The Greg Chaillé Rose

So the next rose mural on the list is the giant Greg Chaillé Rose, on the west side of the historic Art Deco Terminal Sales building at SW 13th & Morrison. (I explained the deal with these rose murals in a previous post about the Mary Lou Fendall Rose.) This rose honors the retired longtime head of the Oregon Community Foundation, who retired in 2011, the same year the rose went up.

The Mary Lou Fendall Rose

Like any good project here at this humble blog, the new mural thing I've been doing continues to evolve. I started out with the RACC list of murals in their public art mural program, and I somehow had the idea that those represented the full set, other than a few outliers that had been grandfathered in. I think I was hoping a complete list existed and I could just work off that list. The murals on the RACC list tend to fall into a couple of categories: Traditional community murals featuring local history or landmarks or whatnot, and others painted on (and sponsored by) local businesses that sort of relate to the business but don't quite count as advertising under the city sign code.

While tracking those down, I realized there was another population of murals around the city, an outgrowth of the street art/graffiti world. In particular, the annual Forest For the Trees festival results in a dozen or so new murals each year, many painted by international artists. Apparently it's pretty common to go on tour like a band would, painting a mural in each city you visit. As far as anyone knows we don't have a Banksy here yet, but if we did it would fall under this general category. The street art-style murals tend to be more varied and interesting (and, frankly, better) than the traditional community-type ones, so I started tracking these down too. A few have showed up here already, and there are more in my giant Drafts folder, and even more on my even-gianter todo list.

But while searching for those, I realized there was yet another type of mural out there that I'd been ignoring. Here and there around downtown and the inner Eastside you'll see commercial buildings with large roses painted on them, sometimes with a big US flag included as well, and an inscription dedicating the rose to someone. They're all over the place, and I'd never paid them any attention until now. There's nothing remotely hip or cutting edge about these roses, but seeking out uncool stuff is kind of a habit of mine, and it seemed like interspersing a few of them among the street art murals would make for an interesting contrast. I soon realized that someone else had taken a similar interest a few years ago, creating the Portland Roses Tumblr, complete with a Google map of known locations at that time. So a lot of the basic footwork had been done already. It doesn't have photos of all of them, but back in 2006 the Oregonian posted a collage of the ones that existed then. They aren't all still around, but it's still a helpful field guide.

I also ran across an explanation of the roses in a 2008 Stumptown Stumper in the Tribune. The buildings with roses are owned by Joe Weston, a prominent developer and real estate magnate. The article explains Weston simply likes roses and has been commissioning them for buildings he owns over the last 20 years or so, naming them in honor of colleagues, friends, and family. As a side benefit, the roses are thought to ward off taggers as well, on the theory that they won't touch a building that already has art on it. The article mentions that Jerry Harley, Weston's longtime rose painter, had passed away recently and new roses were on hiatus. At least a couple have been painted since then, but I'm not sure by who.

Now that we've got the explanation out of the way, the rose pictured above is the Mary Lou Fendall Rose (1995), on the Morrison Plaza building at SW 14th & Alder. In the Tribune article, Weston explains that she was his children's former nanny, and a family friend. If Google serves, she's also the sister of the late John Helmer, of the famous local haberdashery. The photo on the Portland Roses Tumblr shows the mural looking a bit faded, so apparently it's been repainted within the last few years.

DeSoto Building Mural

Here's a slideshow of the new mural on NW Portland's DeSoto Building, on the North Park Blocks between Couch & Davis. Portland's Contemporary Craft Museum, moved here in 2007, triggering a financial crisis that led to the museum's absorption by the local art college. Meanwhile the first floor has housed a series of short-lived fancy restaurants. The building's in a strange spot, neither Pearl District nor Old Town, and doesn't seem to get the foot traffic it would need for businesses to survive here. Apparently the building was originally a DeSoto car dealership. DeSoto was a division of Chrysler, defunct since 1960, and it in turn was named for the notorious Spanish conquistador pictured in the mural.

The mural was painted for this year's Forest for the Trees festival by Gage Hamilton, who's also director of the festival. I'm not sure what the other component of the mural is; to me it looks sort of like a black feather boa, but I'm not sure whether that was the intent or not.

Empress Mural

Our next stop on the big Portland mural tour is at the historic Empress building at NW 15th & Burnside. The mural includes a Portland skyline and logos of a couple of businesses in the building, and was painted by artist Joe Bass, who has a tattoo shop there. NW Portland's neighborhood association discussed the mural when it was proposed in 2011:

Empress Mural: Chad Albright is the current President of the Empress Condominium HOA. The building residents have approved the sketch for a mural to be painted on the west side of their building. The artist is Joe Bass who operates a tattoo parlor in the building one of three businesses on the first floor of the building. PDOT removed the trees to deter homeless from their ajoining lot but the site now looks sparse and uninviting to what residents describe as a mini-neighborhood. There would be no additional lighting. The mural as presented is just phase one of the visison that might someday link into the existing piping on the building. Mary C. expressed some concerns over the color pallet and the inclusion of Mt Hood. Tanya M. was concerned that there was a lot of open space that might attract taggers. Chad assured us that the artist is well known among the garfitti subculture and that his art will be safe and will be maintained by the HOA. Chad visions the mural as a mirror image of the western view hence Mt. Hood on the western façade works and the simplicity of the design messes well with the art deco lines of the building which pre dates the freeway.

I'm going to guess they really meant "meshes" in that last sentence.

Trees Mural, SE 10th & Ankeny

The next mural on our tour is one I bumped into while looking for an entirely different one. This nature scene is in a small alley on SE 10th between Ash & Ankeny. I haven't been able to find anything on who it's painted for or why, but I did recognize the signature on it: Larry Kangas was a prominent local mural artist, who also did the mural at the Vespa dealership on 23rd, among many other things. His website doesn't have anything about this particular mural, though. I suppose if someone just wants to brighten up the back wall and alley behind their building, they technically aren't obligated to broadcast it all over the internet if they don't want to.

Jose Rizal statue, Honolulu

The pedestrian mall along downtown Honolulu's Nu'uanu Stream has a number of statues, memorials, and sculptures along its length, including one of José Rizal, a Philippine national hero in the struggle against Spanish rule. We don't get a great deal of exposure to Philippine history on the US mainland, and I have to admit I didn't know who he was and had to google him.

The city's page about the statue says of it:

Life-size standing figure of Dr. Jose Protacio Rizal, national hero of the Philipines against Spanish colonial rule who was executed at age 35 in 1896. The figure sits on a high pedestal in the style of monumental bronzes. There is a plaque in the center of the pedestal at the front, and two other plaques on the sides. Located on College Walk at North Beretania Street.

Mayas Taqueria Mural

The next mural on our tour is the one on Mayas Taqueria, at SW 10th. It's been there in various forms for a long time; at least 1990, maybe even earlier than that. A Google map someone created of Portland-area murals says it's titled Cultura Maya and was first painted in 1988, but it doesn't explain where this info comes from. As old as it is, it's grandfathered into the city's mural code and doesn't need the usual permits you'd need in order to paint a new one like this. It was repainted/restored in 2009 (and the restoration blog says it was painted in 1984 by Kuis Lopez), and it appeared on a now-defunct RACC-sponsored website about Portland murals [link goes to an archive.org copy].

Refuge PDX Mural

The next mural on our tour is on the Refuge PDX building, at SE Yamhill and railroad-only 1st Avenue. This was painted in 2011, a collaboration between Ashley Montague (who did the Albina Press Garage Mural that appeared here a few days ago) and Joshua Mays.

That's pretty much all I know about this one. It's about a block from the Hair of the Dog brewery, so I saw it regularly well before I had any idea of doing a mural project, and I sort of idly wondered what the deal was with it. Somehow it never occurred to me to google it or even check to see what sort of business was in the building. This kind of illustrates what I always say about my powers of observation. If I'm looking for a category of something (public sculptures, waterfalls, old highway milestones, brewpubs, now murals), I do an extremely thorough job of it, finding them no matter how obscure they are. But if it's not something I'm keeping an eye out for at the time, it'll probably just blow right past me without even registering. I suppose that's part of the value of taking on a new project every so often, so I have to take a fresh look at what's around me now and then.

King County Administration Building, Seattle

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Here are a couple of photos of Seattle's bizarro King County Administration Building. It's the box with the hexagonal patterns all over the outside, right down to the windows, and a high windowless skybridge. I vaguely remember calling it the "beehive building" when I was a kid, and wondering about the people who work there. I'm not claiming King County is an outpost of Hellstrom's Hive, but sometimes I think it would explain a lot.

It's an ugly building, but I suppose at least it's ugly in a unique way. I imagine the architects genuinely believed they were creating something cool and innovative, thinking outside the usual cookie-cutter International Style box, which is really quite sad considering the result. Back in 2006 there was a proposal to demolish it and put in an enormous 42 story office/condo complex, but the global economy imploded before the idea got off the ground. That may be just as well; an abandoned half-built skyscraper would be about the only thing that could be uglier than the current building.

La Montagne

The next sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum (and I think the last one, until they add more) is La Montagne, the other Aristide Maillol nude of the pair flanking the Portland Art Museum entrance. I discussed Maillol and Dina Vierny, the model for the two sculptures, in an earlier post about La Rivière, and mentioned their surprising connection with Vera Katz, former Mayor of Portland. So go read that post first if you haven't yet.

There's one other local connection to Maillol I came across that didn't fit in the previous post. Pioneering local sculptor Frederic Littman was influenced by Maillol early in his career. (The linked article discusses Littmans's Abraham Lincoln for the newly relocated Lincoln High School). In fact, before he arrived at Reed College in 1941, Littman taught at a French art academy headed by Maillol. Littman went on to teach at the museum-linked Pacific Northwest College of Art, and taught many of the Northwest's prominent artists of the mid-20th Century.

It's hard to point at any stylistic resemblances; Littman mostly did human figures, but in an odd lumpy sort of style I've never been fond of, while the generation he taught tended toward pure abstract stuff instead. Still, if anyone's putting together a "professional genealogy" tracking who influenced whom, Maillol would be another data point on the big family tree.

Redd/XOXO Mural

The mural shown above recently appeared on an old industrial building at SE 8th & Salmon, within the last few weeks. It's an otherwise drab old industrial building, and I seem to recall that (until recently) it had sat abandoned for years. It was recently purchased by the Pearl District's Ecotrust Foundation; they've dubbed it "The Redd", and they plan to transform it into a sort of incubator for boutique foodie businesses. Which sounds both incredibly twee and probably delicious at the same time. They haven't started on the remodel just yet, but a couple of weeks ago the building hosted this year's XOXO Festival, a sort of technology/culture/media shindig for people who are vastly cooler and hipper and more elite than I will ever be. I do follow a few people who attended on Twitter, so I'm only about one degree of separation from techno-l33tness, but still.

It's not immediately obvious, but the mural design incorporates the letters "XOXO". It was created by Bay Area artist Erik Marinovich, and the design was also used for the festival's official t-shirt. I'm going to guess they won't keep the mural when the building gets transmogrified into a foodie utopia. And if they do a new one, it'll be all Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream or something along those lines.

Oregon Portland Cement Gargoyles

The Oregon Portland Cement Building is a small but historic industrial building at SE 1st & Madison, next to (and below) the Hawthorne Bridge viaduct. Its sorta-Art Deco look is unusual for Portland, and more decorative than you'd expect from a cement warehouse. Like much of the Central Eastside, it's been converted to lofts in recent years, which means it's gotten a fresh paint job, including gold paint for the four gargoyles on the front of the building. These gargoyles are why we're here, actually; the building's National Register of Historic Places form explains:

The subject building was designed by noted Lake Oswego architect Richard Sundeleaf. In Frozen Music: A History of Portland Architecture (1985), authors Bosker and Lencek describe Sundeleaf as an architect who catered to "Portland's entrepreneurs on the rise", designing many offices, warehouses, and industrial plants in a modernistic tone. Sundeleaf's knack for tailoring anarchitectural style to fit a client's image is exemplified in the subject building. Bosker and Lencek go on to state: "With its cast-stone classical dentils and bulldog-faced gargoyles designed by Lavare, this creamy concrete structure projected a serene lyricism that celebrated the dignity of modern building materials," and "every effort was made to demonstrate the versatility of the cement manufacturers product."

The sculptor behind the gargoyles was Gabriel Lavare, a California sculptor who lived in Portland for much of the 1930s. For the most part he specialized in sculpted reliefs, like his minimalist lions at the entrance to Washington Park. I've always liked those lions, so when I realized he created these gargoyles too, a blog post about them was basically inevitable. The post about the lions includes a rundown of his career in Portland, so I don't think I need to rehash that here. The short version is that he found success here, but he left by the early 1940s and the city promptly forgot about him. Pointing out obscure and forgotten stuff is kind of a specialty of this humble blog, and in this case it's an obscure and forgotten person, someone who created some interesting work while he was here.

N. Portland Road Bridge

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Our next Columbia Slough bridge is the one carrying N. Portland Road; in the photos above, it's the bridge hidden behind the BNSF railroad bridge. I could have gotten closer to take better photos, but neither it nor the railroad bridge looked very interesting so I didn't make the detour. In retrospect I probably ought to have made the trip, since it does have a degree of historical significance. N. Portland Road is actually a state highway, OR 120, although people don't realize this because the state's never gotten around to putting up highway signs. It was built back in the 1930s to connect North Portland to the long-gone stockyards and meatpacking district. One alternate name for the road that's occasionally been used is "Swift Highway", named not for the speed limit, but for the old Swift Meat Packing Company, which built the stockyards and ran Kenton as a company town in the early 20th Century.

As a state highway, the state was responsible for building bridges on it, and for much of the 1930s tha was Conde McCullough's job. He's best known as the designer of fancy bridges along US 101 on the Oregon Coast, but as the state's chief bridge engineer even the most mundane bridges were part of his bailiwick. Obviously he wasn't the state's only bridge engineer, but he tends to get credit for anything the state built during his tenure, similar to Steve Jobs getting sole credit for various Apple products. In this case, McCullough at least invented the type of bridge used here; the department ended up building 158 bridges of this type around the state, so presumably the implementation work for each was farmed out to the department's junior engineers. The wood/concrete composite design was intended to be an affordable way to build smaller bridges, with the important side benefit of throwing some business to the state's struggling timber industry during the Depression. A historical review of the similar (and since-replaced) Vancouver Ave. bridge has a blurb about this one:

The N Portland Road bridge (formerly “Swift secondary highway”), was constructed prior to the subject bridge in 1934 using a similar composite type (Myers 1935:4). The concrete pile bent design varied slightly from the subject bridge by incorporating pointed Gothic-style arch openings. The Swift Highway connected North Portland to the Portland Union stockyards. The bridge retains less integrity than the subject bridge. Many of the understructure wood piles have steel column replacements and the handrail’s wood intermediate posts were removed and replaced by an adjacent modern rail.

Some of the replacement work happened in 2007. The bridge is a major trucking route, so it makes sense that 1930s wood beams would wear out after bearing decades of modern semi trucks. The state transferred much of the highway to city jurisdiction in 2005; from the included map in the transfer deal, it appears the deal transferred everything except the bridge (which it refers to as "Columbia Slough Bridge No. 01726"), with the agreement specifying "Said bridge shall be transferred at such time that said bridge is replaced with a bridge meeting AASHTO bridge design standards", AASHTO being the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. In other words, everyone agrees the bridge needs replacing, and the city prefers that to be the state's problem, paid for from the state's budget.

Albina Press Garage Mural

The next mural we're visiting is the Albina Press Garage Mural, on N. Blandena St. at Albina Ave., on a garage behind the Albina Press coffee shop (home to the Life Cycle of a Sun Flower mural panels). It was created in May 2014 by muralist Ashley Montague, who describes the design: "Thoughts behind this were about infinite knowledge… the owl is representing that. Inside of each of us we have this knowledge, its just tapping into it."

Call me a child of the 1970s if you like, but this design would look kind of awesome on a groovy custom van. And I don't even mean that in a ha-ha ironic sense. Add some shag carpets, curtains on the windows, 8-track player... It's hard to explain. Maybe you had to have been there.

Pedal Bike Tours Mural

The next mural on our ongoing tour is the giant bike design on a building at SW 2nd & Pine St. This mural went up in 2012, sponsored by the Pedal Bike Tours shop located in the building. Until recently it included the words "Welcome to America's Bicycle Capital" in giant letters below the bike logo. This did not strictly comply with the city's convoluted rules around signs and murals, and earlier this year an anonymous complaint put it on the city's code enforcement radar. In May, the city forced the shop's owner to paint over the words, leaving just the logo itself visible. The owner had tried the old "better ask for forgiveness than permission" thing, only to learn that is absolutely not how things work in Portland, at least not where code enforcement is concerned. The one and only thing better than begging for permission here is spinning it so it's somehow jointly your idea and the city's idea, which is what happens with most big development projects. Commissioner Schmoe does a photo op and takes credit, and you make the money, and "everybody" wins. I have no clue how one arranges that sort of thing; if I knew the secret, I certainly wouldn't be here on the internet explaining how to do it for free.

To be honest I think I like it better this way. The words always struck me as a little too, I dunno, self-congratulatory, and there's the little detail of whether this claim is actually true or not. Apparently the shop saw a steady stream of disgruntled tourists insisting their home cities were America's one true bicycle capital, I suppose because tourists are assholes and have nothing better to do in Portland than nitpick at local businesses' signs. Minneapolis, of all places, was singled out as home to some of the more zealous arguers. I can see how they would be far ahead of us in terms of bike-friendly Midwestern flatness, and I'm told the city is quite pleasant during the summer month-or-so when the polar ice recedes. And I suppose the bland calorie-rich food is close to ideal if you're carbo-loading for a long ride. But more to the point, it's probably just safer to fight us over Bike Capital than fight Alaska over Dogsled Capital. Cuz them's fightin' words.

Vancouver Ave. Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the one that carries N. Vancouver Ave. over the slough. The current bridge only dates to 2011, but it's the third bridge at this location, with history going back nearly a century.

As planning for the Interstate Bridge heated up in the early 1910s, local boosters argued over which street would be Portland's main approach to the bridge. The thinking was that winning this prize would lead to a bonanza of traffic and shoppers and general Progress. The two leading candidates were Vancouver Avenue, and Union Avenue (now MLK) a bit further east. The Union Avenue boosters won out, and the street got a bridge over the Columbia Slough in the style of the main Interstate Bridge. Vancouver Ave. had some sort of temporary connection to the bridge construction site, which was supposed to be demolished after the bridge opened, but the city threw a bone to local business interests and let them keep it for another two years on a trial basis. Which encouraged Vancouver Ave. boosters to lobby for a permanent slough bridge.

I'm not sure what happened to that original temporary span, but as far as I can tell there wasn't a bridge here by the mid-1920s. In 1927 there was a proposal to reuse a discarded old span from the Broadway Bridge here, similar to what happened with old Burnside Bridge parts being reused at the Sellwood, Lusted Rd., and Bull Run River bridges. Unfortunately Portland's city engineer concluded the old span was much too heavy for the site, and it would be cheaper to build an entirely new bridge than to build all the heavy supports needed for the Broadway span.

By 1929, local boosters were once again lobbying for a Vancouver Ave. extension, slough bridge, & connection with Union Ave. This time the idea got traction, although the powers that be decided to do it on the cheap; in August 1931, it was decided the new bridge would be a wooden structure, with only the parts the general motoring public would see done in concrete. A historical assessment done for the city in 2009 explains that this is actually a Conde McCullough design, believe it or not. As the state bridge engineer, he was responsible for mundane bridges as well as crown jewels along the coast, and this type of bridge was designed to be an affordable small bridge, with better aesthetics than a plain old all-wood bridge.

In June 1932, the county applied for Corps of Engineers permission to build the bridge. Permitting dragged out for a while, as the slough was then used by fishing boats and a bit of shipping traffic, as hard as that is to imagine today. Objections were eventually sorted out, and a May 1935 construction photo shows the bridge 50% complete. I didn't run across a story about the actual completion of the bridge. You'd think Vancouver Avenue would have hosted a big ribbon-cutting party, after all the lobbying that went into getting it built.

In May and June 1948, floodwaters from the Columbia and Willamette inundated the Vanport area and other large tracts of the city. To try to control the flooding, engineers built an emergency dam around the Vancouver Ave. bridge. It seems that a log raft somewhere upriver had broken during the flooding and a large number of logs had jammed up against the bridge anyway, so they decided to just dump rocks and gravel on top of the log debris until they'd blocked off the slough. Construction photos look messy and chaotic but apparently the dam did actually work as designed, preventing more flooding across North Portland.

In 2008, the wooden bridge supports were damaged by a brush fire that began in a transient camp under the bridge. It closed to vehicle traffic after the fire and was deemed unrepairable, but it remained open for bikes while the city figured out what to do next, and Vancouver Ave. boosters once again had to lobby for a new bridge. The old bridge was fully closed for demolition in April 2010, and its award-winning (and less flammable) replacement finally opened in May 2011. The new bridge features wide bike lanes and a variety of artistic touches, I suppose on the theory that whenever you replace a McCullough bridge, even a minor one, you have to make it a little fancier than you otherwise would. Maybe if you don't he appears as an angry ghost and makes fun of your third rate engineering skills or something. I haven't seen any reliable reports of that actually happening, but (I suppose) why risk it if you don't have to?

BNSF Columbia Slough Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on the agenda is the one carrying the BNSF railroad. This is the same rail line that crosses the Columbia on the Vancouver & Oregon Slough railroad bridges, and continues on through the Portsmouth Cut (beneath a set of railroad-owned road bridges), and then across the Willamette on Bridge 5.1. Like all of the aforementioned bridges, the one over the slough was designed by Ralph Modjeski (who also designed downtown Portland's Broadway Bridge).

This is the smallest and undoubtedly the least interesting of the BNSF Modjeski bridges. Frankly there's nothing interesting about it other than who designed it, and it's hard to imagine that he actually spent a lot of time on this one. There wasn't even anything in the Oregonian database about it, as far as I can tell. But one of the constant guiding principles at this humble blog is that some things are worth doing just for the sake of completeness, and this bridge completes the set of Portland Modjeski bridges. As far as I know. One upside of this sake-of-completeness thing is that I end up having a top search ranking for all sorts of curious and obscure things. Which would be great, if anyone was ever bored enough to actually Google them.

MLK Columbia Slough Bridge

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For several years now, one of this humble blog's ongoing projects has involved bridges. I started out with Portland-area Willamette River bridges, and once I'd done posts about those I ended up doing bridges on the Columbia, Clackamas, and Sandy Rivers too. I've also done bridges in the Columbia Gorge (and there may still be a few of those that I've missed), as well as a bunch of bridges in Cleveland from a trip there a few years ago. I also recently found some lists of Portland-area bridges that local governments believe are historically significant, so I've covered a couple of those too. A few months ago it occurred to me that there were a decent number of bridges on the Columbia Slough, in N/NE Portland, and I could visit a lot of them just by walking the Columbia Slough Trail. None of them are really visually stunning, but some at least have a bit of historical significance. Case in point, the bridge shown above, which carries MLK (a.k.a. state highway OR-99E) over the Columbia Slough. Its Bridgehunter page describes it:

The Columbia Slough Bridge on OR 99E was constructed in 1916 as part of the Interstate Bridge project. The bridge features built-up steel plate girder main spans and the same decorative steel railing found on the 1917 Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River. The bridge was likely designed by consulting firm of Waddell and Harrington just like the Interstate Bridge located just a short distance to the north.

The 304-foot original portion of the bridge features four steel plate girder spans with two main spans of 77.3-feet and two side spans of 76.2-feet. In 1951 the original 44-foot wide structure was widened to 58-feet by the Oregon State Highway Department to accommodate another traffic lane. The new portion of the bridge has a different span layout featuring two 140-foot plate girder mains spans and reinforced concrete approach spans at each end of the structure. The total length of the widened portion of the bridge is 362.5-feet.

In other words, this bridge was a minor project by a very famous bridge design firm. They were the same company behind the Interstate Bridge (obviously), as well as the Hawthorne and Steel Bridges in downtown Portland, the Union St. Bridge in Salem, and the Columbia River Highway bridge over the Sandy River in Troutdale. Oh, and the 12th Ave. Viaduct over Sullivan's Gulch / I-84, near Lloyd Center, which counts as another minor project.

A July 1916 Oregonian article on the near-complete Interstate Bridge mentions the slough span briefly as a remaining to-do item, due to problems with the initial construction done there:

When the water falls sufficiently, a pier will be erected in Columbia Slough to replace the one destroyed by the shifting of the bottom of the slough on account of the tremendous pressure of the big fill at that point. Not until this pier is built can the girder spans across Columbia Slough be placed.

Other than a few traffic accidents, the bridge apparently hasn't been newsworthy since its construction. I suppose if they ever get around to replacing the current Interstate Bridge, this little bridge would be left around as the last surviving piece of the original project. At that point the bridge might come be seen as an interesting historic artifact. But given the recent cancellation of the Columbia River Crossing project, that day isn't likely to come anytime soon.

SW 12th & Spring Garden

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Our next adventure takes us to SW Portland's South Burlingame neighborhood, to a little spot I ran across while poking around on PortlandMaps (Portland's public GIS system), as one does. SW Spring Garden St. generally adheres to the normal city street grid, but it jogs south a bit to intersect SW Taylors Ferry Rd., and this forms a little triangle of land, too small to build on: Two sides of the triangle are somehow both named Spring Garden St., and the third side is formed by SW 12th Avenue right of way, although 12th is just a gravel path and a few steps here. It turns out the city owns this little parcel, specifically the Bureau of Environmental Services, the sewer and stormwater agency. I didn't see anything sewer-related, so I imagine it may have something to do with water quality. Somewhere nearby is the beginning of a small side creek that eventually flows into Tryon Creek at Marshall Park. That's my guess, anyway.

Back in 2008, the local neighborhood newsletter had a few mentions of local neighbors wanting to do a project here and clean up the place. I don't know the exact details on what this was about because the articles are paywalled, both the original newsletter and the copies uploaded to Docstoc. It didn't seem like a sufficiently good reason to open my wallet, so I don't know all the details, but in 2009 the city's Office of Neighborhood Involvement awarded a small grant to clean up the place:

South Burlingame Neighborhood Outreach and Improvement ($1,775): A clean up of Southwest 12th and Spring Garden for beautification and safety purposes. Following cleanup, a safety sign will be placed in the area. Funds will also be used to support a National Night Out community event in Burlingame Park.

I imagine the sunflowers here are due to neighborhood volunteers, midnight guerrilla gardeners, or possibly birds, just on the basis that I don't think the city usually goes for annual garden plants when they landscape an area.

When I showed up to look around, I was surprised to see sidewalks along Spring Garden (including our triangle here) and elsewhere in the neighborhood. It turns out this is a very recent development. Many streets in SW Portland were built without sidewalks, for a variety of reasons. Partly cost, partly walking being out of fashion in the mid-20th century, and partly due to big chunks of the SW hills being outside city limits when roads were built. The absence of sidewalks has been a major complaint of local residents for decades, and the city has a (very) long-term goal of retrofitting them in wherever possible.

Last year the city finally got around to SW Spring Garden, or at least the north side of the street, and they added sidewalks along a long stretch of the road, including here. A project map for the Taylors Ferry to 17th segment shows the triangle here as public greenspace. Detailed plans for the project go into a bit more detail, with various diagrams of the triangle on pages 16, 20, 42, 65, 71, and 78. It gives an idea of how much planning and how many steps are involved in something as seemingly simple as building a new sidewalk. One of the diagrams instructs crews to preserve pieces of the previous stairs in the SW 12th right of way. Detailed planning docs focus on the "how" and not the "why", so it isn't clear whether these stairs were old and historic, or whether city workers were just gathering it up pieces of concrete to recycle. Maybe there's a history article that would clear this up, just waiting behind a paywall. I rather doubt it though.

Patton Square

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Photos of Portland's little Patton Square, a city park at N. Interstate & Emerson, along with the adjacent Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, a performing arts venue in a former fire station. recently renovated with urban renewal money connected to the MAX Yellow Line. Until fairly recently it went by "Patton Park", which doesn't sound anywhere near as fancy. The first reference I've seen to the name "Patton Square" is in a news story from 2001. And if we want to be pedantic, which of course we do, the name "Patton Square" is incorrect because the park is not, in fact, a square.

The city says the park dates to 1960, but the first mention I've found of it in the Oregonian database is from 1957, and it doesn't read as if the park was new at that time. On the other hand a 1956 article on water system expansion (i.e. how the big water tower got here) just mentions the address, with no mention of there being a park here, although I'm not sure that proves anything. Most news stories that mentioned the park in the 1950s and 1960s were in connection with the fire station and water tanks, and not much of anything about the park itself. A 1960 article appears to refer to a "Patton Park Water District", possibly separate from the regular city water system. That doesn't make a lot of sense, so possibly I'm misreading the article. In any event, it made me wonder whether the park itself might have been connected to this water district prior to the city's 1960 date, sort of a midcentury equivalent to the Water Bureau's contemporary HydroParks.

The counterculture arrived here in 1969, with a series of groovy art happenings. The guy behind it wanted to express his "concern for heightened awareness of spatial experience". Apparently this involved a "system of paintings and structural devices", and the effort required the participation of choreographers, dancers, engineers, industrial fabricators, urban planners and architects. I still have no idea what this might have been; it might have been a cult, or a forerunner of Cirque du Soleil, or maybe a little of both.

Note that this park is not to be confused with an entirely different Patton Square in Fontainebleau, a Parisian suburb.