Pics: Savannah, GA

I recently dug out and scanned a batch of old travel photos, so here's a slideshow from historic Savannah, GA, taken sometime in the late 1990s. It was a brief visit and I haven't been back since then. (The visit wasn't motivated by Midnight-in-the-Garden mania, I hasten to add; I've never even read the book.) Much of the city is a protected historic district, and Google Street View confirms it hasn't changed a lot in the last 15 years or so.

And yes, there is a photo of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in the slideshow. I only had dialup internet back then and blogs didn't even exist yet, but it's almost like I knew, somehow.

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Shepperds Dell Bridge

As you may have noticed by now, I've been making another pass through my old Columbia Gorge photos and digging out pictures of historic bridges along the old Columbia River Highway. This combines two of this humble blog's longtime OCD-ish preoccupations: The Gorge, and bridges, and the more I think about it the more I'm surprised I hadn't gotten around to this until now. For the benefit of anyone from out of town who's reading this, the Columbia Gorge is where the Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains, forming a wide steep-sided canyon, with a large number of waterfalls where side streams drop into it. It's the only way through the Cascades that doesn't involve a high mountain pass, so it's been a main transportation route as far back as archeological records go in this part of the world, perhaps back to pre-Clovis times. Today, Interstate 84 runs along the Oregon side of the river, and Washington's SR 14 runs along the river's north bank, with busy rail lines parallel to each of these roads. A century ago, the original Columbia River Highway wound its way through the Gorge from Portland out to The Dalles. It was a showpiece of early 20th century civil engineering, as well as one of the region's first paved roads.

The old highway had to cross quite a few streams on its way east, and the state invested more than was strictly necessary in creating attractive bridges to fit their surroundings. The segment east of Hood River, which was built in the early 1920s, features a few bridges credited to Conde McCullough, the famous bridge engineer, and the guy whose designs show up in coffee table books a lot. The earlier western segment of the highway features bridges designed and built by some far more obscure names: Lewis W. Metzger (who designed the bridge at Eagle Creek, among other things), Charles H. Purcell (who created the state's bridge division, and who later was chief engineer constructing San Francisco's Bay Bridge), and Karl P. Billner, who designed many of the Gorge's more famous bridges, like the Benson Footbridge at Multnomah Falls; the Latourell and Bridal Veil Creek bridges; and the subject of today's post, the Shepperds Dell Bridge, which crosses Youngs Creek in Shepperds Dell State Park.

Like many bridges on both sides of the Gorge, the one here is a concrete deck arch bridge. That seems to have been the vogue at the time, and multiple designers went with it independently. So while the Shepperds Dell Bridge is a reasonably common design, it was a cutting edge one at the time, and it's a great example of the style. The setting doesn't hurt either, it must be said. As with a number of other bridges along the old highway, it was surveyed in 1990 for the National Park Service's Historical American Engineering Record. The resulting description goes into a great deal of detail about how the falsework was done, the exact dimensions of joists, later repairs to bridge railing spindles, that sort of thing. It's all there, if you're so inclined. Which is to say that someone who was truly obsessive about the subject could only use this humble blog as a mere starting point. It's almost as if I'm reasonably normal and well-adjusted, relative to this other hypothetical person.

Sheridan Triangle expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to the intersection at SW Naito & Sheridan, probably one of the uglier places I've ever covered here. At this intersection there's an oddly large, roughly porkchop-shaped traffic island. The city typically landscapes traffic islands this size and makes them sort of park-like (for example, Beryl Triangle, 5th & Caruthers, Regents & Alameda, etc.) This spot, though, is just a vast expanse of drab grey concrete, with a few weeds growing up through the cracks. On top of everything else it's just steps away from the noisy canyon of Interstate 405. It's a great candidate for the godawful ugliest, most brutal-looking, least urban-planned-Portlandia-looking space in the city, or at least within casual walking distance. Which is an actual award I just invented. We aren't here for the scenery, though, as ironic as that would be. And I'm not doing this to grab the top Google result for yet another thing nobody on Earth will ever search for, as rewarding as that always is. Instead we're here for an interesting bit of history that will become clear shortly.

Back in 2008, Portland's annual Pedalpalooza bike festival offered a "Worst of Portland" bike ride, and the ride started right here at Naito & Sheridan. The Portland Mercury described it as "Usually Portlanders can't stop jabbering about how awesome their city is for cyclists. This ride, however, showcases the worst and most dangerous routes. Just watch out for broken glass and 18-wheelers." At least one person survived this adventure, and posted an extensive Flickr photoset of the ride. It looks as though from here they headed across the Ross Island Bridge, then down the ramp onto McLoughlin. Then continued on McLoughlin to Holgate, out to the big railyard, over the Lafayette St. footbridge, and back under the railroad tracks on the ooky pedestrian underpass along Powell, and across the tracks again on the Brooklyn St. footbridge. Then back to McLoughlin and the (now replaced) tumbledown old viaduct near OMSI, and then up to a scramble around the Steel Bridge. That was either where the ride ended, or where the photographer stopped taking photos.

A common thread along that strange journey is that they generally followed busy streets designed in the 1920s thru 1940s, when the world was still learning how to design major roads properly. That era's vision of the high-speed traffic artery of the future did not really include bikes or pedestrians or any other ideas beyond getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

So how does this relate to the Naito & Sheridan traffic island? If you look at the overhead shot on the map above, you might notice the grey concrete comes in a few different shades, and you can sort of make out where the traffic flow used to be quite different than it is now. Look for the weedy seam up the middle of the triangle, not quite parallel with Naito. It turns out this was once the southern end of the old Harbor Drive freeway, aka Highway 99W, the 1940s highway that Portland tore out in 1973 to build Waterfront Park (which we're still bragging about, forty years later). At the intersection with Sheridan St, northbound Harbor Drive split off from Naito (then called Front Avenue) and angled downhill to where Riverplace is now, and continued through what's now Waterfront Park up to the Steel Bridge. So this ugly traffic island here is one of the last surviving relics of that long-vanished freeway.

Southbound Harbor Drive traffic actually passed under Front Avenue in a tunnel before merging onto Front at Sheridan. The aforementioned seam marks the edge of where this ramp used to be. For a better idea of what that was like, see this Vintage Portland post with a 1944 photo taken at this very spot, looking north toward the Harbor Drive interchange.

It turns out that the long-abandoned Grant Street Tunnel still exists; it was walled up after Harbor Drive was demolished, but was opened temporarily in 2011-2012 while the Water Bureau ran a new water main through it. If only I'd had the proper connections and known the right strings to pull, I would've loved to put on a hard hat and check it out, take a few photos, write a blog post about it, you know the drill.

The name "Sheridan Triangle" is something I invented just now, by the way I don't usually do that, but I figured it needed a name, and it didn't have one, and this was the obvious candidate. It turns out there are already Sheridan Triangles in Manhattan, Chicago, and Madison, WI, so one might argue that having a place by this name is the mark of a Real City. So, ok, that's kind of a silly argument. In any case, I occasionally think it would be fun to do something with the Sheridan Triangle to brighten it up a little. Maybe paint it, similar to the City Repair street graphics around town. That would be the cheapest option, anyway. A statue or a fountain or something might work here, too, but I'm not sure what it would take to de-uglify the area, short of completely tearing out this stretch of Naito and redoing it, building a cap over I-405, and probably replacing a lot of the buildings nearby. That would be a good start, albeit a very expensive good start.

Anyway, here are a few items from the Oregonian database related to this forgotten and misbegotten spot:

• The original 1935 proposal for what became the Harbor Drive freeway. Presented as getting cars off of traffic-clogged Front Avenue.
• 1941 call for bids for construction of "subway structures" under Front, one at Clay and one here. I'm guessing that term refers to pedestrian tunnels like the one at Arthur St., not the aforementioned Grant St. Tunnel. If so, any pedestrian tunnel that may have existed here is long gone, either sealed up or removed when I-405 went in next door.
• A Portland street map circa 1947, while Front was being widened.
• A 1942 article stoked about shiny new Harbor Drive, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
• A minor construction accident in 1964, in the midst of South Auditorium urban renewal, with photos showing what the area looked like at that point.
• A 1951 photo of a traffic jam on Harbor Drive at the Hawthorne Bridge.

Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge

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As you might already know, a few years ago I sort of stumbled into a bridge project for this humble blog. It started out with the Morrison Bridge, then a couple of others, then I figured I'd go ahead and do all the Willamette River bridges in town. Then I decided to do Columbia River bridges, and somehow ended up doing Clackamas and Sandy River ones too. And now... I guess I'm not really sure what the scope of this thing is anymore. There have been a few trailing items out there, trailing because I haven't been able to get quality photos of them. With the Clackamas River Railroad Bridge, I finally threw up my hands and figured I'd just go with the subpar photos I had, and try to make up for that with a little extra history work. The Lewis & Clark Bridge at Longview is likely to get a similar treatment. I have exactly one blurry photo of it, but it's a long way to go just to take more bridge photos.

And then there's the subject of today's post, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (aka BNSF Bridge 8.8) between Hayden Island and the south bank of the Columbia. The Vancouver Railroad Bridge carries trains the rest of the way, between Hayden Island and the Washington side of the river. It's similar to what the obscure North Portland Harbor Bridge is to the Interstate Bridge. The cool thing about it is that (like its Vancouver sibling) it's a swing span bridge, where part of the bridge pivots out of the way instead of raising when ships need to pass. Ok, I'm probably stretching the word "cool" to the breaking point here, but hey, I kind of specialize in that. Bridge 5.1 on the Willamette is on the same railroad line, and it used to be a swing span too until it was replaced in the 1980s.

I don't imagine this bridge has to open very often; there are a handful of commercial shipping businesses of some sort along the south side of the channel, but most of the channel is just houseboats. Still, I saw at least two people at the bridge's operator booth, possibly for a shift change. So I suppose it's always ready and able to open if the need arises, once in a blue moon. If you're ever doing pub trivia and they ask you to name all the Portland bridges that open, this is the bridge that will win you the contest, assuming you have a good trivia master. The others are, on the Willamette, doing downstream: Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, and BNSF Bridge 5.1. Then on the Columbia, it's the Interstate, the Vancouver Railroad Bridge, and this one here. That's the whole list. Feel free to split your winnings with me, or at least leave a comment and say thanks, if you'd be so kind as to do that.

I've had a todo item for this bridge for quite a while. I drove by the bridge a several times but never could find anywhere to park. I had a couple of photos from the North Portland Harbor Bridge showing it way off in the distance, and I almost just went with those. Then I realized there was a segment of the Marine Drive Trail atop the levee from the Expo Center to the bridge, so I could just ride the MAX Yellow Line to the end and walk the rest of the way. This worked pretty well, and I got a bonus look at that weird bit of trail. It doesn't look like it gets a lot of use. I saw one other person there, and he was practically a speck off in the distance. He kept looking back, I guess to make sure I wasn't going to mug him or something. Then it started raining heavily. It could be my imagination, but the guy way up ahead seemed to relax when he realized I had an umbrella and wasn't just trudging along in a hoodie, like the umbrella was a badge of respectability and non-threatening-ness or something. I'm not sure how that works, to be honest.

Ala Moana Beach Park

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Here's a slideshow from Honolulu's Ala Moana Beach Park, just across the Ala Wai Canal from Waikiki, and across the street from the ginormous Ala Moana Mall. Most of these are from the tip of Magic Island (which isn't really an island), while dodging joggers and people looking for a place to watch that day's Aloha Festivals Floral Parade.

The park has a few WPA Art Deco touches to point out: The Roosevelt Portals at the entrance to the park (named because FDR visited in 1934 to dedicate the park), and the Equestrian Bridge over a stream flowing through the park. Both were designed by the architect Harry Sims Bent. Apparently he was reasonably well known at the time, but I can't find a good online bio of him.

You might notice that one of the photos includes what appears to be a submarine. It really is> a submarine, and one that carries tourists in fact. I tried to get tickets for it once, but they ended up canceling for the day due to murky water after a big storm. I've heard mixed things about how much tropical marine life you actually get to see, since it's touring in busy waters just offshore of a major city. But still, it's a submarine you can ride in without joining the Navy, and Navy subs don't have windows anyway.

Parent I & Young Girl

Here are a few photos of Parent I and Young Girl, a pair of Barbara Hepworth sculptures outside the Hawaii State Library on King St. near the state capitol. I had sort of assumed these sculptures reflected the 1960s tiki-Polynesian look. It's a reasonable guess given the style and location. Hepworth was British, not local, however, and said her work was influenced by the ancient standing stones and dolmens of rural England.

There's another Parent I in Toronto, and a set with both sculptures plus a Parent II in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Somewhere in rural Suffolk, Parent I is paired with Ancestor I and Ancestor II. The series as a whole is known variously as The Family of Man or Nine Figures on a Hill. Apparently PepsiCo's New York headquarters includes a vast 168 acre sculpture garden, and it (of all places) has collected the whole set. I actually just added that place to my todo list, in case I ever find myself in suburban Purchase, NY with some free time to burn. Which I suppose is possible, in theory.

Upright Motive #9

It's time for more art from downtown Honolulu. This is Upright Motive #9 (1979-81) by Henry Moore, in a little plaza at the corner of Bishop St. & King St. If you read this humble blog obsessively and never read anything else about art, you might still be familiar with Moore's work thanks to his Reclining Connected Forms at CityCenter in Las Vegas. Who says going to Vegas isn't educational?

This is the ninth design in Moore's Upright Motive series, and the Honolulu one is one of six copies of Upright Motive #9. There's another at Moore's estate in rural Hertfordshire, UK, now an outdoor museum, and a third one at an outdoor sculpture park in Kansas City. I'm not sure where the other three are.

For the sake of comparison, here are a few other entries in the long-running Upright Motive series, which Moore began in the mid-1950s: One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Twelve. There's also a series with letters instead of numbers, so here are editions B, C, and D, as well.

ocean waves, assateague island

latourell falls, august 2013

instagram waterfalls

spring flowers via instagram

Three Columns

Downtown Honolulu's Fort St. is a pedestrian-only street for much of its length. Some of the businesses along it cater to tourists, but it's right next to the downtown financial district so there are a lot of banks and buisinesses serving downtown office workers. The Bank of Hawaii tower has an entrance on Fort St., and (like the main Bishop St. entrance) there's a big 1970s sculpture parked out in front of the building. This is Three Columns, by the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Its Smithsonian database entry describes it:

Dates:  1970.
Medium:
  1)Grey concrete with anodized steel bands, 
  2)polished bronze, 
  3)stainless steel with pale gold and chrome.
Dimensions:  3 columns. Tallest elements: H. 16 ft.
Description:
  Three columns combining intricate, machine-like surfaces with smooth, polished surfaces.

The entry also notes that, like Kepaakala (Sun Disc) on the other side of the building, it was commissioned by the tower's condominium owners association and not the bank.

I ran an interesting post from 2010 about restoration work being done on Three Columns. Apparently the columns weren't designed for the Hawaiian climate, and took quite a beating under the tropical climate and salt air. (I would guess that back in 1970 all "international" outdoor art was designed for New York City weather, not the tropics.) The columns seem shiny enough now, so I imagine the restoration went well and these count as "after" photos. Though I haven't come across any photos of them from 1970 from comparison, so it's hard to be sure.

Moon's Garden

This ongoing art project leads to some weird activities now and then. I was rifling through the Smithsonian public art database a while back, as one does, looking for new todo items for this humble blog, and saw an entry for Moon's Garden, a Manuel Izquierdo sculpture in downtown Portland. I'd never heard of it, and it wasn't on the usual maps or in the RACC database. Then I noticed it was in the lobby of a generic mid-rise office building at 1121 SW Salmon. When I see something isn't really public public art, I usually just shrug and cross it off the list, but I rather like Izquierdo's work, and I thought I'd see if I could track this one down.

So the legwork for this post involved walking in the building's front door, snapping one quick photo, and leaving. Not that I expected it would be a problem or anything; I just figured it would be tough explaining what I was up to if someone asked. I have enough of a hard time trying to explain it to myself and any remaining Gentle Reader(s) out there. Explaining this little project to a skeptical stranger might not go so smoothly. Anyway, I feel kind of bad that the one photo I got has a little motion blur to it. I like to think it gives the whole thing a more exciting cloak-n-dagger feel. (It doesn't, but I like to think it does.)

In any case, here it is. There's no mistaking it; it looks like a smaller sibling to The Dreamer and Silver Dawn. Call be biased, but an Izquierdo seems like a nice shiny way to brighten up any office (although certainly not the cheapest way of brightening up an office).

Last

When I visited Cleveland back in March 2012 for a NASA event, I spent most of a day wandering around on foot, mostly taking photos of bridges & cool buildings. I wasn't doing a public art project at the time, but I ran across one that was just too large to ignore. So here are a couple of photos of Last, a huge orange abstract Tony Smith sculpture outside a state office building, a few blocks from Public Square & the Terminal Tower complex. The Smithsonian database entry for Last explains:

A jagged, angular arch formed with six hollow, rhomboidal sections, 6 ft. x 7 ft., bolted together. The sculpture is painted bright orange.
...
Each of the six rhomboidal sections weighs nearly six tons. The sections were bolted together from the inside at five meeting points. The legs are anchored in the massive substructure of the office building. There is an eighteen-inch access hole at the top of the sculpture. Although commissioned by the Ohio Building Authority, the Cleveland Fine Arts Committee helped select the sculpture. It was budgeted at $225,000. The title comes from the artist's decision that this sculpture would be the last arch he would make.

Wikipedia's "List of Tony Smith sculptures" and other sources indicate this really was his final work, although a few of his designs of his have since been fabricated posthumously, one as recently as 2005.

So on one hand it's by a famous and widely acclaimed mid-20th Century sculptor, and I'm always a sucker for geometric abstract art like this. On the other hand, it's only scored one measly Yelp review, and it's a pretty negative one at that. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

march weather

Beaverton Interactivator

Every time TriMet opens a new transit line, the agency buys public art for each station on the new line, which eventually results in a new series of blog posts here. They tend to patronize local artists, and seem to gravitate to weird stuff, not always of the highest quality, which makes this an interesting sort of project. I've primarily covered the Green and Yellow Lines so far, but I think TriMet's done this on every MAX line except for the original eastside Blue Line, and they already have a few pieces up for the upcoming Orange line. It turns out they also did this for the WES commuter rail line between Beaverton and Wilsonville. Unlike MAX, there are just a handful of WES stations along the line, and all of the art pieces along it are by the same designers.

The program was guided by an Art Advisory Committee composed of representatives from every station area. The committee selected artists Frank Boyden and Brad Rude to develop artwork for the stations.

Boyden and Rude created a series of five sculptures, called Interactivators, for the five commuter rail stations. Each sculpture features moveable, cast-bronze heads and a vehicle mounted to a stainless-steel table. The heads, which appear in different guises at each of the stations, symbolize a wide range of emotions, traits and conditions. Like the cross section of humanity that may be found on any train car, these sculpted archetypes serve as a metaphor for the human experience. The bronze vehicles each carry a sculpted scene of an animal representative of the station area where they are located.

The figures and vehicles are attached to the tables in a way that allows them to move within "tracks" cut into the surface of the table. The sculptures, in addition to being unique works of art, offer a potential game that can be played by one person or an entire station full of people. There are no winners or losers, but rather opportunities for infinite encounters that can create social connection, offer insight or produce a simple moment of pleasure.

The one shown here is the Beaverton Interactivator, at the WES station at Beaverton Transit Center. I didn't try to play with it, and nobody else at the station seemed inclined to give it a whirl just then either. The Oregonian's transportation reporter thought they were kind of creepy, and included close up photos to illustrate his point. He may have a valid argument there, though I don't really see a Middle Earth connection. If anything it's more of a Tim Burton look, which may or may not be a good thing.

I only managed one photo of the Interactivator before the train arrived. I'd never ridden WES before, because it goes somewhere I don't need to go, and only at times I don't need to go there, so I had to make a special trip just to ride it to Wilsonville and back. I've included a couple of bonus photos of the train too, for the probable majority of you who haven't ridden it either. It was actually a nice ride, certainly quieter and roomier than MAX and not crowded at all, and the run is reasonably scenic once you're out of the industrial part of Beaverton. If you're in the OR 217 corridor, and need to get somewhere during rush hour, and can tolerate a commute option that isn't available at night, or on weekends, or in the middle of the day, I would happily and unreservedly recommend the WES train, versus slogging along in traffic on 217, or trying to bike safely through suburbia, or waiting for the rumored Tigard-Tualatin MAX line to arrive in the mid-2020s.

Hawaiian Netmender - Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena

Here's another blog post based around a couple of photos I took from a Honolulu city bus. I was riding back from downtown to my hotel, and we were at a traffic light at the busy intersection of King St. & Kapiolani Boulevard. (This is about a block past where I took my from-the-bus photos of Skygate, by the way.) The intersection forms a little triangle of land in the middle, and the triangle is landscaped as a sort of rock grotto with a statue and fountain. This is Hawaiian Netmender - Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena, which the city's Office of Culture and the Arts page describes thusly:

A Sculpture by Charles Watson. Seated figure of a male with a net draped across his outstretched legs. His arms extend over the net, as he is in the act of mending it. He holds a tool in his proper right hand. The figure sits on a natural boulder which is placed in a man-made pool. There are waterfalls behind the figure as part of a landscaped fountain. Located at the triangle park at King Street and Kapiolani Boulevard.

Watson (a local Hawaii sculptor) also created Tree, outside the Foster Botanical Garden, and several other public artworks around the city. Ka Mea Ku`i `Upena is about 15 years newer than Tree, and there's no obvious resemblance between the two. If I hadn't known, I wouldn't have guessed the connection.

The statue and surrounding park merited a stop on the state government's "Capitol District Public Art & Historic Places Walking Tour". It's kind of an odd combo, featuring several pivotal locations in Hawaiian history alongside (often fairly mundane) public art generally dating to the 1960s and 1970s. Although the more I think about it, that's pretty much exactly the kind of walking tour you'd come up with by stringing a bunch of my blog posts together. So it's probably bad mojo to snark about their guide too much.

Klickitat River Bridges, Lyle WA

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I was rifling through old Columbia Gorge photos recently and found the above one, taken from Rowena Crest in the eastern Gorge, showing a pair of bridges on the Washington side of the river. I didn't initially know anything about them, and had to consult the interwebs. The map says these are bridges over the mouth of the Klickitat River, where it flows into the Columbia just west of Lyle, WA. The nearer of the two carries the Burlington Northern rail line and dates to 1908, wile the further one carries Washington highway SR 14 and dates to 1933. Both of them look a lot like bridges along the old highway on the Oregon side, but as far as I know they weren't designed or built by the same people; the concrete deck arch was just a very popular bridge design at the time.

Just west of the river (the left side of the photo) is the trailhead for the Klickitat River Trail, a 31-mile rails-to-trails conversion that follows the river upstream, then continues into a remote side canyon. The original rail line ran all the way to Goldendale; I'm not sure if they plan to ever extend the trail that far, though. I don't know that much about the trail, to be honest, and I haven't gotten around to trying it yet. Like most things, it's on the great big todo list.

Bridal Veil Creek Bridge

The bridges along the old Columbia River Highway in the Gorge are a mixed bag. Some are showpieces of early 20th Century civil engineering and design, others you barely notice. The Bridal Veil Creek Bridge is one of the more minor entries, one I hadn't paid any attention to before I decided Gorge bridges were a new blog project. It's not very big, for one thing. It crosses Bridal Veil Creek immediately above the falls, like the bridge on Ruckel Creek, so it doesn't have a large chasm to span like the Shepperds Dell and Latourell Creek bridges. Like most of the bridges along the Multnomah County segment of the highway, it's a Karl Billner design, and the diagonal concrete braces are sort of reminiscent of his much larger design at Latourell Creek, if you squint. So it's got that going for it, though I'm not sure I'd have clued in on the resemblance if I didn't already know the same person designed them. A 1915 article by Billner about various bridges he'd designed throughout the Gorge mostly focuses on the Latourell Creek Bridge, but mentions the one here in passing; it seems the Bridal Veil bridge needed to clear 3 log flumes as well as the creek, which contributed to it having a different and more utilitarian design.

Unlike many of the old highway's bridges, this one was built without sidewalks for some reason, so I haven't walked across it. It also has a very low railing, and the falls drop away immediately to one side of the bridge, so it would be really easy for rubbernecking tourists or overeager photographers to slip and take the 2 second grand tour. (I learned this phrase at the Grand Canyon, where a ranger called it the twelve second grand tour.) So there's at least one sign sternly warning pedestrians away from the bridge and the area around it.

The important point about all that is that I had a tough time getting a decent photo of the bridge, since the usual "on" and "next to" shots were out of the question, or at least forbidden by fierce official signs and what little common sense I have. The Library of Congress has a couple of historic photos of the bridge from various angles. Those and one of the Bridgehunter photos indicate there's a spot just below the bridge that gives a better look at it than you get at the base of the falls (which is where I took the photos here). I'm not sure how you'd get there, and you'd probably be standing with your back to a steep cliff right behind you. I know I've already taken this bridge project a bit far, but I'm not quite that dedicated. I could be wrong about that, maybe there's a secret safe spot for taking bridge photos if you know where to find it. If such a spot exists, Google isn't saying.

The Oregonian database doesn't have much to say about this little bridge, which I guess is understandable. Multnomah County awarded a pair of bridge-building contracts in March 1914, almost exactly a century ago, with a requirement to have them all completed by August 1st. One of the two covered the Bridal Veil bridge, along with the highway bridge on Multnomah Creek and viaducts on either side of Multnomah Falls, for a total of $40,050, which is around $940,000 in today's money. So maybe $250,000 in contemporary dollars for this bridge. I'm no bridge engineer, but that at least sounds like the right order of magnitude if you were building an equivalent new bridge at the same spot today.

Somewhere upstream of the bridge is Upper Bridal Veil Falls, a large waterfall with no official trail to it for some reason. They can be reached with some difficulty now, and there's a proposal to build a 2.5 mile loop trail that takes in Middle Bridal Veil Falls as well. The proposed trail would head under the bridge and then upstream along the creek. If they build it someday -- and I'm speaking out of venal self-interest here -- I'd get at least two new waterfall blog posts out of it, and I could update this post with better photos. I'm not sure what's involved in prodding the Powers That Be into action, but I'd be happy to sign the petition, if there's a petition circulating out there somewhere.

Untitled Landscape

When I was wandering around Boston a while ago, I ran across Untitled Landscape by David von Schlegell, at the Harbor Towers condo complex on a swanky part of the city's waterfront, previously a district of very old docks and warehouses. The street address, "85 East India Row" conjures images of clipper ships full of tea and spices and whatnot. Concrete high rise towers and a stainless steel abstract sculpture are not what you'd expect to find at such an address.

Untitled Landscape has been catalogued twice in the Smithsonian public art database, and is described variously as "Four rectangular units of steel bent to form obtuse angles." and "Four pieces of metal in the shape of obtuse angles, set in a square facing each other."

The sculpture dates to 1972 when the towers were built; supposedly it's often mistaken for an array of solar panels, I suppose by people who have no idea what a real solar panel looks like. Instead, I see it as showing what it's like being a mouse lost in Starbucks, dwarfed by rows of enormous shiny MacBooks. Yet it was created in 1972, the year Steve Jobs graduated high school. So how could Mr. von Schlegell have created these? Was he helped by aliens, like in all those Von Daniken books? Or could he have known (or been) a time traveller from the early 21st century? And if that's the case, why MacBooks, specifically, and not iPads or something a little more futuristic? What was he trying to tell us? But wait, I'm writing about them on a MacBook right now... what could it all mean? I'm so confused...