Second Growth

Here are a few photos of Second Growth, the art at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. It follows a common design in recent TriMet art: A visual riff on the local neighborhood, set on top of a pole so casual vandals can't reach it. I think I'm going to start calling these things "lollipops". Anyway, TriMet's yellow line Art guide describes the concept behind the station:

Wayne Chabre created symbols of the indomitable spirit of the community.

• A bronze, tree-like vine flowers with forms representing the arts of the area.
• Bronze benches incorporate images from neighborhood industries.
• The community map by Chabre and Jeanne McMenemy features lyrics of songs from cultures of historic importance to Albina.
• Works by Jacob Pander and Bill Rutherford are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel.

Second Growth is the bronze tree-like vine. The artist's website describes it:

This piece celebrates the history of the surrounding neighborhood, where jazz clubs flourished in the 20s & 30s; an area that is now largely industrial, but which continues to re-imagine itself. It is home to such diverse enterprises as a brewery and an art glass factory, two of several businesses that are represented in the sculpture.

Chabre also created Connections at the county office building on Hawthorne, which I rather liked. There's an obvious family resemblance between the two pieces.

A Daily Journal of Commerce story about Second Growth says "The piece of art – a plant bursting from the pavement and flowering into musical and art icons – is designed to symbolize the surrounding area’s urban renewal rebirth after years of battling neglect and racism." This interpretation is sort of... problematic. Redemption via urban renewal is not, strictly speaking, what really happened to NE Portland. Not during the heyday of urban renewal in the 60s and 70s, and not now in the era of transit-driven gentrification. I realize the DJC is a business paper focusing on the construction trade, but still. When the PDC bulldozers came to this part of town, they were not greeted as liberators. Call me crazy if you want, but I like to think that historical accuracy still matters.

Water, Please

The Water, Please sculpture sits along the Willamette River at Portland's Water Pollution Control Laboratory, just south of the St. Johns Bridge. Despite the name, it's actually kind of a swanky looking building, and I wouldn't mind having an office there, at least if I was in the water pollution business. The sculpture, naturally, has a water theme. RACC describes it thusly:

This piece frames the essential and eternal relationship between man and water. The sculpture establishes a parity between a drop of water and a human being, both of which emanate ripples of effect and consequences on each other.

This sounds incredibly groovy, but I admit I'm not really seeing it, myself. Maybe you're supposed to bring your preferred mind-altering substance along, in order to really dig the whole parity between people and drops of water thing. In any case, the sculptor also created Drivers Seat, which appeared here way back in 2007.

The half-raindrop part of the sculpture appears to double as a picnic table, with the inner ripples serving as seats. They're just curved pipes though, so it's not exactly the world's most comfy picnic spot. I guess it's an opportunity to suffer for art, if you're into that sort of thing.

Bishop's Cap

Some photos of Bishop's Cap, the giant rock formation on the Gorge Highway just east of Shepperds Dell Falls. If you search for info about it, much of what you'll see are old vintage photos and postcards from the early 20th century. Couple of reasons for this. First, the rock is much less visible than it once was, as logging is no longer allowed here and the surrounding forest has grown up around it. Second, gazing at unusual rock formations doesn't enjoy the same vogue it did a century or so ago. These are the same reasons the once-famous balancing rock at Coalca Landing, south of Oregon City, is largely forgotten now. Likewise the "Pillars of Hercules" at the overlook near Bridal Veil Falls. There are a couple of exceptions in the gorge: Rooster Rock has its own state park (although it's more famous for its clothing-optional beach), and Angels Rest is one of the rare major trailheads that isn't named after a waterfall. But for the most part the Gorge's rock formations and their melodramatic Victorian names have been consigned to the history books. (Crown Point was once called "Thor's Crown" if that gives an idea of how melodramatic these names often were.)

For those of you who weren't paying attention in Catholic school, an actual bishop's cap is called a "mitre". Based on the old postcard views of the rock, I guess there's a resemblance, in the sense that they're both sort of rounded and taller than they are wide. Oregon: End of the Trail, a 1940 WPA-produced tour guide, insists it was also known as "Mushroom Rock" at that time. That name doesn't seem to have endured, probably because the rock looks nothing like any mushroom I've ever seen. Besides, a name like "Mushroom Rock" just isn't melodramatic enough for the Gorge.

A 2011 study for the state's Historic Columbia River Highway Advisory Committee (which is different than the Columbia Gorge Commission) noted that views from the old highway were increasingly blocked by trees and bushes, and proposed that a short list of protected "viewsheds" be established where vegetation could be removed to protect the view. The area around Bishop's Cap was on the short list for protection, but it's not clear what the current status of this proposal is. If the proposal involves chopping down trees so drivers could get a better look at an enormous rock, I'm not sure I'd be in favor of that, to be honest.

Bishop's Cap featured in a November 1949 Oregonian article "Tourist Treasure for Oregon" about the state's many scenic wonders and how we might lure more out-of-state visitors to come see them, which suggests it wasn't completely obscured by trees at that point. The "Mushroom Rock" name also showed up in the Oregonian once, in the February 12th, 1922 paper, in something titled "A Song of the Columbia River Highway", by C. Louis Barzee, a history teacher at Benson High School. There's no music provided to go with the words so I assume by "song" they meant "epic poem". I can't really offer an opinion about its merits; my eyes keep glazing over at the sight of a poem that long, and I can't seem to read enough in one sitting to decide whether it's any good.

The place names might not have faded out of public awareness if rock climbing was more popular in the Gorge. Looking at all the sheer cliffs and spires and so forth you'd think it would be, but it turns out the rock itself is crumbly and treacherous, "rotten" in rock climbing parlance. There are a few spots where it has some popularity: Broughton Bluff at the far west end of the Gorge, and Rooster Rock, but overall it seems to be kind of a rare activity, at least that I'm aware of. Those are the only two places I've ever seen people climbing, at any rate. I found one trip report (with lots of photos) from someone who climbed St. Peter's Dome a bit further east in the Gorge. They were obviously a group of hardcore climbers and the report sounds like they have no intention of ever going back there ever again. Let me go ahead and say that if you ever see a post here about the top of St. Peter's Dome, or any of the similar pointy bits around the gorge, and I haven't made it explicitly clear that it's a guest post, you should assume I've been hacked and alert Google or the authorities or somebody.

Kingsley Park expedition

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One of the things I like to do here is track down strange and obscure places and things around Portland. Ok, that's actually the majority of what I do here. Over time I've realized my idea of "strange" is maybe not the standard one. If you're here to scout locations for a travel show about "Weird Portland" or "Historic Portland", you will find plenty of material here, but you'll also be scratching your head a lot wondering what on earth I was doing at such-and-such a place and why I wasted my time going there and writing about it. This is one of those times, I'm afraid. I've never made it a goal of mine to visit every single city park in town. Most of them are your basic neighborhood park, with a baseball field or two and maybe some playground equipment. Some have an interesting history behind them, like Irving Park in NE Portland, but (at least as far as I know) most don't have a lot to offer if you're looking for the strange and obscure.

Kingsley Park was intended to be another nice, mundane place like that, albeit a small and remote one. It's part of the Linnton neighborhood, in the far northwest corner of Portland, on US 30 a few miles beyond the St. Johns bridge. The park was donated to the city in 1925, a gift from E.D. Kingsley, president & general manager of the West Oregon Lumber company. Linnton was already a mix of residential and industrial land by then, and the park sat between Kingsley's West Oregon sawmill, and an Associated Oil plant. The article explained Kingsley's reasoning behind the donation:

In presenting the new site to the city Mr. Kingsley declared that he had been planning the move for years to provide proper play facilities for Linnton's increasing child population. Children heretofore have been forced to play in the streets or around the industrial plants of the district.

"Day by day I have seen little ones playing by the roadside with automobiles tearing by at 40 or 50 miles an hour," said Mr. Kingsley. "My blood has run cold at the thought of what might be the outcome. In fact, only a short time ago two lads were run over by a reckless driver, and there have been numerous other accidents."

At present the park is simply a small flat grassy area without any facilities, at least any that I noticed during my brief stop there. The only entrance is a sort of narrow driveway that angles off from the entrance to the huge oil tank farm next door. The photo above is looking down the driveway toward the park. In early 2013 the local neighborhood association applied for a city grant to improve (or re-improve) the place:

The request by the Linnton Neighborhood Association is for funds to develop Kingsley Park a 1.14 acre facility located in Linnton. The land was donated to the City of Portland in 1924 for use as a park and playground facility and until 1971 had playground equipment. The request is intended to provide for fencing, plants, trees, a pathway and for grading of the land. The fencing will be along the side of the park that is parallel to the train track—to reduce the risk of injury to children while playing in the park. This is the only facility of its kind in the Linnton neighborhood. Highway 30 is the west boundary of the park and the east boundary is the rail road line. The proposed fencing would create the north and south boundaries.

A $27,000 grant was awarded in August 2013. In addition to the improvements mentioned above, the neighborhood association is investigating putting in a community garden. Apparently the ground's been tested and judged safe for food production, despite being between an oil tank farm and a fiberglass plant.

In addition to the loss of playground equipment, the park's also lost area over time. Part of the park was shaved off in 1962 as part of widening US 30.

The land between Kingsley Park and the river is an empty industrial brownfield area. It's owned by the fiberglass plant nearby, and I don't know what the future holds for it. Whether it would be redeveloped with a new industrial use, or possibly as open space, or possibly it's too contaminated to do anything with. Right now Linnton is in the weird situation of being an old, historic river community with no public river access at all. I have no idea whether public access to the river is possible here, but the local neighborhood association is lobbying for it. The Port of Portland's Terminal 4 is directly across the river, so the view would be unsatisfying for anyone looking to commune with nature, but it would afford an unusual perspective, and there would be a lot of huge passing ships to watch.

Montgomery Circle

Today's adventure takes us to the Riverplace neighborhood, on the Willamette at the south end of downtown Portland. If this was a normal website, we'd be here to review a restaurant, or rant about the real estate market, or maybe take up rowing or something. But no, we're here because of a traffic circle. Seriously. I'd sort of realized after the fact that I'd already done posts about several of the city's few traffic circles without it being an actual project. I don't think there's an authoritative list of them anywhere, but we don't have a lot here, and I think I may have covered most of them already without even trying. So I figured, why not do a couple of others and collect the whole set?

If you've ever watched the Tour de France, or most any European bike race, sooner or later the peloton encounters a traffic circle. Usually the riders split and take both sides around the circle, joining back together on the other side. The race usually cuts to a helicopter shot at this point because it's a cool visual. If you watch long enough, you'll notice that each circle typically has something in the center to make it unlike all the other circles in town: Art, a fountain, trees, roses, an Arc de Triomphe, that sort of thing. So there's an aesthetic component to this little undertaking, at least some of the time.

Which brings us to Montgomery Circle, at the corner of SW Montgomery St. & River Drive, next to South Waterfront Park. It's not really a busy intersection, and it's just two streets meeting at a right angle, so -- like most of the other traffic circles around town -- it's here to look decorative and upscale-European rather than to solve a genuine traffic flow problem. Visiting Europeans probably think this is hilarious, and they're just too polite to mention it.

Other traffic circles in town:

• Ladd Circle. (Not covered here yet, but I covered one of the Ladd's Addition squares a while back.)
• Collins Circle, at SW 18th & Jefferson, near the MAX station.
• Coe Circle, home to the city's Joan of Arc statue, at NE Chavez (39th) & Glisan.
• The oval not-quite-a-circle at NE Alameda & 38th
• In the 'burbs, there's Lake Oswego's circle at 1st & Evergreen, home to the Fortuna fountain.
• A couple near the airport: One at the intersection of Mt. Hood Avenue & Frontage Rd., and another at the east end of Cascades Parkway (and the Stanley Park Blocks), at the IKEA parking lot. I'm not sure the last one really counts since it's not an intersection.

This is not counting the miniature traffic circles the city likes to install as traffic calming devices. They aren't really individually distinctive and there's just way too many of them. It would be like writing about each speed bump around the city. That would be way too far down the rabbit hole, even for me.

Before anyone chimes in to try to out-pedantic me, I'm using the term "traffic circle" in a generic sense here. So long as it's a round-ish bit of road, surrounding a round-ish bit of non-road, I'm using "traffic circle" regardless of exactly how its traffic control works. Transit nerds and bike nerds get really wound up about this stuff. It seems that if there aren't yield signs for traffic entering the circle, it's actually a "roundabout", a completely different animal, and roundabouts are more European and generally the One True Way, if only our fair city would give them a try. Etcetera, etc.

Mosier Creek Falls

A few photos of Mosier Creek Falls, in the small Columbia Gorge town of Mosier, between Hood River and The Dalles. Mosier Creek and its waterfall are in a narrow canyon on the east side of the town, with houses lining most of the canyon. The setting is unique for the Gorge, and looks more like the Bend area than parts of the Gorge further to the west.

I don't recall there being a sign for the falls specifically, but they're easy to find once you know the trick. If you're heading east on the old Gorge Highway from central Mosier, you'll pass over the historic Mosier Creek Bridge. Immediately across the bridge, on your right is the local pioneer cemetery. Look for a park bench that doubles as the cemetery sign. You want to park somewhere in this area, and then walk through the cemetery, generally following the creek/canyon upstream. Be sure to heed the warning signs about rattlesnakes. I didn't see any when I was there, but they do exist in Eastern Oregon, so better safe than sorry and all that. Before long the trail will lead you to a view of the falls from above.

The falls rush down a steep rock face but don't plummet straight down like some waterfalls do. This means it's possible to raft or kayak down the falls without necessarily crashing bow-first into rocks at the bottom and being horribly mutilated, assuming you're skilled and/or reckless enough to try such a thing. It's not something I have any personal interest in ever doing, but there are insane videos on YouTube if you're curious.

Ideals

The Oregon state office building near Lloyd Center is home to Ideals, an odd and spooky little statue at the corner of NE 7th Avenue and Oregon St. Its Smithsonian art inventory entry describes it as:

Standing female-like figure in the form of a hooded drapery garment with no visible figure inside. The proper left arm is raised.

The sculptor, Muriel Castanis, was known for this sort of figure. Her technique involved draping resin-coated fabric over store mannequins, and removing the mannequin once the resin had hardened. The finished product was typically a bronze duplicate of the original form. A search for other works of hers in the Smithsonian database shows that many of the others look quite similar to Ideals. The Portland Public Art blog griped about this some years ago. I don't entirely buy that argument. It's not that rare for an artist to stick with a technique that's led to a steady stream of commissions and sales in the past. This may be more notable here because Castanis's style is so distinctive. Generally whenever you're doing bronze castings of something, there's a possibility of making more than one copy of the same design. You can either call that "commercial" and sneer, or accept it as part of the nature of the medium. I guess I don't feel particularly harmed by other cities having their own draped-fabric, invisible-figure sculptures, and I don't see how one is devalued by the existence of others, either identical or similar, unless we're talking in a purely monetary, supply-and-demand sense. And in that case, if the local one isn't for sale, who really cares whether the others are sufficiently rare and expensive? I'm just not seeing the point there.

Her 2006 New York Times obit points out that Castanis was self-taught (which the art world generally sees as a Bad Thing), and only took up art in earnest after raising a family (which I understand is also a Bad Thing, at least in the more traditionalist, male-dominated parts of the art world). The gatekeepers seem a bit puzzled how someone like this managed to sneak into their clubhouse, and, moreover, make a living at it.

Her most famous works are probably the "corporate goddesses" atop a Philip Johnson skyscraper in San Francisco. At one point these and other works of hers were hailed (or derided) as major works of postmodernism, full of Classical references emptied of their traditional meanings. Standing outside a government office building, it looks like it's been put there to make some sort of statement, like the blindfolded Justice statues of old, but there's no specific meaning intended here; that's the whole point. By buying Ideals, the state was tracking the cutting edge (or at least the current fad) in the contemporary art world, which is something that we almost never do here. This is especially surprising so soon after the city's unhappy experience with the Portland Building. Art movements and trends come and go, of course, and postmodernism is no longer the irresistible shiny object it was twenty years ago. Back then, I once took an entire college class dedicated to the notion that postmodernity was going to overturn everything we knew about the social sciences as well as the arts. Nobody really talks about that anymore. It's probably just as well, although I did get an 'A' in the class and it would be nice to think I went to all that trouble for an idea with a longer shelf life. (Although at the time I was sure those PoliSci classes on the politics of the USSR and Warsaw Pact would be valuable too.) In any case, Ideals isn't contemporary anymore, and it's not yet old enough to be interesting from an art history standpoint. Maybe in another generation or so, the people who decide what's officially important will stumble across the weird buildings and paintings and statues of the late 80s and early 90s, and someone will write the definitive book, and suddenly major museums and collectors will be crazy for the stuff. That's what usually happens, anyway, and I don't see why it would be any different for a movement that proudly embraced the idea of art as commodity.

But do I like Ideals? Yes, I think I do. I posted an Instagram photo a while back calling it the "Ringwraith Statue of Liberty". That sounds kind of pejorative, but I didn't really mean it that way. The strange thing is that it seems a lot less spooky in person than it does in photos. That might be because it's sort of hobbit-sized in real life and doesn't seem all that ominous at that scale.

Plaza Square, St. Helens

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St. Helens, OR, is home to the historic Columbia County Courthouse (1906), which (uniquely in Oregon) has an honest-to-goodness courthouse square out front. St. Helens City Hall sits nearby, the town's main street runs along the far end of the square, and Columbia View Park on the river is steps away on the other side of City Hall. The whole arrangement goes way past cute into serious twee, at least if you ignore the ugly 1960s addition next door to the original courthouse. I wouldn't be surprised if the word "Mayberry" gets used a lot here. I don't think I've ever actually seen an episode of the Andy Griffith Show, so I can't vouch for the pop culture reference myself. Ralph Friedman's In Search of Western Oregon (1990) says it has the "sleepy look of an Andy Hardy movie". I haven't seen any Andy Hardy movies so I can't personally vouch for that either. To go with a more Generation X pop culture reference instead, it actually reminds me of the Courthouse Square set used in the Back to the Future films, although the courthouse itself looks nothing like the one in the movies.

A narrow path meanders its way around the square. Titled "down the trodden path", it commemorates the journey of the Lewis and Clark expedition along the Columbia River.

The square is home to the city's municipal Christmas Tree each year, and -- more unusually -- hosts a pumpkin lighting in early October to mark a month of Halloween festivities. Apparently the city started this tradition after Halloweentown, a 1998 Disney film, was filmed here. The town's a popular filming location, actually; several locations around town were used in the original Twilight film, and the Governor's Office of Film and Television markets the town as a good shooting location.

For those of you who come here for the really pedantic stuff -- and I like to imagine you exist -- I have a couple of items for you, namely the ever-popular questions "What's it called?" and "Who owns it?". Just going by internet search results, people seem to just call it the town square, the courthouse square, or the Plaza a lot. The streets on the north and south sides of the park are labeled "Plaza Square", so I'm assuming that's the official name & going with that for lack of anything more definitive (although the park's a rectangle and not a square, technically). I don't have anything more definitive because it's not a St. Helens city park as you might expect; the county GIS system says the county owns it, but it's also not listed as a regular Columbia County park either. I imagine it's just considered part of the courthouse grounds or something. The only relevance of this being that it sort of falls through the cracks, internet-wise, and I don't have as much material as I otherwise would. I did find the lists of city and county parks while I was searching, so at least I've got those filed away for the next time I'm in the area.

Liberty Bell, Portland City Hall

If you walk past the 4th Avenue side of Portland's City Hall, you might notice a replica Liberty Bell installed on the north end of the grounds. There's an interesting history behind it, so it seemed like it was worth a blog post. For those of you from outside the US, and those who slept through US history class in grade school, the original Liberty Bell is a large bell commissioned for the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in 1752. Various apocryphal stories have grown up around it, particularly that it was rung on July 4th, 1776 to mark the Declaration of Independence. It's become famous for that event (which didn't actually happen), and for the long jagged crack that renders it unusable as a bell. As far as historians can tell it played no actual role in the American Revolution, but all the same it's been a national symbol since before the Civil War.

In the years between 1885 and 1915, the Liberty Bell was sent around the country several times on publicity tours, until concerns about wear and tear, souvenir-hunting, and additional cracking brought an end to its touring days. On its very last trip, the bell traveled west, headed to San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition. A public petition drive led to the Liberty Bell making a brief five-hour stop in Portland on the morning of July 15th, 1915. The train arrived at Union Station, the bell traveling in its own special rail car. In those days there was still a railroad line up 4th Avenue, so they simply switched the bell's car to a local locomotive and hauled it up 4th to the Multnomah County Courthouse, where it was displayed to the public for a few hours. There was a parade by the state militia, and the city welcoming committee did its best to entertain the dignitaries traveling with the bell. When its stay concluded, they hauled the bell back to Union Station and its regular train, and it left town, never to return.

Nearly 50 years later, a retired local businessman decided the city needed its own Liberty Bell replica, and started a fundraising campaign to buy one. He had been under the impression that no exact duplicates of the original existed, and was surprised to learn that Salem had gotten one (along with the capitols of other US states & territories) in the early 1950s. He was undeterred, however, and Portland's bell arrived in June 1963, just before the 4th of July. The bell was slightly banged up on arrival. It came with a 25 year warranty against breakage. These two facts strike me as odd for a deliberately broken bell. The bell also arrived without the city having a clear idea of where it was going to go. Several sites were proposed, notably the now all-but-forgotten World War II memorial at Memorial Coliseum. After a year of handwringing they decided to leave it at City Hall. A year later, a plaque was added nearby honoring Henry J. Casey, the retired businessman whose idea this was.

This bell had a very short career, however. On the night of November 21st, 1970, a bomb exploded in Portland's City Hall, shattering the bell and heavily damaging the city council chambers. (Photos of the damage here and here.) No deaths or serious injuries resulted, however. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, and no arrests have ever been made. News accounts generally assume there was a political motive of some sort, with 60s radicals the default suspects. And that's one possibility, certainly. But it could just as easily have been someone with a more personal beef at City Hall. Anger over a big building code fine, say, or denial of a requested permit, or a grievance over taxes. Or it could have been someone just obeying the little voices. At this point we'll probably never know for sure unless someone makes a deathbed confession.

In 2006, the City Hall bombing was referenced by a traveling art project, The School of Panamerican Unrest:

The topic of Helguera's panels and discussions changes with each location. On Tuesday evening, Helguera—along with a panel that includes Red 76's Sam Gould, Harrell Fletcher, and Ian Greenfield (Lightbox Studios and the Oregon Bus Project—will engage in a panel discussion on The Portland Liberty Bell: Questions on Civil Disobedience. "On Nov. 21, 1970, a powerful bomb exploded behind Portland's City Hall, and arguably destroyed the State's bronze replica of the Liberty Bell. A urban myth that the Portland Liberty Bell was destroyed has never been fully dispelled, along with the open mystery of who carried out this and other terrorist acts—although it was largely suspected of students and civilian activists. This discussion explores that historic moment in Portland and the US and will include a discussion civil life and unresolved social or political conflict."

In any case, the city soon resolved to replace the original bell. This time there were issues with the bell being cast improperly (that is, a deliberately cracked bell was alleged to have been made incorrectly), and the city and the bell foundry argued over it for three years while the bell sat in storage. It was finally unveiled in Terry Schrunk Plaza in 1975. The city ended up paying $6000 for the replacement bell, a $2000 discount due to the manufacturing problems. This is cheaper than the $12,000 original bell, probably because over a ton of the original bell's metal was recycled into the new bell. In recent years, the replacement bell was moved across the street back to the City Hall grounds where it now stands.

2013: The Year in Instagram Cat Photos

More after the jump. It's possible I take too many Instagram cat photos.

marquam bridge, december 2013

Birds on a Wire

Here are a couple of photos of Birds on a Wire, the kinetic water sculpture on SE Water Ave. across the street from OMSI. The building in these photos is part of a PGE electrical substation, and the art here is the collection of pipes near the top of the building. The pipes fill with water, from internal piping that you can't see here, and a certain fill level unbalances them, and they tip over and empty into a pool below (which you also can't see, due to a relatively recent wall around the substation). I would have taken a video to give a better idea of what happens, but it never seems to be running when I'm there.

OMSI has an info page about the fountain, which appears to have been created for the 1995-96 "Water Works" exhibit and not updated since then. I think the exhibit overlapped a little with the years I worked there, if I remember correctly, and that was a long, long time ago. I know I recognize some of the names in the site credits, anyway. If you like the Space Jam movie website, or you miss Geocities, you'll love OMSI's Water Works pages. Anyway, the page about Birds on a Wire has a couple of video clips of it doing its thing. Unfortunately as a circa-1995 website the video clips are postage stamp-sized QuickTime movies, but they're the only ones I've been able to find of the fountain in operation. In case the OMSI site goes away, here's their description of the fountain:

This water sculpture is a popular attraction at OMSI. Finished in 1995 by David Curt Morris, this fountain is very similar to the Deer Chaser fountain, but on a larger scale. Large metal pipes move in rythmic motions that remind one of birds drinking from a fountain.

A 2001 profile of Morris for the Reed College alumni magazine mentions that he also created the Columbia River Crystal sculpture in downtown portland, which I'm a big fan of. It and Birds on a Wire look nothing alike, and I wouldn't have guessed the connection on my own. A 1994 First Thursday blurb in the Oregonian, for a show at the Laura Russo Gallery, mentions the fountain in passing:

New York artist David Curt Morris is an architect with a predilection for water and engineering. The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry considered him the perfect person to create a sculpture for its new facility. That piece will be completed in 1994, but in the meantime his studio work made of bronze, glass and water is on view at the gallery. Morris is the son of Carl and Hilda Morris, the late Portland artists.

Morris is a common surname, of course, so I would't have guessed this connection on my own either, but Hilda Morris created Ring of Time, the abstract sculpture outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings that looks either like the Guardian of Forever or an onion ring, depending on how nerdy and/or hungry you are. I'm fond of it too, and I had no idea there was a family connection here.

In any case, another profile, for a gallery in Beijing, mentions that Birds on a Wire won an award for excellence by a local engineering society. Details of the award don't seem to be online; it's possible the engineering society didn't have a website yet back in 1994 or 1995. The 1994 date in the Oregonian article might be when it was originally supposed to be done, by the way; my recollection is that it took quite a few months to get the bugs and kinks worked out of it. But then, I wasn't personally involved in the project and mostly just heard office gossip about it, and it was quite a long time ago, and I may be misremembering the whole thing. The more I think about it, this entire 1994-95 business is making me feel old. Have I mentioned I have yet another birthday in a few days? Because I do, and this time I don't have tickets to Hawaii or Vegas or anywhere. Sigh.

Clackamas River Railroad Bridge

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Some time ago, I did a series on bridges along the Clackamas River (or at least the ones near the Portland area). In a post about the ugly, utilitarian I-205 bridge near High Rocks, I had a little addendum about the railroad bridge behind it:

As an added bonus, right behind the freeway bridge is a railroad bridge that now belongs to Union Pacific, although it apparently still has "Southern Pacific" written on it in large letters. It isn't really possible to take a better photo of the railroad bridge without a.) shooting from the freeway bridge (hopefully while someone else is driving) b.) trespassing on the grounds of someone's fancy riverfront home, or c.) riding an inner tube down the river with a camera and hoping it doesn't get wet. A site covering Clackamas River Bridges appears to have chosen option a., so you can check those out if you're curious. But as far as the bridge project goes, I'm going to consider the railroad bridge "done" without resorting to any of the above options, since it does already appear, a little, in the photos here.

I'm still not really sure how to get unobscured photos of the railroad bridge; in the photo above, you can just make out one of the bridge piers behind the I-205 bridge, and you just sort of have to imagine the rest somehow. Admittedly I haven't actually gone back to look for a better angle, so in this case it really is for lack of trying. Still, the fact that I just tacked this onto the end of another bridge post sort of felt like cheating, and I'd really hate to anger the internet police, so I never quite took it off my todo list. I can't show it to you very well, but at least I can try to tell you about it, and if I manage to get better photos sometime later I can always edit this post and add them.

There's a Structurae page about this bridge, and that page has a photo of the bridge from the upstream side, apparently taken while peering over someone's barbed wire fence. It's just a 1950s metal girder bridge, nothing terribly interesting about it other than the fading "Southern Pacific" sign. A railfan page about Amtrak's Coast Starlight line has a similar photo, this time with an Amtrak train on it. Another site has a couple of forum threads speculating about the history of rail bridges on the Clackamas River, and looking for photos of the current bridge's predecessor, which crossed further downstream near the 82nd Drive Bridge.

It turns out there have been railroad bridges here for a very long time, by Oregon standards. An item in the November 20th, 1869 Oregonian mentions that the first bridge has come to a bad end:

The loss of the bridge over Clackamas river, which was just approaching completion, is quite a serious blow to the progress of the railroad, but it will not prove disastrous. It will necessitate still more energy and outlay in order to build the first section of road within the proposed time; but Mr. Holladay is not a man to be checked by such a misfortune. The energy which has for several weeks been so manifest in the construction of the road will be redoubled, and every obstacle will be overcome.

A September 4th, 1873 article discussed the progress on the replacement bridge:

Months ago the contract was let for the construction of a bridge over the Clackamas at a point just below where the railroad bridge spans the stream. Two years ago the old bridge was swept away during a freshet. Early last spring the county authorities determined to build a new bridge near where the old bridge stood. The contract was let, and work soon after began. Since then a force of men have been constantly employed in erecting the new structure. The length of the bridge between the abutments is 213 feet. With the addition of the aprons at each end, the entire length of the bridge, when finished, will be about 300 feet. The piers are constructed of wood, crib-shaped, and filled with stone. Both of the abutments have been completed, and a portion of the "stringers" laid from pier to pier. It is estimated that the heaviest portion of the work is finished. A number of carpenters are pushing forward with the work and the probabilities are that the entire structure will be completed by the middle of October.

A brief note in the October 3rd, 1876 Oregonian merely says "Work on the new railroad bridge across the Clackamas is progressing rapidly." It feels like we aren't getting the full story here. In the 1873 item, it's not clear if they're building a new rail bridge at a slightly different location, or building a non-rail bridge next to the rail bridge, and the non-rail bridge was lost to a separate flood in 1871 but not reported on at the time. And these items about the imminent completion of a bridge are years apart.

An article on August 2nd, 1955 announced the imminent completion of the current bridge, as part of a track realignment project by the Southern Pacific railroad. It seems the train was being rerouted eastward to avoid tight curves that forced trains to pass through the area slowly. The new bridge would be able to handle heavier loads and rolling stock. The article gives a brief history at the end:

The new bridge is the fourth railroad span across the Clackamas river in that area. The first one was built in 1869 when the "East Side" company, headed by Ben Holladay, was rushing construction on the Oregon Central south of Portland. Second bridge, a Howe truss structure was constructed in 1876, and the third in 1902.

If that's true, the 1873 item may concern a predecessor of the 82nd Drive bridge instead. I can't find any record in the newspaper database about a 1902 replacement bridge, though, so it's also possible they had some dates wrong.

Peace Poles, 5th & Montgomery

Barring the unexpected, this is the closest I'm going to have to a holiday blog post this year. Which is fine; I'm not much of a holiday person, and most years (other than 2010) I don't post anything even remotely Christmassy. But this sort of seemed to fit the bill, at least in the generic peace-on-earth, goodwill-to-all sense. On the Portland State campus, near the corner of 5th & Montgomery, is a trio of poles inscribed with "May Peace Prevail on Earth" in various languages. The sign next to them says they're "Peace Poles", donated by the PSU class of 2001-2002. Apparently the PSU poles are part of a global effort that's been erecting similar poles around the globe for several decades now, including several across Oregon. I had no idea this was something that existed, surprisingly. Because it's Christmas, I'm just going to approve of the general sentiment and not snark at length about hippies or whether peace poles do any actual good. So, ok, the poles technically aren't a Christmas thing at all, and I don't mean to ruin the holiday spirit or anything, but the movement behind peace poles was a response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the PSU poles commemorate 9/11. Still, the sign next to the PSU poles doesn't mention any of that, so you're free to interpret it in a more upbeat sort of way if you prefer, which I do.

Columbia View Park, St. Helens

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Couple of photos of Columbia View Park, on the Columbia River in downtown St. Helens, Oregon. I've posted about the park's goofy-looking Centennial Fountain already, and I seem to have missed all the other points of interest: A giant flagpole, a gazebo for concerts and Friday night movie nights and so forth, and a statue of "Seaman", Meriwether Lewis's dog, who came along on the Lewis & Clark expedition. It's crazy that there was a dog statue right there and I didn't get a single photo of it, but that seems to be what's happened. Could be that someone else was taking photos of it, or kids were playing on it or something. I don't recall now what the circumstances might have been.

I do have a few photos of the Columbia River with bits of the park included, and I figured they were reasonably scenic on their own. The above photo has a sliver of the aforementioned gazebo on the very left, plus a bit of Sand Island, a city park that's only accessible by boat, and has a reputation as a "no-rules party zone". Which in practice means way too much Coors Lite, or Corona if you're feeling fancy, and not recycling your empties, and boating without life jackets, and maybe shooting off some some leftover illegal fireworks from the last 4th of July.

This last photo, which looks south/upstream along the river, includes the northernmost tip of Sauvie Island. I don't think you can quite see the Warrior Rock lighthouse from here, since it's on the side of the island facing the main river channel, but it would be a short walk from here if there was a bridge out to the island.

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North Denver Plaza

In yesterday's Paul Bunyan post, I mentioned that the rival Paul Bunyan statue at the Trees of Mystery has a Babe, the Blue Ox at his side, and ours doesn't. This is basically true, but when the MAX Yellow Line went in they added a sort of reference to Paul's bovine companion, in another little plaza right across Denver Ave. from Bunyan himself. TriMet's MAX yellow line art guide just says this:

N Denver Plaza
Brian Borrello's seating sculpture was inspired by Babe the Blue Ox.

The "seating sculpture" being four sorta-benches that look like blue hooves. This terse blurb at least names the mini-park and tells us who created the hooves. Turns out he's created several other things that have appeared here before: People's Bike Library of Portland on Burnside, downtown; Lents Hybrids at the Foster Rd. MAX station on the Green Line, and Silicon Forest at the MAX Yellow Line's Rose Quarter station.

So the question remains why we didn't get a blue ox in the first place. The Trees of Mystery has one, and it turns out a shorter Bunyan in Bemidji, Minnesota has a blue ox as well. The Oregonian database never mentions the idea, as far as I can tell, so we're left trying to guess. Obviously the expense and finding a place to put it would've been factors, but the other key thing is that the longtime largest employer in Kenton wasn't the timber industry, but the old Union Stockyards just to the north of here. If beef is what's for dinner, maybe you don't want to go portraying a giant ox as an intelligent, friendly and loyal companion. I can't prove that's the reason, but it makes a much better story than if it just cost too much, or there wasn't room for it, or that building an ox just didn't occur to anyone.

Paul Bunyan Plaza

Here are a few photos of Portland's famous Paul Bunyan statue, and the plaza he stands in. He was created for the city's mostly-forgotten 1959 Centennial Exposition, and stood at the corner of N. Interstate & Argyle for over half a century. He was moved a block south to the present location as part of the MAX Yellow Line project, and later received a "makeover" in 2009, restoring details that had faded over time. I've always thought the statue is kind of, I dunno, derpy-looking. And strangely bashful, despite being 31 feet tall and wielding a giant axe. The expression makes his current location kind of hilarious though; he stands looking north, gazing across the street at the Dancin' Bare strip club with a shy, hopeful look on his face. At least this scenario makes a kind of sense. Someday, once the city fully gentrifies the Kenton neighborhood, there will be a condo tower across the street, and the ground floor will have a doggie day spa, an upscale yoga studio, and a hot restaurant by the indie chef du jour. And Paul Bunyan will still be standing there with the same dopey look on his face, and it just won't add up. Even if he did have a mighty hankerin' for some Icelandic fusion banh mi, he'd never make it past the building concierge, giant axe or no.

I was originally going to compare our Bunyan unfavorably with the taller one down at the Trees of Mystery in Northern California. I seemed to remember (from seeing him years ago) that he was rougher and tougher and more manly-looking than ours, but a quick image search reveals that he's actually kind of crudely put together. Derpy or not, our guy still beats their guy in the looks department. Their guy comes out ahead in height (which admittedly is a big deal in the Bunyan universe), and having an actual blue ox, and being slightly animatronic, and having a guy inside who cracks jokes and joshes with visitors, and featuring in a This American Life episode about the guys who have this unusual job. We come out ahead in the department of not wiring a bumper sticker onto your car while you're in the gift shop, although supposedly they don't do that anymore either.

The Bunyan statue was announced on February 1st, 1959, a couple of weeks before the state's official 100th birthday. On May 20th, a construction photo showed the statue nearly completed. By early July, Portland was already feuding with Bangor, Maine, which had inaugurated a Bunyan of its own earlier the same year. It seems that Portland's was (allegedly) taller by a few scant inches, but the Bangor Bunyan stood upon a six-foot pedestal, and the Bunyans' backers bickered over whether the pedestal counted toward a statue's stature. The paper dubbed this the Battle of the Bunyans. The battle was settled decisively in 1961 when the obviously taller California Bunyan came along. It seems everyone was building a backyard Bunyan; It wasn't so much a Battle of the Bunyans as a Bunyan bubble. Which inevitably went the way of all bubbles, and the Trees of Mystery one remains the world's tallest to this day.

In any event, the statue remained Kenton's big local landmark through the ups and (primarily) downs of the following decades. He showed up in a 1976 article profiling the neighborhood as it was then. A few years later he made another appearance in a 1983 article about a study of the Kenton area, which described the prospects of revitalizing the neighborhood as "bleak, but not hopeless", whatever that means. A Bunyan photo ran in a 1985 article about Oregon roadside attractions. The MAX line sped either revitalization or gentrification, whatever you prefer to call it, but it's still not a place you'd ever confuse with the Pearl District or trendier parts of Inner NE closer to downtown.

As for the little plaza where our Bunyan now stands, I've found at least one city document using the "Paul Bunyan Plaza" name, and I'm not sure what else you'd call if if not that. It's not a city park strictly speaking; PortlandMaps says it's a piece of unused street right-of-way, I suppose left over from MAX construction, meaning the city Transportation Bureau owns the land. I don't know who empties the trash cans and so forth; I imagine it would be either TriMet or possibly neighborhood volunteers.

Ruckel Creek Bridge

Here are a couple of photos of the little Ruckel Creek Bridge, on a stretch of the old Columbia River Highway now reserved for bikes & hikers. I visited to track down obscure Ruckel Creek Falls, and the bridge is right there too. The bridge really isn't much, quite honestly. A 1987 Oregonian article about restoring the old highway mentions it briefly at the end, as the last and least of three then-abandoned bridges. It's described simply as "a 10-foot concrete slab span with concrete abutments faced with stone. It was built in 1917." The stone-faced railing extends beyond the bridge and is more like 45 feet long, so drivers on the old highway, or hikers who don't venture off of today's path, might assume the creek is a lot bigger than it actually is. The bridge is perched right at the top of Ruckel Creek Falls, and you can easily see the falls from above looking over the side of the bridge. There isn't an official marked trail down to the base of the waterfall, so the bridge is useful for figuring out where they're at. And once you find the falls, any photos you take of them stand a good chance of including the bridge too. And then you'll have some bridge photos, and if you aren't careful you'll be sucked into an ongoing bridge photo & blog project. It happened to me, it could happen to you too.

Anyway, it looks like this bridge was on part of the old highway bypassed in 1937, when a new route replaced the treacherous Tooth Rock Viaduct segment. Which would mean it only served as a highway bridge for about twenty years before becoming obsolete. This happened well before the general rerouting of US 30 after WWII, so I imagine the Tooth Rock stretch of the old highway must have been a real beast to drive. That section is a trail now too, having reopened to the public sometime in the late 1990s. It occurs to me I've never actually been on that stretch of the old highway; sooner or later I'll have to go remedy that.

Trio

Here are a few photos of Trio the brand new public art at the yet-to-open Lincoln St. MAX station, at the south end of downtown Portland. A recent TriMet press release describes it:

Seattle-area artist Elizabeth Conner and crew installed three abstract, mixed metal sculptures, entitled Trio. The steel sculptures were inspired by the theatrical and participatory work of choreographer Anna Halprin and Lawrence Halprin, the architect of the adjacent Halprin District. The sculptures range in height from 9 to 12 feet and 2 to 5 feet in width.

“In designing sculptures for this space, I considered the Halprins’ radical advocacy for a wide range of participation in spaces that are truly public,” said Conner. “My artwork for this space is a respectful reference to the ephemeral nature of traveling from one place to another, with a glimpse of movement, light and shadow, out of the corner of the eye.”

TriMet usually looks for art that's somehow inspired by the surrounding neighborhood. I rather like this idea that 1960s modernism is my neighborhood's local vernacular.

8

So apparently this is what an eight year old blog looks like. Eight years, in which we've gone from "Do you have a blog yet?" to "You still have a blog?" I'm not sure what Google has in store for the Blogger platform these days; they probably want everyone to switch to G+. I've rigged it up so these posts go there too, but so far I've seen zero actual benefit from doing that. In terms of user engagement and feedback it ranks slightly behind dropping pebbles down a bottomless well.

I don't have any particular grand blogging plans for the next year. I've got enough of a backlog of draft posts in various stages of completion that I could probably just roll the conveyor belt for a few months and not need to take any new photos until next spring or so. And I'm ever closer to running out of local art and so forth to write about. So I might have to look around for new ideas at some point next year. But right now I have no idea what those ideas might be, so -- for good or ill -- you're likely to keep seeing fresh variations on the usual formula until you hear otherwise.