Division Street at the Portland City Line

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Back on the outer east side of Portland, as Portland as you can go because the Gresham city line is literally at my back here, at SE 174th Avenue and Division Street, looking west.

This is another example of my poor-man's telephoto, which mostly involves a long sightline and a tight zoom ... but I've always liked the result.

Of interest, off on the horizon, is a hill called Kelly Butte. If you're down Division at about 101st and look south off Division, that's the hill you'll see there; yet another notable member of the Boring Volcanic Field, which is the constellation of nobbly hills starting at Mount Tabor and straggling out into Clackamas County until it merges into the Cascade foothills.

Kelly Butte has a place in Portland Civil Defense and cinematic history, because from 1955 through about 1974, the bunker there hosted Portland's emergency Civil Defense nerve center, to which city officials would rush in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. In 1957, CBS broadcast a movie titled The Day Called X, a documentary narraated by actor Glenn Ford, dramatizing Portland's response to a notional Soviet bomber assault (this was in the days before ICBMs, when nukes came delivered Dr. Strangelove-style, from the bellies of big planes and the city had time to get out of the way), and that bunker - staffed in the film by people who were really Portland city officials at the time, including Mayor Terry Schrunk - was a key location in the film. In 1974, the bunker became the 911 headquarters for the Bureau of Emergency Communications, and in 1994, the bunker was decommissioned and sealed when 911 moved to a more modern location.

Kelly Butte's current job is holding a lot of Portland's drinking water in underground tanks that once went to the now-decorative reserviors at the foot of Mount Tabor, near SE 60th and Division. 

There was also a legendary honky-tonk out this way, the Division Street Corral, also known as the "D Street"; a legendary venue, it hosted acts from John Mayall to Johnny Cash and Paul Revere and the Raiders. 

The page as https://pnwbands.com/divisionstreetcorral.html, has a pretty complete list of all the musical goodness that passed out that way, and some of the pictures are still up (some have died due to net rot). 

One other thing to note is the wiggliness of what would seem on paper to be a rather straight road, and that's another reason I enjoy creating these pictures. Surveying was precise but I guess sometimes it was never perfect, and drawing straight lines on a sphere, which strikes me as one of surveying's great challenges, introduces quirks of its own. 

It also makes pictures like this look nifty. 

It's All Fun And Games Until The Kaiju Show Up

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Never doubt the power of Godzilla to hold your place in line and to negotiate payment of the meal bill with the cashier at the burger joint.

Fortunately, the crew at Cruiser's Cafe was pretty cool about it all. Kaiju or human, you still get great, local fast food there. Seriously. Their crinkle-cut fries are flawless.

Something Went Down at 138th And Division Wednesday Evening ...

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... but whatever it was it involved the westbound #2-Division TriMet bus and required six cop cars to quell.

The photo was taken from the corner of 136th and Division, outside of the magnificent Cruisers Cafe. 

It was peaceful, whatever it was. Soon after this, the group dissipated with no shots fired or mayhem of any kind. No FlashAlert, so we still don't know what happened here, but it ended peacefully, so we hope for the best.

Transit drivers have had it particularly hard and stressful during the Pandemic Year, so we hold faith for them.

East Down Division, Six Days Ago, Under The Smoke

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Here's another thing about that ped overpass on Division at SE 136th: an incomparable sight line.

I got a couple other zoom shots which I'll share tomorrow or the next day so I don't tap myself out and, besides, I'm getting a little tapped out when it comes to blogging today and I want to go paint so there's that.

Anyway! Division is an awesome street, really. There are tony parts, and working class parts, and it goes on forever, all the way from Portland through Gresham and doesn't give out until almost Oxbow Park, way out beyond Gresham. Urban, rural, farm, forest, Division will give it to you.

I return us, though, to that pedestrian overpass I was going on about in the last entry. I said there was a story regarding Birthday Hat, and here it is:

It was windy that day, and I was clicking away at the sky with the incoming smoky miasma, somewhat furiously as I had to get back down to the Dutch Bros where my latte was coming to completion and the Brown Eyed Girl would be waiting to take us on to the Franz store or whereever else it was we'd be going, and what I should have foreseen happened and a gust of a breeze (It was windy that day) plucked Birthday Hat off my head and sent it spinning down to Division Street below.

I got a glimpse of where it landed: in the left turn lane going from Division west to 136th south. A part of me was giving it up for About To Be Crushed, when a red car driven by a black man pulled into the turn lane, snagged my rogue trilby, looked up, saw me, I saw him and we somehow communicated that I'd make my way down and he'd meet me on the corner. Powering down my camera I made for the stairs.

It's fortune that the light at 136th seems to take so long to cycle and that the drivers on Division westbound were courteous that day because I made it down to that car and gratefully retrieved the hat. Either that, or I was terribly motivated. But the hat was gotten back and sincere gratitude expressed for this kindness that day.

And, I did get this shot:

Division under looming smoke, one of the last glimpses of blue sky we'd have for many days (we still don't, as of this writing) ranks of familiar Cascade foothills. 

And me, still in possession of Birthday Hat, which seems to have a sort of modest level of luck attached to it. Well, I may not have much faith in supernatural explanations, but I'll roll with this one for now.

Wy'east Over Division, Six Days Ago

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Diving back deeper, I was finally able to coax a image to resemble things the way I remember them.

I do, as it happens, do a little manipulation of most of the images I post. I try to keep it to the absolute minimum, white balance, color enhance maybe. I suppose many photographers do same, but even though I've learnt a great deal about composition and framing over the years I've shot digital photos for fun, sometimes those cameras just don't pick up the image the way my eye and psyche do. 

Sometimes one feels one's telling a fib with the insane amount of photo editing that is available, but then, if every photo's a story and I'm trying to tell a moment, it's also a sort of integrity that I try to make that photo resonate with my memory of the moment. 

I guess.

Six days ago, before the smoke arrived for good, me and the Girl were out doing whatever it was we were doing, and stopped, as we have habit to do, at the Dutch Bros on SE Division just east of 136th. It's a verity for us. Very nearby there is a pedestrian overpass and I noticed that Wy'east was presenting interesingly under the incoming smoke (which I already visually explored here and here. It was here along Division, though, when I realized I had something visually worth capturing. 

There was a lineup at Dutch Bros, so out of the car I leapt, me and Birthday Hat. Short adventure with Birthday Hat, but that's for the next entry. 

I tried to frame the mountain, but when seen in the viewfinder it mellowed back so much it was all but impossible to compose effectively, so I seat-of-the-pantsed it using surrounding hills and other things that I could see. Eventually I'm here in front of my computer and I can play with curves and, even though this is not what the camera appeared to capture, this resonates with the memory of what I saw.

Old Wy'east usually presents well from this part of Division. Once I got the color where I wanted it, it visually imposes quite aptly.

Here I'll include a bit of pull-back for context. 

This takes in not only Division just below the overpass and the PGE substation at 138th and Divsion but also our insurance agent's office. 

Anthony Kondos. Nice guy. We recommend him. 

There is an endless internal dialogue with me going on when it comes to scenes like this, and its participants are constantly amazed that looking on something like this mountain, which I regard with almost a fetishistic intensity, comes out one fulsome way in the brain and the psyche but another diminished way under the indifference of the digital camera. Our brain really works hard at playing things up for us. 

This dialogue has no resolution, one supposes, and perhaps no end save sufficiently-advanced senesence or biological decease. 

So it goes.

Wy'East in Surrogate on Division

3709The last several days here in my beloved PDX Metro have been gray and cloudy. And I do like this; I've always preferred the cloudy days to the agressively clear, horizon-to-horizon blue.

However, it does prevent me from seeing my mountain muse, Wy'east. But a billboard company has kind of come to the rescue. Looking down on SE 98th and Division, from above a dodgy quick-shop and gas station, and within sight of the big Division/I-205 mixing bowl, we have a beatific place-holder design on a billboard, which has benevolence designed in.

So, if I can't get my Wy'east fix from 122nd, at least I got it from here, this day.

The lighthouse on the cupola of the Public Storage next door gives a dash of visual simultaneously ironic and romantic, in that commercial suburban business district sort of way.

Bonobo Mart Seems Always Out Of Stock

3708Another place we are habitues of, Discounts Plus provides us with much variety, spice 'o' life, and cheap soda pop and the occasional container of Osem kosher croutons and container of Bisto.

But there is one thing that they've never carried, despite what the sign over the window says. See if you can spot it.

If you haven't seen it yet, let's zoom in. Look between the sign that says TOOLS and the one that says TARPS.

That's right. MONKEYS.

And you know what? They're always out of stock. So aggravating.

Home Sweet Home, 2020

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Just east of SE Division St at 130th Avenue there is a pedestrian bridge. The south end is between the Dairy Queen and the Dutch Bros. drive through.

Division is a very wide street.

And about a year and a half ago, some artist decorated it up with a fanciful, colorful paint job. Unicorns, colorful clouds, and the like.

Despite that, it still reflects the human chaos of this time. There is a person in that homeless hideaway-in-plain-sight, and the presence of happy color alongside despair pretty much sums America up right now.

Yes. Like a Kidney Stone.

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Appropriate billboard wisdom coincidentally observed near the intersection of SE 162nd Avenue and Division Street.

It'll pass. It'll take a few of us in going by. But it'll pass.

[Wy'East] Springtime Snow-Covered Mt Hood from Division St

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The setting is SE Division St in the mid-130s. Heavy Eastside Portland. There, at 136th, just between the Dairy Queen and the Dutch Bros. Coffee drive-through, is a pedestrian overpass.

Deep outer SE Division is a thronging boulevard, the main route into, through, and out the area on your way from Portland to Gresham, Sandy, Welches, Rhododendron, Government Camp, and points east and southeast into central Oregon and the Oregon outback. And, as in much of east Portland, it's a combination of what amounts to Oregon urban sprawl covering a palimpsest of the rural land it was about 50 years ago.

The pedestrian overpass gives a good sweep of what the eastside has become.

Down and to the right you see a set of tiny apartments that used to be a roadside hotel. These days, it's the Swan Court; back in the bad old day, it was the Swanee Motel. It had seen better days even then. Now it's a shabby-ish apartment court, and it's actually much better off that way.

Just east of that there's the pet shop. We've never been in that pet shop.

The red-eaved building just beyond that is the insurance agency of Nick Kondos, one of those strange, insurance-agent names you see around town like Billy Grippo.

The pale monolith in the distance is the sign for the Division Fred Meyer store. That's out at 148th Avenue, so that's about three-quarters of a mile off.

Looming above all this is our fair-haired sentinel, boastful of a cap of snow that, this year, at least, is more snow than average.  Of all the things we have to worry about this year, at least a drought summer isn't one of them.

You count your blessings these days.

[Out122ndWay] Divsion St: Fog, The Herald Of Fall

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It's September in Outer East Portlandia, and with it comes the fog, in on little cat feet, or however it gets here. And it comes down to the ground and makes faerie tunnels of major throughfares.

I love foggy mornings. Bracing. Invigorating.

The pictures were taken looking east from about the 11800 block of SE Division Street. The first signal is the one at SE 119th. The far one is the one at SE 122nd. The signs on the building just ahead and to the left there are on McGee's Pub, a newer tavern on the corner of SE 117th that, unlike most attempts as eateries and drinkeries in that building that have come and gone since KC's Pub about a decade and a half ago, seems to be surviving. 

[teh_funnay] Spot The Error

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In the last week, in as much as Wife™ and me were parched, we stopped at one of the fine purveyors of artificially sweetened, flavored, fizzy water arrayed along the many miles of SE Division Street and acquired a small supply of said beveraginal substance in the cup you are about to see here.

Bearing in mind the time of purchase, I invite you to spot the error.

Go on. Take all the 'time' you need!
 

[pdx] People of the Eastside: The Division-Midway Festival of Nations

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Sunday was the day of one of Portland's numerous other street fairs, this time, one quite close to home.

The Division Midway Alliance for Community Improvement … a business group centered along SE Division Street between SE 117th and SE 148th Avenues … is in our back yard. Hell, it's just as good as being our back yard. A few of our favorite merchants are within its demesne. And, each year, it celebrates the astoundingly awesome diversity that the David Douglas community has become with a little thing they call the Festival of Nations.

This year's 'do was held in the most welcoming and accessible spot yet … the western half of the parking lot of the Division Center shopping center, located at 122nd and Division. It happened from noon to 4:00 PM on Sunday, and it contained as much as it could in that small space of time. Nepalese and Karenni folk dancers (which we missed) and Grupo Latitudes (which we did not miss) provided the international flair; Latin and Somali food provided the spice. Here are some of the things we saw there …

An artist, masterful in the use of colored pencil:

Grupo Latitudes played music of the Andes.

We missed the Asian folk dancers performing … but we didn't miss seeing them in their gorgeous outfits, enjoying the food and the Andean music.

There were other crafts, too, such as the metalworker that was there, who had a most attentive student.

Some of the organization's volunteers, flush with the enthusiasm of a successful and interesting event:

We even imagine there were some "good guys" hanging around. Makes perfect sense to me.

The only real problem was that there wasn't enough of it, really. Four hours is a tough time to hold a really super street fair, and the location of it seems to hint at the challenges that our side of town has in creating community. Because of demographic shifts, the area around 122nd Avenue, the spine of the David Douglas school district and the increasingly vibrant David Douglas community.

It's a good place to be, but a place with its own challenges and obstacles that, perhaps, communities east of Mount Tabor don't share. When there are community positive organizations such as the Division-Midway Alliance and people-positive events such as the Festival of Nations that acknowledge the varied complexion of the community, though, how can one not love living out 122nd way? And how can one not have some sort of hope that a positive vision for the future of our neighborhood will prevail?

We had fun, and we hope it will get even better in the years to come. 

[pdx_photo] Mt Hood and Division Street and The Hood and The Camera Thereunto

2942.I'm very happy with the area of Portland I live in, even if it's not the fashionable, Portlandiable part.

As a matter of fact, I think I'm happy with it because it's not fashionable.

Recently I took advantage of a view point that I'd actually not visited before. At SE 136th Avenue and Division Street in outer East Portland, there's a pedestrian overpass. Its south end is located square between the Dairy Queen on the corner and the Dutch Bros of which we have much custom. We had decided to go it rough, get our coffee from Da Broze and our lunch from the shabby but so very good Cruiser's Cafe and pack it off to Parklane Park and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. The Wife™ handled the coffee-purchasing duties and I ascended to the apex of the overpass to catch the view.

It was so nice, the camera came out.

Division Street in Portland runs, from the river out through Gresham, and if you don't count the part calling itself SE Division Dr just beyond Gresham, about fifteen miles. That's a long, straight piece of pavement; when I was a kid and growing up in Silverton, Salem was fifteen miles down the road.

I've always been impressed with streets that run that long

The thing about Division is that it's unabashedly suburban. It's rode hard and put away wet and it's still got a sort of grace. In the above picture there, the little blue-gray apartment complex called the "Swan Court"? Back when this was how you got from city to city, that was a shabby little motel called the Swanee. That's been quite a while.

The division it's named after isn't obvious, but I've wrote of it before. This street runs parallel to, and exactly one mile south of, Stark Street, which is on the Willamette Base Line.  Division Street is laid out along the first section line south of that base line; that's the division it refers to. It was, before it was urbanized, called Section Line Road.

It, of course, beckons one to Mount Hood, which is my other fetish.

The hood I speak of is perhaps a bit of a lazy coinage these days, and I'm a little sorry for it, but it's hard to avoid using it when speaking of the peak. I've lived in its shadow all my life, and it's kind of a lodestone for me. When I see it, I know I'm where I should be. Home ground.

The challenge with my meagre equipment is to frame and choose the perspectives. I don't have the luxury of attaching a telephoto lens when I want to get a perspective that highlights the way Mount Hood seems to loom on the horizon in subjective view; I have to stand and look and then crop the result.

I use in-camera effects.

But it's not entirely bad. I think it makes me work more creatively. When you don't have fancy devices to support your artistic vision, you have to be nimble. Still, I'm always surprised; Hood always comes out so much smaller in my photos than the impression I get simply looking at it.

Cities in Oregon usually impress the visitor because there are so many trees. I remember as a kid in Salem going up to the Chemeketa Parkade, that garage that overbounds Chemeketa Street; you look north and you can't see the city for the trees. Outer East Portland, with so much green, is the same way. As urbanized as it is, the urban gets lost in the urban forest pretty quickly.

And if I take another POV, I arrange more of humankind's works, such as they be, power towers and power lines and transformers and plastic signage and roofing and insurance offices in front of that great mountain and, well, it's something I've been able always to find some sort of odd beauty in.

It's our world. It is what it is.

And so it goes.