The Cheerful Tortoise Mural

The ongoing mural tour takes us to the Portland State campus again. Our last visit here (muralwise) took us to The Knowledge, a photorealistic piece celebrating the university library. Today's installment is a bit different: A few years ago the Cheerful Tortoise college/sports bar (which has been there as long as anyone can remember) was brightened up with a sports-themed mural that wraps around the building. Like many of the others we've visited lately, it's part of the city's kinda-public mural program, so it's legally public art, with an RACC database entry and everything. The RACC description is fairly brief:

The three mural images depict a variety of Northwest regional sports, united by color, texture and background. The murals depict portraits of Hall of Fame members from the Northwest, college athletes including Bill Walton and Steve Prefontaine, and the Portland State University mascot and other related university images.

The Tortoise was there when I was a student, circa 1990, and as I (vaguely) recall it hasn't changed since then, other than obvious things like flat screen TVs and a modern craft beer selection. It's possible they've changed the deep fryer oil at some point since 1990, but I wouldn't bet on it. We occasionally stop there for breakfast, since nothing pairs with bacon and eggs like a nice IPA. Trust me on this. At night it's a different story; we were dragged there by friends one time, and it was red Solo cups, Jager bombs, people going "woooo", etc., which is great if you're 22, or maybe 28 or so if you're still in grad school. Now, not so much. It's never a good idea to be the oldest person at the party, so we didn't stay long.

The mural got me wondering just how old the Tortoise is. The first time it shows up in the Oregonian is December 1961; apparently they sponsored a city-league amateur basketball team at the time, which defeated Nobby's 80-49, if I'm reading the score correctly. In any case, PSU has only been at its downtown location since the early 1950s, so the bar's been there almost as long as the university itself.

Harold Kelley Plaza

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Here are a few photos of Harold Kelley Plaza, the little brick mini-park at NE 42nd & Sandy. It was created in 1984 when the city closed off a short stretch of Hancock St. This was intended as a traffic improvement, to help sort out one of the many awkward intersections caused by Sandy's uneven diagonal course through the Portland street grid. The city decided to create a public plaza here instead of just vacating the right of way for real estate development; at the time the central Hollywood District had no public open space at all, and even now this tiny plaza is the only one. And even this isn't really a city park; it's still legally the Hancock St. right-of-way, so I'm not sure who's in charge of trimming the trees and emptying the trash cans.

The plaza was soon named in honor of Harold Kelley, longtime owner of a nearby appliance store, head of the local booster association, and unofficial "Mayor of the Hollywood District".

The triangular mini-block between the plaza and Sandy Boulevard is home to one tiny building, the historic Hollywood Burger Bar. I've never been there, but a post at Portland Hamburgers says it's been there since the 1950s, and the building was originally built as a streetcar ticket kiosk.

The plaza features a gold star design on the 42nd side of the plaza, because of the whole Hollywood thing. Strangely enough, the neighborhood apparently takes its name from the nearby historic rococo movie palace. It used the name first, and the neighborhood around the Hollywood Theater eventually became known as the Hollywood District. It's an unusual way to name a neighborhood, but hey.

KBOO Mural

The next stop on our new but ongoing tour of Portland outdoor murals takes us to SE 8th, just south of Burnside, where a colorful mural covers the outside of KBOO, Portland's longtime community radio station (which I'm actually listening to online while I'm writing this). KBOO is sort of diagonal across SE Ankeny from the City Bikes co-op and its giant bike mural, if you're trying to visit everything on the list. The RACC description for this one:

This mural is about the Pacific Northwest, Portland, and community radio. At the center of the work is a turntable with the people representing our city’s diversity rising up from it’s core. The forest, mountains, city, radio, and diverse inhabitants that fill the mural share a part of what is great about our region and our city with the surrounding community.

Sunnyside School Park

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Here's a photo from SE Portland's Sunnyside School Park, which is attached to its eponymous tree-hugging grade school. The land's actually part of the school grounds and owned by the school district, but it has the standard city parks sign outside, and it shows up that way on maps of the city, and it's included on the city parks website. Possibly the city gets to claim it as a park because they're chipping in to pay for maintenance or something. I'm not entirely sure what the terms of the arrangement are; I suspect it was created as a way for the city to legally toss some money over to the school district during one of the district's endless financial crises. In any case, school use still takes priority over other park uses, and in a 2010 decision, the city limited public access to the park during school hours. In years past residents of the neighborhood had gotten used to the grounds being open and park-like, and weren't pleased about the change. Still, it is a school, first and foremost, and keeping strange adults off school grounds during school hours seems like a reasonable sort of rule to have.

The city parks website mentions something about there being art here, which is the reason I dropped by. The city's info page for the park didn't give any clues about what to look for, though, so I walked by to see if anything obviously art-like leaped out at me. Nothing really did; the only thing I noticed was a line of boulders marking off the NE corner of the park. I honestly don't know whether this is the art or not. There wasn't a sign next to it, and it might be something else entirely, or it's possible the website refers to something that's gone now, or something inside the school building, or it never existed and it's just an error on their part, I'm not sure. The neighborhood association says the corner of the park marked off by the boulders remains open to the public all the time, despite So maybe that's what they're there for. Or maybe they're just decoration. I dunno. Anyway, I took a quick photo of the boulders just in case they're significant somehow, and here it is.

City Bikes Mural

The next installment in the new tracking-down-murals project takes us to SE 7th & Ankeny, where the City Bikes mural covers the outside of the co-op bike store of the same name. It's part if the city's sorta-public mural program, so it has an RACC description:

The “City Bikes” mural celebrates bicycle culture, infrastructure, advocacy, and cooperative effort. It highlights Portland’s commitment to alternative transportation infrastructure, evoking the community-building influences that bicycles, their riders, and their advocates stimulate. Artist Roger Peet hoped to inspire viewers to consider the role that the bicycles play in both the growth of a city as well as in that city’s struggle to recreate itself as one that has a smaller negative impact on the environment and a greater positive one on its inhabitants.

The store's announcement about the mural includes a sketch of the design, which makes it more obvious that the mural as a whole is a closeup of part of a bike, wrapped around the building. I didn't clue in on that at the time I was there.

I also ran across someone else's 2013 design for City Bikes, which must be located somewhere else since I didn't see it here. It's a much more metal design than this one, complete with a skull and some roses.

St. Francis Park Fountain

Some time ago, I posted some photos of SE Portland's St. Francis Park, a small and rather run-down park owned by the adjacent Catholic church. One of the things that made it seem especially decrepit was the park's old fountain, which sat dry and abandoned in the middle of the park. I think there were even weeds growing in it. It hadn't run for many years and I just assumed it was broken, but some time in the last few weeks they turned it back on and have been running it regularly. I heard about this on the net somewhere and went to check it out, and took photos and a short video clip. A number of other people were there just watching it, like it was something they'd never expected to see either.

It's a fairly elaborate water feature. The water flows out of a low steel sculpture by Bruce West, cascading into a small pool. From there an artificial stream burbles downhill to a lower pool, with some rustic wood bridge structures around it. The video clip follows the water backwards from the lower pool.

The odd thing about this is the timing. The church just announced a plan to tear out the park and replace it with an affordable housing complex. Neighborhood groups aren't thrilled by the idea, and are looking for options that would keep the park in place. So why run the fountain now? Maybe they're open to selling it to the city instead, and maybe they're showing off the fountain to help gin up some interest in the idea, or boost the selling price a bit. Or maybe it's just to see what condition the park's current plumbing is in before they go tearing it up. I dunno. My sentiments here are similar to what I said about the "Fountain for a Rose" in O'Bryant Square: If the park has to to go away or be completely redone, I hope they'd at least keep the fountain around. If not in place, at least relocate it somewhere else.

Viewpoint Road, The Dalles

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In the previous post about the Seufert Viaduct bridge in The Dalles, I mentioned that the bridge now carries lightly used Viewpoint Road, which dead ends at a viewpoint just east of the bridge. Here are a few photos from that viewpoint, which offers a nice view of Mt. Hood, the river, and the Dalles Dam. It's basically just a big unmarked gravel lot at end of the road. Strangely there aren't any signs explaining what you're looking at or even indicating who owns it. There isn't even anything in the net about there being a scenic viewpoint here. I consulted the Wasco County GIS system, which seems to indicate the state owns it, as part of the I-84 right of way. But that's literally the only concrete piece of information I have about this place. I don't even know for a fact that this is the viewpoint mentioned in the road's name, though I don't know what else it would be.

It would be interesting to at least know whether the viewpoint predates the dam or the other way around. There were once rapids on the Columbia here where the dam now stands, so there would've been something to see. In the old Oregon Trail computer game, The Dalles was the spot where the player had to make a critical choice: Go on a dangerous road over the mountains, or take an equally dangerous raft downstream through the rapids. Either way was invariably fatal, in my experience. Anyway, if you've ever drowned while playing Oregon Trail, this viewpoint lets you see one of the spots where it may have happened.

So... it's a scenic spot, yet kind of forgotten and secluded, and it's outside of town but not that far from town. If it's not a popular teen make-out spot now (and I have no idea whether that's still a thing or not), It must have been one at some point. I mean, c'mon. Even the name's perfect. "Let's go to Viewpoint Road" totally sounds like a euphemism. The whole thing's like something out of central casting. Of course then the creature shows up, maybe some sort of vengeful river spirit conjured by the old salmon cannery that used to be nearby, and mayhem ensues. But hey, nothing's perfect.

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.