Hooker St. Skybridge

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The next bridge we're looking at is yet another pedestrian bridge. This one crosses Naito Parkway at SW Hooker St., connecting the Lair Hill neighborhood with the so-called "Bermuda Triangle" area that's home to the local naturopathic college. There's no actual intersection here, since this stretch of Naito is a 1940s-era quasi-freeway, and the the skybridge is one of the only ways in or out of the Bermuda Triangle, along with the creepy Arthur St. Tunnel.

The school's master plan notes the bridge is one of the main ways for students to access the campus, and points out that the bridge is quite old and not ADA-compliant. The bridge has been there much longer than the current school, in fact; it was previously home to PCC's Ross Island Center for a couple of decades, and before that it began life as Portland's amusingly named Failing Elementary School (named for pioneer Josiah Failing, also the namesake of NE Portland's Failing Pedestrian Bridge). I figured the bridge had probably been built for schoolkids, so I dug into the library's Oregonian database again. In a October 2nd 1947 article, school administrators & parents were clamoring for a new pedestrian bridge, since the state was in the middle of turning Front Avenue (now Naito) into a nice modern superhighway. The State Highway Department included such a bridge in their initial plan for the highway, but hadn't contracted anyone to build it, and they favored dropping the idea because it might cost up to $50,000. It seems the state also believed kids wouldn't actually use a pedestrian bridge if one was built, & would rather just dart across the busy highway or something, apparently. Neighbors pointed out that the closest library & playground were on the far side of Front, as was the Neighborhood House afterschool program, so over half of the school's students were likely to need to cross the new state superhighway at some point during the school day.

In a May 25th 1948 article, the state finally gave in and agreed to build a bridge, contracting with the lowest bidder for exactly $17,390.95, although the headline rounded it up by a nickel. You have to admit it looks like something built nearly 70 years ago by the lowest bidder, though it's best not to think about this while walking across the thing.

Unfortunately the delay meant the bridge wouldn't be ready by the start of the 1948 school year, and a September 5th, 1948 article explained the temporary, circuitous safe ways to school until the bridge was completed around November 1st, complete with lots of police and crossing guards everywhere.

The state's weird reluctance and penny-pinching around an obvious child safety issue might be explained by demographics, since this part of South Portland was a poor/working class, largely immigrant neighborhood at the time, as it was for much of the early to mid 20th century. I imagine the state would've preferred to just bulldoze the whole neighborhood in the name of Progress, like they later did in the South Auditorium area further north, and the largely African-American Albina business district in NE Portland.

Denver Ave. / Columbia Blvd. bridge

Several years ago, this humble blog featured a lot of posts about bridges. It was a good subject for an ongoing project: They photgraph well, they often have interesting history to dig up, and esoteric engineering details to nerd out over, and there's a limited supply of them, enough to sustain an interesting project, but few enough that you'll eventually run out and you can call it done. That is, unless you're willing to go further and further afield, or write about increasingly small and esoteric bridges that nobody in their right mind would possibly be interested in. Or you can do what I did, which is call it done, but continue on down the rabbit hole anyway.

You can probably guess where this is going: I outdid myself and found a really super esoteric bridge and wrote an entire blog post about it, and I feel like I need to apologize in advance for just how esoteric it is. This one may actually look vaguely familiar, in the unlikely event you've been following the ongoing bridge project all this time. We covered the Denver Avenue bridge over the Columbia Slough back in 2014, along with the Vanport Bridge next door that's used by the MAX Yellow Line. This time we're looking at the Denver Ave. bridge/viaduct over Columbia Boulevard & a Union Pacific rail line, a bit south of the slough bridge. I suppose I just assumed this was all one structure, and the Columbia Blvd. part was just the southern approach to the slough bridge, but there's actually a short bit of road separating them. The state's 2013 Historic Bridge Inventory assures that although the two structures look identical, structurally and legally they are two separate bridges. From the bridge inventory:

In the late 1920s, increased traffic on the West Side Highway led to a major revision in how the highway approached the Interstate Bridge, then the only Portland area crossing into Washington State. Prior to this redesignation, the West Side Highway ended at downtown Portland, with only the Pacific Highway continuing over the bridge. These new bridges were designed to match those on the Pacific Highway, and continued to be a major part of the approach until the construction of I-5. They both feature a unique baluster railing, which is now mostly hidden behind protective wooden paneling.

In a couple of these photos you can sort of see the "unique" baluster, which is somewhat less distinctive than it sounds, unfortunately. Since these photos were taken, ODOT performed a major renovation on this bridge as well as the slough one, and both now sport modern, safe, and non-distinctive railings. As far as I know, ODOT didn't bother saving a chunk of the old one for posterity; it's just gone. In any case, the bridge inventory also includes a few dry stats, in case Obscure Portland Bridges is ever a pub trivia category:

Bridge Number: 04518
Lat/Long: 45 35 09, -122 41 13
Description: Thirteen 71-ft reinforced concrete girder and floorbeam system spans with curved haunches

In case you were curious, "curved haunches" is a technical term in bridge engineering, and was not intended as an insult. The state's 2012 Bridge Condition Report notes that that the slough bridge proper (bridge number 04517, if you were wondering) dates to 1916, with steel construction, while the Columbia/Union Pacific part dates to 1929, with concrete construction. So I suppose there would have been a surface level intersection & railroad crossing here before the current bridge. I'm not sure why this would be useful information, unless possibly you need to date an old photo or it's part of a trivia question, but hey.

Barbur TC pedestrian bridge

Ok, next bridge up is another pedestrian one, the rather ugly 70s concrete one over I-5 at the Barbur Transit Center. I hadn't really planned on doing a post about this thing, but I ran across it while taking photos of Tapestry, a large mural along the Barbur-side approach to the bridge. I figured I was there anyway, toting a camera, and it was technically a bridge, so sure, why not? A PSU study of local pedestrian bridges notes this was built in 1976 along with the transit center itself. The study notes that many neighborhood streets on the other side of the bridge lack sidewalks (a common problem in SW Portland), so it's not part of a wider network of safe bike/pedestrian routes. I'm not sure that's something city planners even considered back then, and I'm not entirely sure this area was within city limits back in the 70s. Until the late 70s & early 80s large portions of Multnomah County outside the central city were unincorporated, and the county didn't really bother with things like building sidewalks or a proper sewer system, keeping people from building in flood zones, maintaining a useful park system, little details like that.

I didn't see much of anything in the library's Oregonian database about the bridge itself, but I did run across a September 12th, 1976 article with architectural drawings of the proposed "West Portland Transit Station". Barbur was the city's first transit center, as it turns out, and apparently this was a new concept imported from Toronto that other US cities hadn't adopted yet. So, little piece of history here. Though it seems like they hadn't quite perfected the concept, given the center's ugly 70s shelter, which looks rather cheap and dilapidated these days. The article mentions that the transit center was about 92% federally funded, since it's next to an interstate & qualified for money, I suppose because TriMet buses still ran on freeways in those days. A later October 28, 1979 article (which I seem to have misplaced the link to) describes major vandalism problems at the still semi-new transit center. Neighbors said they avoided the pedestrian bridge due to burned-out lights and broken glass. TriMet had even installed security cameras to keep an eye on the place (which was an unusual step in 1979), to no avail. There's probably no easy way to know whether the rate of petty vandalism has dropped since the 1970s. It seems to me, anecdotally, that it has, but I have no actual evidence to back this up. TriMet might have internal numbers on how much they spend each year repairing vandalism, and maybe a count of reported incidents, but I haven't seen that info reported publicly. Assuming my guess is correct, you might be able to chalk this up to the wider national crime wave of the 70s & 80s, which in turn has been blamed on various factors ranging from long-term macroeconomic shifts to the use of leaded gasoline. I've also seen a proposal (which I don't have a reference for at hand, unfortunately) that certain architectural styles tend to promote vandalism. In particular, as the idea goes, people see things made of ugly grey concrete and are instinctively driven to damage them. The idea has a certain poetry to it, but I have no idea how you'd go about proving it. The transit center & bridge haven't gotten any prettier since 1976, so if they aren't getting vandalized like they used to, that would tend to disprove the "architecture rage" idea.

Esplanade Floating Bridge

At some point, I decided that this humble blog's ongoing bridge project also applied to pedestrian bridges, and later concluded that floating bridges are also in scope, so here we are looking at the Eastbank Esplanade's floating pedestrian bridge. I apologize for only having one photo of it; I'm still not sure how this happened, but I've meant to go back and take more for months now, and I haven't gotten around to it, so I think we'll just go with the one photo, and you can google it if you want to see more.)

When the city created the current Esplanade in 2000-2001, they wanted to build something with connections at both ends; the previous trail began at the Hawthorne Bridge and dead-ended at the Burnside Bridge (without actually connecting to the bridge) which made it rather useless. I-5 runs right along the east riverbank and even hangs over the river for a bit north of the Burnside Bridge, so there was nowhere on shore to put a new trail. So the solution they came up with was a 1200' floating bridge running parallel to the riverbank, just offshore. The city parks page about the Esplanade claims this is still the longest floating bridge in the country. That may change in the future, if a similar proposal in Chicago gets greenlighted. The proposed RiverRide system would add floating bike paths along parts of the Chicago River, since buildings are built right up to the river's edge in many places, leaving nowhere to put an onshore pedestrian or bike path. We'll probably just let Chicago win that one, rather than starting a new arms race of ever-longer floating bridges. I'm not sure where you'd put a longer floating bridge, for one thing. I suppose you could add length to the existing bridge by adding some gratuitous zigzags, though I doubt anyone other than the Guinness world record folks would be impressed by that.

Human Diversity mural

Next mural up is on the Garlington Center building at NE MLK & Monroe, featuring panels from various world cultures and a quote from scientist René Dubos. A 2011 Oregonian article about Portland's fading African-American murals mentions this was created in 1993 by artist Judy Madden Bryant with help from local high school students. Since I took these photos, the center proposed replacing its existing building with a new clinic and housing complex, to be completed some time in 2017. I haven't gone back to check recently, so this mural is either gone already or it will be soon.

2016 in Instagram cat photos

#caturday #catsofinstagram #nationalcatday #cat #neko

A photo posted by brx0 (@brx0) on Oct 29, 2016 at 10:53am PDT

It wouldn't be year's end at this humble blog without a post with some of my Instagram cat photos from the last year. (Oh, and I haven't done a post this month yet & the rules say I need to do at least one.) So here's this year's edition of Instagram cats:

A photo posted by brx0 (@brx0) on Jul 9, 2016 at 1:57pm PDT

#cat #neko

A photo posted by brx0 (@brx0) on Apr 3, 2016 at 9:49am PDT

#caturday #catsofinstagram

A photo posted by brx0 (@brx0) on May 28, 2016 at 11:44am PDT

#catsofinstagram #cat #neko

A photo posted by brx0 (@brx0) on Mar 2, 2016 at 4:37pm PST

Pantheon Hall Rose

Next up is another rose from a Portland Roses Tumblr post, this time outside the huge, ramshackle New Copper Penny bar/nightclub complex in Lents. A 2014 Willamette Week article described the owner's efforts to fight City Hall, particularly PDC officials who wanted, no, needed his land for upscale condos and goat yoga boutiques and so forth. The fight went the way fighting City Hall usually goes, and the land's been sold to an apartment building developer, so say goodbye to another piece of sleazy, disreputable Old Portland. The drawings for the proposed new building look entirely soulless, a carbon copy of every other new apartment building around the city, and I'm sure many other US cities too. At least central Lents may finally get its first Starbucks this way, I guess.

23rd & alberta roses

And here's the rose design I mentioned in the previous post, also by artist Pablo Garcia. Street View says this was still there as of June 2016. Like most other pictures of roses you see here, I ran across this in a Portland Roses Tumblr post.

ne 23rd & alberta mural

This mural was on the side of a building at NE 23rd & Alberta just over a year ago. It was created by artist Pablo Garcia, who also did the elephant mural that replaced it, which I don't have photos of, as well as the rose design on the front of the building, which you'll see in the next post.

ne 27th-28th alley murals, ne alberta

Next up (and still on NE Alberta), here are a couple of murals on either side of the alley between NE 27th & 28th. I don't know who created these or when, or even whether they're "official" or just sort of appeared overnight. You might think that since Alberta's heavily marketed as an artsy sort of place, someone might be maintaining a map or a list somewhere, so you could go on an art stroll around the neighborhood after your fancy wine and cheese party. As far as I can tell nobody's taken on that project. I mean, I suppose if you needed that you could probably use the "NE Alberta" tag here in lieu of a proper quality list. I tend to say "I don't know" quite a lot, but at least I usually get the locations and photos right.

ne 29th & alberta murals

These panels are, or were, on the side of a building at NE 29th & Alberta. They looked potentially temporary, and I took these photos over a year ago, so it's possible they aren't there anymore. And it's NE Alberta, so it's possible the entire building isn't there anymore.

mural, ne 30th & alberta

The ongoing mural tour is back on NE Alberta again, this time at Alberta & 30th. This one was on my todo list thanks to a post on the Portland Roses Tumblr. That's all I know about this one, I'm afraid.

"Rediscovering Belmont" Mural

Next mural up is a fading one at SE 30th & Belmont, on the same building as the Peace Mural we visited some months ago. A 1999 issue of CultureWork (a University of Oregon arts publication) mentions it:

One of my favorite murals in Portland is the 1,725 sq.ft. "Rediscovering Belmont" mural on the Futon Factory at SE 30th and Belmont Streets. I'm always engaged by it every time I walk or drive by. It took five months to organize, two weeks to paint, and involved over 100 neighborhood volunteers, including schools, neighbors, and local businesses. If you read the attached plaque you'll see that it was sponsored and supported by the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, AmeriCorps Members for Neighborhood Safety, Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and supported by the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office, Bitar Brothers, Corp. and the city's Graffiti Abatement Project.

Much of the rest of the article is devoted to lamenting the art vs. billboards legal battle that put nearly all murals on hold in Portland in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I've discussed that a few times before, most recently in another post earlier today. So I won't go into that again here.

Lents Crossroads Plaza

Next up is another small public space on SE Foster, the Lents Crossroads Plaza at the corner of Foster & 92nd. It was built back in 2001 or so, meant to be a sort of central gathering place for a neighborhood that didn't have one. There wasn't anything going on when I was there, so I had to resort to the intergoogles to figure out what it's for. Which probably gives an entirely random and unrepresentative sense of the place, but here goes.

• The main thing that happens regularly here is the Lents Farmers Market; I haven't been to it and I'm not sure whether it's in the plaza itself or the grassy area next door.
• There was a pop-up coffee shop for a while in summer 2015, since downtown Lents somehow doesn't have a single brick-and-mortar coffee place, which is just uncivilized, if true. How is this even possible, in the year 2016, in Portland? Maybe it's just that there's, like, a Starbucks somewhere nearby, and they have the sense not to count it.
• An East PDX News article mentioned a hopefully-annual "May Day Pig Roast" held on May 1st, but neglected to mention which year it was. A 2009 Willamette Week article wringing its hands about Lents's proposed (but never built) minor league baseball stadium had a puzzling description for the place: "If Portland filmmakers ever needed a street corner that looked like the Eastern Bloc, the Lents Crossroads would be a perfect fit." I have no idea what they meant by that.

Lents Grown Story Yard

A couple of recent posts have looked at elements of the city's ongoing "redevelopment" (i.e. gentrification) effort in Portland's Lents neighborhood, centered on SE Foster just west of I-205. So far they haven't had a lot of success attracting actual new construction to the area, but they've spent a fair bit of PDC development money creating plazas and monuments and whatnot, in the hope that a new Pearl District might someday arise way out here. You might have inferred from my tone that I'm not entirely convinced this is either likely or desirable. But in all the time I've had this humble blog, the city has never once asked my opinion (or the opinion of any other random pseudonymous internet person, for that matter) before building something, and I doubt they're going to start now.

Anyway, after the initial phase of the project, the city ended up owning various bits and pieces of vacant land around central Lents, to be sold off to developers at whatever point developers take an interest in the area. Leaving them as empty lots for now wouldn't really create a sense of impending prosperity, so it was time to get creative. In August 2014, this parcel at SE 88th & Foster became Lents Grown Story Yard, a temporary art installation featuring odd wire-and-rocks outdoor furniture and large photos of local business owners. The PDC press release for the grand opening explains this is a temporary use of the land, paid for with rather small PDC and Arts Tax grants. This is basically the same model they used successfully with the former Block 47 mini-park at NE Holladay & MLK, across from the Convention Center. I've forgotten exactly what replaced the old mini-park, but the whole area north of the Convention Center has sprouted swanky new apartment buildings in the last couple of years, so it's probably part of one of those now.

Sorry about the picture quality, by the way. Everything I know about this place came from googling it after the fact; I didn't know it was there before going, and didn't realize what it was when I was visiting. While tracking down the weird "Retail Birthplace of U-Haul" marker across the street, I saw what looked like weird boxes of rocks across the street and took a couple of photos out of curiosity. If I'd known it was Art, I would have crossed the street for a better look.

Mirador Community Store mural

Next mural up is this design outside the Mirador Community Store on SE Division, created in 2002 by artist Gwyllm Llywdd. You don't see a lot of circa-2002 murals as this was right in the middle of the city's mural wars. The semi-short version: City sorta-welcomes murals, but frowns on billboards. Malevolent out-of-town billboard conglomerate sues, arguing that treating the two differently violates the state constitution's free speech provisions, which are even more generous than the federal First Amendment. Billboard company wins. City decides it's better to regulate murals like billboards than vice versa. New rules are very strict, with the city fining violators and sometimes sending crews to paint over unauthorized murals, for fear of being hauled back into court for selective nonenforcement. Artists hate this. Everyone hates this. Eventually the city finds better lawyers, who come up with some creative legal dodges, and a permit system that theoretically allows advertising too, if it has enough artistic merit, though off the top of my head I can't think of any examples of this actually happening.

The mural you see here was rather controversial back then. Not because of the subject matter, but because it was just too big. City rules specified the maximum size for a sign in this area was 50 square feet, and murals were now considered signs, and this one was at least 3x that large. So the city ordered the store to paint over it or be fined $50/day. After some wrangling the store gave in, sort of, and nailed plywood over parts of the mural, just enough to get it down to the allowed 50 square feet. It stayed that way for another five years, until the new city mural program kicked in, and it was finally safe to take the plywood down.

(As a small counterpoint, the anonymous "Art Wall of Shame" Tumblr really hated this mural, with a tiny bit of semi-praise: "It’s very Portland. The greenery, the essence of Hippie-ism, the rolling hills." before diving into the full rant.)

Third Eye murals

Various groovy murals outside the Third Eye head shop on SE Hawthorne. One of them's signed "vicky" with an email address I didn't quite catch, but that's all the info I've got. If you search the intergoogles for "Third Eye", "hawthorne", and "mural", the top hit is the photoset you're looking at here. That basically always means the thing you're really looking for does not exist online. Oh well. I mean, I suppose I could have gone in and, y'know, asked, but that's never really been my style.

Prefontaine Mural, NW Davis

Next mural on our ongoing adventure is at NW Park & Davis, where a mural of Steve Prefontaine (the late distance runner and local mythological figure) graces the Portland office of the marketing firm IDL Worldwide (the building's also home to the "Working/Playing" neon sign you might have noticed.). The mural's labeled with the office's official hashtag, which is a thing that would of course exist, and it bears an illegible signature.

This post initially had a whole additional paragraph going on about the Prefontaine myth slash marketing phenomenon, but I read over it and concluded that as a rather, um, occasional runner, it's not my mythology, I don't get it, and honestly I don't care all that much. I will grant, however, that this Prefontaine is better than the one at the Cheerful Tortoise near PSU. So there's that.

Burnside Brewing mural

The next mural we're visiting is outside Burnside Brewing, on the NE 7th side of the building. Apparently the mural predates the brewery; it's signed by Brazilian artist Herbert Baglione, & dated 2006, while Burnside Brewing was founded in 2010. It featured in a 2009 Mercury story about edgy local murals, again before the brewery started up. A web address on the mural mentions hipster retail chain Upper Playground, so maybe they used to have a store here (that was a decade ago & I honestly don't recall), or maybe it was just an ad for a store elsewhere, I dunno.

Papaccino's mural

A neighborhood-themed mural outside the Papaccinos's coffee place at SE 44th & Woodstock, created in 2015 by artist Michael Burge Smith.