A Palimpsest On Tenth

4015

This scene still exists within a block of the monolith I maladroitly complained about in episode 4014. 

It's a block of SW 10th Avenue, just before you get to Taylor Street and the block containing the Central Library. It gives an echo of what this entire district used to be like.

With the Park Tower West (in the left background) and the Fox Tower (in the right background) peering down at it, this feels like a pocket of downtown Portland trapped in a little bubble of reversed time, not yet as shiny and chromed and spiffed and upmarketed like the rest of downtown.

The building in the center is called the Medical Arts Building. We can I think safely assume that, back in the day, it was an office building devoted to the private practice of a number of doctors, dentists, and the like. I dimly recall seeing into some of those windows from an adjacent building many years ago. I saw dusty, abandoned medical spaces, some equipment. I don't think anyone's been in the upper floors of that building for years, a decade or more maybe. 

across the street from it there's the parking garage, identified by the faded painted sign on the wall at its back. There used to be parking structures all over downtown like this. Our beloved Pioneer Courthouse Square used to be one. That one even had a gas station in it. 

There are a few little corners of Portland like this ... and they're getting fewer by the years. Redevelopment and shiny new money will come to this corner eventually. 

It's the Portland way.