27 April 2020

Southwest Oak And West Burnside, February 2020, from Powell's

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Our next stop on the daily photo log adventure comes from only two months ago.

Two months ago. Seems like twenty years ago. I see other on-line humans calling it "the time before" and I mean, say what you want about pop culture, I see where this is all coming from and I'm endlessly impressed with the average person's mind's ability to MacGyver coping with a chaotically shifting zeitgeist on the fly. I mean, cultural literacy won't get you through every emergency, no, but when the order of the day is that which we accept as read today might get rewritten in our faces tomorrow, and the day after may contradict that, well, it's no small tool. Intellectually, it can be a swiss army knife.

Anyway, about two-and-a-half months ago. Coffee Room. #BookChurchPDX. Powell's. 11th and West Burnside. Lookin' out the fishbowl. There is, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Portland's skyline, a building at the corner of Southwest Broadway and Washington. Back in the day I knew it as the Bank of California building. It's now called the Union Bank building after its parent company merged a few times. And it's visually notable for the way it's lit at night, with spotlights pointing down the flutes in the building's architecture.

The Brown Eyed Girl looked out the window across West Burnside where Southwest Oak Street split off between 11th and 10th. The Union Bank tower's the tallest and the lighting made it stand out, and she loved the view, and insisted I take a pic.

When someone with good taste insists, one does not demur. So.


In the foreground is a little walk-through mall with tiny retail spaces called Union Way. The passage goes through to Southwest Stark/Harvey Milk Street. The building immediately net door was a branch of Car Toys for years; what it is now I can't recall. The shorter building was the Federal Reserve Bank Branch in Portland for a long time and was, a short while ago, the home of Jive Software before the vicissitudes of intellectual property and corporate merger sharked that away from Oregon. And over that is the Union Bank building in night dress.

All this from the window of the Cathedral of Saint Ursula in Portland, the Coffee Room at Powells, where we would be tonight If Only.

And so it goes.

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