Healy Heights Park

Today's adventure takes us to little Healy Heights Park, in the West Hills a bit south and east of Council Crest. I only have one photo of the park; this blog is a peculiar sort of hobby, and I was actually looking for the tiny sorta-parks at Carl Place & Patrick Place. This actual park was on the way, so I figured I'd take a photo and get an extra blog post out of the excursion.

I'd actually tracked the park down once before, several years ago. I saw it on a map and assumed there would be a nice view from here, it being high in the West Hills and all. There was no view at all, though, nor anything else that looked particularly photogenic. I suppose that's how the land ended up as a park: It's not "wasting" valuable view property, and it doesn't have a view to attract riffraff photographers and other tourists from outside the neighborhood. Instead it's just your standard pleasant neighborhood park with a playground, sports fields, a drinking fountain, that's about it. If you don't live nearby, there's no particular reason to go seek it out. On top of everything else, there are also stern "No Parking" signs forbidding visitors to park anywhere nearby. I'd be kind of leery of using the ball fields anyway; I'd hate to break some rich person's window with a foul ball. There would be lawyers involved, because there are always lawyers involved, and you'd probably have to fly a bunch of stained glass artisans out from Venice to reconstruct it, obviously at your expense. In any case, I sort of shrugged and crossed it off the places I was interested in. That I'm doing a post about it now suggests that I'm either running out of material, or I've dropped my standards a bit, or both.

The land for the park was purchased, landscaped, and then donated to the city in 1951 by what was essentially the local HOA, for a playground, initially restricted to kids under high school age. Maybe that was intended to exclude the "juvenile delinquents" everyone was so paranoid about back then, although the article doesn't explicitly say so.

All snark aside, though, I'd rather have rich people living up in the hills next to the city and using public parks along with everyone else, rather than clustered in gated communities in a distant exurb, viewing the city with raw, boundless malice, which is what you get in most cities.

Royal Rosarian

Here's a slideshow of the Royal Rosarian statue at the Rose Garden. The RACC description:

The “Royal Rosarian” installed in the International Rose Test Garden is a remarkably lifelike sculpture created by Oregon artist Bill Bane, and was commissioned by the Royal Rosarians and the Royal Rosarian Foundation to mark the organization’s 100th year. Dedicated to community service, the Royal Rosarians are a nonprofit civic group that also serves, by mayoral proclamation, as official Ambassadors of Goodwill for the City of Portland and the Portland Rose Festival.

Essentially the Royal Rosarians are local civic boosters in funny hats. It was an all-male organization until quite recently, because letting women wear silly hats ruins everything, somehow. I'm not entirely clear on why that is. It could be worse, though. The civic boosters in Grants Pass, OR are "Cavemen", and they're responsible for a giant statue of a Neanderthal at the entrance to town, and they have to march in parades wearing pelts or loincloths or something. The Rosarians are afforded a little more dignity than that, at least.

The statue only dates to 2011, and was donated by the aforementioned Rosarians in honor of their upcoming centennial in 2012. The artist also created the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank Esplanade, and the Vic Atiyeh statue at the Portland airport's international concourse. I haven't seen any mention of exactly who is depicted here, which old white dude was selected as the living embodiment of pure Rosarian-ness. I'm not sure it matters, but it would be an interesting bit of trivia, I suppose.

It would be a better story if the Rosarians were not what they seem. Maybe a crack paramilitary organization, cleverly disguised by archaic silly outfits, like the Swiss Guards at the Vatican. (You do know the Swiss Guards have machine guns concealed in those baggy medieval outfits, right?) Or maybe they're some sort of mystical order, with secret rituals and handshakes and so forth. And they control the weather and make it rain all the time on behalf of their precious roses. Maybe there's a dimensional portal somewhere in the garden and they serve some 11-dimensional tentacled horror-beast. Maybe they themselves are 11-dimensional tentacled horror-beasts, cleverly concealed as goofy civic boosters. I'm not saying they are, just that you can't prove they aren't.

Lovejoy Park Shelter

I've done quite a few posts about Lovejoy Fountain over the years this blog's been going. It's in my neighborhood, and I'm kind of fond of it. Besides the fountain itself, the park's also home to a large wooden shelter structure, on the west end of the park, "upstream" of the fountain. The shelter was part of the original park design, and it was designed by a duo of prominent architects, Charles Moore & William Turnbull. So I figured it merited a post of its own.

A Metropolis Magazine article about Moore, "Why Charles Moore (Still) Matters", mentions the shelter project briefly:

“Who threw this tantrum?” That was the reaction—according to Halprin—of a number of Moore’s Yale architectural colleagues when they saw his Lovejoy Fountain Shelter (1966), perched atop the concrete waterfall designed by Moore, Halprin and Turnbull. The whole Portland Open Space Sequence, of which Lovejoy is a part, recalls the natural forms of the nearby High Sierra, with sprays, erosion channels, tumbled rocks, and weirs. Made of a series of board-formed concrete slabs, the fountain works as well with water as without. The pavilion serves as both mountaintop and protection, its expressive hillocks made with a latticework of straight wooden members. One explores the fountain like a natural discovery, climbing down, scaling up, losing one’s sense of oneself in the city. Moore had been interested in water as an element of architecture since his student days; that was, in fact, the topic of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton. In period photographs, one can see the fountain and the shelter against the geometric, repetitive backdrop of nearby SOM towers. “Looking at the photograph of that form, now 50 years old, I thought: This is what people are doing with the computer now,” Lyndon says. “How amazing is the juxtaposition again with the corporate modernism in the background. The latter was the norm of the time.” Before Frank Gehry (with whom Moore and his partners competed for the Beverly Hills Civic Center) lofted an angled chain-link fence in the air at his own famous house, Moore was working with the everyday to make something more monumental, memorable, and strange.

I'd just like to point out here, for the sake of geographical accuracy, that the Sierra Nevada mountains are nowhere near Portland as the article claims. It's true the Halprin designs were inspired by the Sierras, though. If they were being built today, the architects would have the decency to fudge and say they were inspired by the Cascade mountains, which are nearby. But no matter. The "who threw this tantrum?" reaction didn't entirely die down after 1966. A local architecture critic, writing about the Keller and Lovejoy fountains, recently referred to the shelter as "startlingly ugly". I'm not sure I agree; it seems like the fountain, and the park as a whole would look strangely unbalanced without the structure there.

I imagine the city would secretly love to remove the shelter, because homeless people often sleep under it to avoid the rain, which of course is the worst thing imaginable. But they can't tear it out, because it's part of the park design, and so is on the National Register of Historic Places as of 2013. So instead they're obligated to preserve and maintain it, which presents another problem. The shelter is a striking design but not necessarily built to last for decades in this climate. It slowly decayed for years, and its crazy-angled roof began to sag, and it became a case study in an article titled "When a Master Work Fails" (i.e. physically, not aesthetically)). Money arrived with the city's renewed interest in this part of town, and it finally underwent a major renovation that completed in spring 2014.

Northgate Park

I was in North Portland recently taking photos of Portsmouth Cut bridges, and I needed a couple of places to park. For the Fessenden St. and Columbia Boulevard bridges, I figured I'd park at nearby Northgate Park and walk from there. To be honest I'd never actually heard of the place before. It's your basic neighborhood park with ball fields and play equipment, and an elementary school next door. As I've said umpteen times now, parks like this typically aren't that interesting, blogwise, and I don't actively seek them out. If I happen to be at one anyway, though, I'll take a couple of photos and see what I can dredge up about the place on the interwebs. (Incidentally, for the bridges at Willamette Boulevard & Lombard St., I parked at the adjacent Fred Meyer store, and bought a tomato plant by way of thanks for letting me use their parking lot.)

Northgate Park's main point of interest is the school building next door, which you can see in the background in a couple of the photos. This is the former Clarendon Elementary School, which was built in 1970, and closed in 2007 in one of the Portland school district's endless reorganization efforts. I didn't pay much attention to the school until I started putting this post together and realized how unusual it looks from above. The school is the weird cluster of hexagons on the right side of the above map. The unusual design isn't just an architectural whim; it embodies circa-1970 cutting-edge thinking about how schools should work, namely the "open-plan classroom" concept.

A recent historic building assessment done for the school district determined it's a significant building, but isn't yet eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as it's not 50 years old quite yet. (As a fellow product of the year 1970, I'd just like to point out that it's going to be an exceedingly long time before anything from that year turns 50.) The report describes the school building at length; here are a couple of excerpts that explain why it is the way it is:

The hexagonal form facilitated the design of the school following an “open classroom” concept without corridors or interior walls to separate classrooms from one another. Beyond the entry lobby, the main gathering spaces are contained within the three central pods. The most prominent of these spaces is the central pod which features a large concrete column with several arches that branch out to meet individual glulaminated ridge beams which in turn support the hexagonal pitched roof. A platform with a safety railing, accessed via a stair, encircles the concrete column. Several steps descend from the platform to the base of the concrete column. Globe lights, suspended from the ceiling, supplement the illumination provided by the glazing in the cupola Between the northernmost common area pod is a glass enclosed courtyard that features some original concrete playground forms as well vegetation. Immediately to the north of this courtyard is a large multi-purpose area/gymnasium that features exposed concrete masonry unit walls.
...
Unlike the earlier “finger plan” schools constructed during the post-war period in Portland (See Ogata 2008), the Clarendon Elementary School was based upon the hexagon as the organizational unit for each classroom and common space in the building. Each hexagon or “pod” could house up to 90 students in an open classroom environment – an experimental shift in educational focus. When opened, Clarendon “rejected grades in favor of performance groupings” (PPS Staff Report 1971: 2). The advantage of this educational approach was to group students together regardless of age into groups with similar levels of understanding. Daily evaluations were made to determine whether students should shift groups depending upon their achievement (PPS Staff Report 1971: 2).

The design of the school was tailored to this method of teaching. The lack of walls, doors, and corridors, wide open classroom space, and use of bright colors such as oranges and yellows, smaller scale cabinets and sinks, as well as formed concrete columns that resembled tree trunks created unique interior experiences. The independence of each pod was further enhanced by having direct access to the exterior and neighboring Northgate Park thus minimizing potential distractions during recesses and increasing fire safety.

I can see why the district picked this school to close, instead of one of a more traditional design. The philosophy behind it is essentially incompatible with contemporary thinking on education, which focuses on rote memorization and endless high-stakes standardized tests to the exclusion of all else. I don't know whether 70s-style unstructured free-form learning was necessarily "better", but it was probably less soul-crushing. My own elementary school, in Portland's western suburbs, was built in a sort of pod design (albeit without the hexagons and cool tree trunk columns), but it had mostly reverted to a more traditional teaching style, and the floor-to-ceiling movable classroom dividers almost always stayed closed. Anyway, here are a couple of pro articles and con articles about this style of education, if you want to read more about it.

I was about to suggest the old school would make a great McMenamins, or maybe fun offices for a tech startup, but the Portland school district already has plans for the building. As of March 2014, the plan is to reopen the school as a "regional early learner center", as part of the district's expanding pre-kindergarten program.

Portland's Favorite Tree

Recently I wrote about "Freda's Tree", the City Repair intersection project at NE 56th & Stanton, which is sort of a memorial to a beloved, long-vanished neighborhood chestnut tree. During the 1987 Rose Festival, the tree was a finalist in a "Portland's Favorite Tree" contest put on by the Oregonian, but it lost out to a redwood tree (of all things) in the West Hills, near 860 SW Vista Avenue. The contest hasn't been held since, so presumably the redwood tree is still our fair city's reigning favorite tree, in the same way that the USA is the reigning Olympic rugby champion since the sport hasn't been included since 1924.

Long story short, I went to go look for Portland's favorite tree, and here it is. I think. There are actually several redwood trees nearby; I'm assuming the largest and most imposing of them is our favorite. The late 80s were not exactly an era of subtlety and aesthetic restraint, so I'm guessing people went with the biggest tree they could find and automatically called it the best. At least it's a redwood tree, so we can blame the whole thing on Californians.

Couch Park Mosaics

Today's installment in the ongoing Portland public art project is a fairly obscure one. Back in 2012 I did a post about NW Portland's Couch Park, including a bit about the groovy 70's abstract sculpture at the east end of the park. That's the only art the RACC database lists at Couch Park, but later I noticed the Smithsonian art inventory lists a couple of others, so I went back to find them. The Couch Park Mosaics are a collection of glass mosaics on a pair of large planters at the west end of the park, near the Multnomah Learning Center. They date to 1976-77, which is about the era I would have guessed just looking at them. Some details, from the database entry:

Artist:
Grimm, Jere, 1933- , sculptor.
Inscription:
(On third tile from the left on Hoyt Street side, bottom:) THESE MOSAICS WERE/MADE BY MANY/NORTHWEST/PORTLAND/PEOPLE FOR THE/ENJOYMENT OF ALL/WHO USE THIS PARK
Description:
Mosaics of blue, green, yellow, black and brown are inlayed on two sides of two planters. Trees and shrubs are planted in the planters.
Remarks:
Commissioned by the Portland Development Commission and funded through its Housing and Community Development Program. This work was installed as part of a park improvement program initiated by the Northwest District Association. Schoolchildren and other community residents created the tiles under the direction of Jere Grimm, Artist-in-Residence and Couch Park Art Coordinator. IAS files include pertinent memoranda and correspondence from the Development Commission.

I also would have guessed, without ever reading the entry, that the mosaics had been created with the help of semi-skilled neighborhood hippies of all ages, and the work parties were far out, man. The one odd bit here is that the Portland Development Commission owned the mosaic. Much of the Smithsonian's data for the Portland area comes from a 1993 survey, if you can believe that, so I don't know if they still own it or not. If so, it would explain why there's no RACC listing for it, since it's not theirs to keep track of.

Relying on a 1993 survey is the big limitation of the Smithsonian database. It's great for things that date to before 1993 and still exist but have fallen into obscurity, like the mosaics here, the little Lee Kelly sculpture at NE 72nd & Fremont, and the Michele Russo sculpture on Pettygrove near Chapman School. Entries for art that arrived after 1993 are few and far between, though; I think I've seen a few, but I could be wrong and there just aren't any. Likewise a fair number of database entries are out of date. Ownership may have changed, or an artwork may have been moved from its 1993 location (like just about everything along the Transit Mall), and some have been lost entirely. Case in point, the database lists an additional artwork here in Couch Park, a shelter structure that doesn't seem to exist anymore. It also dated to 1976, and was described as "Two four-sided carved supports for a trellis structure. Each side of the poles is divided into eight rectangular sections. The top section has carved masks on each of the four sides of each pole; a total of eight masks. Below each mask are rectangles painted in colors to coordinate with the masks.", and its condition was given as "Treatment urgent". Based on that description, I don't think it refers the park's play structure, which also dated to 1976, and was condemned as structurally unsound in April of this year. If it's the same structure, it's gone now, or will be soon. If it was a different structure, I imagine the city removed it for similar reasons sometime in the last 20 years. It's the eventual fate of all untreated wood structures in this climate. There's probably a great environmental lesson for kids here. Circle of life, and all that.

Walker Park, Honolulu

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Today's adventure takes us to tiny Walker Park, near the waterfront at the edge of downtown Honolulu, at the intersection of Queen St. & Fort St. It's a small plaza built around a fountain, with an abstract sculpture at its center. There's also an ornate gate, and an old cannon. The caption to a wallyg Flickr photo of the park explains that the park dates to 1951, and is a bit of land left over after widening & realignment of Nimitz Highway & Queen St. It's dedicated to the memory of H. Alexander Walker Sr., longtime president and chairman of American Factors, Inc. (later Amfac), a Hawaiian sugar company and one of the "Big Five" corporations that essentially controlled the state during the sugar cane era.

The park's Walker Fountain dates to 1972. The central sculpture Puna (by Hawaii sculptor Sean Browne) was added in 1991, in memory of Una Craig Walker, wife of the park's namesake. (I'd rather think of them as co-namesakes of the park, but apparently that's not how things worked back in 1951.) The caption to a second photo explains the wrought iron gate. It stood in front of American Factors company headquarters from 1902 to 1972, when it was moved here. I didn't notice this at the time, but apparently the park also has a few blocks remaining from the original Liberty House department store, which once stood nearby and was razed in 1979.

I'm not sure what the story is with the park's cannon. A blog post I ran across speculates that it might be from the old Honolulu Fort, which was located here from 1818-1857 (and was the site of a short-lived French invasion in 1849). If it's not an original cannon, it's probably at least a nod to that period of history.

A historic inventory from the Hawaii Culture & Arts District (a local nonprofit) describes the history of the old fort:

Description: Fort Street takes its name from a one-time defensive work located at the present intersection of Queen Street and Fort Street. The Honolulu Fort originated with the Russian-American Company blockhouse. Directed by the German adventurer Georg Schaffer (1779-1836), they built their blockhouse near the harbor, probably against the ancient heiau of Pakaka and close to the king’s palace. Pakaka was an important sacred site for Ku, the Hawaiian war-god and a place of great symbolic and ritual importance to the victorious King Kamehameha. Hearing about this development, Kamehameha I, the king, ordered his advisor Kalinimoku to take a contingent of Hawaiian soldiers to Honolulu and press the Russians to leave. Threatened by a large number of Hawaiians, the Russians quickly abandoned their blockhouse and sailed for Kauai, where they had earlier attempted to start a trading post and soon built another fort. Kamehameha I appropriated the fort and it protected Honolulu harbor and also housed a number of administrative functions, including many years of service as Honolulu’s prison. Created first in 1951 as a product of the widening of Nimitz Highway by the city of Honolulu, Walker Park received new attention in the aftermath of the construction of the Amfac Financial Center in 1968-71. At that time the company, through its president, Henry A. Walker, Jr., contributed to the enhancement of the earlier park through the donation of the paved walkway, benches, sculpture and the wrought and the historic cast and wrought iron sign and gateway that serves as a centerpiece of the park.

Anecdote: The The first capital punishment carried out at the fort was the hanging of Chief Kamanawa (c.1785-1840) and his accomplice Lonoapuakau on October 20, 1840. The Hawaiian Court found him guilty of poisoning his wife Kamokuiki, carried out Kamanawa to avoid a charge of adultery. Kamanawa was the grandson of one of Kamehameha I’s principal advisors, Kameeiamoku, and the grandfather of David Kalakaua, later King Kalakaua. The execution took place on the scaffold set up just inside the fort’s main gate. It attracted 10,000 viewers, all of whom watched solemnly as the Governor carried out the sentence.

Honolulu is in the early stages of building a light rail transit system, which will eventually run on elevated tracks somewhere near Walker Park. Several lawsuits were filed attempting to stop the project; in one of the cases, the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed an amicus curiae asserting that the raised trackway would block important views from the park and a few other locations, and obstruct views of the historic Aloha Tower. The city's own 2008 evaluation of the park in preparation for the light rail project had concluded that it was technically eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but really wasn't all that significant of a place in itself. As of May 2014 the city has fended off the various lawsuits, and construction is proceeding, with completion expected in 2019.

Columbus Road Bridge, Cleveland

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A couple of years ago, I was in Cleveland for a weekend and ended up with a bunch of bridge photos, which slowly trickled out in a long series of blog posts. I thought I was done with those, but it turned out I had a so-so photo of one more bridge, so obviously another blog post was in order. The Columbus Road Bridge isn't the main bridge in the photo above, but the one in the background that you see straight on. It crosses the Cuyahoga at the apex of a bend in the river, right next to the Cleveland Union Terminal bridge, which carries the Rapid Red Line. As I said, the photo isn't that great, but it's still a sort of collector's item. I didn't get close enough to the bridge to notice this, but apparently it was in an advanced state of disrepair, and the county decided to replace it. It sounds like the bridge approaches were kept and renovated, but the lift span itself was demolished and replaced. It's not clear whether this means they also replaced the towers and counterweights, or just the lift span, but in any case the bridge closed for demolition work last May, and the shiny new span was floated down the river and installed this July, just a couple of weeks ago.

A history page notes that the then-current bridge was the fifth at this location. The first was nearly destroyed by angry westside protesters, who feared the new bridge would divert commerce away from the original Center St. Bridge and thus away from the Ohio City area. As the story goes, westside residents boycotted the new bridge, and the city of Cleveland retaliated by demolishing its half of the Center St. Bridge, leaving the Columbus one as literally the only bridge in town. An angry mob showed up to destroy the Columbus bridge, chanting "Two bridges or none", but they were stopped by the mayor of Cleveland and a group of armed militiamen.

An 1857 replacement for the original bridge quickly rotted and collapsed in 1863. An 1870 replacement lasted to 1894, when it was replaced with a double swing span bridge. In this arrangement, the bridge separated in the middle, and the two halves swung off to the side in opposite directions. This lasted until 1939, when it was replaced with a lift span bridge (i.e the one pictured above) as part of a larger project to improve navigation on the river. The lift span lasted much longer than its predecessors, but was poorly maintained beginning in the 1980s, and decayed to a point where it was cheaper to replace it than to attempt repairing it. The 2014 bridge is scheduled to open in October; it's a lift span and is basically similar to its predecessor, but features 5' wide bike lanes as this is apparently a major bike commuting route.

This is actually the second Cleveland bridge that's been replaced since I was there, the other being the Innerbelt Bridge. I'm kind of thinking I may need to go back soon just to keep this blog up to date. By which I mean, enjoy some beer and pierogies, hit the West Side Market again, and keep this blog up to date.

Unity Circle

Today's Portland painted intersection is "Unity Circle", at NE Emerson & Haight, one block east of Jefferson High School. A May 2014 Skanner article describes the project:

The Unity Circle first came into being in 2012, the vision of artist Kymberly Jeka. Living near the Haight and Emerson intersection, Jeka knew it marked the spot where DeAndre Clark, 25, had been shot and killed in 2011. And she knew dozens of students travel that route every day, on foot and in school buses. So she dreamed up the street painting as a way to build community and to bring beauty and hope to the intersection.

This year's City Repair Village Builder guide explains the design:

Te thriving diversity of the Humboldt neighborhood is the inspiration for the painting. The design represents a cohesive geodesic structure with multi-colored triangular pieces joining together harmoniously.

The Facebook page for this year's repainting (May 31st - June 1st) includes a few photos of the event.

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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Next up, a photoset of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall, which extends west from the Public Garden through the Back Bay neighborhood. I wandered along the central mall for a while, taking photos of the over-the-top houses and churches on either side. I'm not sure what we're looking at here; I found a page documenting every building along the avenue, but I haven't gone through to figure out which ones I have photos of. That part is left as an exercise for the reader (he said lazily/hopefully).

It was a very hot day, and eventually I wandered off to find a Starbucks for an iced coffee like a good West Coast tourist, and fortunately there was one a couple of blocks south(ish) on swanky Newbury Street, and ended up walking along over there instead. I feel compelled to explain that I normally avoid Starbucks, but I wasn't sure whether there was iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts (which is essentially the competing coffee behemoth in New England), and I needed a cold but very caffeinated beverage right then thanks to jet lag.

I had a theory -- and I think I mentioned it in a previous Boston post -- that perhaps Commonwealth Avenue was an inspiration for Portland's Park Blocks, since Portland was founded by a bunch of New Englanders, and the city itself would have been named "Boston" if a coin flip had gone the other way. The dates don't bear this theory out though. The South Park Blocks were dedicated in 1852, while Commonwealth Avenue was designed in 1856, and long tree-lined parks like this were simply the vogue at the time, popular among major cities as well as muddy little pioneer towns with big dreams. An architecture guide to the city calls it the "French Boulevard style". 1856 seems like a surprisingly recent date for central Boston, until you remember that the whole Back Bay area was an actual bay until it was filled in during the 1850s. As a West Coast tourist, knowing that makes me worry the ground here will basically liquefy if there's ever an earthquake, like what happened to SF's Marina District back in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Apparently Boston doesn't get earthquakes, though. At least as far as they know.

Brewer Fountain, Boston Common

Couple of photos of the Brewer Fountain in Boston Common, an ornate 19th century concoction that was recently restored to working order. There was a little stand next to it encouraging people to slow down and sit and read one of the free books, and more than a few people had taken them up on the offer. I'm not sure that would work in Portland. Maybe if you stocked it with graphic novels, so long as they're the cool kind, whatever that is.

Wikipedia says there are at least sixteen other copies of this fountain around the world, including ones in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. I occasionally go on about doing a project around visiting every copy of something or other. The Fremiet Joan of Arc would involve a lot of traveling around France, plus trips to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which would be ok. The itinerary for The Ideal Scout would spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering around rural Pennsylvania, which is less of a welcome prospect. Visiting the Brewer Fountain's siblings would be one of the better trips; a page about another copy in Tacna, Peru lists additional known copies in Australia, Chile, Quebec City, Liverpool, four around France, two in Lisbon, and others in Geneva and Valencia. So that sounds like it would be ok, so far as silly projects go.

This fountain dates back to a time when all fountains were expected to come encrusted with mythological characters; cherubs, naiads, mermen, and whatnot. I was going to propose a glib theory that this was because running water was a rare and precious novelty back then, and fountains got the mythology treatment because they were a very big deal. I'm not sure this checks out though. The fountain went live in 1868, and Boston's first waterworks dates all the way back to 1652, over two centuries earlier, so I'm not sure the chronology lines up on this idea. It's also possible this mythological stuff was simply the fashion for a while, and eventually people tired of it and went on to do something else instead.

Cultural Totem

A few photos of Cultural Totem, a public art piece at NE 14th & Alberta, created by artists Roslyn Hill and Lillian Pitt (who also co-created Salmon Cycle Marker at PSU. The description from its RACC page:

As artists, one Native American and one African American, we have made this contemporary totem to reflect our cultural and heritage stories, recognizing our many similarities.

Portland Public Art gave it a meh back in 2006, calling it "largely forgotten" and saying it "serves as a beginning, I guess".

Some years ago the city blocked 14th at Alberta as a traffic control measure, creating a sort of mini-plaza where the street dead-ends. There are a few trees here, and I took a couple of photos since it's the closest thing Alberta has to actual greenspace along the street. Maybe I only noticed this because it was a hot day, but Alberta doesn't have a lot of shady trees, and (unlike the Pearl District) the city didn't put in any sidewalk planters as the area gentrified. Maybe trees have gone out of fashion temporarily in the urban design world, I dunno.

MLK Gateway Plaza

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Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE Grand Ave. & Hancock St, the point where two-way MLK splits into southbound MLK and northbound Grand Avenue. The traffic shift creates a couple of awkward (and unbuildable) triangles of land, which the city's tried to do various things with over the years. Most recently, it's been transformed into something the city calls the "Gateway and Heritage Markers Project" The skinny south corner of the main triangle is landscaped with some sort of tufted grass, I think to discourage people from walking through it. The triangle's divided by a curved metal mesh wall, maybe 7'-8' high, with an inspirational MLK quote facing Grand Avenue, in a font that makes it look vaguely like a Nike ad. The north side is a small concrete pedestrian plaza with displays about Oregon African-American history.

The design of the place is odd for Portland, seemingly designed for the benefit of passing motorists rather than pedestrians. The project was put together by the city's transportation bureau and this isn't technically a city park, which might explain the vehicular orientation of the place. The design drew complaints over the lack of sidewalks; apparently the city felt there were some unsafe pedestrian crossings here, and set out to discourage people from crossing the street in these spots rather than figuring out how to make them safer.

The one-way couplet of Grand Ave. and Union Ave. (the previous name of MLK) was announced in August 1957, and the change went into effect in January 1958. Initially this involved northbound drivers making two 90 degree turns, a left from Grand onto NE Hancock and then a right onto northbound MLK. In 1978 the city bought up the car lot on this block and created today's angled arrangement. This was part of the same project that created a landscaped median along the two-way portion of MLK, while eliminating much of the on-street parking along the street. This design has been widely regarded as a disaster, one that killed off many of the businesses along the street and made the street into a sort of neighborhood barrier since there were very few intersections where cars or pedestrians could cross it. They've worked to mitigate this in recent years, but it's hampered by the fact that MLK is a state highway (OR 99), and ODOT hates traffic lights and anything else that would prevent semis from barreling along city streets as fast as possible.

I ran across a pair of city planning documents from when the Transportation Bureau had to get design approval to proceed with the redesign. One mentions that the original design included additional heritage markers up and down MLK north of here, but noted there was no funding in place to actually do this.

Architects and designers love talking about places as "gateways". That often seems to be meaningless professional jargon, but this spot really is a sort of gateway, or at least historically it's been one. Before gentrification took hold in Northeast Portland, it was at least symbolically an entrance to the only majority-black neighborhood in the city. Growing up out in sheltered 1970s Portland suburbia, I can distinctly recall being cautioned to never ever go north of this spot because it "wasn't safe". Now it's more of a gateway from one trendy hipster neighborhood to another, yoga studios and artisanal coffee roasters as far as the eye can see.

On TV / Electro Umbilico

Today's adventure takes us to the corner of NE MLK and Graham St., Atop one of the buildings is a stainless steel frame that sort of resembles a TV screen, with a disembodied head (or maybe an Earth) floating in the picture. A big steel power cord coils its way along the side of the building. This building is home to Portland Community Media, the nonprofit in charge of our local public cable access channels, and the TV-like thingy is today's public art object.

The TV sculpture is titled either On TV or On the Air. Its Smithsonian art database entry gives a date of 1985-86, and claims "This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program."

Rooftop sculpture of an oblong box television with a revolving globe placed where the screen should be. The television sits on a fabricated carpet or table cloth whose corner drapes over the building. The set has an antenna, an electrical cord and a fishbowl on top.
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Funded with a National Endowment for the Arts, Art in Public Places grant of $5,000 given in 1987 to Portland Cable Acess TV. Additional funding was provided by Portland's Metropolitan Arts Commission and the Oregon Arts Commission. This is the first sculpture funded through Portland's Percent For Art Program. According to the attached article from the Oregonian, the site address is 2766 N.E. Union Avenue. The sculpture is attached to the building, and the artist used the building's walls for portions of the work.

Don Merkt, the sculptor, also created Driver's Seat, on the transit mall near Union Station, and Water, Please at a city office next to Cathedral Park. Other works not visited by this humble blog include several indoor sculptures at City Hall and the local state office building, a giant urn structure in Culver City, CA, and a baseball-themed sculpture in Dublin Ireland. He also created a cool (but unbuilt, as far as I know) concept for Broadway Bridge lighting. I think we ought to build this, if only because Portland currently has zero laser-armed bridges.

It turns out the electrical cord is a later addition, added during remodeling in 2004. It was created by Portland's Blashfield Studio, and goes by the title Electro Umbilico. The website describes it:

A sweeping exterior redesign of the Portland Community Media building as part of the facility's new identity. An 80 foot aluminum umbilical cord droops languidly across the side of the building, seeming to connect the existing Don Merkt sculpture (an abstract TV set) with a huge abstract plug shape above the newly designed entryway facade.

The TV dates to the era when some people still thought cable TV might change the world for the better somehow. Or at least locally produced cable might have a crack at it. It was the era when MTV still showed music videos, TLC had educational programs, CNN had news, Max Headroom was a pop culture icon, and (in theory) anyone could create their own cheesy cable access show, a la Wayne's World, or I suppose the original MST3K. I mean, I certainly wouldn't trade the modern internet for that imagined TV utopia, but it seemed like an inspiring vision at the time.

I honestly couldn't tell you what the future holds for the public access TV model. There are still no HD public access channels in Portland, and I haven't heard of any proposals to create them. The proposal that would bring Google Fiber to Portland is said not to include any subscriber fees to support cable access channels. Which makes sense in a way, since Google Fiber is promoted as a broadband Internet service, not a competing cable TV provider, though it can certainly act as one. A news account I saw indicated that the Google deal might give Comcast some leverage to weasel out of cable access fees too, which I think would essentially defund the current system.

roseburg, july 2014

Little Golden Hallway

Here are a few photos of Little Golden Hallway, an art installation inside Portland's Pioneer Place mall, located next to the skybridge over 4th Avenue. Despite being inside a private shopping mall, the RACC (the local public art agency) had some sort of role in its creation, so it shows up in some of their databases and arts maps. I didn't go looking for it because a.) it's inside a mall, and b.) somehow I'd sort of assumed it was in the mall's other skybridge over SW Yamhill, which was demolished a few years ago when the old Saks store became the new Apple store. Recently I happened to be in the mall with a few coworkers, heading to the mall's top-floor bowling alley, when I noticed it and the title seemed familiar. Weird little random details like this tend to stick in my head better than things I actually need to remember, I'm not really sure why, and I'm not sure it would be a useful talent at all but for this humble blog and the occasional bit of pub trivia. Anyway, I made a mental note and came back later to take some photos without coworkers around, because telling coworkers you have a blog results in them wanting to look at it, and I don't see a lot of upside to that, to be honest.

In any case, the artists' website gives the date as 2000 (around when the mall expansion opened, which makes sense) and describes the piece thusly:

“Little Golden Hallway” was a project included in the new wing of the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, Oregon. The piece was fabricated using cast resin panels, each of which was bolted to a steel frame to create larger grids. Inlaid in each panel is a high lead crystal lens and a photograph taken around Portland–of people, places, and things the artist experienced over the course of one summer. The photographs provided a snapshot of the artist’s interactions, while also working to solidify a certain time in the history of Portland. Situated on the north end of a sky bridge, the piece immerses the viewer by slightly overhanging into the walkway. With the attendant light, and the nature of the resin used, the hallway emits a soft golden glow.

Noble Architect

At the trendy corner of NE 18th and Alberta, a giant statue of a beaver stands at a bus stop, facing the wrong way, gazing off at the eastern horizon. This is Noble Architect, a 2012 addition to the artsy (or wannabe-artsy) neighborhood. The RACC page describes it briefly:

Facilitator of rich ecosystems - Benefactor of the past - Builder of the future.

This sculpture honors the majestic beaver that once abundantly inhabited and thrived in this area. The beaver—called Ina (eena) by the Chinook—faces the rising sun looking for a day when humans and nature harmonize.

A press release for the unveiling elaborates:

Artists Ruth Frances Greenberg and David Laubenthal conceived of the sculpture to “mirror the ebullient, raw and wonderful vigor of nature as well as our relationship to it.” Many different species of animals inhabited and thrived in this area before it was settled as the Portland we know. One of the abundant animals was the beaver. One could scarcely take a short walk without seeing one.

In a written statement, the artists explained their inspiration: “With so much regional history and lore we chose this remarkable animal to represent our reverence and respect for the resilient, beautiful, and abundantly generous natural world that remains intertwined with our human development. Our rendition of the beaver is intended to show the beaver in its innate majesty, grace, wildness, and dignity. It is an homage…a reverent depiction of a magnificent animal.” Its pose is dignified and vaguely humanized, standing on its stump, at just over six feet tall. The “fur” is a richly, hand-crafted, textured mosaic, inviting “petting” from passersby.

Calling them noble and majestic is great and all, but I've always thought the beaver is an innately silly creature, with one unusual (and instinctual) talent. It's a nice change from salmon, but a beaver is still a derpy-looking bucktoothed rodent, and anthropomorphizing it isn't helping. That said, the ceramic tile work simulating fur is really great. Maybe it would help to re-spin it as a friendly kids' storybook creature instead of an environmental message piece. I dunno.

For what it's worth, Alberta St. needs public art because it's sorta-officially the "Alberta Arts District". The name comes from a brief period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when art galleries moved here after being priced out of the Pearl District, creating an alternative "Last Thursday" event to rival the Pearl's First Thursday. For several decades up until that point, Alberta St. had been a lower-income, predominantly African American neighborhood, but when gentrification arrived it happened in record time. Within a few short years the galleries had been priced out again (along with many minority longtime residents), by the usual array of posh restaurants, yoga studios, and doggie day spas. People still act surprised when this pattern plays out all over again in a new neighborhood. Anyway, "artsy" is still part of the street's value proposition, as it were, according to both City Hall and every realtor in town. So, in lieu of actual present-day galleries, it gets some public art.

Going by the art and the other twee touches the city's added in recent years (bioswales, fancy bus platforms, etc.), you'd know there was wildlife here once upon a time, but you wouldn't have any idea this was ever a black neighborhood. I mean, acknowledging people while aiding the real estate market that's pushing them away isn't a good look either. But as it stands now, everyone who lived here in 1994 has been written out of history, essentially. That can't be a good thing.

Updated: I only realized this after posting this, but it turns out that today's beaver sculpture replaced a previous sculpture of a baobab tree, by the same artists, at the same location. The baobab arrived around 2004, and was still there circa 2010, but apparently it had a variety of maintenance issues and the city decided to just junk it and go with a different design. A different and non-African design, to be exact. Now, it's possible that was a total coincidence and I'm just being cynical, but it really makes you wonder.

Kings Corner, NE 13th & Webster

The next stop on our ongoing tour of Portland painted intersections takes us to NE 13th and Webster, a block north of trendy Alberta St. The design is simpler than a lot of the others you've seen here. Apparently this is one of the early ones, having been mentioned in a City Repair guide way back in 2006. Back then you could get away with multicolored dots; today (2014) the bar's been raised (as silly as that sounds), and people expect salmon, bears, rainbows, that sort of thing, or at least a much fancier abstract design. That City Repair page calls the intersection "King's Corner" but sadly doesn't explain which king they had in mind. Apparently they considered also doing the next couple of intersections north on 13th, at Sumner and Roselawn (the latter right next to Roselawn Park) but so far haven't gotten around to it.

NE 13th & Beech

Here's the painted intersection at NE 13th & Beech, one block west of the rainbow-patterned one at NE 12th & Beech. It's another part of the larger "Beech St. Project" you read all about in the previous post (assuming you read the previous post), but this one has a nature theme instead of an abstract rainbow design. I suppose if your neighborhood can't agree on a single design that represents its "identity", you can always do multiple ones, if the alternative is angry shouting at neighborhood meetings. I dunno. Neighborhood association politics are basically opaque to me. Having two intersections competing for volunteers might make people even more unhappy, as far as I know.

NE 12th & Beech

Here's another of Portland's painted intersections, in the Sabin neighborhood at NE 12th & Beech. It's supposed to be part of a larger "Beech St. Project", which this year's Village Building Convergence guide describes as:

Our goal is a super community-friendly, gorgeous, interactive, happy space for moseying and chatting with neighbors. Including: two intersection paintings, three little libraries, filling several curbstrips with beautiful pollinator attracting plants, and an urbanite bench. We are planning to have lots of fun working together, so come by and join in. This is a Fly Awake PDX project, with support from: Whole Foods, Advantis Credit Union, Albina Library, Beanstalk, Papa Murphy’s, Nature’s Needs, Caffé Destino, Acadia, Hankins Hardware, Ticket PDX, Irvington Veterinary Clinic, and, of course, our awesome neighbors, City Repair and, all you, the volunteers!

So this is a bit more ambitious than your average intersection repair thing, where people have an annual block party, meet their neighbors, paint (or repaint) a single intersection, and call it good. I don't want to snipe at people for being way more ambitious and energetic than I am, but multiple intersections, multiple library boxes and more just seems like overdoing it a bit, if you ask me.

But maybe this project's raising the bar for everyone else around town. Maybe by this time next year you'll get sneered at if you don't have a high-concept multiblock project in the works, and the other cooler neighborhoods will laugh and kick sand, er, organic compost on you. A couple of years after that, you'll need to hire professional painters and landscapers, because nobody has time for all that volunteering, and to pay them you might need to work some advertising into your intersection design, or sign the little libraries up as Amazon affiliates or something. Then local tech companies and such join the craze, painting the intersections outside their offices as a cool Portlandy team building thing, and everyone gets a polo shirt and commutes back home to Tualatin afterward.

Ok, no, I'm getting silly here, that's probably not going to happen, or most of it probably won't. The tech company part is bound to happen sooner or later, though. My company would probably have done one already if we weren't right downtown on a busy street. Speaking of which, although we may be up to a couple of dozen painted intersections now, as far as I know there are still zero anywhere on the Westside, not even near 23rd or in Multnomah Village. I probably ought to have a glib sociological theory about why that is, but I don't have one yet.