By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
Nothing too profound or prolix about this shot, though I do enjoy the perspective feel that the diminishing traffic signal gantries and overhead street blades provide.
You've got Grand, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th crossing East Burnside here, then that small hill to a slightly higher flat, that's at 12th.
You have to be watching very carefully to know when you cross from one street to the other here, because it won't seem like you have changed from one street to another at all.
SE Thorburn St and SE Gilham Av serve one main purpose in the Portland traffic greater-scheme-of-things: channelling traffic from E Burnside St at a point just east of E 67th Av around the shoulder of Mount Tabor and down through Montavilla on the Stark-Washington couplet. Though one is technically an avenue and the other a street, due to their layout, which respects the topography of that side of the mountain in order to have terraces for salable housing lots, they meet at such an acute angle that if it was any smaller they'd be parallel streets.
At any rate, SE Gilham Av is the most advantageous connection to Thorburn east of Gilham which goes from a 2-lane neighborhood street with speedbumps collecting traffic from Stark west of Mount Tabor to a four-lane boulevard after Gilham merges in. There are an annoying lack of of visual cues to hint to the driver they're actually on a different street now, reinforced by the way the grading directs traffic.
Long story short, if you want to just get to Montavilla off East Burnside, just go with the flow. If you want to know which street you're actually on, look sharp; there are weathered signs hiding in the foliage.
This is the view of our objective from where 32nd crosses East Burnside, the eastern gateway to the Laurelhurst neighborhood.
Between the last photo and this, The Burn flattened out from 60th until 47th. At 47th, the road dips and goes into the grove of trees that are a trademark of shady, leafy Laurelhurst, and the Burnside does a little bit of a sway. It straightens out quickly after it crosses César E Chávez, and being at the brow of another slope provides another bit of advantageous topography.
I really hate that car in front of us. Spoilt an otherwise perfect shot. But there it is, hail Eris. Visible also in front of Big Pink there is the newly-built 5MLK building, at the corner of SE Grand and The Burn, which looks immediately adjacent due to foreshortening but is actually on the same side of the Willamette as we are at this point.
Next photo closes the rest of this gap.
One thing I have never gotten tired of, having come through life from Silverton to Salem to Portland, is the sight of skyscrapers.
I absolutely love them. Besotted, you might say.
And one of the best things about them is the advancing view one gets from a distance. They seem truly majestic.
Case in point.
I give you the USBancorp tower here in Portland, At 532 feet in height and 42 stories, it's the second-tallest building in Portland (and, thus, Oregon). Its footprint is that of a parallellogram, the west and east fronts being parallel with SW 5th and 6th Avenues and the north and south fronts with West Burnside. It respects its geography. Since Burnside runs a straight line between the east side and west, and the terrain is advantageous in more than one spot west of the shoulder of Mount Tabor, you get to see it get closer and closer as you do.
This, for starters, is the view down East Burnside from its intersection with E. 60th Avenue*
Straight ahead and on the left is our quarry. The color of the building itself has lent the name Big Pink to it, and since USBancorp really isn't much there anymore, it's a better name to call it, anyway.
This was lensed at about three miles out from ground zero (20 blocks to the mile). The next photo will about halve that.
* Since the directional changes at Burnside, there has, in my personal writings, been a convention to use both directionals, e.g. NE/SE 60th, but I've never liked the awkwardness of it. A convention has developed to simplify it to, in this case, "E 60th Ave", and this is one that TriMet has used for its MAX stations along Burnside for years, and it has a schematic simplicity to it as well as harkens back to when numbered streets east of the Willamette were simply referred to, south of the Burn, as "E", so I too will be adopting it from henceforth. This will be in references to intersections with E Burnside only.
