Amongst The Willamette Archipelago

4133

The highway along the Cascade Piedmont, Hwy 213, sometimes has a surreal aesthetic to it. I mean, the highway winds along side the hills and looks out over the farmland of the eastern Willamette Valley and the feeling is nothing so much as being in a speedboat on a peculiar sea, dotted with islands.

There'll be large stretches of flat tilled land with a massif in the distance that's really an island of trees rising from the generations-tilled flatland.

There's a vague feeling of otherworldliness to the landscape there.

Toes of the Mountains

4110

The course of Oregon State Highway 213, a road which technically begins at PDX and goes to Salem, dances along what I've come to think of as the Cascade Piedmont.

Anyone reading this probably understands that the word piedmont, literally translated, means 'foot of the mountains'. There's a region in the deep South that they call 'piedmont', the fall line where streams in Dixie emerge from the foothills of the Appalachians and spread out across the plains on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

 The Cascade Piedmont I am terribly fond of is nowhere near as extensive but I think just as remarkable.

 

Highway 213 dances in and out of the toes of the Piedmont quite nimbly. Much of the time, as you close on and go south of Molalla in the direction of Silverton, it's obvious ... to your left, the land is notably hilly, on the right it flattens out and gives great views of wide and deep farmlands stretch to the distance-diminished Coast Range thirty or forty miles west.

And when it comes to a hill, it skirts around its middle.

Despite the fact I've called Portland home for more years in my life than anywhere else, I still feel a strong connection to this ground, this particular soil. It's emotional, but real; I was born along the Cascade Piedmont, and I have a father and a brother who are buried in its ground. 

Much the way a young duck is said to imprint on the first face it sees as a parent, I must have done same with this ground.

Nothing like it anywhere else. I guarantee this.

Throwback Pictures: Silverton, Oregon 2009

3512A.

Back in the winter of 2009 me and The Wife™passed through my old birthplace of Silverton. Just this last weekend I imported a bunch of photos dating from when I started playing with a digital camera, the legendary ViviCam 3705 ... the Plastic Fantastic ... and I stumbled on some of those wonderful pics.

Here are two of them. I'll post some now and again.

The view here is on the corner of North Water St and Oak St, on the doorstep of the legendary Palace Theater, where I saw 2001 and Planet of the Apes and Westworld and so many other beloved films when they first came out. Not one of those businesses that were current when I was but a neat thing are there now except for that insurance business down the street there, a block, on the corner of East Man and South Water.

Still, it doesn't look too different from when I was a kid. At least, not if you don't look too closely.

This is exactly one block east of the last shot, and looking kinda the same direction. That is the 100 block of North 1st Street, and Oak Street is still in our foreground. At one time there was Norma Branstetter's flower shop (which is now over where Park Street t's into North Water) then it was a beauty shop. Could be anything now, I suppose. The charcoal-blue building on the far right was a furniture store when I was young. Doggonned if I know what it is now, though.

But it still looks more or less the same. There's at timelessness to Silverton which endures despite its modern arrival at Quirky Little Oregon Town-ville.

[pdx] 1 Elevator Street, Oregon City, Oregon

3036.

In Oregon City, an elevator is something other than else.

The history of the elevator goes way, way back, and the legend goes something like this: as the city developed, this legend goes, the early OCans made do with the trails that the original inhabitants used to get between the bench and the bluff. That wouldn't fly over the long term, of course. Eventually, funds were raised for a more civilized way up the hill.

The first elevator, which went into operation about 1915, was a water-powered contraption, very business-like, matter-of-fact, practical, and plain. You got up and got down and got about your business. In the mid 1950's, though, the current version - which is done in a combination of what I understand to be Art Deco and a Space-Age style somewhat appropriate to The Jetsons, possibly inspired a little by Metropolis, was built and went into service. And this is what we have now.

The entry is a tunnel leading below the railroad tracks from this nifty façade at the intersection of 7th and Railroad Streets, just one block away from the end of the Arch Bridge (Downtown OC is defined by three N-S streets, and is only two blocks wide).

The crow's-nest observation deck is about 130 feet up, and has the nifty look of a alien spaceship from some 1950s B-monster SF flick.

You can fly me anytime, baby.

The elevator is really a conventional elevator, which is unique because Oregon City employs an elevator operator. He (today it was a he) sits on a small stool behind a plexi partition and works the buttons, is generally a nice host-y presence.

Being a map aficionado, the floor of the deck had a great thing for me to see. That, of course, would be … a map. Quelle suprise.

A plat map (a plat is the term of art of the original town street design on the ground, whether the streets actually get built or not) from the original OC was adapted into a design for the floor of the deck. Brown blocks for the lower level; green blocks for the upper.

The 'wooly-worm' design that denotes the bluff is known by cartographers as a hachure, and in this case is mostly symbolic, but is a rather rustic way of indicating slopes. In more technical representations, the length and width of the hachure indicates the slope and direction of slope; much as you can tell how sheer a hill is by the spacing of the contour lines on a modern relief map, knowing how to read a hachure gives you a graphical glimpse-idea of the terrain.

The crow's nest design of the deck allows historic Oregon City to show herself off at her sexiest.

All about, the deck (and the tunnel below) are lined with an ingenious historical display. Each photo is a layered thing: a modern view, a historic view, and a wide panorama of the falls. Due to the same effect that allowed a kids eye to wink at you in those toys that had the corrugated plastic, that gave a kind of animation effect, the exhibits designers packed a time panorama into a series of well-curated panels.

The below I selected because, well, vintage street signs, and the kind of finger-directional signs we used to grow around here, a style which existed well into the 1960s.

The art-deco touch even extends to the well-chosen typography, which is drawn from the past's idea of what the future would be. Of particular note is the low waistline on the font, which can be noted in the R, E, and G, and the absolute geometric perfection of the forms. The Art-Decoish feel to the facade just reinforces the retro-future feel.

The tunnel leading to the lower entry to the elevator is a great place to play your songs, as this guy working it showed us. He didn't seem to be busking, just playing to hear himself play. He was quite skillful and very much into it.

I love tunnels. They're fun to photograph and the neat thing about it is you can take it for where you are or it can be anywhere. They're great for fantasizing and getting lost in your own visions.

And from this Art Deco treasure, you can see the other.

[pdx] More Portland Milestones

2220.As pointed out by Cyclotram's Atul666 in the previous post's comments, there are more milestones around Portland than just the ones on Stark Street.

The reading I did on Stark Street Mile Markers blog suggests that there could well have been a system of mile markers on all four major routes into and out of the city. Not just east (Stark Street) but West (Canyon Road), North (Saint Helens Road) and South (Capitol Hwy) as well.

Stark Street's markers seem better preserved than the rest. The claim gains a measure of credibility when we find that there's another P7 milestone – but which is preserved today, perhaps not exactly in its precise position, at the corner of the property on which the Multnomah County Library's Capitol Hill Branch now stands:

See the tagged Flickr stream containing the above photo, taken by Chris_G_OR, hereabouts. It's got bits of history in it that make for intriguing reading (such as, e.g., the name "Taylors Ferry Road" used to go down what we now consider Capitol Highway).

Technorati Tags: Portland History, Portland Geography, PDX History, PDX Geography, PDX Milestones

[oregon] Oregon Capitol Mall Postcards, ca 1955

2217.Anyone who knows me knows I'm silly in love with my native state's great Capitol building. Everything about it is nifty, from the golden Pioneer atop to the cylindrical cupola to the strong vertical lines. The Wikipedia article on it says the style is Art Deco, but it looks modern yet timeless because of the simple dynamism of the lines.

It is the fourth-newest state capitol building in the US, having been finished in 1939.

Yesterday, The Wife™ found two gorgeous post cards, which I gather (based on the styles of the cars and some of the state of the architecture) were made sometime in the latter half of the 1950s. This first one is a view toward the south, taking in the State Capitol from the roof vantage point of the Transportation Building (two blocks north and just east of the Capitol, on the east side of Oregon's Capitol Mall:

This next one is very telling:

The Capitol itself is significantly smaller, and there is a building that should be there, in the upper left, that isn't. Here's the scoop on that:

1. The Oregon Capitol Mall, prior to about 1980, was defined by Winter Street NE (on the west), State Street (on the south front of the Capitol), Capitol Street NE (on the east), and Center Street NE (on the north. Leading away from the north end of the mall was Summer Street NE, which devolved into West Summer Street NE and East Summer Street NE, which circulated traffic about the Mall itself. Latterly, West and East Summer have been turned into pedestrian malls, and the street running across the center of the Mall – Chemeketa Street, NE – now serves an underground parking area which runs the length of the Mall. No auto traffic now accesses the Mall area except via Court (the street in front of the Capitol) and Center.
2. Particularly in the second card we can date the scene. Obviously the photo was taken before 1977, when the Capitol expansion project extended the building's wings west and east and added to the back – this space primarily for legislator's offices. But on the block in the upper left of the Mall, where there appears to be a church, is now the Oregon State Labor and Industries Building, which was finished in 1961 (the Bureau of Labor and Industries, the original tenant, now is based at the State Office Building in Portland; the building itself is home to part of the State Insurance Division).

For reference's sake, the extant buildings on the Capitol Mall in the picture above are: the Oregon State Library, to the Capitol's immediate left: right-upper, the Transportation Building; right-lower, the Public Service Building. Dynastic changes have caused original tenants to change or move to other buildings entirely; the Mall itself now has expanded northward about twice its original dimension along both sides of Summer Street, NE as far as D St, NE.

If you want to embiggen them, see Posterous here:
http://zehnkatzen.posterous.com/vintage-1950s-oregon-state-capitol-postcards

Technorati Tags: Oregon State Capitol, Oregon State Capitol Mall, Vintage Oregon Postcards