The Long View West Down Glisan From NE 89th

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There's a wonderful fable about how Portland's geography sports a 'flat' east side, a more level landscape than can be found west of the river.

That's complete bull, of course. There are remarkable hills on the east side of the Willamette offering low-key splendid views (I'm not just talking about Mount Tabor or Rocky Butte). There's the Alameda Ridge, stretches of Stark Street, a long length of Sandy Boulevard. Portland's east side is remarkably bumpy for a flat place, and the person who first started talking about 'Portland's flat east side' is was probably a cyclist with calves of titanium, you know the kind.

NE Glisan east of I-205 is fairly level, but as soon as you get to about 89th to 92nd Avenues, it drops. There's a long lovely slope alongside Multnomah University (actually a modestly-sized bible college) and it offers this long-range view.

In the distance there are, of course, the West Hills ... west of the Willamette. Here, we're approximately four and a half miles east of the Willamette. The stretch of Glisan we can see here is somewhat more than a mile. 

Portland is a city of hills. Many of them hide their light under a bushel though.

Staring Down The Sunset On SE Morrison, July 2017

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This is a photo that reminds me of some semi-apocalyptic role-playing game art I've seen online lately involving sightlines down city streets with a low sun-angle.

In this case, it's just looking westbound on SE Morrison St just east of SE 7th Avenue on a July evening in 2017. 

The tall building on the left, close-by, is the Weatherly Building, southeast corner of SE Grand and Morrison, a 12-story edifice constructed by the man who once sold more than 90 per cent of the ice cream in Oregon ... well, about 100 years ago, anyway ... and it was hoped that the Weatherly would be the nucleus of a business district to rival the one on the west.

Well, here it is, 2021 and there are enough bulky buildings in the MLK/Grand corridor that the Weatherly is now just a little taller than the rest and the new 5 MLK building at MLK and Burnside exceeds that by 5 floors. So, as it turned out Weatherly and his cohort were right about the inner east side.

They just had to wait 100 years.