Bella venti-tre e Thurman

The next public mural on our ongoing tour is Bella venti-tre e Thurman, located outside the Vespa dealership at the busy corner of NW 23rd & Vaughn. The mural was sponsored by the dealership along with a few other area businesses, all of which appear in the mural. Its RACC page describes it:

Initially appearing as a vibrant scene in an Italian village, closer examination reveals that the bustling activity is in fact Northwest Portland. Side streets reveal craftsman-style homes and well-known sites such as the Chapman Elementary School during the yearly Vaux's Swifts invasion. The mural seeks to show the essence of the neighborhood and provide a colorful attraction with fun details to discover.

For any prospective tourists out there, you should be aware that the real Portland isn't quite as vibrant and Mediterranean as the mural suggests, as fun as that would be. The mural's pleasant to look at, though, and it brightens up a part of 23rd where residential NW Portland segues into the gritty NW Industrial District. I'm pretty sure there was just a boring blank wall here before the mural went in.

This was one of the last designs by local mural artist Larry Kangas, who died in November 2013. There's a gallery of his other murals on his website.

Sullivan's Gulch 1806 and Confluences in Time

The next mural on our ongoing public mural tour has the ungainly title Sullivan's Gulch 1806 and Confluences in Time, a neighborhood nature-and-history mural for the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood. It's located at NE 17th & Weidler, on the back wall of the Broadway Grill & Brewery. It's a decent design, and it's kind of a shame they chose to only paint a small portion of an otherwise blank wall. The description from its RACC page:

The mural showcases the Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood as it appeared 200 years ago with 47 different native plants and animals. The mural border depicts Native American petroglyphs along with hobo signs from the 1930s. The mural is a culminating work for the Grace Academy Confluence Project, Untold Stores, and Unsung Heroes.

The mural dates to 2006, a year newer than the Street Twig sculpture (and its associated condo building) one block west of here. Every so often the city tries its hand at making the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood trendy, and turning the retail strip along NE Broadway into the next Hawthorne or Pearl District. It never quite pans out, but the neighborhood sort of muddles through it and picks up whatever goodies the city throws its way. The mid-2000s effort bumped up against the end of the great real estate bubble, but there's a renewed push on now, albeit mostly west of here for the time being. The CL Line streetcar arrived a bit over a year ago, and now the area around the 7th Avenue MAX station is a giant construction zone, with multiple large buildings going up at once. Sooner or later the vacant lot behind the brewery will be too valuable not to build on, and at that point the mural will go away, presumably having served its purpose.

Bales Wetlands Natural Area

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Our next adventure is another rare excursion into suburbia. This time we're visiting Aloha's Bales Wetlands Natural Area, next to the big strip mall at SW Farmington and Kinnaman. You'll notice that most of these photos are taken while peeking over a chain-link fence. Like the Vanport Wetlands in North Portland (and many other designated wetland areas), the Bales Wetlands are fenced off and not open to the public. No trails, no interpretive signs, nothing. But you're perfectly welcome to come and watch birds from outside the park. Washington County is investigating building a trail through the park to connect the shopping center on one side with the homes and apartments on the other, but that remains at the conceptual stage for the time being. There's also an ongoing SOLV cleanup effort here that began in 2003, pulling up Himalayan blackberries and other invasive plants, and removing nutria that had taken up residence here. SOLV is known primarily for their annual beach cleanup, which is promoted as family fun at the beach for do-gooding Portlanders. Pulling blackberries in a muddy wetland next to a suburban strip mall doesn't have the same sort of cachet, and it probably only attracts hardcore dedicated volunteers.

Aloha's flood-prone and neglected Butternut Creek begins here or somewhere nearby. It flows west past (and sometimes on top of) suburban backyards for a while, similar to SE Portland's Johnson Creek, before entering farm country at the Urban Growth Boundary on SW 209th. It continues from there until it joins the Tualatin River, which in turn flows into the Willamette at West Linn. From there, it's on to the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. A portion of the Tualatin River is diverted through a canal to Oswego Lake, so water that begins here may eventually end up as part of the view from someone's gazillion-dollar lake house. As you might recall, Oswego Lake is privately owned by the local uber-HOA, and nonresidents are forbidden to so much as touch the precious (but bacteria-laden) water, on pain of getting tasered or something. Even though some of it is the same exact water that flowed out of Bales Wetlands and past the abandoned fridges and shopping carts in Butternut Creek first. At some point along the way, the water temporarily becomes a pure and precious resource with its own security guards. I suppose the magic happens at the Oswego Canal inlet on the Tualatin, although it's not clear to me what sort of dark arts are involved in the transformation.

The adjacent shopping center dates to 1991, and it replaced the smaller, circa-1973 Farmington Mall. When the "expansion" (more of a tear down and rebuild, as I recall) was proposed in 1990, the owners proposed to fill and build on a portion of the wetlands next door. Neighborhood residents weren't keen on the idea, in part because filling wetlands would likely increase flooding along Butternut Creek, but the county gave tentative approval in June 1990, and final approval in December of that year, with certain conditions around wetlands and traffic congestion. The articles don't spell this out in precise terms, but I suspect the park exists as the wetlands mitigation part of the expansion deal. I also suspect the park's named after the owner of the Bales Thriftway (now Bales Marketplace) grocery store, the anchor tenant of both the original and current shopping centers. Maybe that helped grease the skids to get the deal done, I dunno.

The reason I was out here in the first place is that I was doing a bit of volunteer work. One of the newer tenants in the mini-mall is the little Aloha Community Library, which was founded in 2011. Washington County doesn't have a single county-wide library system the way Multnomah County does. Instead, each city has its own library system, and in turn those systems are members of the Washington County Cooperative Library Service. This provides for common library cards, inter-library loans, and so forth, and funding through county-wide library levies, but cities are still responsible for siting, building and operating their own libraries. This arrangement is fine so long as you live in an incorporated city. Aloha never quite managed to incorporate, and adjacent cities have lost their former interest in annexing the area, so there was never anyone around with the power to create a library. So as usual Aloha just sort of went without, and residents got used to driving to downtown Hillsboro or Beaverton or up to Tanasbourne just to check out a book. That state of affairs went on for decades until someone finally had the bright idea of starting a nonprofit library outside the county system, and then applying to join once it was up and running. So far this seems to be working. In May 2014 the WCCLS system approved the library's application to join, conditional on passage of the upcoming 2015 library levy.

As for why I was volunteering, I actually grew up in Aloha, wayyy out here in the distant 'burbs. The Aloha library would have been a short bike ride from home, if only it had existed when I was a kid. (A helmetless and unsupervised bike ride, I should add, because it was the 1970s). I would have loved it. What's more, they somehow inherited a full set of the short-lived Aloha Breeze newspaper, which was founded in 1974 and absorbed by the Hillsboro Argus in 1983. I asked about it and was told they're looking into scanning the paper and making it available online. Which would be kind of fun, since the paper actually interviewed me (with a photo and everything) when I was in 6th grade and did very well in the school district spelling bee. In any case, if you feel like going to their upcoming book sale fundraiser (September 24th-27th), be aware that I helped semi-alphabetize the fiction section. If you can't find what you're looking for, I'm pretty sure it's that other guy's fault.

Fire Eater

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Here are a couple of photos of Fire Eater, a metal sculpture on the outside of Fire Station 10 on Taylor's Ferry, near the intersection with Terwilliger. It wraps around the building and my photos were taken from SW 4th, a small side street. They didn't show the Taylor's Ferry side as well as I would have liked, so I included an embedded Street View so you can see it from that side too. The sculpture dates to 1985 when the fire station was first built. Its RACC description is fairly brief:

Peter Teneau’s “Fire Eater” was commissioned for Portland Fire Station 10 as a visual symbol of their work. Based out of Portland, yet recently retired, Teneau specialized in large scale, site-specific sculptures.

As I said, I didn't get as good of a look at it as I would have liked, but I do like the design. To me it sort of evokes an abstract silver dragon, which I guess makes sense on a fire station because of the whole fire-breathing thing.. I'm not really familiar with the artist, but I see that the Portland Art Museum has a couple of his artworks in their collections, although they're not currently on display.

One fun detail about the fire station itself is the address: 451 SW Taylors Ferry, as in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel with book-burning firefighters. I'm not absolutely sure the address was intentional, and I haven't come across any sources saying it is. I haven't even come across anyone noticing or remarking on the address at all. But if it's just an accident, it's a very weird and improbable sort of accident.

SW Barbur/Multnomah Viaduct

I recently ran across ODOT's 2013 Historic Bridge Field Guide, which lists bridges the state thinks are "significant" somehow, broken down by county. Part 4 covers Multnomah County, and it includes a number of obscure structures I wasn't familiar with or had never paid any attention to. Case in point, SW Barbur crosses over Multnomah Boulevard on a kinda-historic overpass, built in 1935. I've driven over it countless times but never gave it a second thought until now. The state's description of it:

Description: Three span continuous reinforced concrete deck girder bridge with a 70-ft maximum span on a 47-degree skew. The bridge originally crossed over the Oregon Electric Railway.
Alterations: The railway was replaced by Multnomah Blvd, changing the context of the bridge.

The pdf also includes a photo of a plaque on the viaduct, which reads:

OREGON ELECTRIC RAILWAY OVERCROSSING

Built under co-operative agreement by
The United States Bureau of Public Roads
Oregon State Highway Commission

C.J. Montag
Contractor
1935

The old Oregon Electric Railway tracks were removed to make room for Multnomah Boulevard not long after the bridge here was built. A news article from October 1948 indicates the road was being built at that time, so rail service must have ended at some point before that. Further west, a long stretch of the former Oregon Electric line was reused as part of the westside MAX Blue Line, and another stretch of track now carries the WES commuter train.

The Oregon Electric system was an entirely different system than the competing Southern Pacific Red Electric, which crossed the West Hills just south of Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy. The Red Electric right-of-way wasn't replaced by a new road after service ended, and in recent years parts of it have ended up as much-needed neighborhood hiking trails.

The Big Bang of Peace

It's been a few weeks since the last painted intersection I covered here. At this point I've done most of the ones I know about, and the others are sort of inconveniently scattered around the city, so the rest are likely to trickle out as I get around to visiting them. Today's installment is The Big Bang of Peace, at N. Borthwick and Killingsworth Ct., just west of Jefferson High School. A May 2014 Skanner article describes the project, as well as the Unity Circle intersection east of the school:

The Big Bang of Peace was started with the support of STRYVE, a federal violence prevention initiative. STRYVE (Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere), which is run through Multnomah County Health Department, is sponsoring a range of projects this summer that will bring adults and youth together with the aim of building a stronger, safer community.

The Killingsworth Court intersection was chosen because of its location, bordered by Rosemary Anderson High School, Piedmont Church of Christ and the North Star Ballroom, with Jefferson High School just a block away. Church leaders have welcomed the project and are helping coordinate about 20 students and neighborhood residents, as they turn an intersection that has seen too much conflict into a place for gathering and friendship.

Youth involved in the project envisioned a design that features a tree whose roots extend into neighboring streets. The design also includes a honeybee theme because honey is known to increase immunity.

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A July Oregonian article includes a short video of this year's repainting. The media coverage highlights something positive I've been noticing about intersection painting projects: They really are an expression of their surrounding neighborhoods, and it's not always the same people creating them. Sometimes it's hippies, as with the famous sunflower just off SE Belmont. Others, like the pair of intersections on NE Beech at 12th and 13th, are driven by hard-charging neighborhood activists and have a long roster of commercial sponsors. And this one was driven by the neighborhood's African-American community, without a single hippie or hipster in sight.

In Portland it would be very easy to end up with a top-down citywide nonprofit running the show, with paid staffers and well-placed friends at City Hall, going to and fro bestowing the fruits of hipsterdom and gentrification upon trendy neighborhoods across the city, and it would just be one salmon/pugs/yoga/crystals design after another, everywhere. I'm pretty sure that would be the path of least resistance, in fact, and I'm impressed (amazed, even) that it's managed to remain a grassroots phenomenon as it's grown and spread across town.

(ex-)Mellow Mushroom Mural

The next public mural on our ongoing project is in the Pearl District, at 14th & Flanders outside the former Mellow Mushroom pizza place, which is currently being transformed into the new Portland location for Bend's 10 Barrel Brewing. This is one of two new brewpub outposts opening soon in the Pearl, the other being a Portland outpost of Cleveland's Fat Head's Brewing, which I understand is supposed to open some time in October.

The pub wasn't open yet when I walked by. I could see they'd done a lot of interior work but the mural was unchanged so far. The mural design doesn't specifically say "hippie pizza joint" anywhere, so maybe they're going to keep it. It was a very boring ex-industrial building before the mural went in, so I kind of hope they do. Or at least replace it with something equally colorful if they don't keep it.

Cherry Sprout Produce Mural

The next stop on the ongoing tour of Portland public murals is the one at the Cherry Sprout Produce store at N. Sumner & Albina, next to tiny Sumner-Albina Park. Here's the mural's groovy RACC description:

The Cherry Sprout Market mural brings different elements together to show the dynamic harmony of nature, farming, wildlife, plants and different states of time. It is purposely abstract in order to be more open ended and create energy for the viewer to step into the mural. It provides multiple vantage points from which to view nature, elements of human intervention, and their place in nature. All greens used in the mural match the neighborhood region and are considered by the artists to be planetary and universal as they are brought into the neighborhood through the mural.

The adjacent park has changed a bit since I posted about it in 2012, and it's lost much of its twee, overgrown look now. It must be a recent change, since it still had much of its old landscaping in April of this year when a British Columbia gardening blog paid a visit. I don't see anything on the net about remodeling here, so I don't know why the place has changed, and frankly I liked it better the old way. Maybe the twee hobbity look has simply gone out of fashion now, and I'm not cool enough to have been cc'd on the memo. I dunno.

Pics: Klamath Lake

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I was rummaging through old photos a while back, specifically ones from a mini-roadtrip around southern and eastern Oregon back in 2007, and realized there were still a few I hadn't done anything with. For instance I had a handful of photos of (Upper) Klamath Lake, the giant marshy lake just north of Klamath Falls and the California border. I had never been there, but was I was on my way from Crater Lake to Lakeview and was short on time and didn't plan on stopping, so I snapped a few photos while motoring along. Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and common sense kind of dictates that too. I'm just saying it's what I did at the time, but that was a very long time ago.

I haven't been back since then, and going back isn't right at the top of my todo list, so I figure these photos will have to do for the time being. Although Klamath Falls does have a geothermal-heated brewery that I wouldn't mind revisiting...

The Cheerful Tortoise Mural

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

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

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

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

Harold Kelley Plaza

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

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

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

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

KBOO Mural

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

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

Sunnyside School Park

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

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

City Bikes Mural

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

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

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

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

St. Francis Park Fountain

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

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

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

Viewpoint Road, The Dalles

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

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

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

Seufert Viaduct

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A few months ago I did a series here on historic bridges in the Columbia Gorge. Since then I've tracked down another, very obscure one. The Seufert Viaduct (1920) crosses Fifteenmile Creek just east of The Dalles, near the Dalles Dam and right next to I-84. The design's credited to Conde McCullough, the state highway department's famed chief bridge designer during the early 20th century. He's famous for his bridges on US 101 along the Oregon Coast, but examples of his work pop up all over the state. Actually I've never been entirely clear on whether he did all of this design work himself, or whether he gets credit thanks to being in charge of the state's bridge design unit.

In any case, it's listed as one of his, and as a significant historic bridge it has the usual Bridgehunter & Structurae pages. A forum thread at American Road Magazine points out that this once carried US 30, the Old Oregon Trail Highway, which was the stretch of highway east of The Dalles. Officially only the stretch west of The Dalles was called the "Columbia River Highway", though I've seen the name applied to surviving historic parts of old US 30 as far east as Umatilla. Thus a page at "Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway: shows what this area looked like in the 1940s, before I-84 and the dam went in. Today the bridge just carries lightly traveled Viewpoint Road, which dead-ends at an overlook not far east of the bridge. When I stopped by, I was hoping to also get some photos of Cushing Falls, a small waterfall somewhere just upstream of the bridge on Fifteenmile Creek. It turns out it's not visible from the bridge, though, and upstream of here is private land, and I didn't feel like knocking on doors to ask if I could see their waterfall. At least I came away with some bridge photos, though.

A circa-1994 Oregon Inventory of Historic Properties form has a little background info on the bridge:

The reinforced concrete girder bridge derives its name, Seufert Viaduct, from a former train station named for two pioneer brothers who moved to Oregon in the early 1880s. Located on the route of the Old Columbia River Highway, the bridge was designed under the auspices of C.B. McCullough, and constructed by the State Highway Department. The bridge was built under contract in 1920 by the Colonial Building Company. Total length is 222 feet. It consists of one 22-foot span and five 40-foot spans. At one time Arthur Seufert kept the bridge lit with direct current from a Pelton wheel which he operated in connection with Seufert Brothers Cannery.

ODOT's 2012-2013 Cultural Resources Guide (Which I think is their "hey guys, please don't bulldoze this stuff" guide for their work crews) includes a mention of the old Seufert cannery, which sat downstream of the viaduct, partly under today's I-84 and the rest in what's now a city park along the river. It mentions that it was once the most productive Salmon cannery in the world, and the site is considered historic even though very little of the original structure remains.

A 1920 issue of Western Bridge Builder described the upcoming viaduct project, as the state was soliciting construction bids for the job:

One reinforced concrete viaduct near Seufert requiring approximately 580 cubic yards class "A" concrete, 20 cubic yards class "B" concrete, 110,000 pounds metal reinforcement, 425 lineal feet concrete handrail, 250 cubic yards excavation.

The State Highway Commission's Biennial Report for 1919-1920 included a little info on the project, which was nearing completion as the report went to press:

Just south of the cannery at Seufert, about three miles east of The Dalles, the Highway crosses Threemile Creek, at an elevation of some fifty feet above the bottom of the stream bed.

A concrete viaduct consisting of one 22-foot and five 40-foot spans is practically complete for this crossing and will soon be opened to traffic. In order to get a suitable foundation, it was necessary to excavate do a depth of 20 feet below the stream bed, making some of the columns as long as 70 feet.

The contract for this work was awarded on March 32, 1920, to the Colonial Building Company under contract No. 257. It is probable that it will be completed by December 1 and will cost approximately $42,200.00. The expenditures to date amount to $34,284.05.

(Note that the creek seems to have been called Threemile and Fivemile creek in the past. I suppose all of these names are accurate, technically, depending on where you're measuring from.)

Much more recently, a 2003 ODOT bridge evaluation recommended replacing the bridge instead of repairing it, at a cost of around $3M. It's been over a decade since then, though, and they haven't replaced it yet. It was one of the more expensive projects on the list, and Viewpoint Rd. past the bridge only serves a couple of rural houses and the aforementioned viewpoint. So I'd imagine this isn't a top priority, and I'd be surprised if they get around to it anytime soon.

SW Nottingham Dr. Circle

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So I was looking at a map of Portland's West Hills a while ago for something or other, and (because I was being a nerd) I noticed a little traffic circle up in the hills between OHSU and Council Crest, at the end of SW Nottingham Drive. I'd done a couple of posts about traffic circles before (because it wasn't the first time I'd been a nerd), and I looked at it on PortlandMaps and noticed it's an actual tax lot owned by the city transportation bureau. So it's not really a city park, but "city-owned" was close enough for various other places that have ended up as blog posts here. So I figured it was worth a look, and it went on my ginormous todo list as somewhere to track down if I was in the area anyway. Which I was, recently, so I drove by and took a couple of photos. I didn't stay long, though. Maybe I was thinking of the recent Dosch Park Circle thing, but if I lived there I'd be puzzled if a strange car drove up and the driver started taking photos of the roundabout at the end of my street. I mean, it's a public right of way and public property, and all of this is undisputed, but "indignant taxpayer who knows his rights" speeches never seem to make much of an impression on Officer Friendly and his friendly taser.

The streets in this area all have Robin Hood names; Nottingham Drive branches off from Sherwood Drive, and there's an Arden somewhere nearby. Rich neighborhoods use Robin Hood names surprisingly often, I suppose just because they sound oh-so-refined and evoke Jolly Olde England ever so much. For some reason they never seem to play up the whole stealing-from-the-rich part of the story. Anyway, the houses along Nottingham Drive are a small 16-home subdivision just called "Nottingham", which only dates to 1969. This bit of infill came around the same time as the big apartment complex proposal that ended up as Marquam Nature Park instead. The developers here were a bit faster than the guys downhill, and the subdivision was already under construction by the time the nature park campaign got underway. The city archives include a photo of the cul-de-sac at the time it was constructed. Sadly the record is online but (as is usual with city archives photos) the photo itself is not available online. I imagine it looked like this but without all the trees.

The nature park's Marquam Trail runs just behind the backyards of some of the houses here on its way uphill to Council Crest, and the trail crosses SW Sherwood not far from the intersection with Nottingham Drive. The land the trail runs on is city-owned but doesn't show up as a park on most maps, since the city auditor's office is the owner of record. That's not uncommon, though I've never figured out why the city auditor needs to own bits of forest around the city. Maybe they're little getaway spots for those days when the spreadsheets don't look so good.

Voices of Remembrance

Portland's MAX Yellow Line ends at the Expo Center, the city's general-purpose large event space. Auto shows, dog shows, cat shows, trade shows, gun shows, swap meets, concerts, and so forth. The Cirque du Soleil sets up circus tents in the parking lot every so often. The Multnomah County Fair used to be held here, and the old Pacific-International livestock expo was held here for many years and lent its name to the place.

Riders exiting the train pass under a set of Japanese torii gates, each adorned with little metal tags jangling in the wind. This is Valerie Otani's Voices of Remembrance, the public art for this MAX station, and it commemorates a much darker episode in the Expo Center's history. From the local arts agency's description of the piece:

Five cedar gates commemorate the site where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Stainless steel tags in the shape of tags people were required to wear, create sound giving voice to this history.

There are numerous accounts on the net about Oregon's deportations and the Expo Center's role in them, including articles at the Oregon Historical Society, OPB, BlueOregon, & Portland IndyMedia. The latter two include a survey of 1942 news stories from the Oregonian. I was thinking of doing that myself but I'd recommend reading those accounts instead. Japanese internment was a national shame; these articles point our our particular local shame: The unseemly enthusiasm Portland brought to the task, and the fact that almost nobody spoke out against the deportations. There are probably still a few people around who spent World War II rounding up law-abiding citizens, or guarding the camps, or stamping transit orders in the internment bureaucracy, although of course nobody will admit to it now.

There's also a good article about the gates at UltraPDX by artist Linda Wysong. (The article link goes to a Wayback Machine copy of the piece, as the UltraPDX site seems to be offline right now.)

This is not Portland's only monument to this ugly historical episode -- there's also the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Waterfront Park, as well as a few references along the "festival streets" in Chinatown. I think this one is by far the most effective of the lot, however. Next time you're at the Expo Center, take a moment to stop and look, and think about what happened here.

NE 16th & Tillamook

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Our next sorta-adventure takes us back to the Irvington neighborhood again, this time to the intersection of NE 16th & Tillamook, where a narrow landscaped strip cuts diagonally across the intersection. This is yet another Irvington location from a list of very obscure places the city parks bureau somehow had a hand in. Like the others nearby, this spot functions as a traffic control device. Vehicles (other than bikes) can't go straight here; on one side, all northbound traffic has to turn west, while eastbound traffic has to go south, thus diverting inbound traffic from both directions off Irvington's residential streets. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it's one of the subtle traffic tweaks that keeps cars out of Irvington without looking like an actual barrier. Somehow you always end up going around Irvington rather than through it, and only realizing years later that you've never actually been there.

As with the other Irvington traffic widgets that have shown up here, it's a little mysterious that they're on the list and other similar ones around town aren't. I think I have a clue with this one though. An Urban Adventure League photo caption says this was the very first traffic diverter of any type in town, and relays a story that it was first built in the 1960s as a "neighborhood guerrilla action".

I checked the library's Oregonian database, and I can't find anything to confirm the "neighborhood guerrilla action" story or the notion that this was the very first traffic widget in town. Which is not to say they aren't true, just that I don't have anything concrete to back them up. But news stories do confirm this spot dates back to the 1960s. Which is surprising, since the 60's were very much the age of the almighty automobile here in Portland. So as you might imagine, adding a traffic barrier was not without controversy. It first appears in the paper in July 1967: Residents were lobbying to create a traffic barrier here, but a reluctant city council deferred immediately action on the proposal. In late August they approved it, but only for a 90 day trial period, with no commitment to keep it after that. At the time, a resident on nearby NE 15th Ave. complained that the project was happening due to "16th Ave people" who wanted a private playground for their children, essentially spending public money to make it safe for rich kids to play in the street.

The city quickly pulled the plug on the 90 day trial after only 22 days. The reason given for ending the experiment so early was a rash of complaints from residents on 15th Avenue, who saw a sudden influx of traffic on their street now that it was being diverted away from the intersection one block over.

By December, angry Irvington residents were lobbying to bring back the barrier. The city pushed back hard on the idea, saying it had already been tried and had failed miserably, end of story.

Although obviously this wasn't the end of the story, as residents eventually found a different pot of money to tap into. Construction of the present-day barrier was finally approved in March 1972, apparently with little controversy. The approval came not from the city council but the local "Model Cities Planning Board", the local arm of a federally-funded urban renewal program. Much of the article is concerned with the creation of NE Portland's Woodlawn Park, which required demolishing several dozen "blighted" houses. But that's a story for another post entirely.

The 16th & Tillamook diverter comes up in the comments at BikePortland now and then, some praising it for blocking auto traffic, others grumpy about a large and potentially dangerous bump in the curb here. Meanwhile it was given as an example recently when the Transportation Bureau consulted the city fire department about some bike-friendly traffic changes they wanted to make elsewhere in town. Apparently this is one of only a small handful of diagonal traffic diverters in the city, and the fire department specifically advised against making any more like this as they block through traffic and present an obstacle for turning fire trucks. Which just goes to show that you can't please all the people all the time, unless maybe you switch to bike-based fire trucks.