7 NE Oregon St Part 4: The Worker Must Have Bread, But She Must Also Have Roses

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REturning now to 7 NE Oregon Street, that delightfully-marvellously decorated TriMet service depot building, let's look at that side actually fronting Oregon Street.

It's quite a work of art, in itself.

The real appeal of this art is its graffiti feel, it comes from that marvelously chaotic place where the the militant meets the working class and it's not afraid to show it. The text in the design states where its heart is, in a very clear way: The worker must have bread, but she also must have roses. The art is militant, with more than a hint of feminism and revolution to it, and I like it quite a lot for those reasons. 

There's a lot to see here, and I encourage embiggening the picture and spending a while letting your eyes do the wandering. At the time I took the picture I was kind of walked-out, though, and the Brown Eyed Girl had come through the vaccination line over at the OCC and was waiting on me so I started back. As I'm looking at the picture I'm finding that I wish that I had taken more detail shots. The artists really did a splendid job.

We can always go back.

Another Aged Directional Sign In The Lloyd District

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This picture serves as a reverse angle from the previous one's. 

I mentioned then that State Hwy 99E runs up and down Portland's east side out loud while 99W does it under cover. The previous episode shows directions to the southbound leg of the MLK/Grand couplet. Perforce, this one points you down the northbound leg ...

 ... which is NE Grand Avenue. 

The thing that I really cogged on, noting the obvious weathering of this sign, is that approximately the same weathering is adorning he signs over NE Oregon Street that I captured in the picture in this posting. The new Lloyd District has just about covered the old one over, but there are echoes of what it once was, like old cord, tying the area together, all of a piece. A diffuse one, perhaps, but a piece never the less.

Just A Directional Sign, Doing Its Faithful Best

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Oregon Hwy 99E still is considered to run through the east side of town - McLoughlin - MLK/Grand. 99W is no longer signed through town though the streets that it once comprised - Barbur Blvd, Naito Parkway, and Interstate Avenue, are still the Pacific Hwy 1W, in interior ODOT parlance.

You still see State Highway shields on the east side, like this one on westbound Lloyd Blvd between MLK and Grand, letting you know which way you can go at the next light:

 

 

It's a good old, hard working sign ... though it does look like it's blown its paycheck on one too many rock concerts. 

 

But I'm not judging.

Just Another Photo Of Downtown PDX, Part 1

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I can't stop taking pictures of Downtown Portland's skyline like I can't stop taking pictures of Wy'east. It's one of my favorite things and every time I do it it's like writing a quick love note to my hometown.

I will say without reservation, still, the Wells Fargo tower ... which I still think of as the First National Bank Tower ... is amongst the most beautiful. I can see beauty in the minimalism, the stark, no-nonsense thrust for the sky. To see so many newjack towers bunch up against it is a strangeness, though. Even though I was born in Silverton and didn't settle in Portland until '85, achieving a long-sought dream, there's been enough new stuff and I've been in town long enough that I'm feeling that sense of displacement that people in a certain age cohort feel at a certain time in the collective history.

Downtown no longer has the things in it ... the cheap eats, the art stores (save Blick) and the book stores (save Powell's, and with the current demise of the Coffee Room as a place to burn some hours on a bookstore night) that used to call us. The pandemic is a big factor, but as the money moved it, it seems the good stuff has moved on. 

I shouldn't get too distracted there; I still see elements of the downtown me and the Brown Eyed Girl so adored in there, and she keeps saying how we should go down, walk around, and see what we can discover. What can I say - I'm game. And when things aren't so panedmic-y, we shall. 

As the title of this episode suggests, I have more to say. It involves zooming out on this frame, taken on NE Lloyd Blvd just a block or so east of NE Grand Ave, in the shadow of Metro's headquarters, and we'll explore that in the very next episode, so away shall we go. 

3855 or bust, campers!

You Down With OCC? Yeah, You Know Me

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The Oregon Convention Center is a remarkable structure, memorable for the two glass spires which pierce the center of the structure. Built in 1989 and opened in 1990 (yes, it's now more than thirty years old ... one supposes that makes it a Millennial) for about 15 years it was the only remarkable landmark in that area and was so visually pleasing that small square signs iconized it for the purposes of semantic guidance.

If one stands at the east end of the Steel Bridge, where eastbound vehicle traffic debouches onto about two and a half blocks of NE Oregon Street, you can frame things just so, and come up with this view ...

If one looks at the directional sign above and on the right, one will see a washed-out square, and that is one of those iconized directional signs mentioned earlier. They, like the signs on the gantry themselves, have been neglected as this is not really that important a through-route anymore. If you want to get to the Lloyd District and its surrounds from inner NW Portland, you're more than likely going to be using the Broadway Bridge, the next one north. However, it does serve as a somewhat forlorn monument to a past that had this as a major connection to North Interstate Avenue ... and a time when the major destination in the area was the Memorial Coliseum, because there was no Rose Garden Arena/Moda Center yet. 

That colorful building on the left there? That's a TriMet facility that I'll use a number of blog entries to explore the artwork on ... but not yet. Soon though, very soon. 

Downtown Portland from the Lloyd District, circa 2010

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I just downloaded about 700, a little more, photos from a Kodak EasyShare camera's card that I found that I had taken in 2010.

Eleven years ago.

So, periodically, when the creative writing well is dry, I'll dip back into this folder and share a shot. Some of them are quite mundane, but they all come from the period of about 2010 through 2013, and some of them are obviously different, and several of them are impossible to reproduce because Portland's growth has become glandular in these latter days: either there's a building in the way, or there's a building on top of where it happened.

This particular one was taken in 2010 from the floor of the Red Lion Hotel near the Lloyd Center that that year's OryCon had its Hospitality Suite on. The view from the window at the elevator lobby was always splendid and gave a great angle. This day, there were clouds muscling over the West Hills that also bulk up behind the downtown towers.

Not only has the profile of downtown Portland changed, likely as not, there's now a high-rise between this viewpoint and downtown, so this is an impossible shot now.

Bridge in the foreground is the Burnside. There are now several high-rise apartment towers that would obscure that view. 

We must go up there, get a 'today' shot, and I'll post them side-by-side. Stay tuned for that.

The Lloyd District In The Haze

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I crave to be blogging but have nothing really to say at this time, so here's some more pics of Portland in the smoke from the 10th ... five days ago, when we were transporting me down to the OSU Food Innovation Center for the yummy taste test. 

I can neither confirm nor deny it involved some sort of seafood. I can confirm that I loved it all. 

Our route took us down the Banfield Freeway (I-84 for you out-of-towners) and Brown Eyed Girl decided we'd go through the Lloyd District then use the Broadway Bridge to cross the Willamette. I got it coming and going.

Inbound (approaching from the east) things looked like this:

This was five days ago ... five days, can you believe it ... and we were just beginning to get into the heavy part of this. At this writing, the smoke has abated somewhat. with AQI down into the mid-200s where they were still near 500 yesterday.

By now, the smoke seems to have seeped into our very bodies and is encouraging a headache, which is terribly glad to be here.

The view as we were leaving northwest Portland to go home. The treat was down the road a bit, a breakfast burrito from Jack in the Box (we like what we like). Nearly every one of those high-rises you see is less than a decade old (feel free to insert Old Portland-New Portland gripe here). The Oregon Convention Center has to do visual battles now it never even envisioned back when it was built.

The Lloyd District from Terwilliger Blvd

3721There is an area of town called the Lloyd District, and it's undergone some changes over the years.

Generally speaking, this area of town centers along NE Broadway and Weidler, and goes from Williams Avenue on the west to about 15th Avenue on the east. It's spiritual heart is the Lloyd Center Mall, which has gone through many evolutions over the years and is now in what seems to be an accelerated metamorphosis into sort of a second downtown for Portland. More high-rises, more business, fewer shops and whatnot. Even the seminal Lloyd Center itself seems to be on the decline despite some passionate rebranding over the last few years.

But this is what it looks like, today, from one of the viewpoints on Terwilliger:

That would amount to a respectable downtown in any medium-sized city anywhere else. In Portland, that's our back-up downtown in case we ever have to send the usual one in for service.

In the washed out horizon blue of the oppressively clear day, Luuit keeps its own counsel.