Peninsula Crossing Trail

Here are a couple of photos from North Portland's Peninsula Crossing Trail, which parallels the Portsmouth Cut (the big artificial canyon for the BNSF railroad) between Willamette & Columbia Boulevards, and then continues north all the way to Marine Drive. I only walked the segment between Columbia and Fessenden; I parked at Northgate Park, took photos of the bridge on Fessenden St, and then followed the trail to Columbia to check that bridge off the list too. The trail winds along in a bit of forest between the cut on one side and various apartment complexes on the other. You don't see the cut from the trail, at least on this segment. Which is probably fine, since it's really not that scenic unless you're into trainspotting, and I imagine the trees reduce the train noise for the surrounding neighborhood a bit.

The trail's pleasant but not that exciting on its own, but it provides a key connection in a larger network of trails around the city. At its northern end, it connects to a segment of the Marine Drive trail, near the Oregon Slough railroad bridge. It also kinda-sorta connects to the Columbia Slough trail at Columbia Blvd., near the giant sewer plant, although getting across Columbia there is kind of dodgy. On the south end, the trail's supposed to eventually connect to a new segment of Willamette Greenway trail (according to Metro's regional trails plan), although it's likely to be years before that trail's constructed, since an underfunded Superfund cleanup has to happen first. In any case, my understanding is that this trail is primarily supposed to be a bike commuter route, and maybe it is one during prime commute hours. When I dropped by, though, most of the people I saw on the trail were walking dogs or pushing strollers.

Portland Store Fixtures Mural

Apparently I've wandered into a new tracking-stuff-down project, and this time it's outdoor mural art. I've mentioned before that there's a weird legal situation around public murals in Portland; the one upside of that whole legal saga is that there's an official list of "approved" murals, excluding only those that were grandfathered in.

So the next installment in this new project is the mural at the Portland Store Fixtures store, at 110 SE Main, near the Hawthorne Bridge. (It's the same building that also has all the creepy mannequins posed on the roof.) The description from its RACC page:

Each of the four panels in this mural depicts a different stage and location in Oregon and its relationship to water and the life cycle. The mural represents the importance of water and the vital role it plays in our community and state, and provides a reminder to conserve and protect our environment.

The first panel depicts the wetlands at dawn with the female figure as mother earth bringing water and life to the world. The herons, Portland’s official bird, and the salmon are both an important part of the Northwest. The second panel depicts our forests and the rivers that run through them promoting growth and life. The third depicts the role water plays in industry and agriculture, bringing electricity from the eastern Oregon farmlands into Portland. The last panel portrays the Oregon coast with a child taking water from the ocean.

Cars into Plowshares

Here's a slideshow of of Cars into Plowshares, the mural outside the Farm Cafe restaurant at SE 7th & Burnside. It's yet another installment in the city's quasi-public mural program, so it has an RACC page with a description:

The mural is composed of a farmer tilling the paved land of a 20th century city, transforming it into a renewable, sustainable urban farm community. It reflects not only the goals of The Farm Cafe to promote local, sustainable farming, but of the greater Portland community’s goal for green living throughout the city. The mural brings color and interest to the site as well as contributes to the continued growth of the cultural and economic significance of the neighborhood.

The artist's website includes a big portfolio of primarily commercial mural work, but a profile in the UO Alumni magazine says she's now focusing on industrial design, and has won awards in that field.

Sabin Community Orchard

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Today's adventure takes us to an unusual little spot along NE Mason St. between 18th & 19th Avenues. The city owns a street right-of-way through here, but never got around to creating a street, and now they probably never will. In 2010 the vacant stretch of land was repurposed as the Sabin Community Orchard, a project of the Sabin neighborhood association along with the Portland Fruit Tree Project, a local nonprofit. It's a volunteer project, and fruit grown here is split 50/50 between volunteers and a local food bank.

Since 2010, two additional orchards have gone in, one in North Portland near McCoy Park, and another in Outer SE Portland's Brentwood neighborhood. It's nice that they picked these locations instead of automatically going to gentrified or soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhoods. I know I sound like a broken record talking about that stuff, but it would be the easiest thing in the world to make fruit trees another twee hipster amenity, and I'm pleased they didn't go in that direction.

I'm not sure what was here before the fruit trees arrived. It turns out this stretch was on a certain obscure list of obscure places I found on the city's website a while ago, places I've slowly been tracking down to see what they're like. The list predates the orchard, but doesn't say what was there at the time. I'll bet it was probably just some boring inedible landscaping, though.

For casual visitors, the orchard includes a short path with some interpretive signs explaining what the various trees are and why they're important and so forth. This is actually helpful. I learned to identify trees for a merit badge one time, but as I recall that was limited to a.) commercially valuable conifers and b.) things you should and shouldn't build a campfire with. In fairness, that was a long time ago, and it's possible that fruit trees hadn't evolved yet.

Marquam Nature Park

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Our next adventure takes us to Southwest Portland's ginormous Marquam Nature Park. The park includes a big chunk of the West Hills around OHSU, encompassing a few densely forested ravines with little creeks flowing through them, crossed by an extensive trail system. The "densely forested" part presents a problem, though, in that every photo I've ever taken there has come out as a fairly generic Northwest forest photo. These could be from anywhere, and you just have to sort of take my word about where they're from. These photos are actually several years old; I suppose they sat around in the archives waiting for me to lower my standards enough to use them. I just can't seem to get the hang of the place, photo-wise; I'm not sure why, but I know I've been there at least one other time with the intention of taking better photos (or at least more of them), but ended up not taking a single shot.

The park's quite large, but I don't think it's one of the city's natural crown jewels, and not just because my photos of it aren't so hot. Admittedly I've never actually been to the big chunk of the park south of OHSU, so maybe it's more pristine and scenic than the parts I've been to. The city's vegetation survey for the park isn't encouraging in that regard, though. In that survey, no part of the park was rated better than "fair" ecological health, with much rated as "poor" or "severely degraded", with English ivy and other invasive plants shouldering much of the blame. Additionally, the creeks flowing through the park end up in a pipe that continues deep beneath Duniway Park, and then on that way to where it joins the Willamette near the Marquam Bridge. So don't come here expecting to bag a migrating salmon during fishing season. (I'm only half joking here; other Portland-area streams do see wild salmon now and then.)

What the park does have is an interesting origin story. Despite being so close to downtown, the land remained undeveloped into the late 1960s thanks to its steep and landslide-prone terrain. In 1969, a group of developers proposed a plan that would have built a gigantic 500 unit apartment complex in the ravine. This didn't sit well with area residents, who eventually formed a "Friends of Marquam Nature Park" to lobby for a park here instead. A Marquam Ravine preservation effort began in earnest in 1975. This campaign had the advantage that a "Who's Who" of influential West Hills society people wanted the area to stay the way it was. Even then, convincing the developers to give up their lucrative dream was a big sticking point. Fundraising went down to the wire, as the campaign stood to lose federal matching funds if it didn't raise money & get the deal done in time. The deal was finalized one day before the deadline. And the rest is history.

One fun thing about the park is that it connects to the larger regional trail system, so you can start at the trailhead at the water tanks near Duniway Park, hike up through the park, then continue uphill to Council Crest, then down the other side of the hill and over to Washington Park. You have a couple of options at point: The Marquam Trail connects to the Wildwood Trail, which then meanders northward through Forest Park for another thirty miles. Note that there's no (legal) overnight camping in the city parks along the West Hills, so you'll either need to do it in segments, or wake up very early and be in much better shape than I've ever been. Or you can do something the city calls the 4-T Trail, as in "Trail, Tram, Trolley & Train". This involves taking an elevator down to the underground MAX station & catching an eastbound train into downtown Portland. You've already done the trail part, and MAX is the train part, so the third T involves taking the Portland Streetcar down to the South Waterfront area -- and usually they hate it when you call the streetcar a trolley, but not this time. Then you take the aerial tram back up to OHSU, and find your way back onto the Marquam Nature Park trail system from there. It's not what you'd call a classic wilderness hiking experience, but it has a certain novelty value.

Winter Wonderland

Here are a few photos of Winter Wonderland, the large mural on the US Outdoor Store building, on SW Broadway near Ankeny. The mural shows a guy snowboarding, and the store's primarily a ski/snowboard shop, but the mural doesn't include a store logo, because them's the rules. The mural's part of the city's quasi-public mural program, under which a mural can apparently have the same general theme as the store backing it, but it can't technically be "advertising". The RACC (the local arts agency) holds an "art easement" over the mural, which (thanks to a longstanding, twisty legal saga too complicated to rehash here) is what allowed it to be painted in the first place. Their page about the mural includes a brief description:

A snow boarder is shown leaping off a mountain cliff with a Cascade winter landscape in the background. The mural is painted with a graphic technique reminiscent of the style found within the snow boarding culture.

Above and Below

So I went out to the coast for a couple of days recently, and stayed at the hotel at Salishan, just south of Lincoln City. The hotel dates to 1965 and still has a swanky 60s feel to it, due in part to all the then-contemporary art scattered around the complex. The developer behind Salishan was John Gray, who also developed Sunriver south of Bend, Skamania Lodge in the Gorge, and parts of the Johns Landing area just south of downtown Portland. When not developing resorts, Gray was president of Omark Industries, a forest products equipment maker, and was also an avid patron of the arts, focusing exclusively on local artists. Hence the giant Lee Kelly sculpture outside the old Omark headquarters building on Macadam.

Now that you're up to speed on the background of the place: I'm sitting on the sofa in my hotel room, and I look up at the art on the wall right over me. It's a linocut print with a sort of circus theme, and I notice it's signed by Manuel Izquierdo. Izquierdo is best known as a sculptor (or at least he is to me), and I'm rather fond of his work, so I've tracked down a fair number of his creations around town. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of his prints before, though, so I figured I ought to snap a couple of photos and, um, create a blog post around it. So this print is titled Above and Below, and is dated 1976. The Portland Art Museum has a copy as well, donated by the artist's estate in 2010, but it's not currently on view.

This post probably involved the least effort ever, on the photo end. All I had to do was roll over and get my phone and take a few photos, without ever getting off the sofa.

Dickinson Park

Our next adventure takes us to SW Portland's Dickinson Park, 18 acres with forests and a large open grassy area, located on a rather steep hillside. I dropped by a few months ago when it was too muddy to get to the forested part, but a page at ExplorePDX has a few photos showing what it's like. The park's open area has nice views to the west and, somewhat incongrously, it's home to a shiny new "Evos Play System", a very fancy new play structure. Willamette Week's Summer 2014 guide dubbed the park "Portland's Backyard Jungle Gym", but pointed out the park still has no restrooms.

The city's owned it since 1993, when it acquired the property from Multnomah County, as part of the county's dismantling of its struggling park system. Apparently the county had never done much of anything with the land, and the city didn't immediately have any budget for the place, so they only began design work for it in 2001. A plan soon came together but initially there was no money in the city budget to implement it. 2006 rolled around, and the city had a temporary budget surplus thanks to the national real estate bubble, so they were finally able to break ground on the park at that point.

At first I couldn't find anything at all about the county's prior stewardship of the park, until I looked at the transfer agreements and realized the county called it "Dickenson" with an 'e', not "Dickinson" with an 'i'. Even then, I found next to nothing about the place dating to that era, but the few things I've come up with seem to indicate the county seriously neglected its park system when it had one. A 1982 letter to the editor complained that the county had effectively defunded the system around that time. By 1986, the county was already anxious to transfer it to the city, which had annexed the land (along with Lesser, Maricara, Orchid St., West Portland, and Woods Parks) in 1979. The city was reluctant to take them over until the county settled up for some disputed sewer construction charges at these parks (as well as at SE Portland's Brentwood Park). The article mentions that the aforementioned parks were all undeveloped and the county had no idea what to do with them. Lesser, Maricara, and Woods parks must have transferred before 1993; West Portland, aka Loll Wildwood never transferred, and eventually ended up as a Metro natural area. The remaining "Orchid St. Park" is unfamiliar. A June 1987 article about the proposed transfer mentions the city had pledged to maintain all but the Orchid St. site as parks, and a previous article about a city-county land dispute over Woods Park mentiosn the Orchid St. park was only 0.3 acres. So I suppose they must have sold it off at some point.

Other assorted Dickinson Park tidbits I ran across:

• The park occasionally hosts live music and movies on summer evenings.
• There's an active proposal to create a community garden here.
• The city's SW Trail #5 runs somewhere through the park, probably in the forested bit that I didn't get to.
• Blog post from a local goat owner, talking about taking goats for a walk in the park & letting them chow down on invasive plants. Which seems like a very sensible thing, and a Portlandia sketch all at the same time.

Temple of Cosmic Love

Here are a couple of photos of Temple of Cosmic Love, a big mural down a narrow sorta-alley off SE 12th., between a New Age counseling/yoga/whatever complex and a kooky dive bar, and about a block east from the Belmont Goats. This is another mural in the quasi-public RACC mural program, and their description indicates it was only inspired by the crystal-gazing side of the alley:

The mural integrates themes related to the wellness center, healing energy, nature and the elements, and focuses on creating a pleasing landscape that helps transport viewers to a peaceful setting outside the daily hustle and bustle.

The website of one of the artists describes it thusly, or at least I think it's a description:

light•weav•ing ⎮līt wēv ing⎮
v.

The harmonic fusion of energy quanta (photons) with matter, in a way which increases the luminous flux of the original matter, producing a spiritually and/or intellectually illuminating effect, especially through the medium of Art.

I admit I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, and I suspect the physicists I know (and I do know a couple of them) would probably have the same reaction. But no matter; we're just here to look at the art right now. It's a very pleasant and attractive design, quite apart from any quantum stuff that may or may not be involved. And just as importantly, it has a really groovy title. As soon as I saw it on the RACC website, I figured I ought to track this one down, just so I could have a blog post with this groovy title. Anyway, next to the mural is a tiny shelter structure in the hippie-hobbit common to City Repair projects, and the website of another of the artists mentions it was painted in 2006 for that year's Village Building shindig.

Burnside Median

Our next thrilling adventure takes us to SW Broadway & Burnside in downtown Portland, specifically to the trees-and-ivy median strip down the middle of Burnside. It turns out this median is another spot on a list of very obscure places I bumped into on the city's website a few years back. Some of those places turned out to be reasonably interesting, so it became a project and I've tracked down quite a few of them in the last few years. The Burnside median didn't sound very promising, though, so I ignored it for a long time. But recently I was in the area anyway, and I figured I might as well take a couple of extra seconds crossing the street, snap a couple of photos, and check it off the list for the sake of completeness. So here we are.

The median project was announced in April 1975, and a variety of reasons were given for it at the time. The city and county claimed it would somehow alleviate traffic congestion and reduce carbon monoxide pollution, since they made room for the median by eliminating the 117 on-street parking spaces along this stretch of Burnside. At the same time it was also supposed to make the area safer and more pedestrian-friendly. I don't know what Burnside was like before the median went in, so maybe all of this is true; I just know that despite the median, this stretch of Burnside still has traffic congestion, and is nobody's idea of a nice pedestrian-friendly zone, much less the thriving district of cafes and small shops that the plan envisioned.

More recent ideas in urban planning suggest that fast-moving streets without on-street parking are precisely the thing you don't want if you're trying to create a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Oh, and English ivy is now recognized as an invasive species, and the city prefers that you not use it anymore for anything ever. Although so far they haven't gotten around to ripping out existing plantings of the stuff along roads and in city parks, since that would involve spending money they don't have.

Matrix Hill Park

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It's time for a rare suburban adventure here on this humble blog. We're headed to Beaverton's Matrix Hill Park, a high point on Cooper Mountain just off Murray Blvd., directly uphill from the new mini-Walmart. The Walmart location was previously a (late, lamented) Haggen grocery store, and long before that it was a rock quarry owned by the Cobb Rock Co. The steep cliffs left over from the quarry days result in sweeping views to the south and east. Granted you're just looking at miles and miles of suburbia, but you can see quite a lot of it from here. There's a bit of a view to the north too, but you're better off going to nearby Sexton Mountain Meadows Park if you really want a better look at the suburban jungle of central Beaverton.

Since it's out in the 'burbs, Oregonian coverage is spotty at best, so I only have a few bits and pieces of info about the place. If the database search function is to be believed, Portland's paper of record has mentioned it precisely once, in May 2001, in an article about volunteer efforts in Beaverton-area parks. However an OSU Extension newsletter from 2010 says the park had just opened to the public. That seems odd, but maybe the Tualatin Hills parks district owned the land for a long time without officially opening it to the public. I'm not really sure, but the path up to the viewpoint looks pretty new, so it's certainly possible. The park district's September 2011 board agenda includes a capital projects list, showing they were spending about $40k per year on renovations here at the time. And a Winter 2010 Metro newsletter showed lots of volunteer events to pull invasive blackberry bushes here.

The park's also mentioned briefly in a 2013 US Fish & Wildlife study, "Willamette Valley Conservation Study: Nature-based Recreation and Educational Opportunities and Underserved Areas Assessment", but it's simply listed as "Existing opportunity identified in spatial data", which I think means they noticed it on a map and didn't investigate it further.

What I really want to know, and what nobody is telling me, is where the name "Matrix Hill" comes from. It's obviously not a native Indian name, nor is it likely to be a pioneer-era name. The first mention I've seen of the name was in 2001, which is a couple of years after the movie The Matrix came out. I'm really hoping it's not named after the movie. I mean, my first guess would be that some clueless polo-shirted real estate developer of the 80s or 90s wanted to build on the hill, and came up with the name independently because he thought it sounded high tech and upscale. This seems plausible because developers are always a rich source of cheesy place names.

But just suppose the park district had asked the public for suggestions, circa 2001 or so; maybe they put the suggestions up for a public vote, and allowed online voting. And suppose that a group of Matrix fanboys decided to troll the vote, and the district was somewhat less than tech savvy and never caught on to their l33t h4x0r script kiddie sk1llZ, and the rest is history. I have zero evidence to back this idea up, so it doesn't even count as a proper theory. But at minimum it would make a great urban legend, so feel free to repeat it if you want to. Be sure to add that we're lucky "Matrix Hill" eked out a win, as a rival tribe of fanboys was rigging votes in favor of "Park-Park Binks".

Ivon Park

Here are a few photos of SE Portland's miniscule Ivon Park at 47th & Ivon, just south of busy SE Division. The park is essentially a small corner lot that ended up as a playground instead of a house and yard, and the space is just big enough for some play equipment. The equipment looks fairly new, possibly added within the last couple of years. In recent years the park has also been a regular stop for Sunday Parkways bike events. I unfortunately don't have an origin story to share about this place. The city says it was created in 1989, the same year as Piccolo Park, but I've never seen it mentioned in connection with the Mt. Hood Freeway. I don't see news stories about it in any other capacity either. Maybe it's just that, until quite recently, SE 47th was just too far from downtown, and Division just too unfashionable, for the Oregonian to bother reporting on the area.

SE 32nd & Ankeny

Our next adventure is a visit to yet another spot from the obscure municipal list of obscure places I've been tracking down now and then. As with the last couple of places from this list, the spot we're visiting now is basically a bit of traffic control landscaping. At SE 32nd & Ankeny, the curb bulges out to prevent eastbound auto traffic from continuing on past 32nd; cars have to make a right turn and go north to Burnside instead, although there's a pass-through bit so bikes can continue eastbound. SE Ankeny was seen as a key bicycle route as far back as 1984, when it was included in something the city called the "Central Corridor Bicycle Route". It's not clear to me whether the plan involved actual marked bike lanes, or just some road signs indicating it was a designated bike route. A 2007 city document on bikeway construction standards explains that what we're looking at here is called a "semi-diverter", because it only blocks traffic in one direction. It also mentions that this was one of 17 semi-diverters around the city at the time, so it's not clear to me why this one's on the list and the others aren't.

It helps, in terms of scenic-ness, that there's an old historic church next to the spot. The building was once home to Portland's Central Presbyterian Church. Around 1980 it was home to something called "The Bible Church", and it was later part of Union Gospel Ministries organization (which is sort of a religious social service agency for the homeless) circa 1989. In 2014 it seems to be primarily a wedding venue and event space. Which honestly is a big improvement over being a church, if you ask me.

Piccolo Park

Photos of SE Portland's tiny Piccolo Park, just south of Division between 27th & 286h. It's a tiny place with a cameo role in one of modern Portland's creation myths, the successful fight against the proposed Mt. Hood Freeway. The freeway was supposed to branch off the Marquam Bridge near OMSI, and head east from there, first along a path between Division and Clinton Streets (i.e. right here), and then along Powell further east, continuing to I-205 and beyond to the distant new eastern suburbs the plan envisioned. Despite the name, it would not have gone anywhere near Mt. Hood. This proposal came on the heels of several other ill-conceived freeway projects (Marquam Bridge, I-5 along the eastbank waterfront and through North Portland, etc.), and this one turned out to be the last straw. There was a huge public outcry, and after years of wrangling the city and the state highway division (now ODOT) finally abandoned the idea. The federal grant money for the freeway was repurposed to build the eastside MAX Blue Line, and the rest is history, and we're still patting ourselves on the back for it close to 40 years later.

The original freeway plan was explained in a March 1972 Oregonian article "Residents of Southeast Portland to Help Plan New Freeway". The list of negative impacts is almost comical: Ugly concrete ramps to the Marquam Bridge visible from Ladd's Addition. Homes and schools bulldozed in the name of progress. Dirt. Noise. No way to cross the freeway in a lot of places. But think of all the exciting benefits: Maybe a greenspace next to the freeway or something. Maybe a bike path if they decide to build one someday. An exciting new shopping mall along the freeway out towards I-205. Oh, and maybe a pedestrian footbridge over the freeway at 28th, i.e. right here. Curiously, the article goes on to discuss mass transit options for the area, and mentions the idea of building a new transit-only bridge near the Marquam Bridge, which is precisely what's being built right now for the new MAX Orange Line. Go figure.

Anyway, by the time the freeway was canceled, the state had already started eminent domain proceedings for the freeway right-of-way. Along Powell, between about Foster Road and I-205, the little parking areas along the south side of the road are on land that was condemned and acquired for the new freeway. Closer in, Piccolo Park is one of very few leftovers of this effort. (There might be others, but this is the only one I'm aware of.) The site of Piccolo Park would have been under the westbound lanes of the freeway, I think, since it's just a few houses south of Division. There were once five houses here, before they were demolished in the name of Progress that never arrived. After the cancellation, ODOT held onto the land, which sat in limbo for about another decade.

Finally in October 1986 neighborhood activists convinced the city to take the land off the state's hands. The city had been resistant to the idea, as they had a policy at the time against adding tiny new parks. The parks bureau was persuaded to make an exception here as the neighborhood had very little greenspace of any kind, and this seemed to be the only viable chance to add a city park in the area.

At the time, and in subsequent early planning stages, everyone referred to it as "Hosford Park", and it seems to have gone by this name unofficially during the years ODOT owned and ignored it. The name changed at some point between then and 1989 when the newly funded and landscaped park officially opened to the public. A 1988 article about playground improvements at nearby Abernethy School also mentions the upcoming new park, but doesn't name it, so the name may have been in flux at that point. I haven't come across any explanation of the name change, but I imagine it would've been to avoid confusion with Hosford Middle School, a couple of blocks due north on the other side of Division. That would make sense, and I'm all in favor of avoiding naming collisions when possible. Regarding the eventual name, one theory I've seen points out that "piccolo" is simply the Italian word for "small", and it may not have anything to do with the tiny, super-annoying musical instrument. I want to emphasize this point in case anyone thinks it would be hip and ironic to show up here en masse and have a piccolo-playing Segway-riding flash mob or something. I just want to be sure people know that doing this would look unsophisticated, telling the world you had no idea it was an Italian word. Just imagine how embarrassing that would be.

Anyway, the park is just big enough for a playground, which was the whole idea when the neighborhood lobbied the city about it. There are some artsy touches here and there, some of which I only noticed in other people's photos after I was there. A small "Friends of Piccolo Park" was formed in 2012 to raise $7000 for a water fountain here. Which I suppose is an appropriately small goal, since this park only exists thanks to a revolt against massive grand plans.

SW Dosch Park Circle

While I was trying to take photos of the little sorta-park at SW Dosch & Boundary, I turned onto a side street (SW Dosch Park Lane) to get some photos from another angle. The road continued into the Dosch Estates subdivision, and I ended up turning around at a small traffic circle. I took a couple of photos of it since it was kind of cute in a twee sort of way, and I had my phone out anyway, so here they are.

In retrospect I'm not sure I was supposed to be there; on the way out I noticed a "Private Road" sign, and PortlandMaps shows the road being part of a couple of weird gerrymander-y tax lots owned by the local HOA. The map still seems to show the street as a public right-of-way, although I might be misreading it.

So... in case Officer Friendly is reading this, these photos were created in Photoshop using advanced skills I've since forgotten and can't demonstrate to you; the place(s) that may (or may not) be depicted in these photos may (or may not) actually exist, as far as I know, or don't know. Also it's possible the post about the sorta-park nearby may (or may not) have ever happened. That one might be Photoshop too, as far as I know, or don't know.

SW Dosch & Boundary

Our next obscure city park is one of the more mysterious ones I've run across. I was poking around on PortlandMaps, as one does, and noticed a little chunk of city-owned land at SW Dosch Rd. & Boundary St., a narrow parcel mostly taken up by a stream that runs through it. The map entry for it says it belongs to the City Auditor's office, which isn't unusual for city parks. Particularly for undeveloped places the city can't afford to do anything with, doesn't know what to do with, or has just forgotten about. I'm always up for a new and obscure place, so it went on my big omnibus todo list.

So the key thing about this spot is that it's a narrow overgrown lot with a short stretch of stream running through it. It seems completely undeveloped, and just upstream of it is an adjacent parcel, also wild but owned by the adjacent Dosch Estates homeowners association.

I'm not entirely sure what this place is for, or what it was meant to be, but I've found a few clues. The plans for a 1957 sewer project (around the time the area was first subdivided as "Forest Acres") show this lot prominently labeled as "PARK". So my working hypothesis is that it was supposed to be a city park, or maybe a piece of a larger city park, and the project just never came together for some reason.

Much later on, a 1993 city list of stormwater facilities refers to this spot as a "detention basin", and notes this creek is part of the Fanno Creek watershed, which the city's been trying to protect. So it's not as if the place is useless; it just doesn't have a lot to offer the casual human visitor, unless maybe it's blackberry season.

The Dosch Estates subdivision's main street is Dosch Park Lane, but there's no actual Dosch Park, unless maybe the land we're looking at here was supposed to be it. One of the houses along Dosch Park Lane is the historic Henry E. Dosch estate; the rest of the subdivision used to be the grounds of the estate, before it was subdivided in the early 1980s. (A page at ExplorePDX has a walk/run route through the subdivision, with a couple of photos of the old Dosch house and the surrounding area.) So today's Dosch Estates replaced the old Dosch estate, a twist on the usual procedure where a subdivision is named for what it replaced.

Henry E. Dosch has appeared here once before, as the wealthy benefactor who donated the pair of Fort Sumter cannons in Lownsdale Square. In that post I described his life as

"Your basic 'German bookkeeper immigrates to US just in time for the Civil War, joins up, has adventures, gets wounded, leaves the Army, heads west, has adventures, does a stint as a Pony Express rider, ends up in Portland, goes into business, eventually retires, spends later years as an amateur horticulturalist, when not managing exhibits at World's Fairs around the globe.' type story".

He sounds like the Victorian era's "Most Interesting Man in the World". If only he'd owned a hot air balloon or maybe a submarine, and used it while wearing a monocle and top hat, it would have been perfect. Even his house has its own Wikipedia article, albeit a fairly short one. It's not really that extravagant of a house, by the standards of that era, and it lacks the usual turrets and mansards and so forth. Or at least it's not that fancy above ground. Maybe there are catacombs underground, or a secret lab for "horticultural experiments" or "revenge against the world" or something. It just sort of stands to reason.

Waud Bluff Trail

Here are some photos from Portland's short, steep, and shiny new Waud Bluff Trail, which connects the north end of Swan Island to the residential area above, near the University of Portland. The trail's only about 1000 feet long, but with an average 10-13% grade, and at the bottom there's a footbridge over railroad tracks, and there are steep stairs on the other side of the tracks. (The footbridge gets a post of its own, because, um, them's the rules here.) There's a further 700 feet of flat trail between the footbridge and the dead-end street next to the Coast Guard base.

There's a nice in depth article about the trail at BikePortland; when I visited, nearly all of the other people there were biking up the hill. The article follows the trail downhill, in the opposite direction to all the cyclists I saw, who were doing the climb and looking very determined about it. I hope none of them were expecting cheering crowds or KOM points at the top.

So there's a nice view of Swan Island and downtown from along the trail, which is the main reason I visited. The city thoughtfully installed a couple of turnouts so you can stop for the view and not be in anyone's way, which is what I did. And if you're riding the hill, the turnouts are a chance to get off your bike and give up and wait for the team car to come pick you up. While all the other cyclists ride by and roll their eyes and giggle as they steamroller their way up the hill like it's nothing. At least you get to laugh last when they inevitably test positive for EPO or 'roids or something.

East Marine Drive Trail

Today's adventure takes us to the east end of the Marine Drive Trail, which runs along the south shore of the Columbia River much of the way between Gresham and industrial NE Portland, with gaps for a few marinas and houseboat communities. Other parts of the trail have appeared here before: Once for the west end of the trail, east of NE 33rd at Broughton Beach, and again for a disconnected segment further west near the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge.

This area merits a separate post because a.) It's a nice scenic spot, well east of the other two locations, and b.) The stretch from NE 158th east to near 185th is owned by Metro instead of the Port of Portland. I don't think there's a sign or any sort of notice when you hit the boundary between the two areas, and they look basically the same, with the river on one side and Marine Drive on the other. It's possible I'm the only person who cares about this stuff, and even I only sort of care, but hey.

This stretch of shoreline was once part of the underfunded, mismanaged Multnomah County park system, until that system was divided up among Metro and the cities of Portland and Gresham back in 1994. (I located a list of those properties, or most of them, a while ago; it's posted on the Mason Hill Park post ). Back in circa-1994 the county listed it as the "Philippi Property". Which isn't a great name , but Metro's GIS system used it up until recently. That system now refers to it as "Columbia River Shoreline B", which isn't much of a name either, particularly since I looked all over the place & didn't see a Shoreline A. So I'm just going with "East Marine Drive Trail" because that's at least a reasonable description of the place

NE 28th & Weidler

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Our next adventure takes us to a triangular park-like space at NE 28th & Weidler, right next to the Hollywood Fred Meyer store. There is play equipment and swings, and a few benches, and a path meandering through it. There's no sign explaining exactly what it is, though, or who owns it. Which is a shame because there's an interesting story here.

This area isn't actually a public park, but rather is owned by Fred Meyer (or, strictly speaking, Kroger, its Cincinnati-based parent company), and it's the result of a compromise deal when the store went in back in 1990. The store (built on the site of the old Hyster forklift factory) was quite controversial at the time; neighbors claimed it would bring traffic problems and change the character of the Hollywood District, and generally felt it was just too suburban and car-oriented and simply wouldn't fit here. The little park was intended to be a buffer area between the store's parking lot and the residential neighborhood next door. More recently, the play equipment and park furniture were replaced in 2011 as part of a larger renovation of the store.

It does kind of seem like a missed marketing opportunity here. Imagine signs on the play equipment and outdoor furniture: "Kids can't get enough of this? Buy one for your backyard! On sale right next door! Free box of wine with every purchase, because assembling it is half the fun." Maybe they just don't sell the right sort of play equipment and outdoor furniture to make that feasible. Maybe it would be doable if there was a Home Depot or IKEA here instead. Or maybe the neighborhood's still too touchy about the store existing at all for this to be a good idea.

Les AuCoin Plaza

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Photos of Les AuCoin Plaza, the landscaped surface portion of the Washington Park MAX station. There's a big sign giving the name, but I've never heard anyone call it that. I've never heard anyone call it anything, honestly. Despite all the paths and terraces, there's not really a good reason to come and hang out here, unless maybe you're waiting for an elevator to the underground MAX platform. And the only time you might have to wait for an elevator would be if a zoo concert just let out, or maybe right after the zoo closed on an especially busy day. So it's a nice space, but a little-used one.

When the westide MAX Blue Line opened in 1998, an architecture writer for the Oregonian talked up the virtues of the place

Farther west on the line, Washington Park Station finds the romance in a mechanical process. The station sits at the midpoint of a 3-mile tunnel, drilled from both directions through 16-million-year-old basalt 260 feet underground. The two granite wheels that ground the tunnel met in a "kiss" at the station.

The kiss, explains Murase, caused an allegorical "emotional explosion," symbolized by a circle of basalt slabs at the station.

More stone columns landed in the Les Aucoin Plaza just up the steps from "the kiss." Landscaping in the plaza and below took its cue from the zoo and followed a dry, upland theme. Katsura trees flutter their heart-shaped leaves and ornamental grasses dance softly with lavender, juniper, yarrow, spirea, rosemary and cotoneaster.

The plaza's named for Rep. Les AuCoin, who represented Oregon's 1st congressional district (including much of the westside MAX route) from 1978-1993. He played a big role in getting federal funding for the project, and so they named part of one of the stations after him. Likewise, the last station on the line, out in Hillsboro, was named in honor of Sen. Mark Hatfield, who had recently retired in 1996 after nearly half a century in Oregon politics. AuCoin is very much alive and blogging; I met him once when I was a young Cub Scout, and I always thought he was a decent guy. I'm pretty sure I voted for him in 1990 (the first time I was old enough to vote), and then in 1992 when he ran against now-infamous Senator Bob Packwood and should have won. In that election, it turned out The Oregonian (our local newspaper) knew all about Packwood's shenanigans well before the election, but sat on the story to avoid "ruining his career". The public only found out later -- after the election -- when the Washington Post broke the story. And then Packwood managed to stay in office another three years before finally resigning.

Oregon had a spate of naming things after living politicians during the 1990s and early 2000s, but that seems to have cooled in recent years, after we learned Neil Goldschmidt's dirty little secret. I always thought this was a bad idea, and I'm still amazed that we avoided naming anything important after Goldschmidt (and thus avoided having to rename it hastily, especially if it was a school or something). Either that was sheer luck, or the people in charge of naming things had heard the rumors about him. TriMet seems to have dodged a bullet by naming things for Hatfield and AuCoin (and not, say, Packwood, or Goldschmidt, or David Wu, or...). I still think it would've been better to wait for future historians to weigh in, though.