SE 9th & Oak Mural

The next mural on our tour is on the Willamette Plaza building at SE 9th & Oak, painted for last year's Forest for the Trees. Two of the artists (J. Shea and Yoskay Yamamoto) also worked on the nearby mural at 8th & Sandy, painted the same year.

You can clearly see where the mural replaced a large billboard. In fact there's still a ClearChannel logo on the building now. I don't know whether it's just left over from the billboard days, or they still have some sort of rights over this spot, and it could someday go back to being a Lexus ad or something.

The building itself is a cool mid-20th century modern design; it was built in 1960 and originally housed insurance company offices.

Clyde Drexler Mural, SE 9th & Clay

Here's a slideshow of the large mural of Clyde Drexler (the star Portland Trailblazers player in the late 1980s and early 1990s). It's located on SE 9th between Clay and Hawthorne (i.e. the south side of Hawthorne), on the back side of the same building that hosts the koi mural you might have seen here recently.

This was painted by artists Madsteez (who has a Wikipedia bio) and Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter, for the 2013 Forest for the Trees mural event. The festival's Vimeo channel has a time lapse video of the mural being painted, assuming you're in the mood for a Hall & Oates soundtrack. Going by other examples of the two artists' styles, I'm guessing Madsteez created the Drexler part, and Letter did the abstract sorta-lightning design that coils around Drexler.

SE 8th & Sandy Mural

The next mural on the agenda is this sorta-dream-nautical design on the Nu-Way Printing building at SE 8th & Sandy. This was painted by J.Shea & Yoskay Yamamoto for the 2013 Forest for the Trees festival. Shea also painted the mural at Kidd's Toy Museum during that year's event, and there's a clear family resemblance between the two, even apart from being all blue.

I ran across a post about this mural at Kay-Kay's Bird Club. It looks like she's been doing a mural project too, including several I'm not familiar with. I'm starting to get the impression this project is going to be even bigger than I thought.

Arch Angel

The next mural on our ongoing tour is Arch Angel, the large design on the Studio 3 building at SE 12th & Madison, behind the Jolly Roger tavern. It was created by artists Meggs and Kamea Hadar for the 2013 Forest for the Trees mural festival (and a time lapse video was filmed while they did it.) Meggs's description of the project:

The (approx) 100×20 ft mural, titled ‘Arch Angel’ reflects both my recent solo show and Kamea’s powerful portraiture work; using a composition that could stretch the full width of the space. As a homage to Portland we kept to a trailblazers colour palette and included Roses & tattoos – all things very identifiably P-town!
We were stoked that so many locals came by during the process and felt the mural really represented them and their town!

Apparently there's also a skull design on the Jolly Roger that was painted at the same time. I didn't notice it while I was there, but I made a little note to look for it next time I'm in the area.

Black Butte, Siskiyou County

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Just south of Weed, California, near Mt. Shasta, Interstate 5 passes right along the base of a big volcanic cinder cone called "Black Butte". Not to be confused with the one near Bend, OR (the one the beer's named after), or any of the others out there. The USGS geographic name database has 196 entries for things named "Black Butte", although some are rivers, schools, dams and so forth. Still, as a place name it's probably right up there with "Bald Peak", "Larch Mountain", and "Salmon Creek" in terms of unoriginal pioneer-era names.

The puzzling thing is why they ran the freeway right along the base of a volcano when they didn't have to. It's definitely scenic this way, but they've placed a pretty serious bet that the thing will never erupt again. It's only thought to be around 9-10k years old, which is less than a heartbeat in geological time. It was after the Bering Land Bridge era, so there could very well have been people around to witness it forming, hopefully from a safe distance. Undoubtedly there was a planning discussion about where to put the freeway, and I imagine it was all documented for posterity somewhere, but I have no idea where to look for that sort of thing.

Boston Common

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A couple of summers ago, I spent a week in Boston on a business trip, and managed to find a little time here and there to take some tourist photos. Actually a lot of tourist photos, such that I'm still slowly sorting through them and putting together new blog posts every so often. I walked through Boston Common a couple of times; it's a sprawling park in the middle of the city, across the street from the state capitol building, and I always seemed to end up back there after wandering around the city's mazelike streets. Which I suppose is better than running into the municipal minotaur or something.

Long story short, I was there and took a few photos. A few have showed up here previously, in posts about the Brewer Fountain near the eastern edge of the park, and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on a high point toward the park's center, as well as the Boston Public Garden next door. I still had a bunch of photos from here and there around the park, so I figured another slideshow was in order. Et voilà.

For the Love of Cars Mural

I am beginning to sympathize with the city's handwringing over murals vs. billboards. I've covered a lot of cases where a local business painted the outside of their building, with a theme more or less related to the business, and went through the city's hoops in order to get it approved as "public art". On the other side of the grey area are things that are obviously advertising, but were painted as murals, or at least look like they were. Case in point, the big "For the Love of Cars" kinda-mural on a building at SW 2nd & Stark, which is an ad for the Ron Tonkin chain of car dealerships. The design you see here shows a nature scene full of cars, complete with spark plug butterflies. This was painted in 2009, replacing an earlier design with cherubs wielding car keys instead of bows and arrows. Anything promoting cars in Portland is bound to get some negative reactions, like this rant at RebelMetropolis.org that contrasts it with the "America's Bicycle Capital" mural that ran afoul of the city's byzantine sign code. And I get the frustration, but I can't come up a simple and precise dividing line between advertising and art, in order to treat the two differently. I'm not sure how you do that without lots of byzantine rules and special cases..

Unfortunately it's already too late to see this one. Shortly after I took these photos, workers began plastering over it, pasting up a giant generic Land Rover ad in its place. On the bright side, this preserves it for future archeologists as an artifact of the early 21st century, before we ran out of oil and melted the polar caps. I'm sure they'll be fascinated by us.

The Tiffany Weston Rose

Not far from the previous two rose murals I've covered here is another one, the Tiffany Weston Rose (1994), on a back wall of the Tiffany Center (previously the Neighbors of Woodcraft Building), at SW 14th & Yamhill. There's a rose here because this is yet another building owned by Joe Weston, the local real estate baron, and (as explained in a previous post) he just sort of likes murals of roses. This rose and the building it's on are named for his daughter, which I suppose is one of the little benefits of being a real estate baron.

The fraternal organization that built this tower had an odd taste in architecture. It's fortresslike on the outside, complete with Art Deco gargoyles. On the inside, it has a pair of fancy ballrooms, popular for weddings and other events. I've been to a number of company holiday parties there, and off the top of my head I can't think of any comparable event spaces around the city just in terms of sheer swankiness. It really makes me wonder what these Woodcraft people were up to. I do know it was a concert venue well before it became the Tiffany Center; for example, here's a blog post pointing out that Jerry Garcia played an acoustic show here on June 4th, 1982. Personally it's always reminded me of the 55 Central Park West tower in Manhattan, the building made famous in Ghostbusters as "Spook Central", built by an insane architect as a tool for summoning Gozer.

Swan Island Lagoon

Here are a few photos from the Swan Island Boat Ramp, at one corner of the Swan Island lagoon, in the midst of a shipping and industrial zone. I haven't actually taken up boating; it just seemed like an interesting spot to go and take some photos. Looking around, you'll see some more or less natural areas, as well as a bunch of ships and barges docked at the ship repair facility downriver. There's even one end of a Freightliner wind tunnel protruding out over the lagoon, which is not something you'll see every day. Unless you work there, obviously.

The land around the boat ramp is not quite a city park; for some reason it's owned by the city's Bureau of Environmental Services, the local stormwater and sewer agency. I'm not sure what their interest in the place might be, since it looks like it predates their Big Pipe project on the other side of Swan Island.

This area was actually once part of the Willamette River, back when Swan Island was still an island, before the channel was filled in during the early 20th Century. Swan Island then became home to Portland's municipal airport until the current one opened in 1940, and it quickly became a shipbuilding center during World War II, churning out the war's ubiquitous T2 tankers. After shipbuilding wound down, it eventually evolved into today's general industrial zone. It seems like an unlikely place to put a public boat ramp. There are very few river launch points along the lower Willamette, so I suppose the city saw a chance to add another and grabbed it, even though boaters may have to dodge tankers and grain ships and Coast Guard dredges in order to use it.

As with much of the lower Willamette, the river here is full of all sorts of icky stuff, and there are big signs here warning people to never, ever, ever eat any fish caught here. Fishing in the Willamette has become a popular activity among some local immigrant communities, so the signs are translated into several languages to make sure people get the memo.

In some of the photos you'll see a rather photogenic abandoned and half-sunken boat not far from the boat ramp. This has been there for several years, and it's part of a larger abandoned boat problem the state continues to wring its hands about. Apparently nobody has the legal authority or the funding to do anything about it, so abandoned boats in state rivers just continue to sit abandoned indefinitely while nature slowly takes its course.

A Vintage Portland photo from 1935 shows this area in its short-lived airport days. A comment on the article mentions that the Swan Island lagoon was a popular waterskiing spot in the 1950s and 1960s, back before the word "Superfund" was invented. Eew.

Black Canyon, Colorado River

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Here are a couple of old photos from the Colorado River's Black Canyon, downstream of Hoover Dam and a short drive from Las Vegas. I was on a group tour bus at the time and we had stopped at the Willow Beach marina (on the Arizona side of the river), where we rented motorboats and headed up the river toward the dam. In the photos of the canyon walls, I was actually trying to photograph some bighorn sheep high up in the canyon, despite only having a cheap point-n-shoot camera at my disposal. At one point I thought I could pick them out as tiny specks in the photos, but now I'm not so sure.

Vaillancourt Fountain

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Here's an old photo of San Francisco's modernist Vaillancourt Fountain, in a plaza along the Embarcadero across from the Ferry Building. You can tell this is an old photo because of the Embarcadero Freeway lurking in the background. This was taken a couple of years after the big Loma Prieta earthquake that damaged the old freeway, and the city was in the very early stages of tearing it out. If you look closely you can see construction equipment on the lower deck of the freeway.

The one thing everyone seems to know about this fountain is that it was vandalized by U2's Bono during a concert in 1987. I actually liked them at the time, but I still thought it was a dumb stunt. It looks even worse with a few decades of hindsight, as Bono's aged into a pretentious celebrity buffoon (who hasn't had a decent album since 1993's Zooropa). First he vandalizes a fountain, then he comes and dumps his new album on your iPod without even asking.

Kidd's Toy Museum Mural

Here's a slideshow of the new J.Shea mural on the Kidd's Toy Museum building at SE Grand & Main St., painted for this year's Forest for the Trees mural thing.

I've never actually been inside the museum. I'd vaguely heard of it before, but didn't know it was here until I came looking for the mural and realized what it was attached to. Other than the new mural, the building is almost comically nondescript on the outside. On the inside is a vast collection of vintage toys, focusing primarily those produced before 1940.

Accounts of visits to the museum often warn that some of these vintage toys are rather shockingly racist. The common argument made is that it's important to not whitewash the past and pretend this stuff didn't happen. I can see the logic of this argument; a significant number of people alive and voting today grew up playing with toys like this, and there's some value in understanding where your whackaloon Tea Party great uncle got his ideas. I suspect, however, that this is one of those things that's easy to say as a white person. I don't imagine the "important historical artifact" argument would feel terribly compelling if I was the one being targeted.

Koi Mural, SE Hawthorne

Here are a few photos of the koi mural along SE Hawthorne, between 9th & 10th. It's on a wall next to the historic Red Men Hall building (the weird name refers to the fraternal organization it was originally built for, a group allegedly descended from the Boston Tea Party guys, and later New York's Tammany Hall.)

The mural was created by Portland artist Blaine Fontana for the 2013 Forest for the Trees mural event. Apparently koi are a common theme of his.

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].