09 June 2020

Portland's Lovejoy Fountain, September 2008

3690There is a part of downtown Portland called Portland Center. This is the part of downtown that used to be a charming and somewhat ramshackle area full of blocks of Italian immigrants and Jews, until the City of Portland got that fever that cities all over the United States got during the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal. They created an area called the South Auditorium Urban Renewal district, created a few nine-square-block 'superblocks', erected posh apartment towers and made it over so thoroughly that you need pictures and a vivid imagination to picture it the way it once was, charming, vital, and ethnic.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Anyway.

Today it sits between the equally-toney Riverplace area on the east (or is that south?) and the still-on-the-rise University district on the west, bounded on the south by the Stadium Freeway and on the north by the south edge of the central business core. The streets that ran through the area have been replaced by wide pedestrian walks, and in the midst of all this tree cover and hidden by the apartment towers, there are these pocket parks. And, despite the acid cut of the jib of this prose, they are very lovely places worth a walk-to.

And when you get to the park, located in the center of the superblock bounded by Southwest Market Street, Southwest 1st Avenue, Southwest Harrison Street, and Southwest 4th Avenue, you'll find a plaza with this in the middle:


Portland does fountains.

This, as well as the picture in the following entry, were taken by my first digital camera, the Vivitar ViviCam 3705, the 'Plastic Fantastic', which had a imaging throw-weight of 3.3 MPx, which was something in 2008, and had nothing but digital zoom which resulted in some delightfully small pictures, and basically obsessing on on the specs of a camera you can now find on eBay and Amazon for as little as five or ten bucks kind of takes the intimidation factor out of the fact that this picture is nearly twelve years old, so there's that there.

So it goes.

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