochure describes it:

Fortuna
Simon Toparovsky
The Greek myth of Icarus is used to celebrate the importance of daring and living courageously. (Part of a suite of sculptures throughout Millennium Park.)
simontoparovsky.com
bronze, basalt

Toparovsky is best known for his work on the new cathedral in Los Angeles. Locally, this is one of at least nineteen works of his in or around Millennium Plaza Park. It's not clear if they all went in at the same time or have been added over the years; if it's the latter, a steady stream of return business like that has got to be any artist's ideal arrangement.

Other than the official arts commission site, I haven't found a lot of mentions of Fortuna around the net. I would've thought there'd be at least one blog out there about Lake Oswego arts and the joys of upscale life by the lake, but apparently not. I've seen a number of (possibly auto-generated) mentions of the fountain on Lake Oswego-oriented real estate sites, which is somehow fitting, it being Lake Oswego and all. I did come across a few posts about Fortuna and related pieces at PDXCept, with some decent photos of each of them, so that's worth checking out at least.

willamette river, december 2013

Hamilton Mountain

View Larger Map

Here are a few photos from Hamilton Mountain, on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge, just east of Beacon Rock. These photos were taken back in 2007 and some have already appeared here in posts about Rodney Falls / Pool of the Winds and flowers along the Hamilton Mountain trail. I also took a bunch of scenic photos from some high cliffs along the trail, but I never got around to posting them back then. I recently remembered I had them and dug them out of the archives, so here they are. I've already talked about the hike in those two previous posts, plus the post about Dry Creek Falls which I visited later the same day. So I won't go into a lot of additional depth here, in large part because it's been six years now and I mostly just remember the highlights at this point. Luckily there's info about the hike on the interwebs, including Portland Hikers' Field Guide, LocalHikes.com, and the Washington Trails Association, if the photos make you want to check the place out. The funny thing is that the parking lot trailhead gives you two trails to choose from, and they're labeled "Difficult" and "More Difficult". If I remember right this was from "Difficult", because "More Difficult" didn't hit the waterfalls along the trail. I could have that backwards though. I know I took the trail to the waterfalls, whatever the label was. That much I'm quite sure of.

The overlook these photos are taken from is an interesting place, with a great 180+ degree view of an especially scenic part of the Columbia Gorge. You come across it rather suddenly too: You're slogging away through a long stretch of typical Northwest forest, then you come around a corner, and suddenly there are these rugged rock outcrops, and beyond them a cliff dropping several hundred feet. Or at least this is how I remember it from 2007. There are a few well-worn paths out onto the outcrop area, from decades of people trying to look daring, or just trying to get a better photo. I didn't follow these all the way to the cliff's edge; I'm not afraid of heights in general, but heights plus a lack of any solid handholds tends to make me a bit anxious. It doesn't happen a lot, either. Ran into it here, in Yosemite, and at Saddle Mountain. This time I approached it as an experiment: See how far I could go before it began to seem like a bad idea. (Answer: Not very far.) Then take a step back, wait, see if I can go a bit further. That helped a bit, though I still hit NOPE.GIF territory well before the actual edge. So I think I'm going to chalk that up to having survival-oriented DNA, coming from a long line of not-falling-off-cliffs people, and leave it there.

The upside here is that I ended up with bits of foreground scenery in the photos too, which I'm told adds visual interest. If anyone asks (obviously other than you guys, o Gentle Reader(s)), I'll just pretend I did it that way on purpose.

Chain of Life / Pioneer Quilts

By now you're probably getting sick of crappy old Blackberry photos. Believe me, I sympathize, I really do, and at least this one marks the end of the Green Line. As I said in an earlier post, I realize I ought to have gone back and taken better photos, but I realized I wasn't going to get around to it any time soon. Doubly so in this case; this stop is at the Clackamas Town Center MAX station, and taking better photos right now would involve visiting a suburban mall during the Christmas shopping season. I'll go to surprising lengths for y'all, o Gentle Reader(s), and I never get tired of pointing that out, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm drawing it at mall Santas.

In any event, here's TriMet's blurb about the art here:

The Chain of Life, by Richard "Dick" Elliott, includes patterns found in indigenous basketry, pioneer quilts and the spiral shape of DNA. The work appears in the brick pavers of the station platform, in the cut steel designs of the walkway guardrails and in windows of the parking garage elevator shaft.

The photo I have is of one of the pioneer quilt designs, on an elevated walkway from the mall parking lot to the MAX station. It's a better photo than most of my Green Line photos because I had to actually get off the train this time, but it's still just a Blackberry photo and I only took one. In my defense, I didn't realize Chain of Life was a multipart thing, and I wasn't able to look it up on the go with 2010's primitive mobile internet technology. In any case, the artist's website describes the pioneer quilt designs:

The next link in time relates to the settling of Oregon. The cut steel designs on the railings that connect the parking garage to the platform were created to honor pioneer quilt makers. They allow an expression of my long-standing study and appreciation of quilts. Mary Bywater Cross, author of Quilts of the Oregon Trail, was a consultant on this part of the project.

Waving Post

The next stop on the Green Line tour is the Fuller Road MAX station, home to Waving Post, which you can barely make out in this terrible Blackberry photo. It's the sort of curved spiky-looking thing in the distance, toward the right of the photo. TriMet's description of it:

The SE Fuller Rd station is located in a section of the Con Battin neighborhood that was isolated from the rest of the neighborhood by the freeway in the late 1970s. Pete Beeman's Waving Post invites viewers to turn the crank, bring the sculpture to life and wave to the neighbors.

Beeman also created Pod (a.k.a. "Satan's Testicle"), the stainless steel kinetic whatzit across the street from Powell's on Burnside. A 2006 Stumptown Stumper at the Tribune explains Pod a bit, and mentions Waving Post briefly as a coming attraction.

I realize this is a crappy photo, but even a great still photo can only tell you so much about a thing like this that's designed to move. Fortunately Beeman posted a short Vimeo video that shows what happens when you turn the crank. It looks cooler, and more graceful, than you'd expect given the whole "waving at the neighbors" concept.

Another TriMet page with statements from various Green Line artists includes this about Waving Post:

The forms of Waving Post are visually suggestive without being too explicit. When I designed the yellow and red horizontal elements, I wanted them to suggest different things to different viewers. One person might come to it and see a human spine; another might see a dinosaur bone, bird wings or even a building truss.

The Fuller Road station is located in an old neighborhood named for an Oregon Trail family. When the freeway went in, the neighborhood was bisected and mostly eliminated. When I realized that a one-block piece of Con Battin Road continued on the other side of I-205, I wanted to make a sculpture that could wave hello at that distant piece of street across the way.

I don't claim to be an expert on this part of town, but I'd never heard of a "Con Battin neighborhood" before. I checked the Oregonian historical database but didn't see anything interesting; I imagine this area was just too far from town to merit discussing in print, from their point of view. Luckily TriMet rides to the rescue again, something they almost never do in real life. As part of the Green Line project, they put together a "Cultural History" of neighborhoods along I-205, and it includes a history blurb about the area:

Formerly known as the Battin neighborhood, this area takes its name from the Battin family who lived here from the 1870s to about the 1950s. Thomas E. Battin came to Oregon from Pennsylvania in 1865, at the age of 19. He came unaccompanied, working as a hired cattle drover for another migrating family. He met his future wife, Caroline, while wintering in Boise. Upon arriving in Oregon, he worked at cutting cord wood and investing in real estate—usually buying portions of claims from earlier settlers. He was the first owner of a parcel of school land in the present- day Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood in Portland, which he bought from the state for $200. Two weeks later, he sold the land for $1000. He settled down on a farm that stretched from Fuller Road to now-gone Jacobson Road (at approximately 90th Avenue) and from Battin Road to Otty Road. Over the years, the Battin property was subdivided among family members, and local streets were named for these children: Battin Road was originally Cleo Battin Road and Con Battin Road was named for C.E. Battin. William Otty Road and J.E. Jacobsen Road were named for claim-holders to the east. Fuller Road was originally Fuller-Price County Road.

The Battin neighborhood was divided, and much of it was removed, when I- 205 was built through the area. Mary Alice Clay, who lived up the hill from the Solid Rock Baptist Church where her husband was the pastor, remembers that church attendance dropped considerably because the freeway forced members to move away. The church survives today with a congregation that primarily live in more distant neighborhoods. Cresslyn Clay, granddaughter of Mary Alice, still lives in her grandparents’ house. Battin Elementary School dates from the 1930s, although Clackamas County School District #54 held a deed as far back as 1917. The school was demolished and replaced with a Home Depot and other stores in 1989.

Lents Hybrids

The next stop along the Green Line is the Lents Town Center / Foster MAX station, home to Lents Hybrids:

Brian Borrello's Lents Hybrids is a series of spiraling plant forms with "buds" that generate energy through a hybrid system of wind and solar generators. The pieces are evocative of the native long grasses that may have once grown near the station area, while the buds are symbolic of the unfolding beauty and potential for the Lents neighborhood.

I only managed to capture one of the sets of hybrids while riding by on the train. There's at least one more at the station, with four spiraling stems instead of two. And I didn't do the two-stem one justice either, this being yet another crappy Blackberry photo taken from a moving MAX train.

Borrello also created People's Bike Library of Portland in downtown Portland, Silicon Forest on the MAX Yellow Line, the blue ox feet at the Kenton MAX station, and apparently much, much more, including some giant filberts he's creating for the City of Tigard. Like Lents Hybrids, Silicon Forest is a collection of tall, skinny solar-powered tree structures. Add in More Everyday Sunshine and Nepenthes, and it starts to look like solar-powered art is a hot local trend right now. Or at least it will probably look that way to art historians a century from now.

Neighborhood Notes has a few construction photos. East PDX News has a few more, plus one of the finished product glowing blue at night, which looks kind of cool in a Lothlorien/Vegas sort of way. Lents Grown mentions a second artwork at the MAX station, Out of the Brambles by Wayne Chabre (who also created Connections at the Multnomah County building on Hawthorne). It looks like I would've needed to get off the train in order to see it, though, and even if I'd been in the mood to get off at each stop and look around, TriMet's website neglects to even mention that it's there.

As with Sky to Earth elsewhere on the Green Line, Lents Hybrids was created with help from a local pipe bending company. That sounds kind of esoteric, but their photo galleries showcasing their work are actually pretty interesting. Go take a look if you don't believe me.

Shared Vision

The next stop on our tour of MAX Green Line art is Shared Vision, at the SE Holgate MAX station. TriMet's description:

Lanterns are popular festival decorations associated with gaiety and rejoicing, and are reminders of the security of a light in the window. By using light as a metaphor for expanded awareness, Suzanne Lee's Shared Vision represents prosperity as the richness of positive social interaction and communication—the very essence of neighborhood.

Another TriMet page elaborates a bit:

Five ornate lanterns developed by Suzanne Lee are the central elements of this multicultural sculpture. Sited above the station platform, the illuminated sculpture appears like a beacon at night.

I haven't found a lot of info to pass along about this one. Oldtrails.com has a better photo of it, and OregonLive has an interesting close up construction photo, showing a level of detail that ordinary MAX passengers probably can't see.

One other item, unfortunate in light of all this talk about security and positive social interaction. Two people were shot at the Holgate MAX station in October 2013, one fatally. A few days ago, a grand jury concluded the suspect had acted in self defense, and declined to indict him.

Money Tree

The MAX Green Line's Powell Boulevard station is home to Money Tree, the sort of winged post in the distance in the above photo. TriMet's description of it:

Valerie Otani created a contemporary Money Tree to symbolize the revitalization of the neighborhood and hope for the prosperity of the new immigrant communities. The overall form evokes the Douglas fir, and each branch takes its design from traditional folk art of cultures living in the neighborhood

This photo was taken from inside a MAX train, with an inferior-grade phone camera, so you can't really see the branch details, but an Examiner article about Green Line art has a detail photo of part of one branch, which gives a better idea of what it looks like up close.

Otani's work has appeared here a few times before, including Folly Bollards at the downtown Performing Arts Center, and Prescott Biozone on the MAX Yellow Line. She doesn't appear to have a website, so I'm having trouble elaborating on TriMet's rather terse description. They don't even mention which immigrant communities are represented here. I did run across a few mentions of a female Saudi-American artist who collaborated on part of Money Tree. An interview with her describes this segment of the tree:

You may also see one of Huda’s art pieces live in a neighborhood of Portland, Oregon called the “Money Tree” sculpture. It is a beautiful and creative joint public art project designed by both Huda Totonji and a Japanese American artist, Valerie Otani. Dr. Huda Totonji designed a branch of the “Money Tree” 20 feet tall sculpture. It stands tall on Powell Boulevard Station, TriMet, I 205. The theme of the sculpture is the revitalization with new immigrants as they bring prosperity and cultural strength. Dr. Huda’s design incorporates Arabic calligraphy that communicates good wishes for prosperity from the Muslim traditions.

As we continue through the Green Line sculptures, you'll notice a theme developing. With a few exceptions, they tend to be tall poles (such as the one here) with much of the design elements overhead and out of reach. I imagine this is to thwart casual vandals, metal thieves, and teenage boys who want to impress people by climbing them, because this part of the outer eastside isn't the most upscale part of town, and TriMet's afraid of whatever mischief the restless natives might get up to. That's my theory, anyway.

Sky to Earth

The MAX Green Line's SE Division station is bordered by a curving blue chain-link fence. The is actually the art installation for this MAX stop, which Trimet describes thusly:

Sky to Earth, by Carolyn Law, is a vivid sky blue fence that rides the visual edge between the light rail tracks on one side and the expansive topography of the surrounding land along the other side. The artwork's flowing and changing sculptural line shifts between solid and transparent, activating the site and the experience of MAX riders.

The artist's website has photos from various angles (all of which seem to be better than my viewpoint aboard a MAX train), and a longer explanation:

The design of the artwork relates specifically to the nature of the site and the alignment of the light rail track as well as dealing with the striking openness and topography of the land where the station and access paths will be located. The artwork rides the visual and experiential edge between all the site’s characteristics.

The site is an intense place with an expansive, open landscape framed by freeway lanes on one side. It can be viewed at many speeds and angles. The other sensory and physical undercurrent here is the sky and the wind. The wind appears to be nearly a constant. The grasses ripple elegantly and somewhat hypnotically, registering the caprice of the wind’s directions from moment to moment.

Within this landscape, the fence is a flowing, changing sculptural line of one color and a form that shifts between solid.

The same page also links to a story about Sky to Earth from "World Fence News", a trade paper that apparently exists. As a trade paper, it points out that a couple of local companies, Portland Fence Co. & Albina Pipe Bending, were key to putting this together. Not mentioned in that article, but found elsewhere on the net, a third company did post sizing and foundation design for the project.

In 2010 the national Chain Link Fence Manufacturers Institute awarded Sky and Earth its 2010 Les Grube Memorial Design Award; previous winners include the prominent architect Frank Gehry, so it seems like this is kind of a big deal, at least within the fence industry. The 2011 award went to a somewhat similar project in Boston, and the 2012 one went to a fence project for an overpass in Kansas City. The 2012 link goes to a page by the design firm explaining the project and going on about what a cool (and unfairly overlooked) material chain link fencing is.

The same year, the group Americans for the Arts named Sky to Earth one of 40 exemplary public artworks completed the previous year.

I suppose I'm pointing out the awards it's won, and the local construction and art fabrication jobs involved in creating it, because this is an artwork that would be easy to demagogue. It's easy to imagine people on talk radio or Facebook ranting about how it's not really art, it's just a chain link fence, we paid how much for it, the citified liberal elitists are trying to pull one over on us, etc., etc. It got a brief and mostly positive mention in an OregonLive article about some weird & alarming art along the WES commuter rail line. Surprisingly the article only has four comments, and they aren't all negative. I suppose modern art just isn't the conservative hot button issue it once was in decades past. That, or they just figure anything within Portland city limits is a lost cause at this point.

Tall and Fallen

Back in the naïve, low-tech days of yore (mid-2010), I'd just gotten a shiny new Blackberry phone, one with both a camera and a Twitter app, and I was pretty stoked about living in the future. The MAX Green Line was less than a year old then and I hadn't yet ridden it to the end at Clackamas Town Center, so one day I decided to make the trip and try this newfangled "live-Tweeting" thing I'd heard so much about. I even used the hashtag "#greenline", so, I guess, the entire world could follow my fearless expedition into Darkest Clackamas. Most of the photos I ended up with were of the new public art along the MAX line, although I wasn't really doing a public art blog project at the time. I think I was just trying to post at least one photo from each MAX station, without actually getting off the train, and the art seemed like a good way to tell the MAX stations apart.

In any case, I recently tracked these photos down in my old Twitpic account, and figured I could maybe reuse them here. None of them are that fabulous (though most are at least better than the one in this post), and if I was truly dedicated to this art project I really ought to go back, get off at each stop, and shoot some quality photos instead, and maybe hit the RAM Brewpub at the mall instead of grabbing tacos and tater tots at the food court like last time. But it's a rather long train ride just to get photos of things I already have photos of, and I'm positive it would be a long wait before I got around to it. Long story short, I'm going to go ahead and post with the photos I have, not with the ones I wish I had.

So this is one of the less successful photos of the series, from the SE Main St MAX station near Mall 205. If you look between the closing MAX doors and beyond the shelter you can see Tall and Fallen, the tall pillar with the jutting triangular bits. TriMet describes it:

The fan-shaped leaf of the ginkgo tree inspired Anne Storrs to create Tall and Fallen. Tall consists of seven abstracted ginkgo leaves cast in concrete and stacked inside four stainless steel poles. Fallen, constructed with the same leaves appearing singly or in pairs, suggests the gingko trees' fallen leaves.

I really do like this one, and I feel kind of bad my only photo of it is so terrible. The artist's web page about it has vastly better photos than mine, with a brief caption:

Inspired by the ancient ginkgo tree, this sculpture is created by stacking seven interlocking ginkgo-like concrete leaf forms in a stainless steel framework, 20’ x 3’ x 3’. More concrete ginkgo elements stacked singly or in pairs are found in the stations' landscape.

Looking around Storrs's website, I realized she also created Begin Again Corner, along the downtown Portland segment of the Green Line. I point this out because my photos in that post are actually pretty decent, in case you're wondering whether I ever take anything besides crappy camera phone shots.

If this was a professionally run blog on a platform less orphaned than Blogger, right about here is where you'd see a "Related Posts" or "You Might Also Enjoy" widget, with results probably generated by a simple keyword match, say on the word "ginkgo" for instance. In which case you'd see links to posts about ginkgo trees in the Plaza Blocks, and maybe the Ginkgo Petrified Forest in Eastern Washington, to pick two random examples with photos better than the one you see here. And if the algorithm looked at geotags, you might also get a link to Milestone P6, just north of Mall 205. Ok, there'd also be a "From Around The Web" section with links to crappy fad diets, celebrity news, anti-Obama rants, and bad investment advice, which is a big reason why I don't have a widget like that here.

Stone, Water and Heaven (Daedalus to Icarus)

Stone, Water and Heaven (Daedalus to Icarus) is one of a trio of Rose Quarter sculptures, along with Little Prince and Terra Incognita. This one is a bit more obscure than the other two, and is probably my favorite of the three. It's smaller, and sits at the corner of N. Winning Way & Center Court St. (and yes, those are stupid street names), streets that only see a lot of traffic on game days. I don't recall ever seeing it (or at least ever noticing it) before I tracked it down for this blog post. It's obscure enough that both the Smithsonian art db (the first link, above), and RACC call it by the wrong name, "Earth, Water and Heaven". The sign next to the piece says "Stone", not "Earth", as does an essay on the artist's website, which suggests to me that "Stone" is the correct name. Sadly (if we're going to be really pedantic about it), neither variation on the name includes an Oxford comma . Sigh.

RACC's description of the piece, wrong name and all:

Earth Water and Heaven (from Daedalus to Icarus), in contrast to the other two sculptures located in the Rose Quarter by Averbuch, is of moderate scale. It is also more quiet and meditative. This work deals with the dichotomy and integration of two different levels of meaning. One is the ring of stone and water tied in an everlasting balance of nature (rivers and mountains, oceans and continents). The other concept is about us as humans and our expressive aspirations for "heaven" represented by the image of a wing - an age-old icon that reappears in many cultures, describing our aspiration for greatness, fantasy and the supernatural. It is about the heroic feathers that we strive to have and that drive us further in life, about our aspirations that rise like the tower of Babylon, and about the actual gravity and balance of the earth that keeps us intact.

The artist's website also mentions a very similar 2003 piece, The Wing and the Ring, located at the city cultural center in Nahariya, Israel. The cultural center was built in the early 2000s and saw scandalous cost overruns, including all manner of lavish (and garish-sounding) furnishings.