One Of The Most Oregon Things You'll Still Ever See

3707There is a thing called dimethlyl sulfoxide. It is, as I learned when I was but a neat thing, is a "solvent degreaser". It was a byproduct of paper manufacture, and we had a paper plant on just about every corner through the 1970s, so it was all over the place. It also has alleged medical properties, and is or maybe was-has-been touted as an 'alternative' treatment for cancer.

Sort of an Oregonized laetrile, if you will.

And there was a time, back in the 1970s, when stores from the drug to the hardware variety, all thoughout northwestern Oregon, would sell it to you. But they couldn't sell it as a drug, because that was illegal. So they solid it as that 'solvent degreaser' that the average home just couldn't do without and it's-a-suppressed-miracle-drug-but-you-didn't-hear-that-from-the-person-behind-the-counter-at-the-Coast-to-Coast-if-you-catch-our-meaning-here.

But, back then, you could find DMSO just about everywhere because, well, power to the people, I guess.

It's hard to find now, not so much because the nanny-state suppressed it but because, just like anything, it's fallen out of style. We've moved on. But there are some places you can find it:

The sign on the top of a local mailbox somewhere around the corner of SE 117th and Market is similar in shape and format to the signs peering out of store windows back in the day beckoning you in for some of that sweet, sweet, DMSO anodyne. Actually, DMSO has some very interesting properties: it is absorbed readily into the skin, and can become thereby a transdermal transport vehicle for some other pharmaceuticals. Also, when you apply it, you taste garlic at the back of your throat because of science science neural transport biochemistry science (hand wave). But it hasn't changed medicine or liberated the peoples thereupon, and, as I've said, we've moved on. Mostly.

The sigh of a The Oregonian paper tube, in this era of a light tabloid daily that isn't even delivered seven days a week any more, just ups the poignancy of years gone by.

[OR_liff] Greetings From Downtown Salem, 1958

3508.

I stumbled on this on a page from the Worldwide Elevation Map Finder page for Salem, after being turned on to the image by another friend I have on Facebook, which means this is probably from someone's Flickr but I was unable to determine whose. So, if youse whose stumble by here and find it and let me know, I'll link credit for the scan or take it down as you prefer, but I really wanted to share it.

This is downtown Salem, looking east on State Street from its intersection with Commercial, and I'm guessing that, given the angle on the shot, the photographer is probably on the southwest corner (in the shadow of the 11-story building today called the Capital Center). The vintage of the cars suggest this was taken in around 1958.

What really made my heart sing with remembrance was that curbing there, in the very street, enforcing a left-hand curb-lane turn from westbound State to southbound Commercial. I've never been in another city, not even in Oregon that did that. Just Salem. It's was Salem's way of saying You're gonna make a curb-lane turn, pal, or how're ya fixed for a spare tire right now? Those concrete snakes lay on the curb through about the mid-80s, I think.

Much nostalgia for those of you who remember those old, old Salem commercial names. 

[pdx] Downtown Portland: The Good Old Days Weren't That Long Ago

2832.John Chilson, the esteemable chronicler at the helm of Lost Oregon, has shared an album of what he calls 'Recent Portland Losses'. This is an album of stuff that has been razed in aid of putting something else there.

These were the Rose Friend Apartments.

They were on the southwest corner of SW Broadway and Jefferson Street.

This was in 2006, just six years ago. What's there now? Take it away, Google Maps: 

It's a condo and upscale retail tower. Does anyone care what the name is? Given what it replaced, I don't, not really At least they saved the Ladd Carriage House, just in sight to the right of the tower there, rather famously moving it a few blocks west in typical Emmert style, but can we really say what's been put there was better, when this:

… seemed just fine?

Can you really blame the people who moan all the time about how something in Portland these days is only worth something if it can be replaced with something else? Can you really say they're moaning? I think they have a point.

Now, I know I'm quite lucky to be able to call myself a Portlander. We have a sense of history here, and despite what's been deleted from the public view in just the last 10 years, we actually have more of our history than most places. I know a guy in Phoenix who laments that whenever anything … anything … is more that 10 years old it gets pulled down in favor of something else.

I think we can do better than we have been though.

This circumlocution actually was in aid of a goal. This album crystallized something for me; when me and The Wife™ returned to Portland after a break in Corvallis, we went downtown as often as we could. You couldn't pry us out of that place. So much charm. There were nifty places and shifty places. There were new places and gritty places. I saw Waiting for Guffman at the old Music Box Theatre, on Yamhill between Broadway and Park. The block of Broadway between Yamhill and Taylor was beautiful with its Fox and Music Box marquees. Anyone remember Barbara Clark, Social Stationer? We browsed there once. Where the Columbia Sportswear store is now used to be a food court business, Metro on Broadway, where all sorts of colorful downtowners would eat.

That's all gone now. Downtown is kind of a sterile thing, a sanitized vision for the office workers and the hotel patrons we seem to lust after in an unseemly way, and the über-prosperous condo dwellers we wish would fill those towers. Downtown Portland looks wonderful, but it's gotten just skin deep.

There's very little there there any more, to kype a thought from Gertrude Stein.

Me and The Wife™ now spend our time in Montavilla, along Hawthorne, places that still have a little soul to them. Foster and Powell, a bit of Woodstock, and our beloved Russelville, which even has a cart pod of its own now. But we almost never go downtown. Why bother?

It's our downtown any more. Not really. It's someone else's.

Did you  know that there used to be an Arctic Circle restaurant on the corner of Broadway and Yamhill, on the first floor of the Jackson Tower? And you could get yourself a bit of soul-satisfying junk food and sit at the big window and watch the Square and Broadway. Nothing like that downtown now, certainly not that's not overpriced and effete. I couldn't picture myself sitting in The Original watching the world go by (and neither could my budget, for that matter).

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. One must live with it.

Here's the rest of the album, from Mr. Chilson. Give him propers; he's an Oregon transplant that loves Oregon history more than most Oregonians I know, and as a native-Oregonian, I say he's doin' a hell of a job.

Here's the link to view the rest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9807122@N08/sets/72157601847946673/.


What a difference 10 years can make.

[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