Seufert Viaduct

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A few months ago I did a series here on historic bridges in the Columbia Gorge. Since then I've tracked down another, very obscure one. The Seufert Viaduct (1920) crosses Fifteenmile Creek just east of The Dalles, near the Dalles Dam and right next to I-84. The design's credited to Conde McCullough, the state highway department's famed chief bridge designer during the early 20th century. He's famous for his bridges on US 101 along the Oregon Coast, but examples of his work pop up all over the state. Actually I've never been entirely clear on whether he did all of this design work himself, or whether he gets credit thanks to being in charge of the state's bridge design unit.

In any case, it's listed as one of his, and as a significant historic bridge it has the usual Bridgehunter & Structurae pages. A forum thread at American Road Magazine points out that this once carried US 30, the Old Oregon Trail Highway, which was the stretch of highway east of The Dalles. Officially only the stretch west of The Dalles was called the "Columbia River Highway", though I've seen the name applied to surviving historic parts of old US 30 as far east as Umatilla. Thus a page at "Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway: shows what this area looked like in the 1940s, before I-84 and the dam went in. Today the bridge just carries lightly traveled Viewpoint Road, which dead-ends at an overlook not far east of the bridge. When I stopped by, I was hoping to also get some photos of Cushing Falls, a small waterfall somewhere just upstream of the bridge on Fifteenmile Creek. It turns out it's not visible from the bridge, though, and upstream of here is private land, and I didn't feel like knocking on doors to ask if I could see their waterfall. At least I came away with some bridge photos, though.

A circa-1994 Oregon Inventory of Historic Properties form has a little background info on the bridge:

The reinforced concrete girder bridge derives its name, Seufert Viaduct, from a former train station named for two pioneer brothers who moved to Oregon in the early 1880s. Located on the route of the Old Columbia River Highway, the bridge was designed under the auspices of C.B. McCullough, and constructed by the State Highway Department. The bridge was built under contract in 1920 by the Colonial Building Company. Total length is 222 feet. It consists of one 22-foot span and five 40-foot spans. At one time Arthur Seufert kept the bridge lit with direct current from a Pelton wheel which he operated in connection with Seufert Brothers Cannery.

ODOT's 2012-2013 Cultural Resources Guide (Which I think is their "hey guys, please don't bulldoze this stuff" guide for their work crews) includes a mention of the old Seufert cannery, which sat downstream of the viaduct, partly under today's I-84 and the rest in what's now a city park along the river. It mentions that it was once the most productive Salmon cannery in the world, and the site is considered historic even though very little of the original structure remains.

A 1920 issue of Western Bridge Builder described the upcoming viaduct project, as the state was soliciting construction bids for the job:

One reinforced concrete viaduct near Seufert requiring approximately 580 cubic yards class "A" concrete, 20 cubic yards class "B" concrete, 110,000 pounds metal reinforcement, 425 lineal feet concrete handrail, 250 cubic yards excavation.

The State Highway Commission's Biennial Report for 1919-1920 included a little info on the project, which was nearing completion as the report went to press:

Just south of the cannery at Seufert, about three miles east of The Dalles, the Highway crosses Threemile Creek, at an elevation of some fifty feet above the bottom of the stream bed.

A concrete viaduct consisting of one 22-foot and five 40-foot spans is practically complete for this crossing and will soon be opened to traffic. In order to get a suitable foundation, it was necessary to excavate do a depth of 20 feet below the stream bed, making some of the columns as long as 70 feet.

The contract for this work was awarded on March 32, 1920, to the Colonial Building Company under contract No. 257. It is probable that it will be completed by December 1 and will cost approximately $42,200.00. The expenditures to date amount to $34,284.05.

(Note that the creek seems to have been called Threemile and Fivemile creek in the past. I suppose all of these names are accurate, technically, depending on where you're measuring from.)

Much more recently, a 2003 ODOT bridge evaluation recommended replacing the bridge instead of repairing it, at a cost of around $3M. It's been over a decade since then, though, and they haven't replaced it yet. It was one of the more expensive projects on the list, and Viewpoint Rd. past the bridge only serves a couple of rural houses and the aforementioned viewpoint. So I'd imagine this isn't a top priority, and I'd be surprised if they get around to it anytime soon.

SW Nottingham Dr. Circle

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So I was looking at a map of Portland's West Hills a while ago for something or other, and (because I was being a nerd) I noticed a little traffic circle up in the hills between OHSU and Council Crest, at the end of SW Nottingham Drive. I'd done a couple of posts about traffic circles before (because it wasn't the first time I'd been a nerd), and I looked at it on PortlandMaps and noticed it's an actual tax lot owned by the city transportation bureau. So it's not really a city park, but "city-owned" was close enough for various other places that have ended up as blog posts here. So I figured it was worth a look, and it went on my ginormous todo list as somewhere to track down if I was in the area anyway. Which I was, recently, so I drove by and took a couple of photos. I didn't stay long, though. Maybe I was thinking of the recent Dosch Park Circle thing, but if I lived there I'd be puzzled if a strange car drove up and the driver started taking photos of the roundabout at the end of my street. I mean, it's a public right of way and public property, and all of this is undisputed, but "indignant taxpayer who knows his rights" speeches never seem to make much of an impression on Officer Friendly and his friendly taser.

The streets in this area all have Robin Hood names; Nottingham Drive branches off from Sherwood Drive, and there's an Arden somewhere nearby. Rich neighborhoods use Robin Hood names surprisingly often, I suppose just because they sound oh-so-refined and evoke Jolly Olde England ever so much. For some reason they never seem to play up the whole stealing-from-the-rich part of the story. Anyway, the houses along Nottingham Drive are a small 16-home subdivision just called "Nottingham", which only dates to 1969. This bit of infill came around the same time as the big apartment complex proposal that ended up as Marquam Nature Park instead. The developers here were a bit faster than the guys downhill, and the subdivision was already under construction by the time the nature park campaign got underway. The city archives include a photo of the cul-de-sac at the time it was constructed. Sadly the record is online but (as is usual with city archives photos) the photo itself is not available online. I imagine it looked like this but without all the trees.

The nature park's Marquam Trail runs just behind the backyards of some of the houses here on its way uphill to Council Crest, and the trail crosses SW Sherwood not far from the intersection with Nottingham Drive. The land the trail runs on is city-owned but doesn't show up as a park on most maps, since the city auditor's office is the owner of record. That's not uncommon, though I've never figured out why the city auditor needs to own bits of forest around the city. Maybe they're little getaway spots for those days when the spreadsheets don't look so good.

Voices of Remembrance

Portland's MAX Yellow Line ends at the Expo Center, the city's general-purpose large event space. Auto shows, dog shows, cat shows, trade shows, gun shows, swap meets, concerts, and so forth. The Cirque du Soleil sets up circus tents in the parking lot every so often. The Multnomah County Fair used to be held here, and the old Pacific-International livestock expo was held here for many years and lent its name to the place.

Riders exiting the train pass under a set of Japanese torii gates, each adorned with little metal tags jangling in the wind. This is Valerie Otani's Voices of Remembrance, the public art for this MAX station, and it commemorates a much darker episode in the Expo Center's history. From the local arts agency's description of the piece:

Five cedar gates commemorate the site where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Stainless steel tags in the shape of tags people were required to wear, create sound giving voice to this history.

There are numerous accounts on the net about Oregon's deportations and the Expo Center's role in them, including articles at the Oregon Historical Society, OPB, BlueOregon, & Portland IndyMedia. The latter two include a survey of 1942 news stories from the Oregonian. I was thinking of doing that myself but I'd recommend reading those accounts instead. Japanese internment was a national shame; these articles point our our particular local shame: The unseemly enthusiasm Portland brought to the task, and the fact that almost nobody spoke out against the deportations. There are probably still a few people around who spent World War II rounding up law-abiding citizens, or guarding the camps, or stamping transit orders in the internment bureaucracy, although of course nobody will admit to it now.

There's also a good article about the gates at UltraPDX by artist Linda Wysong. (The article link goes to a Wayback Machine copy of the piece, as the UltraPDX site seems to be offline right now.)

This is not Portland's only monument to this ugly historical episode -- there's also the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Waterfront Park, as well as a few references along the "festival streets" in Chinatown. I think this one is by far the most effective of the lot, however. Next time you're at the Expo Center, take a moment to stop and look, and think about what happened here.

NE 16th & Tillamook

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Our next sorta-adventure takes us back to the Irvington neighborhood again, this time to the intersection of NE 16th & Tillamook, where a narrow landscaped strip cuts diagonally across the intersection. This is yet another Irvington location from a list of very obscure places the city parks bureau somehow had a hand in. Like the others nearby, this spot functions as a traffic control device. Vehicles (other than bikes) can't go straight here; on one side, all northbound traffic has to turn west, while eastbound traffic has to go south, thus diverting inbound traffic from both directions off Irvington's residential streets. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it's one of the subtle traffic tweaks that keeps cars out of Irvington without looking like an actual barrier. Somehow you always end up going around Irvington rather than through it, and only realizing years later that you've never actually been there.

As with the other Irvington traffic widgets that have shown up here, it's a little mysterious that they're on the list and other similar ones around town aren't. I think I have a clue with this one though. An Urban Adventure League photo caption says this was the very first traffic diverter of any type in town, and relays a story that it was first built in the 1960s as a "neighborhood guerrilla action".

I checked the library's Oregonian database, and I can't find anything to confirm the "neighborhood guerrilla action" story or the notion that this was the very first traffic widget in town. Which is not to say they aren't true, just that I don't have anything concrete to back them up. But news stories do confirm this spot dates back to the 1960s. Which is surprising, since the 60's were very much the age of the almighty automobile here in Portland. So as you might imagine, adding a traffic barrier was not without controversy. It first appears in the paper in July 1967: Residents were lobbying to create a traffic barrier here, but a reluctant city council deferred immediately action on the proposal. In late August they approved it, but only for a 90 day trial period, with no commitment to keep it after that. At the time, a resident on nearby NE 15th Ave. complained that the project was happening due to "16th Ave people" who wanted a private playground for their children, essentially spending public money to make it safe for rich kids to play in the street.

The city quickly pulled the plug on the 90 day trial after only 22 days. The reason given for ending the experiment so early was a rash of complaints from residents on 15th Avenue, who saw a sudden influx of traffic on their street now that it was being diverted away from the intersection one block over.

By December, angry Irvington residents were lobbying to bring back the barrier. The city pushed back hard on the idea, saying it had already been tried and had failed miserably, end of story.

Although obviously this wasn't the end of the story, as residents eventually found a different pot of money to tap into. Construction of the present-day barrier was finally approved in March 1972, apparently with little controversy. The approval came not from the city council but the local "Model Cities Planning Board", the local arm of a federally-funded urban renewal program. Much of the article is concerned with the creation of NE Portland's Woodlawn Park, which required demolishing several dozen "blighted" houses. But that's a story for another post entirely.

The 16th & Tillamook diverter comes up in the comments at BikePortland now and then, some praising it for blocking auto traffic, others grumpy about a large and potentially dangerous bump in the curb here. Meanwhile it was given as an example recently when the Transportation Bureau consulted the city fire department about some bike-friendly traffic changes they wanted to make elsewhere in town. Apparently this is one of only a small handful of diagonal traffic diverters in the city, and the fire department specifically advised against making any more like this as they block through traffic and present an obstacle for turning fire trucks. Which just goes to show that you can't please all the people all the time, unless maybe you switch to bike-based fire trucks.

The Burnside Rocket

Our next installment in the new tracking-down-murals project is The Burnside Rocket, a collection of mural panels by various artists on the building of the same name at 1111 E. Burnside. Its RACC description:

This mural is a collection of 24 - 6’ x 4’ panels curated by Ruth Ann Brown. Each of the 24 panels on the building facade collectively represent the historic identity of the Central Eastside Industrial District (CEID) as a place of burgeoning artistic production. Each artist was chosen for their quality of work, diligence, and ongoing commitment to making art in Portland.

If the name sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Rocket, a short-lived restaurant that opened here with great fanfare and critical acclaim in 2007, only to close about a year later as the global economy cratered. The building itself was in the news a lot too, as the city's Bureau of Planning & Sustainability was heavily involved in the project, and therefore it's got the inevitable LEED Platinum certification, and various cutting-edge sustain-o-licious features. Even the mural panels are sustain-o-licious, as they double as movable exterior window shades. They're also supposed to be swapped out every 3-5 years, providing an ongoing showcase for emerging local artists. Or at least that was the original plan when the building went in. I don't know whether they're actually doing this or not.

Long story short, despite the name there are no actual rockets here, or even pictures of rockets, so the story isn't quite as cool as Seattle's Fremont Rocket (which isn't a real rocket either, but it at least kind of looks like one). I do have some photos of actual rockets, though, in case you're interested: The Atlas V rocket that launched the Curiosity Mars rover; the Minotaur V rocket that launched the LADEE moon probe; and a bunch of vintage 1960s rockets st the NASA visitor centers at Kennedy Space Center and at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Including an unused ginormous Saturn V. You probably weren't asking; I get that. I just happened to have a bunch of rocket-related tourist photos lying around, and it seemed like as good time as any to dust them off.

Blair Community Garden

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's Blair Community Garden, near SE 33rd & Stark. It's a fairly small garden, and it's a little unusual in that the city doesn't actually own it, even though it's part of the city's garden program. The land belongs to the assisted living facility next door, and when it changed hands in 2005 the garden went on hiatus for five years. Eventually the local neighborhood association managed to cut a deal with the facility's new corporate owners; among other things, some of the garden plots are now reserved for facility residents, which I suppose is only fair. The garden was revived in late 2010, I suppose just in time to plant bulbs for spring 2011, or anything else that needs to go in the ground early. (I generally don't grow plants from seeds, so I'm a little hazy on planting times for most things.)

When I see mentions of "new corporate owners", for me it conjures up images of community gardens being bulldozed, maybe in favor of a monocrop of Monsanto's new carnivorous franken-tobacco, and neighborhood pets disappearing when they wander too close, and expensive lawyers in expensive suits, and whistleblowers "vanishing", and an uncanny glow at night, followed by desperate aerial spraying, and the National Guard coming in with flamethrowers, and finally a massive coverup with City Hall's full support. Luckily this hasn't happened so far, unless maybe they have a really excellent professional-grade coverup in place.

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.