What Kind of Burnside Bridge Do You Want For The Future?

4161While the process grinds forward on the redux of Interstate Bridge 2.0, the process is rolling along quite smoothly on the planning to replace the Burnside Bridge.

The current bridge is gorgeous, laden with history, a classic of design, a linchpin of Portland's geography, and will collapse like a Republican excuse for not doing the right thing when Cascadia Next happens. It's apparently advantageously situate for keeping the city together in the wake of that anticipated cataclysm, so the goal is to have a Burnside Bridge that will not shake down when that 'quake finally happens.

In the apres-quake times, the most important thing for getting Portland back on its bearings ... however long that will take ... will be eastside-westside connectivity and access.

The opporunity is being taken to make the new-Burnside-Bridge-to-be another example of statement architecture that we Portlanders are so very fond of. There are two options to consider; a tied-arch bridge, similar to the Fremont Bridge, and an cable-stayed bridge, using the technique that was built into the Tilikum Crossing. 

These two styles are asymmetrical; the signature architectural part, the arch in the first case and the cable-stay tower support in the second, will be over the Interstate 5-east end of the bridge, leaving a span over the middle of the channel for a the necessary drawspan for river traffic and for making Portland tourist wonder why they had to stop on the bridge in the middle of the day.

There are also variations on each style. This picture, sharked from the Earthquake Ready Burnside site, shows the beauty profile of the tied arch look from a point in Tom McCall Waterfront Park on the west bank:

Source: https://burnsidebridge.participate.online/tied-arch.html

Driving over it will look like this ... which reminds me of a crossing of the Fremont, which has always been a love of ours:

Source: https://burnsidebridge.participate.online/tied-arch.html

The other option, the cable-stayed version, looks this way:

Source: https://burnsidebridge.participate.online/cable-stay.html

This version will have taller towers than the arch-style, but the visual presence isn't there for me. However, the asymmetry of the cable stays does have a element of dynamic style in it.

There is a survey on line that anyone can submit their opinions and personal preferences into, it's found at https://burnsidebridge.participate.online/survey.html. The homepage of the informational website is https://burnsidebridge.participate.online/, of course. 

In the near future, this bridge will close for a remarkably-long five year span for this replacement. I don't even remember the Hawthorne Bridge being closed for that long back in the 90s when they updated the eastside approaches.This will be something to contend with for a lot of us on all levels. I'll be recording everything I can about it and posting it here as I go.

We were there for the opening of the 21st Century Sellwood Bridge, and I'll put my anchor down here; I'm looking forward for us to be there for the opening of the 21st Century Burnside Bridge as well. In the meantime I'm going to be finding us taking many more pictures of the current span; it's a charming architectural gem, and that passing will be notable. 

Plague Year Diary: 20th and East Burnside Looking West

3623

One of the places we went was down Burnside Street. Those of you have been following along for any length of time know that Burnside is an important street in the Portland layout: it splits town north from south: NW and NE Portland are north of Burnside and west and east of the river: respectively are placed SW and SE Portland.

This is 20th and East Burnside, looking west, on a weekday afternoon that would otherwise be quite busy.

But everyone's gone to the Moon.

Plague Year Diary 5: The Emptiness of East Burnside

3620

We went out today to get a look at our world. It's gotten kind of eerie.

This and the next two or three postings will give you a look at how little activity we saw. Now, out here, in Outer East Portlandia, as I've said before, it's a little hard to call. The amount of traffic out here tends to vary and I keep a vampire's hours and weekends, so I normally see a light traffic flow. Also, though, as also noted, my impression of my flip-side surroundings has been that of a lighter throng.

This picture is of East Burnside St looking west from about 60th Avenue.

Another thing I'd like to note is that these pictures were taken mid-afternoon, on a Tuesday, at about the time Portland's now-legendary rush hour starts.

Now, this angle takes in a stretch from 60th to about 50th, about 1/2 a mile. That ziggurat in the distance is Big Pink (the US Bancorp Tower) which is, if you aren't familiar with PDX and I haven't mentioned it (and I'd be surprised if I didn't) is a 42-floor tower and the second-tallest building in Oregon at 536 feet. And beyond that is Portland's West Hills. There are 20 city blocks to the mile in PDX, so that should give you some idea of the depth of field.

I count only three cars along this half-to-three-quarter-mile stretch of East Burn. In the middle of the afternoon, in traffic-choked Portland.

It gets lonelier. Stay tuned.

They Call It The Fair-Haired Dumbell. No, Really.

3574

Portland is in the midst of a building-boom, of course, economics being what it is here in terminal-stage capitalism, of properly Erisian proportion. It's only natural that someone or something in the collective psyche would snap.

Here's what happened with it did.

Back in the days of Mayor Sam Adams, someone got the brilliant idea to turn E Burnside and Couch from NE 14th to the Burnside Bridge into a one-way couplet; Burnside going east, Couch going west. Not only did it ruin a great visual approach to downtown on East Burnside, but it also improved property values (like any other corner of Portland really needed it; pretty soon, you'll be renting the air).

This caused a change in geography in what we sometimes still call the "Burnside Bridgehead", that area where the east end of the Burnside Bridge comes back to earth. The sole corner used to be Burnside and Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Now, Couch was changed to go one-half block west, s-curve south, then join Burnside to channel the westbound flow onto the bridge. The architecture, such as it was, was swept aside. An open space was created, and that's the way it stood for more than a couple years.

Well, bring us up from 2014 to the present day. Ladies and gentlemen not of Portland, allow me to introduce you to what is actually called "The Fair-Haired Dumbbell"

Looking SE from NE Couch St and Couch Ct, a street belonging only to bicycles

When built, a local alt-weekly exulted Finally, architecture we can argue about. Across the river, on SW 5th, The Portland Building breathed an almost-audible sigh of relief knowing that there was finally a building in town that would attract more opprobrium.

Looking SW from the corner of MLK and Couch

The building looks as though what you'd get if you engaged Willy Wonka as an architect.  Your eyes do not deceive you; non of the sides are plumb. It's all angles. The windows are of various sizes and in seemingly random array.

It's apparently an attempt to redefine the concept of 'building' as 'a structure you walk into and do things in'.

The middle of the Dumbbell, showing the connecting walkways.

As can be seen in the above picture, strictly speaking, the Dumbbell isn't just one building, it's two smaller ones connected by a sort of stacked set of skybridges. Just as you figure you have it figured, you find you figured wrong.

Looking NW from the corner of East Burnside and MLK Jr. Blvd.

There's another thing that one might have surmised in looking at this building; it is stranded on a smaller-than modestly-sized Portland block, surrounded with some of the heaviest street traffic in Portland, with minimal parking. That street parking you see on MLK is all the parking there is next to the building proper. There is a parking garage in that Death-Star-looking edifice behind it and on the left, and while I didn't peep the prices, I understand easy financing is available for well-qualified parkers, if you follow me here.

Looking NE, from the Burnside Bridge

And what a paint-job there, hey? Positively painfully Portland psychidelic.

The Fair-Haired Dummbell is one of a kind; if Portlandia put a bird on this one, it'd have to be a cuckoo. But it casts a kind of a spell, you see; one begins to enjoy it despite every instinct in one that insists that this is quite possibly a crime against architecture suitable for prosecution at the International Court of Justice.

Now, I've loved buildings and I've hated them. I have alternatively loved and hated them. But never before have I simultaneously loved and hated a building. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is both joyously antic and fun and also rage-inducing ... and I hold these emotions concurrently. 

That alt-weekly was right. This is architecture we can argue about.

I just don't know if they meant you can argue with yourself about it.

[EagleCreekFire] A Day Of Looking Directly Into The Sun

3501.

This was Portland, Oregon, green city famous for the environment, under the shroud of the smoke from a not-so-distant fire.

The following digital photos are unretouched, f-stop: IDGAF, aperture: The thing that lets light in the camera:

Now, these photos were grabbed on our way down to our weekly bout of Powell's I like to call "Book Church". The above was taken while we were on our way across the Burnside Bridge and had just got on the east end. The long-wave light poking through the dome of the sky enough to illuminate the clouds beyond add a certain poignancy to the whole thing, I think.

The above photo was taken on SE Stark Street approaching the I-205 access. That hill in the distance is our famous Mount Tabor. That bright spot in the upper right of the frame is something called the Sun. Which you could look right at without discomfort.

This next shot is East Burnside approaching the signal at 55th:

... and this is NE Couch St at 12th Avenue:

... and this is how mild and gentle the Sun was. I could stare it down and frame a shot and the Sun just glowered through the smoke, indifferently.

The building the Sun's about to dip behind is that bizarre housing-related object at the east end of the Burnside Bridge called Yard PDX. Reminds me of a giant stainless-steel bowtie. We're about at NE 8th and Couch at this point.

What you're looking at here is the west end of the Burnside Bridge, along what remains of what we charmingly call 'skid row'; even that's getting pushed out of the area. Shi-shi high rises are being built into what was once the Grove Hotel; even the perennial homeless camp we called R2D2 has left the building. But there's enough strife to be, as we called back in the day, a 'sitchiayshun' in front of the Portland Rescue Mission there.

The world smelled again like a campfire. At this writing, the rain has moved in, and the sky resembles your typical northwestern Oregon sky in mid-September: gray, full of torn clouds that may or may not rain on you.

And so it goes.

[pdx_art] Murals Overlooking Beautiful SE Grand Avenue

3491.

Whilst we were at the legendary Andy & Bax, finding a replacement messenger bag for the one I had that was wearing out (yes, I am a bearded man in Portland who carries his diary around in a shoulder bag, thanks for acknowledging that I fulfill the stereotype) I noticed, going in and going out, a couple of murals that I hadn't seen before. After finally settling on a properly effete and artistely poserly bag (the Rothco M-51 engineer's field bag, there, ya happy now, you judgemental bastards?) me and Wife™ returned to the car but since I was in dilettante art-blogger mode all of a sudden, I had to get some pictures, aren't I the nice one?

Anyway. Ahem.

These two beauties are on property looking out on SE Grand Avenue between SE Ash and SE Pine Streets. The first one caught my eye because it was kind of aggressive, the other, because it was soft and evocative.

Party of the first part:

The text reads NOTHING GOOD COMES EASY, and the legend is kind of its own indictment, because the good thing that doesn't come easy is an angle on that painting. Right, out of frame, the roofline belongs to a building that comes out all the way to the sidewalk on the east side of Grand, and obscures any sort of decent, direct view of it from there; another place it cannot be seen from is across Grand from there, and Grand is pretty wide for a Portland street, so at this point, I'm thinking that Olga Volo and Zach Yarrington, the attributed artists, while passionate about doing this painting, weren't too keen on actually having people see it, which actually kind of fits, because that's as Portland passive-aggressive as you can get.

I love the mural you guys, but I got a shot of it; I bested you. I won your little game.

The other one, much more accessible, was in the parking lot immediately north of that.

This one is so sweet and moody that it pretty much took the steam out of the bad attitude I worked up going up against the other creation there. If it references something, I'm not yet sure; but it's got a mixture of moody, melancholy, and calm going on that's quite seductive and appealing.

The artist is credited as Jade Rivera, and I fell in love with the painterly maker's mark, seen left in the small graphic, located in the upper left corner of the building's wall.

I enjoyed the chase and got a little bit of walking into my out-of-shape frame, which is kind of a bonus. But me and that other mural ... we're still gonna have words at some point. 

[art] What Do You Do At East Burn at 11 PM on a Sunday Evening?

3242.

Well, since the tables are covered with a sort of Kraft paper, and crayons are provided, you draw something.

And this is … well, certainly something. 

The crayons were kinda sad and unhelpful, so I used the trusty Cross Classic Century.

Another thing you do is order and share the Trinity fries, which are regular French fries, sweet-potato fries, and deep fried leek shreds. This is really tasty and relatively economical … you get a big bowl of fries for $8, and if you split that, that's $4 per. And $4 really isn't so much to spot when they taste that good. Also came with rosemary aioli. I'm not that big a fan of aioli.

And since it was sitting between us, we were suspiciously close to playing with (or in) our food.

And, it was all fun and games …

… until Rocketship X-1 showed up.

We didn't stay around to welcome the astronauts. We'd already had a full day.

[pdx] Classic Neon, 20th and East Burnside, Portland

3214.

Last posting was a long look down East Burnside from NE 20th Avenue. Here's what I stopped to pict, though:

Super cool, and look really nifty late at night, QED, as they say.

The two buildings are on opposite corners of East Burnside Street and NE 20th Avenue. And they've been there for a long time, a very long time. Of the two, the one with more vintage is the Tip Top Cleaners' sign, which shows its age most proudly. The words are in two horizontal bars, with a bending arrow running through them, going from absolutely vertical to pointing at the front door, as those signs used to do. It has no animated effects, but I'll bet at one time that arrow was a running animated series.

Also, it's delightfully multicolored.

The other one, above and to the right, belongs to the Willoughby Hearing aid center concern on the NW corner. It's only one color, the bright red, late at night; the sign sprouts as a semi-futuristic and minimalist layerd trilon from the building's corner.

What it misses in vintageness it more than makes up for in MadMen-style coolness and simplcity. If the Tip Top's sign was the art-deco dude in shiny-lapelled tux and tails, the Willoughby sign is the Rat-Packer, cool in his slender-cut black suit and his skinny tie.

The visual loveliness isn't only limited to the neon on this corner. The window to Tip Top, here lensed by The Wife™, is very sensitive to not only its vintage, but it's sense of Portland place.

That fat type on the bottom and the art-deco flair framing the mountain? Awesome. 

[pdx] East Burnside, Late Sunday Night

3213.

Looking west, down East Burnside Street from 20th Avenue, late Sunday evening.
That is all.