By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
The other part of 7 NE Oregon I wanted to share today: this visually delectable, entrancing abstract pattern.
Since it only went up in 2019, I understand why it doesn't have the memory-share I thought it should. Also, note the "@LEVELHEADEDPRESS" credit there.
I don't know if the individual strokes have any meaning as such, but the way they're layered and shaded they capture the eye and draw one in. Such delicate attention to detail is the province of someone truly talented, and I enjoy it muchly, from the almost fractal quality of the patter to the way the deft shading makes it all almost three-dimensional.
It's a beautiful thing, to be sure.
I've been going on at length about the area around the Steel Bridge, looking toward downtown PDX, the Convention Center, and the river, but not to much the other direction. Here's what's the other direction; we call it the Rose Quarter, in a view that shows what general direction the MAX line goes as it comes into the Rose Quarter Transit Center there.
This is where Portland's major league sports action (that isn't soccer) happens. For the legendary Portland Trail Blazers, who won their only NBA championship in 1977, this is the center of the universe.
Decades ago, this was a commercial district and neighborhood that formed the nucleus of the old city of Albina (absorbed into the consolidated City of Portland in 1891 when Portland, East Portland and Albina merged to form the beginnings of the modern City). In the 1960s, blocks of houses and businesses, largely of Black people, were cleared off to build the edifice on the left, Memorial Coliseum (today known as Veterans Memorial Coliseum, but typically referred to by locals as just The Coliseum when we speak of it at all). Eventually it was deemed necessary, in the way sports franchises deem it so, that a modern arena grace the area; a sea of money flowed into the area and from it arose, by 1995, what we then called the Rose Garden Arena. Eventually it succumbed to the regrettable trend of selling corporate naming rights, thus, in 2013 it became Moda Center, after an health insurance provider that itself was once known as ODS.
The naming rights expire in 2023. I kind of hope they just let it go. The name Rose Garden is in the tradition of arenas like Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden and I insist that a great traditional reputation was jettisoned in favor of something lesser.
It will, however, be approaching 30 years old in 2023 ... and we all know how much sports franchises hate old clothes. Who knows what'll happen?
Just north of the Steel Bridge, standing between the Rose Quarter and the Willamette River, is a hulking grain elevator and shipping facility that seems increasingly out of place in the evolving cosmopolitan atmosphere that seems to obtain there.
This has been an active grain-shipping facility for a very long time now. Since approximately 2010, it's been owned by the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the biggest firms you never heard of. It's glandularly huge in world commodities; chances are, if you eat, it's touched the ingredients in your food at some point along the line. If you don't eat ... well, good for you, you android you.
Also, fun fact? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she who was Elaine in Seinfeld and the title character in Veep, is the daughter of the late Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who ran the company for a while. It's a family-owned joint.
And this is the name I've known it under; working in transportation dispatching as I have, I've known it as the Louis Dreyfus Dock or just the Dreyfus Dock. But that has come to an end apparently, according to the Portland Business Journal, in '19, LDC sold the facility to an outfit called Rabin Worldwide, who buys and sells industrial properties. It'll either remain empty for a while, remain a grain terminal, or maybe suffer the fate of so much of old Portland: redevelopment.
So that goes.
