Columbia Slough Trail

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Here's a slideshow from Portland's Columbia Slough Trail, which runs along the north shore levee of the Columbia Slough between N. Portland Road and Vancouver Avenue. I walked the length of the trail (minus a bit at the west end) one summer day, primarily as a way to get photos of a lot of the bridges over the slough, as well as the two islands in the middle of the slough that are technically Portland city parks (albeit inaccessible ones). After taking the trail I figured it merited a post of its own too. It's not precisely a nature trail, though; as it follows along the slough the trail passes the Heron Lakes golf course, Portland International Raceway, Portland Meadows (Oregon's sole surviving horse racing venue), and assorted industrial stuff. I dunno, I thought that was kind of interesting, or at least unusual. Your mileage may vary, obviously. (For what it's worth, it turns out that it's considered bad form to heckle the golfers, no matter how terrible they are, or how ugly their golf clothes look. You learn something every day, I guess.)

The stretch of trail between Portland Road & Denver Ave. is the original stretch of the trail, completed back in 2001, and planned back in the late 1990s. It connects with the north-south Peninsula Crossing Trail at the Inverness Force Main Bridge, the pedestrian bridge that's actually a bridge for a cleverly concealed giant sewer main. The original stretch of trail hasn't gotten proper upkeep in recent years and has developed potholes, which is probably not something you want on the top of your levee. More recently, the mile-long stretch between Denver & Vancouver Avenues just opened in January 2014, so it's in great shape, and the shiny new Vancouver Ave. bridge is designed to be bike friendly, for a change. Maybe the rest of the trail will get more attention now that it's becoming a through bike route and not just a weird disconnected stretch of trail in the middle of nowhere.

The bit between the old and new segments at Denver Ave. isn't so great right now. It's a busy street and your best bet is to take the Schmeer Rd. underpass under the street, and even then there isn't a sidewalk or bike lane, and you have to walk on the shoulder and look around for trouble. The city and ODOT want to redesign the intersection in the near-ish future, since the current intersection isn't great for cars and trucks either. The plan is to move the Schmeer Rd. intersection further north, with the current underpass becoming part of the trail.

The long term plan (or sorta-plan) is to eventually have a trail along the entire length of the slough, from Kelley Point Park all the way out to roughly Troutdale. I'm not sure about the eastern portion, but the stretch between the Willamette and the Peninsula Drainage Canal (near NE 33rd) should be doable, since it would involve building on top of existing levees, which are already publicly owned. Publicly owned & operated by the county's four obscure and seriously underfunded drainage districts, to be exact. But that's a whole other story.

Alaskan Way Viaduct

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Here are a couple of photos of Seattle's fugly Alaskan Way Viaduct, which carries Alaskan Way (State Route 99) right along the downtown waterfront. This structure is not long for the world; the viaduct is of the same basic design as the Cypress Street Viaduct that collapsed during San Francisco's Loma Prieta quake in 1989, which was a clue that the Seattle edition wouldn't do well in a quake either. When it sustained damage in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, the city finally decided they maybe ought to do something or other about it.

Even after realizing the viaduct needed to be replaced, Seattle spent close to a decade agonizing about what to do. For much of the time, the city and state wanted to replace it with a new viaduct, in the same place but even bigger and uglier than the current one. A more expensive proposal suggested building a tunnel. There was a precedent for this with the city's 1980s-era bus tunnel through downtown. A third suggestion, favored by some activists, would have torn it down and replaced it with nothing, the idea being that the downtown core would adapt to become less car-oriented than it is now.

They eventually settled on the tunnel option, in part because the lure of all that freed-up real estate along the waterfront was too shiny to ignore. That and the fact that the thing's incredibly ugly, and mars any photo you take of the city from a boat, and the proposed new viaduct would've been even worse. So at long last they planned it out, and contracted for the world's largest tunnel boring machine to dig it. Unfortunately, "Big Bertha" (as it was named) stalled out not long after construction began, and tunneling has yet to resume. The viaduct here will still go the way of the Embarcadero Freeway at some point, but exactly when is anyone's guess. So I still get to make fun of Seattle's transportation woes for a few more years.

The sole saving grace of the viaduct is that it does a decent job of keeping rain off the parking spaces beneath it, which is nice if you're playing tourist and going to the Seattle Aquarium, or having lunch at the original Ivar's on the waterfront (instead of an unscenic one in the 'burbs).

Frank Slide

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Here's another set of old Canada photos, this time from the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, at Crowsnest Pass in the Canadian Rockies. This spot was the site of the Frank Slide, an enormous 1903 landslide that buried parts of the coal mining town of Frank, including an estimated 70-90 residents.

I have to admit I was really creeped out by this place. I think in large part because the enormous rocky debris field is basically unchanged since that day in 1903. No moss grows on the rocks, no trees grow up in between them, no birds, no animals, nothing. It looks like it could have just happened days ago. History or no, I was happy to leave, and would've left even sooner if I'd been the one driving.

Grant Park

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Here are a couple of photos from NE Portland's Grant Park, which sort of wraps around the sides of Grant High School. I stopped by there a while ago to track down a fountain & statues based on Beverly Cleary's Ramona books. The statues are actually kind of creepy, which is a near-universal problem when people try to do sculptures of kids. I can't put my finger on why, exactly, but I call it the "Chucky Effect". Anyway, since I was at the park already, I took a couple of photos of the general vicinity too, on the theory that there might be a city park post in it. I'm not going to claim that these photos are particularly attractive, or representative of the park as a whole. The city parks page for the place has a brief history section:

The park is named after Ulysses S. Grant who visited Portland three times, a rare thing for a president to do in the days before air travel - or even before standardized rail travel! Grant was first assigned to Fort Vancouver where he made friends with many of Portland's politicians.

Grant Park was the setting for many scenes in children's books by Beverly Cleary. In 1991, a group of teachers, librarians, and business people formed the Friends of Henry & Ramona, and began to raise funds for the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden for Children. Portland artist Lee Hunt created life-sized bronze statues of three of Cleary's best-loved characters - Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Henry's dog Ribsy. Scattered around the concrete slab are granite plaques engraved with the titles of the Cleary books that take place in Portland - and a map of the neighborhood showing where events in the books "really happened." The Sculpture Garden was dedicated on October 13, 1995.

Other than the Chucky Effect plaza, it's your basic neighborhood park, and it has generally positive Yelp reviews, for whatever that's worth.

It's not entirely clear where the school ends and the park begins, and I'm not sure whether things like the pool and the running track are open to the general public, or are reserved exclusively for school use, or reserved for the school only while school's in session, or exactly what the arrangement is. The library's Oregonian database suggests this has been a source of confusion from the very beginning. The original deal was that the city parks bureau would buy the land and hand a portion over to the school district for a new school, and the two parties would share the park somehow. This quickly became contentious; by November 1922, before either park or school had opened, the parties were already arguing about details, such as who was responsible for heating the park's swimming pool. And when not fighting with the school district, city bureaus fought among themselves. In May 1923, the parks bureau was fighting with the City Engineer over proper grading of streets around the school, the parks bureau wanting a 6% grade and the city engineer wanting only a 5% grade.

Controversies around the park and the school multiplied as planning and construction dragged on. In December 1923, people realized the new school was 11 whole blocks from the nearest streetcar line, as nobody had put any thought into how students would get to the new school. This resulted in calls to put in a new streetcar line to serve the school, as the modern school bus had not yet been invented. In June 1924, as the school was under construction, the contractor in charge of building it was forced to replace 500 window sections in the school after the district accused him of using cheap, shoddy window glass. The article states the original glass "was declared to distort the view and to be hard on the eyes of the children", whatever that means. The city and school district were still fighting over who was responsible for what in July 1924, with the parks commissioner insisting he had no authority to do any grading or improvements around the new school unless the school grounds were included in the city park, under his jurisdiction.

I haven't gone through subsequent decades' newspapers to see whether the bureaucratic infighting continued or not. I would assume it probably did, though, right up to the present day. Contemporary thinking about schools is that they need to be maximum security facilities, full of ID badges and metal detectors and security cameras and all that, and this doesn't mesh well with having an open campus that sort of segues into a regular city park. In other places like SE Portland's Sunnyside School Park, they've resolved this tension by making the park school-use-only during school hours. They haven't taken this step with Grant Park, and there would be a neighborhood uproar if they tried it, but I imagine the school district has at least considered the idea.

NW Luray Circus

One of the many ongoing projects here on this humble blog involves a certain list of obscure places I found on the city archives website a few years ago. It's a list of places the city parks department had some sort of involvement with between about 1970 and the early 1990s, though most of them aren't official city parks. I just can't resist lists of obscure things, and I really can't resist patently absurd blog projects, so I've been tracking these places down now and then. Most of them turn out to be not that interesting, but you never really know ahead of time what you'll end up with.

So the next obscure place in this little project is one that's actually had a cameo here before. NW Luray Circus is a short dead-end street high in the West Hills, and it's also the top end of a flight of public stairs, up from NW Luray Terrace. You can get here from "lowland" NW Portland by taking several flights of stairs, this being the top of the fourth and last flight. I did this a few years ago for this post about stairs, and I did it again recently because of what's at the top. As I said, this street is on the list of obscure places, albeit listed as "Luray Circle" (which doesn't exist.) The list is simply a list of place names or addresses, so on arriving the question was, what exactly am I looking for? The stairs leave you off at a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, the circle/circus of the title. If you look closely at the center of the cul-de-sac, it looks like there used to be something there other than pavement. My guess is that it might have been a landscaped circle at one point, since that would explain why it's on the list. If that's what it was, it would have made for a very tight circle, and it probably would have gotten in the way of residents' ever-larger vehicles. I imagine someone phoned up city hall and called in a favor or something, and it's gone now. Or maybe the list referred to something else entirely, although I don't see anything obvious that it might be, other than the stairs. And if it's the stairs, I've already covered them elsewhere. So it's Mission Accomplished either way.

Other than real estate ads, Luray Circus only appears in the library's Oregonian database in connection with the lurid 1930 Leone Bowles homicide case, which sounds like something straight out of a film noir. Bowles and her husband Nelson, a prominent local banker, married in 1920 with a big high society wedding, and moved to Luray Circus. By 1930, their marriage had broken down, and Nelson Bowles had moved in with Irma Loucks, his longtime mistress. On November 12th, 1930, Louise Bowles went to Irma Loucks's eastside apartment, and died there of multiple stab wounds. The following day's newspaper account reported it as a suicide, based on the accounts of Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks, who conveniently were the only two witnesses, as well as that of Dr. Paul B. Cooper, a doctor friend of Mr. Bowles who arrived at the scene shortly thereafter. For some reason Cooper sent the body directly to a mortuary without notifying police or the county coroner. Frankly I don't believe a word of their story, and it's strange that the paper essentially reported their accounts as undisputed facts.

Inconsistencies in the accounts of the stabbing emerged over the next few days, even as the paper went on about how distraught Bowles was, and how his wife had supposedly been suicidal for a long time. Investigators didn't buy that argument, and the inquest became a homicide investigation. Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks were arrested on December 6th, on suspicion of murder as well as "lewd cohabitation". Meanwhile, the funeral was held in Yakima, WA on December 13th, with a casket covered in flowers sent by Nelson Bowles, even though he was currently sitting in jail awaiting indictment, which is just creepy. On December 31st, a grand jury returned a sternly worded indictment against both Nelson Bowles and Irma Loucks.

So the case went to trial in March 1931, and this is the part of the story where money, privilege, and connections made a world of difference. The same Dr. Cooper who tampered with evidence right after the death was somehow permitted to testify as an expert witness for the defense. Bowles's high-powered legal team won him an acquittal, after putting the victim on trial and selling the jury on the defense's suicide story. Shortly thereafter all charges were dismissed against Dr. Cooper, who'd been investigated for tampering with evidence.

Several months later, the Nelson Bowles and the new Mrs. Irma Bowles appeared in the paper again; in the intervening months the two had married and skipped town to Denver. And this is the last we hear of the pair in the Oregonian, and Google is no help either. I have no idea what became of the pair after that.

Portland Heights Park

Here's a set of photos from Portland Heights Park, up in the West Hills, on Patton Rd. next to the swanky Strohecker's grocery store. (Yes, I know it's technically called "Lamb's at Strohecker's" now. That name's just way too clunky.) The city parks page for the park has a brief history section:

In the 1920s, this property was owned by Mayannah and Boudinot Seeley who allowed neighbors in the area to use it for games and recreation. In 1924, the Portland Heights Club presented a preliminary plan to the City for the development of the site, including a ball field, tennis courts, and restrooms. The City built a playground between 1925-27; it was operated by the Portland Heights Playground Association (PHPA). In 1929, the Seeleys sold the property to the PHPA who raised funds for the purchase by subscription. In 1943, the site was deeded to the City.

An Oregonian article from December 1923 explains that the Portland Heights Club was in the middle of raising $40,000 to buy the land and put in a playground, the idea being that they city would lease it for $1 per year for a while, and then buy it outright at some unspecified future date. This future date ended up being 20 years in the future; I imagine the Great Depression probably delayed the handover for quite a few years.

That's about all I know about the place. The library's Oregonian newspaper database has references to a "Portland Heights Park" as far back as 1891. Apparently it was some sort of outdoor music venue, site of concerts of annoying Victorian-era music, heavy on the Sousa marches. The arrival of jazz a few years later must have been quite a relief for everyone. I don't know whether that original Portland Heights Park was at the same location or not; all of the news items about it that I've seen assumed that contemporary readers already knew where it was, and they don't give an address. A few state it was reachable by streetcar, but don't specify which streetcar line to take, much less which stop to get off at.

A subdivision by the same name was announced in October 1945, as what must have been one of the city's first postwar subdivisions. The entire rest of the page concerns the doings of individual local soldiers and sailors, with hopes expressed that they'd be coming home soon. The subdivision was somewhere around SW Sherwood Drive & Broadway, a bit east and downhill from the city park.

So I have to admit that I took these photos while shopping at the swanky grocery store next door. In my defense, it's not my usual grocery store, and I went there in part because I needed better photos of the park, and I figured I might as well get some grocery shopping done while I was at it. If you page through the whole slide show -- and why wouldn't you? -- you'll see it includes a bunch of generic forest photos. Those were my original photos of the park from several years ago, or at least I'd concluded they were of the park, based on when they were taken and when I knew I'd walked past the place. In the last couple of years I've kind of lowered my standards a little regarding photos, such that pseudo-artsy DSLR photos are currently the rare exception to the rule. But the photos I had really gave no sense of the place at all, and I couldn't see building a whole post around a few generic low-quality forest photos. I figured I ought to take at least one photo that's absolutely, positively from Portland Heights Park before I could move forward with a post. I dunno, otherwise it just didn't feel right somehow.

Stephens Creek Nature Park

Here's a slideshow from SW Portland's little Stephens Creek Nature Park. It's basically a few acres of creek bottomland wedged between SW Bertha Blvd & Capitol Hill Road, with a low bridge over the creek and a couple of other trails winding around the park. Since much of the park is in a ravine below street level, the park seems larger than 3-ish acres, but only so long as you're standing still. If you follow any of the trails you'll be up against the edge of the park in no time, and the illusion ends there, as if you've bumped into the wall of the holodeck or something. The vegetation unit survey for the park (a city report on the environmental condition of the place) lists all the units as either "poor" or "severely degraded". Though that seems to be par for the course for city natural areas. The survey also mentions there's an additional unit to the park, downstream of here, east and on the other side of I-5. It doesn't seem to border any roads and might be inaccessible.

A sign in the park includes an old newspaper article from April 1975 explaining the park's origins. It seems the trail through the present-day park began not as a nature trail, but as one elderly gentleman's guerrilla project. Students walking to or from nearby Wilson High School had to walk along the shoulders of busy streets to get there, and he decided to build an off-street trail as a safer way to get to class. Inevitably, wrangling with City Hall ensued, as it does whenever someone in Portland does an unauthorized good deed. The park sign went on to note that the city eventually signed off on the idea and everyone lived happily ever after, although it tries to be very firm and clear that the 70s were basically the Wild West and we no longer do things that way in this civilized age, so don't even think about it, this means you.

More recently, the city developed a "functional plan" for the park in 2005, with a list of things the city wanted to do fix or improve here, but with no immediate dollars attached. In 2007, the current bridge was added, along with trail improvements. A 2010 story explains that the improvements came about thanks to neighborhood volunteers, who did the construction work themselves instead of waiting for the city to find $900k to have the parks bureau do it. Not really a guerrilla effort, but the earlier thing may have helped inspire this. A bit of trail through the east side of the park opened in March 2014, not long before I visited, after another neighborhood fight over making the trail ADA-accessible.

On May 9th, 1920, the stretch of Bertha Blvd. next to the park was the scene of a high-speed streetcar collision. Apparently the engineer on one of the streetcars ignored a signal and his train collided head on with an oncoming train, killing 8 people (including the engineer) and injuring at least 38 others. A Multnomah Historical Association article about the accident includes a few photos (non-gory) of the scene. The photos show that this area was still rural at the time, and the creek was spanned by a rickety wooden bridge.

Inverness Force Main Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the newest, other than the rebuilt Vancouver Ave. bridge. The Peninsula Crossing Trail continues north after the Portsmouth Cut area, and crosses the Columbia Slough on a new-ish bike/pedestrian bridge, just east of the city's ginormous Columbia Wastewater Treatment Plant. Several sources (including the Google map above) insist the bridge and the bit of trail south of it are part of the Columbia Slough Trail, which intersects the Peninsula Crossing Trail just north of the bridge. The Intertwine trail map says it is, a Metro map about the ongoing Columbia Slough Trail project says it isn't. The slough trail is an east-west trail along the north bank of the slough, running a few miles through N/NE Portland, while the crossing trail is a roughly north-south route that vaguely parallels the BNSF railroad across the N. Portland peninsula. The bridge is clearly part of the latter route, not that that's going to stop anyone from making new wrong maps in the future. The map error is out there now, and map errors tend to be strongly self-propagating once they're out in the wild.

Anyway, when I walked across the bridge, I thought it seemed a lot more solid and heavy duty than was strictly needed for a bike and pedestrian bridge. I assumed that was so the occasional maintenance or emergency vehicle could use it too. Then I bumped into an old planning document from 1996 that explained the bridge's hidden secret. It turns out that in the early 90s the city's Bureau of Environmental Services wanted to build a bridge over the slough for the Inverness Force Main, a shiny new sewer pipeline (though maybe "shiny" is the wrong word here), and they figured they might as well put a bike/pedestrian walkway on top, concealing the pipe while they were at it. (Though it seems like they continued calling it the Inverness Force Main bridge instead of naming it after either of the trails.) It's not just any old sewer pipe, either, but a 30 inch main carrying pressurized raw sewage. As you might imagine, it was kind of a bad deal when the pipe under bridge sprang a leak back in February 2014. The public was advised to avoid contact with the slough, which generally speaking is what people do anyway.

Olympic Park, Calgary

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Here are some old photos from the Olympic Park in Calgary, site of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Most of these photos are from the ski jump and bobsled track. These were taken just a few years after the Olympics, so I think the venues were more or less the same as they were for the games, other than the lack of athletes, spectators, and snow. The first photo in the slideshow is taken from the top of the ski jump run, looking down. I figured I'd lead with that one since it's a bit... dramatic. This ski jump run is the very spot where Eddie the Eagle (the semi-skilled British ski jumper) became a global punch line for a while. And the bobsled track is the one where the Jamaican bobsled team made its legendary Olympic debut. You're looking at history here, folks.

Lovejoy Columns

The next public art we're looking at is a bit unusual. The Pearl District's swanky Elizabeth Lofts building has a plaza on the 10th Ave. side, and this plaza includes a group of concrete columns that look like construction debris, topped with twisted rebar. The columns are wrapped in plastic panels with designs printed on them.

For many years, the area of today's Pearl District was a railyard belonging to the Seattle, Portland & Spokane railroad, crossed only by the Lovejoy St. viaduct, which ran between the Broadway Bridge and close to I-405. As the story goes, a railyard night watchman named Tom Stefopoulos had a hobby of making chalk drawings on the columns of the Lovejoy viaduct in his spare time. He had a natural talent at it, and over the years a collection of his drawings accumulated on the columns. The railyard was more or less abandoned after the railroad was absorbed by BNSF in 1970, and the land sat derelict until the late 1990s. A few scenes in the Gus van Sant film Drugstore Cowboy (1989) were filmed around the railyard in the urban decay days, before the rich people or even the artists had arrived. Rumors spread about the drawings on the Lovejoy columns, and people would occasionally visit them by sneaking in or just by knowing the right people.

When developers arrived in the late 1990s, pulling up the old railroad tracks was the easy part. The Lovejoy viaduct was the real obstacle (they felt), and it had to go in order to create the urban condo tower Utopia everyone had in mind. The Pearl District arts community eventually convinced the city to salvage at least some of the columns, for some sort of unspecified future reuse. So far so good. This sure sounds like it ought to be the beginning of a happy ending.

Unfortunately this salvage effort happened without involving any actual art conservators, and local arts institutions seemed to be profoundly uninterested in the columns. I've always thought they would've been far more interested if only Stefopoulos had been a "real" (i.e. non-outsider) artist, with the right connections and some gallery sales under his belt. In any event, the columns were left out exposed to the elements while the parties dithered endlessly over what to do with them, and the chalk drawings on many of the exposed columns were irreparably damaged, as in totally washed away by rain. There they all sat for a few years, until a condo developer stumbled across an art installation about the columns and decided he wanted to reuse them in his next project.

The original plan for the surviving drawings was to chisel them off the columns and display them in the Elizabeth Lofts lobby. Preservationists managed to derail that idea, so the columns were eventually re-erected in front of the building, albeit wrapped in plastic panels with reproductions of the original drawings, along with a mid-2000s promise that the originals would soon be restored to their original glory somehow.

Supposedly the originals are still there underneath it all, protected somehow by these panels. I admit I have my doubts about that. It doesn't look like the sort of covering that would actually protect a chalk drawing from rain. Of course, this is Portland so nobody's going to fess up and admit to being incompetent and ruining the drawings, and nobody's going to be the one to be rude and point fingers and assign blame, and nobody's going to get fired or publicly embarrassed over this monumental screwup, and we're all going to pretend the plastic panels are the real drawings, at least until everyone who could possibly be offended has shuffled off to the great live/work condo loft space in the sky.

Eastbank Esplanade Footbridge

A while ago I'd gotten the notion that footbridges over local railroads would be an interesting subproject of the ongoing bridge thing. I'd done the fancy one next to Union Station, and I'd gotten the notion that I wanted to cover the Brooklyn St. and Lafayette St. bridges in SE Portland too, and a quick survey suggested there weren't that many more besides those, so I started thinking I ought to try to do the others for the sake of consistency. So the bridge you see here is one of the better known example, crossing the Union Pacific tracks just east of the Steel Bridge, connecting the Eastbank Esplanade to the Rose Garden/Convention Center area. Apparently when the Esplanade first went in, this bridge was one of the main sticking points between the city and the railroad. The railroad was in the middle of a rough merger, having just acquired the Southern Pacific railroad. The railroad soon realized they'd bought a pig in a poke, and several decades worth of deferred maintenance along with it, and the city's proposals encountered a company that wasn't inclined to do anything new or risky or innovative just then. The city ended up writing them a $1.1M check for easements up front, and an annual $36k to cover additional wear and tear on the Steel Bridge due to the new Steel Bridge Riverwalk, the lower-level walkway across the bridge. It probably helped too that the resulting bridge is quite high above the tracks and it's entirely enclosed by a wire mesh, so nobody's going to be jumping or tossing things onto the tracks, at least not without a great deal of effort.

An earlier article points out that the Riverwalk was designed to accommodate police horses, since at one point the city intended to build new mounted patrol stables on the east bank, so officers would have to ride across the bridge in order to make their usual rounds around downtown.

This bridge is home of some of the more confusing stairs you'll run across anywhere. The angles are all wonky, and treating them like normal stairs will lead to a faceplant. If you're here after having a few beers, say, walking home after watching the Blazers lose, the ADA-compatible ramp may be a better bet.

Cardboard Castle mural (3)

So here's the third mural on the Cardboard Castle building on N. Albina. I didn't get great photos of this one; it's on the back side of the building, behind a chain link fence, and for some reason it didn't occur to me to put my phone up to the fence to take an unobstructed photo. Fortunately someone else was a little brighter than I was, and posted a photo of it on Instagram. This one was created by Mexico City mural artist Curiot, who posted an even better Instagram photo of it. The mural was painted for the 2014 Forest for the Trees festival, and their Tumblr has a few photos of it as well. In short, just about everyone has better photos of it than I do.

Apparently the artist is another of the itinerant globe-trotting mural artists the Forest for the Trees festivals have been bringing to town. Before I started this mural project, I had no idea this stuff existed. It sounds like a really fun job, honestly, though if it's anything like sketching or watercolors I'd be greatly hindered at it by my utter lack of artistic skill. If you want the sort of spaceships I drew in 8th grade English class, I can probably hook you up, but I'm pretty sure that would be a waste of a perfectly good wall.

In any case, besides here and Mexico City there are Curiot murals in Munich, Compton, CA, and even Tunisia. (I'm not sure I should say "even Tunisia", knowing as little as I do about contemporary pop culture there. Murals could be a huge deal in Tunisia and I would have no idea.)

Cardboard Castle mural (2)

The second mural of the trio at the Cardboard Castle building (4703 N. Albina) is on the south side of the building, facing the Albina Press coffee shop (which is home to a couple of murals of its own). Unlike the other two, this one wasn't part of a Forest for the Trees event. It was created in 2013 by Ashley Montague, who also did one of the murals across the street, and co-created the one at Refuge PDX, among other things.

I usually introduce a blog tag for somebody's work after about the third thing of theirs I've written about (i.e. the post you're reading now), and there are a couple of other Montague murals my giant omnibus todo list that I'll probably track down sooner or later. And voila, here it is.

I have sort of a theory that the presence of one mural attracts additional murals to the immediate vicinity. The intersection of N. Albina & Blandena is probably an extreme case, but here the first mural went up on the coffee shop in 2005. A few years passed, then this one arrived in 2013, and 2014 saw three more: Two more on the Cardboard Castle building, and one more on the Albina Press building. It may be sort of like tattoos: Somebody gets one, they like the look of it, and decide to get more of them. On the aforementioned giant todo list, I know of a couple of dense clusters of murals along NE Alberta and along Hawthorne, and I know of exactly one along equally hip Williams Ave. and none at all along Mississippi. There could be other factors obviously; Mississippi may just have a dearth of suitable walls, or property owners who won't play ball, or a really uptight neighborhood association. Or maybe it's just waiting for someone to paint the first one, and then the whole street will go wild.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”