SE 16th & Ash

Here's another City Repair painted intersection, this time at SE 16th & Ash, a oouple of blocks south of East Burnside. Some of the street designs have names and others don't, and as far as I can tell this one doesn't. Their 2013 Village Builder guide just calls it SE 16th & Ash, anyway. As with most of the others, they went with a floral design, with a different flower and color for each arm of the intersection, all growing out of the central traffic circle. It's less complex than Sunnyside Piazza, for example; I imagine this is a function of how long it's been around, and how many people typically volunteer to work on it.

I should probably point out that these photos were taken in midwinter, in between paintings, so it's showing a little wear and tear right now. Part of the idea behind "intersection repairs" is that they need to be repainted every so often, thus helping people meet their neighbors, which fosters community spirit and so forth. So I guess I'm showing one part of that cycle in action, though I feel I ought to apologize for not presenting the design at its best. I did run across a blog post with a video of this intersection being painted, and a few photos of it in a less-worn state. Figured I should pass those along to give a better idea of how it's intended to look.

To go off on a tangent, while I was searching for any info about this design, I ran into an entirely different 16th & Ash in Forest Grove, a semi-rural gravel road the state film office thinks would make a fantastic filming location for some reason.

Untitled, NW 1st & Davis

These aren't the best neon photos you'll ever see. They're taken in daylight, for one thing. The neon isn't even lit. As far as I can tell the city never turns it on anymore, so these photos are probably the best I'm going to do. This is the public parking garage at NW 1st & Davis, and the neon art on it is simply called Untitled. That RACC page doesn't even have a description; it basically just says "David Kerner, Untitled, neon, 1990". But it does have a couple of night photos from back in the day, so to speak, so you can see how it was intended to look. If the page hadn't listed the date, 1990 would be the obvious guess anyway thanks to all the exciting festive triangles. If you, like me, are of a certain age, it's tough to look at all the triangles and not get "Pump up the Jam" stuck in your head:

One could argue that possibly the triangles look a little, I dunno, dated, and maybe that makes them a lower maintenance priority than they otherwise would be. I'm not arguing that myself, mind you, because if the triangles are dated, so am I. But it's an argument I could imagine someone making.

Updated 2/6/23:A few weeks ago I updated this post to lead with a slideshow, and so I remembered this 'rad' neon art when I saw it last night after drinks with coworkers. It was even on and fully illuminated (which still seems to be a hit-and-miss thing 9 years later) and I remembered I had no photos of that, so I took some and added them to the photoset. They aren't all winners, honestly, largely due to the aforementioned drinks with coworkers, but hey. Also fixed the RACC link above, which they broke in a recent site redesign, and added a map to give a better look at the building. You can even zoom in a bit more and kind of see the art if you squint just right.

The artist is apparently from Wisconsin originally. I ran across a Milwaukee (WI) Journal article from 1985 about a show at the city's art museum, "Technology in Art". Being 1985, technology in art seems to have involved primitive computer graphics and lots of creative Xeroxing. The creator of our Untitled gets a mention for his neon work in the show:

David Kerner skilfully captures our era's formal power and theoretical fragmentation in "Elegant Chaos", a controlled explosion of neon tubing that makes brilliant use of the inherent power of negative space.

That's the only description I've run across of anything created by him, and I don't think it tells us anything about our Untitled here. I was kind of hoping there would be more of a story here, something beyond "Random 1990 decorative item, but funded through 1% For Art so it's in the public art database". It would be cooler if it was illustrating various theorems of Euclidean geometry, say. It doesn't quite look like it is, but I've only worked through the first couple of books of Euclid so I could be wrong. It could also be an ironic Kasimir Malevich reference, timely due to the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. I can dream up of lots of interesting stories; I just kind of doubt any of them are true, though.

I did find one link where he (or a different upper Midwest artist by the same name) is credited as a former assistant to a well-known Wisconsin glass artist, whose work was showcased in a 2012 retrospective. Which is kind of a tangent, but there's some interesting (and quite varied) work at that link if you're interested in modern glass art.

The SmartPark garage here was built around the same time the neon went in; construction was delayed because of extensive pollution at the site. Before the present-day garage, this block was home to a Broadway Cab taxi facility with underground gasoline tanks. And before the taxi garage, it was home to a gas lighting facility around the turn of the 20th Century, which left the soil full of coal tar. Yecch. Maybe it's for the best that a parking garage went here rather than apartments or condos.

The garage's roof is home to the Portland Downtown Heliport, which has the FAA designation "61J". It opened along with the building but was not immediately successful; the expected flood of busy and important executives never really arrived. Helicopters as a mode of fast VIP transportation doesn't seem to have caught on here among people who could afford it. One problem being that there aren't a lot of other heliports in the area, so you're limited in where you could go from here no matter how big of a hurry you're in. Unless you're willing to land in a parking lot or a field or something, and there are probably FAA rules about that, and anyway it lacks glamor that way. The city website doesn't offer any info about our municipal heliport as far as I can tell, and these days it seems to cater exclusively to TV news helicopters. If you see a helicopter taking off from the garage here, and it isn't time for the morning or evening commute, there's probably a police chase in progress, or there's a protest downtown, or another missing hiker out in the Gorge.

Sunnyside Piazza

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If you happen upon the quiet intersection of SE 33rd and Yamhill, just one block south of Belmont, you'll immediately notice the intersection's painted up as a gigantic sunflower. This is Sunnyside Piazza, one of the first and best-known "intersection repair" efforts from Portland's City Repair Project. I've posted photos of a couple of other examples that I've run across, and I have a couple more of them in the pipeline. I guess I like these things because they're so idealistic. I tend to be a cynical person by nature, and a bit on the antisocial side; these community projects are a little antidote to my usual stomping around and scowling at the world, I guess. It's not the specific designs, exactly (though I'm fond of the spiral sunflower design here), but that they're impermanent and require a big neighborhood block party every year to repaint them. So I imagine that not all of these things will endure after the initial burst of enthusiasm wears off. And it's not like it's practical to do one at every intersection; you'd run out of willing neighborhood volunteers long before that.

It's a shame there's nowhere to put one in my downtown neighborhood. All the streets around here are way too busy, and most of them have MAX or streetcar tracks running through them. It's a shame because I think I'd be pretty good at brainstorming designs. The moon, maybe, or a giant octopus, or a Deep Space Nine wormhole, or Pac-Man, or a crop circle, or maybe a Sarlacc pit, or a surreal Escher design to confuse passing motorists. Some of these might be a bit tough for amateur street painters to pull off in a weekend, though, and others might have trademark issues. Feel free to swipe any of these notions for your local intersection if you like though.

Couple of links about Sunnyside Piazza and places like it:

• Nomination for a Project for Public Spaces award.
• City Repair page about the annual repainting, part of their city-wide "Village Building Convergence". It describes the project:

  One of the most famous and iconic of all the city's intersection projects, the re-painting of the Sunflower is a long standing tradition during the Village Building Convergence and this year is no different.

  This project is one of the few public places in the world to incorporate Fibonacci geometry. With its vibrant colors of yellow, orange, red and green, this street piazza is considered by many to be the heart of the Sunnyside Neighborhood, whose symbol is the Sunflower. With the Sunflower just a block off bustling Belmont street, this intersection is admired daily by neighbors and local business patrons alike.

• A short YouTube time lapse clip of the 2011 repainting.
• Info page from the metal fabrication firm that created some of the metal work that goes along with the street design here.
• A positive 2009 OregonLive article, since the paper hadn't yet evolved into today's hysterical right-wing tabloid. There aren't even any angry all-caps comments below the story.
• A nice Sightline Daily article about the "intersection repair" phenomenon.

Flight of Birds

Today's art foray takes us to Lloyd Center again. This is Flight of Birds, another Tom Hardy bird sculpture, which hangs over the escalators at the mall food court. I'd never really paid much attention to it until now, but it turns out Flight of Birds is one of the few remaining vestiges of the original groovy 1960 open-air mall.

A July 31st 1960 Oregonian article describes Flight of Birds along with the other (now vanished) examples of then-avant-garde art the mall had commissioned:

A flight of steel birds will soar over the east end of the Lloyd Center skating rink as one of the market's principal objects d'art.

Constructed by Oregon artist Tom Hardy, the 30-foot long assembly of metal-winged birds will be suspended from a barrel vaulted ceiling.

Some 70 feet above the rink, the "Flight of Birds" was made of 10 and 16 gauge steel and painted gold to show up against a white overhead.

Hardy, artist in residence at Reed College, cut sheet steel and welded it together for many weeks before the aerial sculpture was completed.

Commerce promoted art at Lloyd Center back then, and art returned the favor. The long-vanished Sieberts home furnishing store in the mall held a show of Hardy sculptures to coincide with the unveiling of Flight of Birds:

Sieberts at Lloyd Center is presenting a one-man show for Tom Hardy using the artist's huge "Birds in Flight" done for the Ice Arena as inspiration for the exhibition of smaller Hardy works.

Since Hardy's welded metal sculptures are becoming increasingly popular for home interiors and patios the store has arranged this showing in conjunction with furniture arrangements indicating the most effective use of the sculpture for enjoyment in the home.

Both large and small scaled sculptures are in this most recent Hardy showing. Smaller sculptures include fox heads done in copper, a small horned toad, bird studies and bison. A larger version of the bison theme is done in steel on silver leaf platform. A handsome metal screen, turquoise banded, features a giraffe motif. A number of pieces are birds poised on pedestals rather than being shown in flight. Drawings augment the showing.

A brief 1964 item mentions a showing of a color film of Hardy creating Flight of Birds. I imagine that film would be an interesting period piece if it still exists somewhere.

If you're curious about what the rest of the mall used to look like (before it was renovated & enclosed around 1991), check out these photo-filled posts at MidCentury Modern League, Malls of America, and Vintage Portland.

I grew up in westside suburbia so we didn't go to Lloyd Center very often. Mostly I remember being cold there because it was an open-air mall in the Pacific Northwest. I still kind of looked forward to going there though, because it had what I was convinced was the world's greatest candy and nut store. Childhood memories about candy stores are notoriously unreliable, but I recall window displays overflowing with red and green pistachios, which were especially tantalizing because mom wouldn't buy them due to the artificial colors. Once I talked mom into getting some old fashioned rock candy, because it looked cool, and she'd talked about having it when she was little, but I didn't care for it. Another time I ended up with a bag of hot salted pine nuts (and I'm kind of amazed they had pine nuts back then, in retrospect), and I didn't really care for those either. Come to think of it I'm not really sure why I thought it was the world's awesomest candy store, because I can't think of a single thing I got there that I have fond memories of now. I'm sure it must have been visually stunning, though. If there are any vintage photos of the store out there, I probably don't want to see them and realize how ordinary it actually was.

Black Hole No. 4

In today's thrilling adventure, we're off to inner SE Portland to look for Black Hole No. 4, which the Smithsonian art survey says is at the Plaid Pantry convenience store at SE 20th & Ankeny. Seriously. I went there and took the above photos; it's just that I don't know what the actual art is supposed to look like, so I don't know whether this is it, or whether it's missing and this is just the pedestal it used to be on. The survey describes it as:

Artist:  
  Hess, Robert, sculptor.
Medium:  
  Sculpture: bronze(?); 
  Base: concrete.
Dimensions:
  Sculpture: approx. 20 x 25 x 25 in.; 
  Base: approx. H. 32 in. x Diam. 14 in.; 
  Pedestal: approx. Circum. 50 in.
Condition:  
  Surveyed 1993 November. Treatment urgent.

...which sort of suggests we're maybe just looking at the pedestal here. Sigh. The sculptor is apparently a professor emeritus at Willamette University in Salem, and photos from a Portland gallery representing him suggest that the missing sculpture was probably kind of cool. The only mention of it I've found in the Oregonian database is a brief community calendar item, from June 1985, stating the next meeting of the local neighborhood association would "Discuss a new crime prevention committee, goals for the community development plan, plans for the Buckman Flea Festival, and art for a Plaid Pantry store at Southeast 20th Avenue and East Burnside Street.". So that's all I really know. I did find a 1982 article about the same neighborhood association teaming up with Plaid Pantry to create a mural (which still exists) on another store at 12th & Morrison. So they'd worked together before Black Hole No. 4

If I was truly dedicated to this blogging thing, this would be the point where I'd start making phone calls and doing legwork and trying to figure out where the art went. Except that I hate making phone calls, and really I think this is a job for someone who lives a little closer and has more of a stake in the outcome. Is it in storage now, maybe in a vast warehouse like the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Or maybe it sits forgotten in a neighborhood volunteer's attic, and we won't see it again until it pops up on Antiques Road Show? Or maybe meth-crazed metal thieves stole it? Or professional art thieves, perhaps in the employ of an anonymous Swiss collector? Who knows?

Silver Dawn

I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm rather fond of The Dreamer, the shiny bronze whatzit in Pettygrove Park. I recently found out it has a silvery sibling in NW Portland's Wallace Park, so obviously I had to go check it out. Silver Dawn is at the NE corner of the park, near the fenced off-leash dog area. The blurb from its RACC page is more artist bio than description:

“Silver Dawn” is an excellent example of the large biomorphic abstract sculptures that Manuel Izquierdo was known for. Izquierdo, a central figure in the mid-century Portland art scene, was born in Spain and came to Portland as a refugee who fled after the Spanish Civil War. He studied at the Museum Art School (now PNCA) and taught there for 46 years after graduating.

Silver Dawn makes a cameo in a blog post about the author's ongoing project to track down Izquierdo sculptures around the city. It mentions that Silver Dawn had once been in the middle of the off-leash area, and had also received dents and dings over the years, possibly thanks to balls from the nearby baseball/softball field.

The June 28th, 1980 Oregonian had a photo of Silver Dawn being installed, and the July 22nd paper mentioned it had just been dedicated as part of a repair and improvement effort at Wallace Park: "A sea-form sculpture by Manuel Izquierdo, selected in a national competition coordinated by the Northwest District Association, was dedicated during a neighborhood potluck." Silver Dawn was mentioned in passing in a 1982 article; this being the era before the internet and publicly accessible databases, the then-Metropolitan Arts Commission decided to put together a book cataloging the city's public art, fountains, murals and so forth, and they asked the public for suggestions to try to make the book as complete as possible. Which suggests they themselves didn't already have a master list to work from. Now, thirty-odd years later, they do at least have a public database of things they administer; works belonging to other government agencies or private owners are generally not listed, though. The Smithsonian art database is a bit more comprehensive, but isn't updated on an ongoing basis, so anything new in the last few years won't be listed. Still, the combination of these various sources is enough to keep this humble blog humming along, so I can't complain too much.

Incidentally, to go off on a mostly-unrelated tangent, I know exactly where I was on July 22nd, 1980. It was a hot day, and we were at our suburban neighborhood swimming pool. All of a sudden, people looked up and noticed a big grey mushroom cloud in the sky: Mt. St. Helens was erupting again. The famous destructive eruption had occurred back on May 18th, but the July eruption came on a clear sunny day and I think it may have been the only eruption I actually witnessed (at least until the volcano woke up again in 2004.) I even got out the family Kodamatic instant camera and took at least one photo of it, which I think I still have around somewhere. (If I ever find it again, I'll probably scan it and post it here.) The eruption was naturally the big lead story in the next day's paper.

Henry Carlson Park expedition

This post has been in the works for an uncommonly long time. Sometime back in the mid-1990s, a Willamette Week "Best of Portland" issue had a brief blurb about a tiny, super-obscure, and rarely used park somewhere in Northwest Portland. I tend to remember the oddest bits of trivia, and I happened to remember this item, but unfortunately not the name or the exact address. I thought I remembered something about it being on NW 19th Avenue, or maybe 21st, at least. So I looked around a few times and the only likely (but wrong) candidate I came up with was a landscaped corner of the Good Sam hospital campus at 21st & Lovejoy, as seen in this 2008 post. But I couldn't prove it, and I'd kind of written this off as a mystery from the pre-internet years that I wasn't likely to ever solve. Then just recently I was putting a post together about the In the Tree Tops statues at Lloyd Center, and bumped into an ancient 1990s Best of Portland issue's "Off the Beaten Path" page that has inexplicably remained online all this time. There were a bunch of other items on the page besides the one I'd originally searched for, and one in particular caught my eye. Here's the text in full, in case Willamette Week ever clues in about the ancient pages on its site and nukes them:

BEST INNER-CITY PARK TO BE ALONE IN
Sure, Forest Park is scenic. With its verdant canopy and myriad trails, it makes for an ideal escape from the city. But on weekends, the pacific wooded area in Northwest Portland turns into a 3-D version of ESPN's Extreme Sports. Why dodge the spandex-clad bicyclists whizzing around blind corners when there's a nearby spot that offers true solitude--the HENRY CARLSON PARK at Northwest 19th Avenue and Hoyt Street. Adjacent to the First Immanuel Lutheran Church, this 30-by-30-foot square parcel has no grass and three trees only slightly taller than the average midget. Yet you won't be running into Herve Villechaize here, not only because he's dead, but also because no one ever comes to sit on the brown benches that line a couple of shrub-filled plant boxes, nor does anyone frolic on the brick-laid surface. Aside from the occasional passerby using the trash can--a rare item in Portland parks these days--not a soul will disturb you in Henry Carlson Park, making it a great place to read or just sit and ponder your existence.

I'm quite certain this is the item that I remembered from back in the Netscape days. Tiny, obscure, rarely used, owned by someone other than the city (i.e. the church next door), and located on 19th Avenue. So I put it on my todo list (which is actually an Evernote notebook and a Google map these days), and I went to look for it the first chance I got. It was trivial to find once I knew where it was, but I'm fairly sure I've walked past this spot a lot since the mid-90s, and it never once occurred to me that this was any kind of park at all, much less the mysterious one I was occasionally looking for. There's no sign out front, for one thing, and it's a fairly nondescript little plaza that doesn't attract the eye. There are a few rose bushes in the back, but it's January so they aren't contributing to the scenery right now. It is, frankly, not a fascinating or inviting place. I took the photos you see here, and then stood around for a few minutes hoping for inspiration. I soon decided I'd exhausted the possibilities of the place and there weren't any more photos here waiting to be taken, so I declared Mission Accomplished and wandered off.

As for the name, the only reference I was able to dig up was a 1977 obit for a Henry Carlson who attended the Lutheran church next door. It doesn't explain why they named a sorta-park after him, though. The only other link I could find about the park is the church's 2011 annual report, which budgeted $5000 to refurbish the park sometime between then and 2017. That's a big time window, and not knowing what it looked like in 2011 I'm not sure whether my photos are pre- or post-refurbishment.

But at least I sorted out the longstanding mystery that had been bugging me. Even with the remaining unanswered questions, I'm going to chalk this one up in the win column.

Flying Together

Some photos of Flying Together, a sculpture of a pair of birds outside the Oregon History Museum on the South Park Blocks. I've probably walked right past it hundreds of times since it arrived in 1990, without ever really paying attention to it. This time it registered for some reason and that set the well-oiled blog post factory in motion. I'm not really sure how I overlooked it until now, but hey, I've missed worse before. I've said once or twice that one of the big things I like about this blogging racket is that it forces me to pay attention to my surroundings for a change, since ordinarily I'm kind of terrible at that. With a caveat, I guess, that clueing in on one's environment isn't necessarily something that happens all in one go and then it's done. Flying Together being a case in point, obviously.

Anyway, this is another animal art piece by Tom Hardy, who created Oregon Landscape at PSU and many, many other works all over the Northwest and beyond. The Smithsonian survey page for it has a brief description: "Two abstract birds in flight with their wings extended vertically. The upper bird is sideways with its lower wing connecting to the upper wing of the lower bird. The lower wing of the lower bird extends into the base."

The Smithsonian database says there's another Flying Together at Mount Hood Community College, described as "Three wing-like segments attached to a slender vertical element atop a large rock. " I haven't seen a photo of it, but it sounds different from the Park Blocks one, so maybe Hardy only reused the name. The Park Blocks one does look a lot like the only other bird sculpture of his I've covered, the Herons at Howell Territorial Park on Sauvie Island. The Sauvie one has three birds instead of two, and they're a bit more heron-like, but there's an obvious family resemblance. There's another Hardy bird sculpture in the food court at the Lloyd Center Mall; I have photos of it too, but it's a bit further back on the blog post conveyor belt. It'll be here sooner or later, so don't touch that dial.

Oneonta Creek Bridge

Here are a few photos of the historic Oneonta Creek Bridge, which once carried the old Columbia River Highway across the creek of the same name. This bridge was abandoned in place when the Oneonta Tunnel closed circa 1954, and it was used for Oneonta Gorge parking for many years. Parking moved to the far side of the tunnel after it reopened in 2009. It's one of several Karl P. Billner bridges along the road, and like many of the others it uses the "concrete arch & cap" style, one of a handful of design motifs used repeatedly along the old highway, as described in a post on WyEast Blog. The Library of Congress has some vintage photos of the bridge from a variety of angles if you want a better look at it from below, not that it's that spectacular from that angle. It's not one of the major bridges along the highway, but it's a reasonably attractive minor one, and it was designed by the guy who also created many of the highway's more famous and distinctive bridges. So I figured this one merited a blog post of its own too. We'll be hearing more about Mr. Billner in the future when we visit some of his better known designs.

I should point out that right next to the historic bridge is the current Gorge Highway bridge, which isn't exactly brand new either. It probably dates to when the highway was rerouted around the old tunnel, so it's roughly 60 years old at this point, versus a mere 40 year age difference between it and its predecessor. But the newer bridge is not part of the original highway, so nobody pays a lot of attention to it; a lot of bridge websites and so forth refer to the older bridge as "the" Oneonta Creek Bridge even though there's another one right next to it, plus additional bridges for the Union Pacific railroad and Interstate 84 a short walk downstream.

The observant reader might notice I've done posts about the tunnel and the bridge here, but not any about Oneonta Gorge itself, much less the hidden waterfall at the far end of the gorge. It's on my to-do list, it really is; it's just that a trip up Oneonta Gorge requires a bit of wading, which works a lot better in warm weather, and I haven't quite decided which electronics I'm willing to risk getting wet. There's a similar wading situation for Gorton Creek Falls further east in the Columbia Gorge; I've never actually been there, so that's higher up my priority list than Oneonta Gorge, but I plan on getting around to both sooner or later.

Long before the bridge or the highway went in, Oneonta Gorge was inconvenient to visit. In an 1886 account of a trek to Oneonta Gorge, our heroes convinced the railroad to stop and let them off nearby. They waded up the gorge and were disappointed to realize the hike to the falls was rather shorter than they'd been told. So they switched to fishing for a while, and were surprised (and annoyed) to stumble across other visitors to the gorge. This is an eternal problem in the Columbia Gorge, even when you think you've found an out-of-the-way, obscure corner to have all to yourself for a while.

Which brings me to a little adventure that isn't really on my todo list to repeat anytime soon. Some years ago it occurred to me that it was strange how little access to the Columbia River there is through this part of the Columbia Gorge. I-84 and the railroad are effectively a wall between all the popular tourist stops and the river. Oneonta Creek passes under I-84 in a big pipe, a culvert really, but one big enough for an adult person to clamber through without crawling or anything. Or at least that was possible circa 1994; I haven't checked since then. In any case, that's what I did, and found there was a big empty sandy beach along the river on the other side. Well, almost empty. I walked downstream along the beach for maybe a mile or so, and ran across a group of people with a little campfire on the beach. I think they might have just pulled off on the freeway shoulder and hopped over the barrier; I'm not sure where they came from, and I'm sure they wondered the same thing about me. Wary nods of acknowledgement were exchanged but I didn't stop and say hi or anything.

Further along, at Multnomah Falls, the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-84 diverge for a bit, and the main falls parking lot sits between them. I'd figured this was a good place to cut inland since you only had to get across the westbound side of I-84, and there was a perfectly nice tunnel under the eastbound lanes so visitors could get to get to the falls. The me of 2014 absolutely does not recommend doing this, but it's what 1994 me did. And then from Multnomah Falls I just walked along the Gorge Highway to get back to my car at the Oneonta Gorge parking lot. I don't recommend doing this either; there's little or no shoulder along much of the road, and passing cars and RVs to worry about. Plus the walk along the road just seemed a lot further than walking along the beach. At one point I did score a discarded cassette tape of mariachi music, which I probably still have around somewhere. All in all I wouldn't recommend it though, even with the random roadside finds. If for some reason you do decide to brave the pipe under I-84, and I'm not saying you should, and I don't know whether you even still can, but if you do, you should probably go back the same way you came and not try to make a big dumb loop out of it like I did.

garage art, nw 13th & glisan

A while back, I was putting together a blog post about Urban Arrangements, the metal art on the otherwise blank walls of the downtown Nordstrom store. I was poking around the artist's website, looking at other things he'd done, and one photo looked rather familiar. It, and the photos here, are from the Chown Pella Lofts building at NW 13th & Glisan; the building has semi-underground parking, with open mesh windows on the Glisan side. It would probably be rather ugly if it didn't have this series of cheerful metal designs on the outside of the windows. I haven't found anything mentioning a name for the window art, and maybe there isn't one. But I've always kind of liked this one, and I figured I'd pass it along even if I didn't have any interesting trivia to share about it.

In the Tree Tops

Some photos of In the Tree Tops, the pair of bright red figures at NE 12th & Broadway, at an outdoor portion of Lloyd Center Mall. Walking Portland mentions that this was one of the artworks selected by the mall's owners when Lloyd Center was reconstructed in 1990, along with the Capitalism fountain at the mall's SW corner; the Free Flow fountain in the south-side parking garage; the house-shaped display boxes of consumer goods in the same garage; and probably a few others here and there that I'm not aware of. The artist's website just mentions In the Tree Tops in passing in her bio.

Some time in the 1990s (I'm not sure which year), Willamette Week's annual Best of Portland issue proclaimed it "Best Public Sculpture":

In a breezeway between Northeast Weidler Street and Broadway, in what was once part of the Lloyd Center back before its open-air corridors were enclosed by cheap siding, right outside the last Newberry's in town, stands one of the weirdest sculptures in Portland, a city rotten with weird public art.IN THE TREETOPS, or The Radish People, as it's affectionately known, consists of two humanoid figures standing side by side, their red, semi-glossy skin innocently unadorned. On top of their bony, elongated bodies perch gentle, Modigliani-style heads that gaze down tenderly at a house-shaped stone cradled in their long, extraterrestrial fingers. Out of their downturned heads grow lobster-red branches sprouting bright green leaves, and both pairs of skinny legs end in a single, tangled rootball. Are they emissaries from an underground kingdom? Mascots of a vanished Oregon industry? Like some misbegotten gene-splice between Will Vinton and Giacometti, the radish people are at once crude and empathetic, cutesy and mysterious, adorable and horrifying. Mostly adorable, though.

I've never heard anyone call it "The Radish People". Maybe that was a short-lived fad. I was about to say "The Radish People" was also a cheap 50s Sci-Fi movie, but I was probably thinking of "Attack of the Mushroom People". An honest mistake on my part.

This is about all the info I've got for you, but I did come across a fair number photos other people have taken of In the Tree Tops. It seems to attract passing cyclists a lot, for whatever reason. Here's a selection:

• 365 Project
• Lakewood Observer (in Ohio, believe it or not)
• Portland Oregon Daily Photo
• A Travelers Log
• blipfoto
• Worldisround

Vincent, Waiting for Alice

In SW Portland's Pendleton Park, a giant 8' rabbit statue watches over the playground. This is Vincent, Waiting for Alice. It's yet another Keith Jellum sculpture; at this point I've lost track of how many of those I've covered here. I'm honestly not seeking them out particularly, but I keep running into them everywhere, all the time. In any case, he has a blurb about Vincent, Waiting for Alice on its RACC page:

In Louis Carroll's “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice is lured into her journey by the site of a white rabbit that keeps dashing out of sight, just beyond her reach. At one point in the tale, Alice finally encounters the white rabbit that is late for a party given by the duchess. However, the rabbit has misplaced its gloves and fan and sends Alice to retrieve them. As an adult, I still delight in the playfulness of this story and see it as a metaphor for pursuing one's dreams - even when the dream seems beyond one's reach. May your imaginations run wild in the pursuit of dreams!

Designing a giant Lewis Carroll rabbit is probably harder than it sounds; you have to avoid anything that remotely resembles a character from the Disney version, because lawyers, or any Warner Bros. rabbit character, because other lawyers, and you also have to avoid making a terrifying Donnie Darko rabbit. Ok, a scary Donnie Darko rabbit statue actually sounds kind of awesome, but there would be Concerned Neighborhood Parents if you tried that, especially in this part of town. And then you'd get insufferable indie film dudes making pilgrimages here from across the globe, bored significant others in tow, which is not exactly an improvement over neighborhood kids having a normal fun day at the park.

I don't really have any more material about this particular rabbit, but YouTube is full of random video clips about giant rabbits, Carroll-esque or otherwise, so here's a brief selection.

Dr. McCoy's run-in with a giant Alice in Wonderland rabbit (which is actually a robot), from the original Star Trek episode Shore Leave

Donnie Darko:

The aforementioned Donnie Darko rabbit. Apparently he's named "Frank".

"White Rabbit", the Jefferson Airplane song. (Pssst! It's about drugs! *clutches pearls*)

And, most terrifyingly of all, a bit of vintage Easter ragtime piano from the Lawrence Welk show, because the 70s were a dark and primitive time.

Dwight S. Parr Park

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I was out in deep westside suburbia last weekend running some errands, and I stopped for lunch at a teriyaki place I used to frequent back when I lived out there. I'd forgotten there was a tiny park next to the restaurant; once I noticed that, I figured I ought to take a couple of quick photos and see what I could could come up with about the place. Dwight S. Parr Park (a.k.a. "Dwight S. Parr Woods Natural Area") only comes to 0.63 acres, and the entire park is a stand of old, tall conifer trees, with a short path winding around between them. Taking the trees into account, it's possible the park is actually taller than it is wide.

From what I can tell, the park's named after Dwight S. Parr Jr., former president of Parr Lumber, and son of the company's founder. The missing parts of the story here are a.) How a postage-stamp sized chunk of forest came to be preserved while suburbia sprawled out all around it, and b.) How it came to be named after a lumber and building supply CEO. Spidey sense says there might be an interesting story here, but it happened in the 'burbs so the Oregonian didn't cover it, and Beaverton's Valley Times doesn't seem to have online archives available. Apparently the UO Library in Eugene has the Valley Times on microfilm, but that just seems impossibly inconvenient; I don't even know what year to search for, for one thing. So if you happened to come across this humble blog and can fill in some of the missing parts of the story, feel free to leave a comment below. Thx. Mgmt.

Prowform and Propform

A few photos of Prowform and Propform, a pair of public artworks at the Prescott St. MAX station. Prowform is a construction of tubes and vanes at the north end of the station, designed to sorta-resemble the prow of a ship (allegedly), while Propform is the rusty propeller shape in the nearby "Prescott Biozone". Said biozone is of the region's seemingly endless demonstration projects around trying to mange stormwater in an artsy and upscale sort of way. The city's Bureau of Environmental Services maintains a list of such projects, which describes Prowform and Propform thusly:

Brian Borrello and Valerie Otani, Artists; 2004 These sculptures, inspired by the historical ship building industry on Swan Island, are artful representations of the history of the area, as well as innovative approaches to managing stormwater.

MAX Yellow Line art guide says of the two, "A stainless steel "ship's prow" gathers rainwater and funnels it to a greenspace.", and "A rusted steel propeller sculpture flowers amidst a swirling pattern of grasses."

I'm not sure what the process was for choosing an overall theme for each MAX station. Generally they're supposed to reference the local neighborhood somehow, and they picked the maritime industries of Swan Island for this one. That's a reasonable choice. So far, so good. But they also had to include a positive environmental / educational message about stormwater management, for whatever reason, and figure out how to mash the two ideas together. These two themes don't have any obvious synergies, which may be why we ended up with a pair of nautical-themed downspouts. I'm not sure what else they could have made and still stayed within the prescribed themes, quite honestly.

It's odd that we have an actual genre of stormwater-themed art here. Maybe I'm the only person who thinks that, I dunno. In recent decades the city's Bureau of Environmental Services (the delicately-named sewer agency) has tackled the multi-billion-dollar Big Pipe and other big-ticket capital projects, and the 1% for Art rules apply to them as much as anyone else, so I suppose that makes for a large pot of money to draw from. For that kind of money we could probably have gotten ourselves a giant gold statue of South Park's Mr. Hankey, or maybe some Futurama sewer mutants, but for whatever reason the city prefers art that focuses strictly on the boring rainwater side of their business. Like Prowform and Propform, Eye River near OMSI has a focus on our heroic struggle against the endless, pitiless rains. Memorial Inscription near PSU isn't water-themed itself, but it's part of a mini-plaza that also includes educational displays so college students can learn important truths about the rain, our friend, constant companion, and eternal adversary. Or whatever.

Hooray for Hollywood

I was wandering through the Hollywood District recently, taking photos of a few items on my todo list, which you'll see here sooner or later. Since I was in the area anyway, the public art map on PortlandMaps listed something called Hooray for Hollywood nearby, and it turns out to be a set of stained glass windows at the Hollywood public library. Generally speaking I'm not sure that stained glass is in scope for this little project of mine, but it was on the way, so I figured I'd walk past and take a couple of quick photos. The RACC page for it includes a brief description from Peter Mollica, the artist:

"I think of these windows as colored glass companions to the books. I hope that during visits to the library, patrons will begin to see forms in the windows that remind them of things they have seen or thought about in the rest of their lives."

His page about Hooray for Hollywood has a few more photos of parts I missed. Apparently he's rather well known in the stained glass world. He has a Wikipedia bio (which includes photos of other works of his), and Amazon carries his textbooks teaching stained glass techniques. I didn't know any of this, which just goes to show how little I know about contemporary stained glass, I guess.

Oregon Korean War Memorial, Wilsonville

A few photos of the Oregon Korean War Memorial, in Wilsonville's Town Center Park, one of a small number of Korean War memorials around the state.

You might notice that, along with the US, Oregon, and POW/MIA flags, the memorial flies a United Nations flag. The flag's there because the war was fought under the banner of the United Nations Command, and the same UN organization is technically in charge of forces in South Korea to this day (though in actuality it's only been US and South Korean forces for decades now.) To be honest, a big reason I stopped was to see whether the UN flag was still there or not. Shortly after the memorial opened, there was an ugly episode of right wing hysteria about the UN flag flying at the memorial, with the usual Bircher mutterings about one-world government and so forth. There doesn't seem to have been a repeat of the episode, or at least it hasn't made it into the Oregonian since then.

Arch with Oaks

If you live or work in Portland's western suburbs, you've probably driven the Sunset Highway more times than you can count. And at least one of these times, you were probably stuck in traffic next to the giant steel archway next to the eastbound lanes of Sunset, just east of the Cornell/158th exit you probably should have taken to avoid this traffic snarl. If you were really bored, you might have wondered what the deal is with this arch. It's even possible you're stuck in traffic right now and you're googling the arch on your phone. Anyway, today's your lucky day, other than the whole traffic nightmare obviously. This arch is called Arch with Oaks, and it belongs to the surrounding Cornell Oaks Corporate Center business park. It was created in 1986 by Lee Kelly, a prominent local sculptor since time immemorial. There are a lot more works of his around Portland, mostly closer to downtown; I've covered enough of them here that I've added a 'kelly' tag to the posts to keep track of them all. Despite that I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan, for the most part. I'll make an exception for the arch, though. I actually like this one.

The Smithsonian art inventory page for it (the first link) says it's 30' high. Kelly's website says it's either 38' or 48' feet high depending on which page you're looking at. I'm terrible at guessing heights, but the 38' number feels about right.

A September 11th, 1986 Oregonian article about Arch with Oaks explains that the developers opted for a giant arch sculpture instead of a traditional sign as a sign of "quality", to attract a better sort of tenant to their shiny new business park. Plus it was a gift to the community and a symbol for the entire Sunset Corridor. It probably didn't hurt that the arch cost them $100,000 in 1986 dollars, while an ordinary sign was estimated to run around $130,000. Pretty sure everyone loves to talk about quality and aesthetics when it's saving them $30k, roughly the price of a new BMW 3 series back then.

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It took a while to figure out how to visit Arch with Oaks. It sits astride a creek in a open area in the business park, north of Greenbrier Parkway next to the FOX 12 TV studios. I came by on a weekend morning, parked in the studio's visitor parking lot, and took a lightly used walking trail over to the arch. It turns out there's actually a "Private Property, No Trespassing" sign right next to the arch to discourage people from standing under it, I guess, although I didn't notice any taser-happy security guards lurking around while I was there. Your mileage may vary, obviously. (Oh, and there's apparently a geocache somewhere nearby, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Oh, and not to be pedantic here, but most of the trees near the arch are willows, not oaks. There are a couple of oak trees next to the office building on the opposite side of the creek, but they aren't a prominent presence around the arch, so the name seems just a little misleading. Maybe there were more oak trees here before this part of the office park was built out. Sort of like the old cliche about subdivisions being named after what they replaced ("Aspen Grove", "Pacific Vista", that sort of thing).

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.