Cardboard Castle mural (1)

The next mural on our ongoing tour is one of a trio on a recently renovated building at 4703 N. Albina, home to the Cardboard Castle animation studio. This one, on the north side of the building, is a collaboration between artists Brendan Monroe and Souther Salazar, created for the 2014 Forest for the Trees festival. An article at Arrested Motion explains that Monroe did the Tron-like sorta-tree designs, and Salazar created the colorful creatures floating among the trees.

That article also includes a few photos of the mural being painted. It seems like Forest for the Trees murals commonly have someone on site photographing or filming the painting process. That would be tough, I mean, it would feel very strange if someone was filming me while I grind out blog posts, or while C++ code flows from my fingertips at work (I mean, in between long bouts of consulting Prof. Google about my current issue, and checking Twitter). Either one would be a strange and boring documentary. I suppose if you're busy painting you have to just ignore the cameras and keep going.

Anyway, an article at BOOOOOOOM has more photos, including a few more of the painting work. Another Arrested Motion article shows a mural Salazar painted in San Francisco right after this one, for the 2014 TEDMED conference (which I imagine involves medically-oriented TED talks). Meanwhile Monroe recently painted murals in Berkeley, CA and Taiwan, in a similar style to the one here. It's a very distinctive style, and it seems to lend itself to collaborations with other artists.

Winthrop Square, Charlestown, Boston

View Larger Map

When I was in Boston a while back, I spent a few days wandering around the city taking in the standard tourist sites. At one point I crossed a bridge over to the Charlestown neighborhood, first to see the historic USS Constitution, and then the Bunker Hill Monument. On the way uphill to the monument, I ran across a small, shady city park with a statue in the middle. So I took a couple of quick photos before continuing on. This park is called either "Winthrop Square" or "The Training Field". The name situation is a little confusing here. Wikipedia isn't helpful in this case; its measly Winthrop Square article is a short disambiguation page, pointing at three different parks in the Boston area, none of which are the one here. So in addition to this place, there's a Winthrop Square in the downtown Financial District, and others in Cambridge and Brookline. And none of these parks have their own Wikipedia articles. The city's recent "Cultural Landscape Plan" for the park splits the difference and calls it "Training Field / Winthrop Square". As far as I know this is the only Winthrop Square within the Charlestown neighborhood, though, so hopefully the title of this post points at one place and one place only.

If my past record with Boston posts holds up, I'll get at least one irate commenter here pointing out that I've gotten it all wrong. Inevitably it will turn out that both "Training Field" and "Winthrop Square" are official legal names that nobody ever uses, and the actual name in use is something else entirely, something I could never figure out by googling the place since locals never utter it online where outsiders could see it. Or possibly there are multiple unofficial names, and the one you use indicates what part of town you're from, or which pilgrim ship your great-great-etc.-grandparents came over on, or your side in a centuries-old blood feud dating back to the old country, or something like that. Or possibly it really is called "Winthrop Square" and the irate commenter is just here to heap random abuse on a random outsider purely for the lulz, which I understand is a traditional and beloved Boston pastime. Which is kind of weird since everyone I encountered in Boston was actually really nice in person, at least really nice by Portland standards. I don't claim to understand this phenomenon; I just hope I got the name right this time.

The next surprising thing about the park is that last year marked the very first ever archeological dig here. One would think that in a city full of universities and history nuts, at some point someone would have wondered what might be underground here. Apparently nobody ever got around to looking until now, though. The article mentions the city thinks the park might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, seeing as it's been a city park since the 1850s, and served on and off as a militia training ground for over two centuries before that. I'm no historian, but I think they have a fair shot at landing that historic designation, if they play their cards just right.

Third mildly odd thing: The park's named for Gov. John Winthrop, who governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s and 1640s. The statue here is not of him, though. It's a Civil War memorial called either the Soldiers Monument or Soldiers and Sailors Monument, depending on who you ask. Which is not to be confused with the much larger Solders and Sailors Monument in Boston Common. Meanwhile, it turns out that the Winthrop Square in the Financial District also features a statue, and it's not of Gov. Winthrop either, but rather of Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns was Plan B after the square's developers tried and failed to obtain a historic Winthrop statue owned by a historic Unitarian church in the Back Bay. I think I've located it in Google Street View here; if it's the right statue, it seems to be a bit on the small side, and would probably look out of place in any sort of grand monument.

I mean, this is all assuming the park in Charlestown is named after this one particular Winthrop. At this point I'm not willing to assume that as an undisputed fact. It could just as easily be named after Jezebekiah Winthrop, a mad industrialist and warlock of the early 19th Century, uniquely feared for both his work with electricity and his knowledge of arcane manuscripts, and the heavy monument actually exists to seal an interdimensional portal he created, and there's a very, very good reason everyone's avoided disturbing the soil here until now. I'm not saying I know this to be the case, obviously. I'm just saying that if an army of steampunk golems emerges from beneath Charlestown to spread havoc and mayhem, well... I'm just saying there were certain potential warning signs.

Nu'uanu Stream, Downtown Honolulu

[View Larger Map]

I haven't done any Hawaii photos for a while, so here's a slideshow of Oahu's Nu'uanu Stream as it flows through downtown Honolulu along the edge of Chinatown. It flows down from the leeward side of the Nu'uanu Pali area, but it's very much an urban waterway by the time it gets here; it flows through a straight, stone-lined channel, and suffers from wastewater pollution, invasive fish species, and it's also the site of occasional drownings.

There are also a lot of bridges over the stream, but you'll be surprised to know I wasn't really paying attention to bridges at the time, so I don't have a lot of photos of them specifically. I'm not sure why not; possibly because they aren't very big and most of them aren't very interesting. Well, that and the fact that I was in Hawaii and had better things to do with my time than stare at bridges. It turns out there isn't a lot of info about them available anyway; there's an UglyBridges page for the Interstate H1 bridge over the stream, which you can see in a couple of the photos. Other photos (including the first one in the set) show the little footbridge over the stream near the Chinatown Cultural Plaza. It's pretty photogenic but doesn't seem to be very old. I can't seem to locate any information about it -- why it was built, or exactly when, or anything -- which I'm sure means I just don't know where to look. If I had to guess I'd guess it dates to the 70s, and was part of some sort of urban renewal scheme.

Meanwhile, on the right edge of the first photo you can sort of see the large, abstract T'Sung sculpture. From this standpoint (i.e. from the Beretania St. bridge, looking upstream), the Jose Rizal statue is off to the left, and the Sun Yat Sen statue is off to the right. Some of the trees in the distance straight ahead are part of the Foster Botanical Garden. I highly recommend the garden, although you really have to slow down and take your time to properly appreciate it.

Alberta Legislature, Edmonton

[View Larger Map]

Here are a few old photos of the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, circa 1990 or so. I was in college at the time and this may have been the last family vacation I went on with my parents & younger siblings. The main reason we'd gone to Edmonton was to visit the West Edmonton Mall, which was then the world's largest shopping mall. Everyone else was pretty excited about this, but I had the usual self-righteous college student disdain for malls and was bored silly, except for the water slide park, which was ok. Wikipedia says the mall is still the largest in North America, but only the tenth largest in the world, meaning there are no US malls in the top ten. I don't know about you, but I find that quite astonishing.

Anyway, we made a little side trip to go see the provincial capitol building, since we always had to go see state capitol buildings while traveling for some reason, and this was a logical extension of the idea. So we toured the building and wandered around the extensive grounds for a while. Despite being a PoliSci major at the time, it didn't occur to me to look into provincial politics and understand who was governing from this building. If I'd known the province was (and still is) run by right-wing whackaloons, with an official opposition of even crazier further-right whackaloons, it would have put a bit of a damper on the experience.

So the thing that intrigued me the most wasn't the building itself, which is your standard sorta-Roman, sorta-Gothic stately government building. What really drew my attention was a trio of odd concrete structures with mirrors at their tops, located in front of a legislative office building. I didn't realize what they were for until much later. Edmonton has an extensive network of pedestrian walkways, both underground and above ground, which was primarily built in the 1970s and early 80s, and these mirror towers are part of this network. The mirrors act as periscopes, reflecting sunlight through skylights into a pedestrian tunnel below ground. Several Canadian cities have systems like this, as do a few in the US, like the Skyway in Minneapolis, and underground tunnel systems in Houston, Dallas, and even Oklahoma City.

Portland has nothing like this system, and City Hall is aware of this and fully intends for it to stay that way. The idea is that pedestrian walkways above or below ground draw people away from street-level businesses, leaving the outdoors empty and sort of inhospitable. That's certainly been Edmonton's experience, such that the city council is now trying to figure out how to get people to go outside. Our weather is nowhere near as extreme as theirs, but dry indoor walkways would be awfully attractive during the long, cold, dark rainy months. People would use them constantly if they existed.

Siskiyou Summit

[View Larger Map]

Here's another old photo from a shoebox of old photos, taken while driving over Siskiyou Summit on Interstate 5 in S. Oregon, heading toward the California border. I didn't (and still don't) know this part of the state very well; to me the name "Siskiyou Summit" evokes car trouble, snow, and a long stretch of highway without convenient gas stations or restrooms. I know the Siskiyou Mountains are more than just an obstacle to freeway traffic, obviously, but I've never made a trip down there to go exploring. A large area due east of this spot is protected as the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. I'm not sure whether the freeway actually passes through the monument boundary or not. These photos were taken ages ago, before the monument existed, so there wouldn't have been any signs at the time.

The deep road cut should be a clue that this isn't quite a natural pass through the mountains. Until I-5 went in, the standard north-south route over the mountains went over nearby Siskiyou Pass. (There are no east-west routes; construction began on a road at one time, but the project was dropped due to environmental concerns, and the intended route is now within federally designated wilderness, including a stretch of abandoned highway slowly being reclaimed by nature.) Pioneer-era trails through Siskiyou Pass gave way to railroads and the old Highway 99. I'm not sure why I-5 took a different route instead of absorbing the older highway. The railroad is a rather steep and arduous route for trains; rail service ended through the Siskiyous in 2005, but in 2012 there was an effort to restore service with the help of a federal grant, and construction is supposed to be complete by July 2015.

The centerpiece of the rail line is the historic Tunnel 13, a 0.6 mile tunnel under the pass. On October 11th, 1923 the tunnel was the site of the last "great" Western train robbery. Western movies have given train robberies a sort of romantic aura, but this one was anything but. The DeAutremont brothers boarded the train near Siskiyou Pass and tried to rob the train's mail car, thinking there would be valuables in it. The plan quickly went awry, though, and the robbers killed four railroad employees and fled without obtaining anything of value. The brothers went on the run for four years. Hugh DeAutremont, the youngest brother, joined the army and headed out to the Philippines, where another soldier recognized him from a federal wanted poster. The older twin brothers were captured shortly after this break in the case.

Anyway, regarding the photo, yes, I did take it from a moving vehicle. Per the usual disclaimer, common sense and Legal both say not to do this. Not to make excuses or anything, but this was probably easier to pull off semi-safely in 1995 than it is now. I had a cheap fixed-focus, no-zoom 35mm point and shoot camera at the time, and all you had to do was point it vaguely out the window with one hand and press the button. No looking through the viewfinder or finding the power button first, or launching the right app, or anything like that. The downside, obviously, was not being able to share the photos easily, and you had to change rolls every 36 photos, and there was the time and expense of film developing... Ok, really there were all sorts of downsides. I mean, technically you could still do it this way now if you wanted to. You can pick up 35mm point & shoot cameras for less than a dollar at Goodwill, for the simple reason that nobody wants them anymore. Then you're good to go, assuming you can still find film and somewhere to have it developed. (Or you could go all out and develop it yourself, I guess.) The downsides are exactly the same as they were ~20 years ago, it's just that they're so much less tolerable than they once were.

I-5 Columbia Slough Bridge

View Larger Map

The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the I-5 Columbia Slough Bridge. When highway traffic reports use the dreaded phrase "northbound traffic backed up past the slough bridge", this is the bridge they're talking about. I haven't actually paid attention to traffic reports in a while, since I live in downtown Portland and walk to work. It's possible this phrase is less common than it once was; the bridge was widened in 2008-2010 as part of ODOT's I-5 Delta Park project. The project removed a notorious traffic bottleneck for Clark County commuters by widening this stretch of freeway from two lanes to three in each direction. Somehow they managed to do this without shaving off parts of the adjacent Columbian Cemetery just south of the bridge. The project's final "Revised Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact" included a few provisions for coexisting with the cemetery, such as not running pile drivers during funerals.

Even the widened freeway is still puny by the standards of nearly any other city. The Oregon side of the metro area has a general policy of freeways having no more than three traffic lanes per direction, so this is as big as I-5 is likely to get barring an unlikely tectonic shift in local attitudes toward cars. As predicted, the traffic bottleneck simply shifted south to another section of two lane freeway around the Rose Quarter / convention center area. There have been suggestions about widening the freeway there too, and potentially capping it and putting parks or buildings on top. That would probably just push the bottleneck somewhere else again. But I do generally like the idea of capping freeways and hiding the ugliness away underground, so maybe there would be an upside to the idea. My understanding is that the widening was also supposed to be a prerequisite to the now-abandoned Columbia River Crossing, which would have been a ginormous replacement for the current Interstate Bridge.

Anyway, these photos were taken from the new stretch of Columbia Slough Trail that opened in early 2014, so you can see what the bridge looks like from the side and underneath, in case you were curious. It's sort of a utilitarian, unmemorable bridge, but it's interesting that they blended the expansion with the existing bridge so it isn't immediately obvious that it was widened. If you look closely at the bridge supports you can see a line between older & newer concrete where the outside lanes were added.

The library's Oregonian database indicates that ODOT proposed the bridge in May 1962, as part of what was then called the "Minnesota Freeway" project. (I-5 south of downtown was called the "Baldock Freeway" and I-405 was sometimes the "West Hills Freeway" and other times the "Foothills Freeway". All of these names have long since fallen out of use.) A photo spread in March 1964 shows the bridge under construction, and another photo in July of that year shows the bridge nearing completion. By 1981 (when the bridge was only 17 years old), Multnomah County and ODOT were already wringing their hands about it, but at the time they couldn't afford to do anything about it. It was already over capacity in 1981, but they went around in circles for another 25 years before figuring out how to make it happen. I suppose impatient people don't last long in the civil engineering business.

Mercurial Sky

Here are a few photos of Mercurial Sky, the art installation / lightshow at downtown Portland's Director Park . This is by Seattle artist Dan Corson, who also created the Nepenthes (which are illuminated as well) along NW Davis in Old Town. Portland doesn't have a lot of public art that needs to be seen at night. Other than the two Corson pieces, there's More Everyday Sunshine along the NS streetcar line, and the untitled neon piece on the parking garage at NW 1st & Davis. There might be others, but these are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Anyway, the RACC page for Mercurial Sky describes the concept behind it in more detail. The digital video aspect wasn't obvious to me as I was watching it, but it's possible I was being impatient and didn't stay long enough. This might be a fun place to sneak in the occasional Rick Astley video without most viewers noticing.

Mercurial Sky is an ever-changing array of light played on LED tubes integrated into the Director Park Canopy. The digital video only emits from the lighted bars, and provides a sense of movement through an abstract tapestry of light and color. If you stand farther away, or look in nearby reflections, the images are compressed and give a clearer view of the video.

“...it seemed like a natural idea to infuse the randomness of the movement of nature into [this hardscaped park]... The inspiration for the images came from my own personal interests and exploration in natural patterns of movement. You can see the natural elements of water, fire, and air expressed in the video. You can also catch movements from creatures under a microscope and worms crawling across fresh moss, jellyfish pulsating, birds flying, and strings of kelp swaying in the ocean current.”

Mt. Shasta Vista Point (on a cloudy day)

[View Larger Map]

So here are a couple of old photos from the Mt. Shasta Vista Point along I-5 in Northern California, a bit north of Yreka. As the name suggests, on a clear day you'd get a view of Mt. Shasta and the southern Cascades from here. Obviously it was not a clear day when I took these. It was still reasonably scenic, though; you can see a bunch of smaller mountains,, and you can sort of vaguely tell where the larger mountains are obscured by clouds.

It took me a while to figure out exactly where I took these photos. I wasn't being that meticulous about tracking locations, since I was kind of busy driving a Ryder truck across the country at the time. These were originally film photos, so they obviously weren't geotagged, so I didn't have that to go by either. So I looked at the state's list of highway rest areas and concluded it was probably the Randolph Collier rest area, by process of elimination since it's the only one in the rough vicinity. The viewpoint here apparently doesn't count as a rest area, per se, so it wasn't on that list.

I even had a fun naming situation to puzzle out about that other rest area. Sources including Google Maps insist it's spelled "Randolf", but the state DOT and Collier's Wikipedia bio insist it's the traditional spelling. I even did an image search and found a photo on Wikimapia that looks a lot of like mine, labeled "Randolph E. Collier Rest Area". Though other sources indicate Collier's middle initial was 'C', not 'E'. Guy sounds like a shady character to me. Anyway, I thought I had a definite match. But it turns out all of the other photos of the wayside look anything like this, and Yelp reviews explicitly say it doesn't have a view, so I'm pretty sure that one photo was actually taken at the Mt. Shasta Vista Point too, and someone labeled it wrong, and I almost propagated the mistake. I had an entire post written up and I was about to hit publish when I decided to double check the location and realized I had it all wrong. Posting that would have been really embarrassing.

Columbian Cemetery

Since it's late October now, here's a slideshow from NE Portland's Columbian Cemetery, which sits next to I-5, inside the curve of the northbound Columbia Blvd. offramp. It's bordered by noisy roads to the west and south, and industrial warehouses to the north and east, and it's maybe not the most idyllic and restful final resting place out there. As with the Powell Grove Cemetery out at NE 122nd, the cemetery was here first, and then roads and general development encroached from all sides. I haven't come across anything like the Powell Grove legal battle here; maybe the state and county learned their lesson from the earlier conflict and routed I-5 around one side, instead of trying to dig up anyone's ancestors.

It turns out the fancy fence and gate out front are quite new, added sometime after 2006 in conjunction with the widening of the I-5 Columbia Slough Bridge. An environmental assessment for the project described the fence upgrade:

The existing chain-link fencing along the front of the cemetery contains two brick pillars (at the entrance) and a modern metal pipe gate identifying the name and date of the cemetery. This fencing will be replaced with an iron-style fence designed to replicate the appearance of the historic fence. Fragments of the historic fence are available to use as a template. However, for security reasons, the new fence may be taller than the historic fence, which was approximately 3 feet high. A driveway gate that is in keeping with the historic fence design and incorporates the name and date of the cemetery will be installed at the entrance.

I actually dropped by to find an old city boundary marker that a helpful Gentle Reader had sent me a tip about. Unlike Lone Fir, or Greenwood Hills, or the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery, I gather that in general this spot is not the final resting place of prominent early pioneers or the rich and famous of any era. A chatty volunteer told me about a couple of interesting residents, including a former slave who had moved to Portland after the Civil War (who I was unable to locate), and a gentleman who held Portland Police badge #1 (and who, for some reason, was buried juuuust outside city limits).

I imagine he would have had additional stories to share, but the cemetery's equipment shed had been robbed a few days earlier, and he and another volunteer were busy figuring out the extent of the damage and how to secure the remaining equipment. I am not a superstitious person by any means, but the act of robbing a cemetery just calls out for some sort of nasty cosmic retribution. At minimum, it seems like the perpetrators ought to be cursed to wander the earth as tormented spirits, unable to enjoy a moment's peace until everything they stole is replaced. Even if that means chasing old tractor parts across the globe to a metal recycler in China or somewhere. That would be a good start, at least.

Oregon Historical Society Mural

Here's a slideshow of the trompe l'oeil mural on the Sovereign Hotel building, next to the bunker-like Oregon Historical Society complex. It was created for the historical society in 1989 by artist Richard Haas. One side depicts the Lewis & Clark expedition, while the other covers the pioneer period, with the various historical figures painted as if they were architectural features of the building. The fake 3D effect is surprisingly effective. To me, anyway. Maybe you aren't as easily fooled as I am. (If you like optical illusions, let me direct you to Akiyoshi's Illusion Pages. I don't get a lot of chances to link there on this humble blog, but it's worth a look. May cause motion sickness if you're really prone to it.)

A few items related to this mural from around the interwebs:

• OregonDigital has a photo from 1976 (though it shows the non-mural sides of the building so it's not useful for comparison), as well as an undated photo taken from the roof of the building.
• Dave of Dave Knows Portland (who used to live in the Sovereign building) points us at another historic photo showing the view from the building circa 1923.
• A recent ZehnKatzen Times post explores the South Park Blocks around the historical society, with a bit about the mural and an explanation of the peculiar street naming along the Park Blocks.

Embarcadero Freeway

October 17th, 2014 marked the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people and caused heavy damage across the Bay Area. One of the damaged structures was the old Embarcadero Freeway, an ugly double-deck elevated structure that ran across the San Francisco waterfront. The freeway was closed immediately after the quake, but sat around abandoned for a few years while the city tried to figure out what to do next. Eventually they demolished it, which was a hugely controversial step at the time. These photos were taken around 1991 before demolition began in earnest.

Snake Mural, SE 11th

Here's a slideshow of the new snake mural on a building on SW 11th between Stark & Oak, near St. Francis Park, and next to the ADX building (which has a mural of its own). The snake was created by artist Spencer Keeton Cunningham for the 2014 Forest for the Trees mural festival.

Somehow I ended up without a photo of the head of the snake (on the first visit). I'm not really sure how I managed that. The artist's Tumblr has a few photos of him painting it, including one of the head. A post at the festival's Tumblr has more photos of it; apparently the mural wraps around three sides of the building, not the two that I thought, and the head is on the side I didn't realize was there. I also didn't realize it was a snake, since without the head it kind of looks like an abstract design, like the orange ADX mural next door. So I didn't realize I ought to be looking for the head of a snake. That sounds kind of dumb in retrospect, but it's the only excuse I've got.

Updated: I went back and got proper photos of the head of the snake. It just didn't seem right, otherwise.

ADX Mural, SE 11th

Photos of the colorful abstract mural on the ADX building, at SE 11th & Oak, across the street from St. Francis Park. Painted by Japanese mural artist Mhak for the 2013 Forest for the Trees thing. The artist's Facebook page includes a photo showing more of the mural on the back side of the building, which I didn't realize was there and didn't notice when I visited (the first time around). A blog post by the artist includes more photos, and another post links to a short video of various Forest for the Trees artists busy doing their thing.

Updated: I felt bad about not covering the whole mural, so I went back and got photos of the part around the corner. Enjoy, or whatevs.

Hillside Park

[View Larger Map]

Here's a slideshow from Portland's Hillside Park, in the Hillside neighborhood just uphill from NW 23rd and the Nob Hill area. I was in the area looking for the kinda-sorta bridge structure at NW Melinda & Maywood, and it occurred to me that I'd never been to this park before, so I figured I'd take a look at it on the way.

In addition to the usual ball fields and play equipment, the park is home to the Hillside Community Center, a Pietro Belluschi building that once housed the original Catlin Gabel School gymnasium. The school moved to its current campus around 1968, and after a short-lived stint as an artists' cooperative the old school went back on the market. There was lobbying and fundraising and rich people nervously taking out second mortgages in order to help buy it, and eventually the finances worked out and the place was saved for posterity. Although the city actually demolished much of the school to make room for sports fields, only saving the gymnasium. And, famous architect or no, the remaining building just sort of looks like an old school gymnasium standing by itself.

The city's info page for the park has a long history section explaining its formative years in a lot more detail. I thought about quoting a big chunk of that instead of summarizing it, but honestly the origin story isn't that compelling, unless maybe you live nearby and want to know where your local park came from. I've covered several places with better origin stories, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Council Crest and Lotus Isle are former amusement parks. Duniway Park sits atop an early 20th century garbage dump, which filled a ravine that previously held a poor Italian immigrant neighborhood. Irving Park was once home to a racetrack where Barney Oldfield set a world land speed record. Waterfront Park was created by tearing out a freeway, and Piccolo Park is land left over from the canceled Mt. Hood Freeway. Kelly Butte was home to a jail and later the city's atomic doom bunker. Frank L. Knight Park was apparently donated by its namesake to protect the view of Mt. St. Helens from his house. And of course tiny Mill Ends Park originated as a running joke by a 1960s Oregon Journal columnist, which later took on a life of its own and became one of Portland's sillier tourist attractions.

Union Pacific Columbia Slough Bridge

[View Larger Map]

The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the Union Pacific railroad bridge, which crosses the slough and Wright Island just east of the new pedestrian bridge. I can't find much in the way of information to share about this one: How old it is, who designed it, the usual factoids. That's annoying but not uncommon with obscure railroad bridges. Looking at it, you can see the stubs of old pilings underneath the bridge, suggesting the current one replaced an earlier wooden trestle-type bridge. Not sure I would hazard a guess as to how old the current bridge is; a 2003 ODOT study on improving local rail access suggested replacing it with a new, higher bridge, but I don't know whether this was ever implemented. It looks older than 2003, though, or at least the portion south of the island does. The northern side looks like it might be newer, but it's hard to tell, and (as I said) I have no concrete information to pass along.

In lieu of that, all we've got are a few Panoramio photos, and photos on railfan sites (and they're mostly interested in bridges as places to photograph trains.) One such site points out that this train line is just north of a major rail junction, as well as the Union Pacific tunnel under North Portland, so apparently this area is kind of a big deal if you're into trains.

Santiam River Wayside

[View Larger Map]

A couple of years ago, I was on my way back from the McDowell Creek waterfalls near Lebanon, OR, and stopped at a highway rest area north of Albany, where Interstate 5 crosses the Santiam River. After using the facilities, it occurred to me that it was a fairly scenic spot by rest area standards and I figured I'd take a few photos while I was there. First order of business was the bridge, actually. It's a nondescript modern concrete bridge, but I was heavily into the ongoing bridge project at the time and felt I needed an example of the style, such as it is. I also ended up with a few assorted photos of the river, and a few of people boating and fishing, and it occurred to me there might be a second post in those photos. And behold, here they are.

This is not the beginning of a highway rest area project, just to be clear on that point. Creepy urban legends aside, it just seems like a weird and unrewarding undertaking. Which is saying a lot considering all the other weird projects I've gotten into over time. I might make an exception for the one just south of Wilsonville if I get around to it, since it has a weird bit of Cold War history to it. Apparently it was designed to double as a military staging area in case of emergency. Which I imagine means it would've been outside the presumable blast zone if the Rooskies had nuked downtown Portland. (Meanwhile, city officials and VIPs would have ridden out the attack in the city's old nuclear bunker at Kelly Butte.) Maybe the Santiam one was designed for a similar role, in case the Rooskies ran out of major cities to nuke and went after Albany instead. I have no actual information to that effect, but it's possible that's still classified or something.

Lombard Street, San Francisco

View Larger Map

So here are some old tourist photos of San Francisco's Lombard Street, taken sometime in the early 90s. To be more precise, these are of the famous steep one-block stretch of Lombard St. with the switchbacks. Tourists inexplicably come from far and wide to drive down this street, while other tourists gawk at them. This is possibly the world's most idiotic tourist attraction. It's a steep, narrow, windy street. Drivers often have to line up and wait to drive down it, and then they're too busy steering and riding the brakes to enjoy it, whatever enjoying it might entail. They do get to tell the folks back home they did it, though, for whatever that's worth. It's a cheesy tourist trap, and there isn't even a gift shop at the end that sells you "I Survived Lombard Street" t-shirts. Or at least there wasn't one the last time I was there. So it isn't even a tourist trap that makes money.

When I was a kid, we lived in the Bay Area for about a year, and I recall we made the trip into the city to drive down Lombard St. at least once. I went back as an adult I suppose just to confirm that it was what I remembered: Nothing but a steep windy street that people feel compelled to drive down for some reason. I also had the idea I was going to be all meta-ironic and get photos of the gawkers, because I was about 22 at the time and it seemed like an original idea that probably nobody had ever thought of before. As far as I know nobody was taking photos of me while I took these, but that possibility only occurred to me much later. There is probably a fun art project, or at least a Tumblr, in taking photos of smug hip people visiting Lombard St. ironically and thinking they're at the top of the meta-irony food chain.

Anyway, evidently I'm not the only person who thinks this is dumb. Due to complaints by area residents -- probably many decades' worth of complaints -- beginning in summer 2014 the city began closing the street on weekends as an experiment. If it's not too disruptive, they may eventually close the street on a permanent basis, or at least on a regular basis, and tourists will have to find something else dumb to do, like buying overpriced trinkets at Fisherman's Wharf, or taking selfies with a Haight-Ashbury intersection sign. Those two will probably never go away.

The "Keep Portland Weird" Mural

I grudgingly realized I couldn't do a project about Portland murals without touching on the big Keep Portland Weird sign at SW 3rd & Ankeny, across the street from that one donut shop all the tourists have to visit. You know the one I mean. I'm pretty sure this sign's for the benefit of tourists too. They can take selfies with it, and they love it because it confirms everything they saw on that one Portland-based IFC sketch comedy show. You know the one I mean.

The first thing to know about the whole keepin' it weird thing is that we stole it from Austin, Texas, and they came up with it as part of a "support local business" campaign. At least the local variant had the common decency to change the font, since Austin's seems to use Comic Sans, which is entirely the wrong kind of weird. Yech. I've never been to Austin, and all I know about the place comes from the movie Slacker. The movie certainly made it seem weird, but the movie's going on 25 years old now, and was made before many of today's hipsters were even born. So I can't venture an informed opinion about Austin's present-day weirdness. They have us beat in the bat colony department, but as far as I know hipsters had nothing to do with that.

The second thing to know is that apart from a few neighborhoods (you know the ones I mean) this is not a particularly weird city. The suburbs have the same suburban people and chain stores you'd find anywhere else around the country. The only clue to what city you're in would be the occasional "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker on a hulking Lexus SUV, put there without a trace of irony.

Washington Square, San Francisco

View Larger Map

Here are a couple of old tourist photos of San Francisco's Washington Square, a city park in North Beach, the city's historically Italian neighborhood. As a tourist, I didn't get beyond the standard shot of the Saints Peter & Paul Church with the park in the foreground. I seem to recall that at the time were actual old Italian guys there, smoking cigars and playing bocce. That was about 20 years ago, though. Today it's probably nothing but awful tech dudebros in polo shirts yapping on about their awful startups. It was obvious the city was changing the last time I was there, about 6 years ago, and I gather the demographic shift has really taken hold in the last 2-3 years, so now anyone who isn't backed by venture capital is rapidly being priced out of the city.

SE 3rd & Morrison Mural

The next mural on our tour is the new magic-snail-n-tentacles design near SE 3rd & Morrison, on the side of one of the City Liquidators buildings, across the street from the Montage. This was painted for the 2014 Forest for the Trees event by Philadelphia-based artist NoseGo. (Twitter: @nosego, Instagram: @nosego). An article at Bizarre Beyond Belief includes a bunch of photos of this mural, along with another NoseGo piece at Gigantic Brewing down near Reed College.

Maybe it's just that it's October right now, but I do like the part with the tentacles bursting through the wall, as if from another dimension. Contemporary public art in Portland is rather deficient in the eldritch horror department, and while this is a bit too cute and technicolor to qualify, it's at least a step in the right direction. Still, I know we can do better if we put our puny mortal minds to it. I'm pretty sure we could use a painting or a bust of Great Cthulhu for the library's rare and forbidden manuscript room, for one thing. Ok, technically it's just the "rare book and other special collections" room, but you know that's got to be a euphemism for forbidden manuscripts.