Downtown Portland from the Lloyd District, circa 2010

3793

I just downloaded about 700, a little more, photos from a Kodak EasyShare camera's card that I found that I had taken in 2010.

Eleven years ago.

So, periodically, when the creative writing well is dry, I'll dip back into this folder and share a shot. Some of them are quite mundane, but they all come from the period of about 2010 through 2013, and some of them are obviously different, and several of them are impossible to reproduce because Portland's growth has become glandular in these latter days: either there's a building in the way, or there's a building on top of where it happened.

This particular one was taken in 2010 from the floor of the Red Lion Hotel near the Lloyd Center that that year's OryCon had its Hospitality Suite on. The view from the window at the elevator lobby was always splendid and gave a great angle. This day, there were clouds muscling over the West Hills that also bulk up behind the downtown towers.

Not only has the profile of downtown Portland changed, likely as not, there's now a high-rise between this viewpoint and downtown, so this is an impossible shot now.

Bridge in the foreground is the Burnside. There are now several high-rise apartment towers that would obscure that view. 

We must go up there, get a 'today' shot, and I'll post them side-by-side. Stay tuned for that.

Sunrise on the Last Day of February 2021

3781

The sunrise, today, the last day of February 2021, from a work site somewhere in northeast Portland:

That is all, for now.

At Last, The 2021 Calendar

3775

The Pandemic Year and its attendant centrifugal effects have forced a great many changes. We've lost friends, changed our routines, and endured creative stresses we couldn't have forseen.

The SJKPDX calendar, which I've produced and sold through Lulu.com for the past four or five years, has thusly emerged, a little late, but it's here. In addition to the other struggles, with the retirement of Flash, which Lulu's calendar creator was coded in, I had to hope and wait until they developed a similar way to do it. I can lay it out and upload the PDFs but liked the other way better. More painless. I just have to include captions in the uploaded picture now (I didn't this time, but am planning on doing it next time). It includes January 2022, so anyone getting it now is going to still have 12 months of Action Calendar! And it includes many of my carefully curated Portland street photography, which is my pride and joy.

The Brown Eyed Girl endorses and insists, to my benefit, to be creative this way, and if Brenda Balin were still with us, she's be sore disappointed in me. 

Interested? Follow the link below. $12.49 US. 

CLICK ON THIS LINK TO GO TO LULU AND BUY THIS BEAUTY.

The Ziggurats From Four Miles Out: NE 57th And Sandy

3698Portland is a city which, to the Oregon mind, sprawls, but is still personal-sized. Herewith another example.

Portland's got an angle. It's not an insider's angle though, and it's easily findable by anyone on any map; it's called Sandy Boulevard. Starting at SE 7th and Washington and through the Parkrose district, where it more aligns with the Columbia River, Sandy Boulevard is a great diagonal. Rising from the east side center of town to what was once merely the northeast corner at about 30 degrees, it cuts through all walks of Portland life; from the affluent to the merely prosperous, it connects all.

It's more than five miles worth of fork intersections and small flat-iron shaped buildings, has one television studio, it's main-street Hollywood District, its a small clutch of Asian restaurants up near 72nd, the Pirate's Cove with the huge jug-shaped building, it's the good, the bad, the ugly, it's as iconic as any Portland arterial.

Portland's Wilshire Blvd, really, in a way.

It also surmounts the comparatively flat eastside's actually-rather-undulating geography. As one moves east from the Hollywood District's business center, you go up a very long climb, which levels out at NE 57th Avenue. Here, at the crest of the Alameda ridge, you look back the way you came, and you have an extraordinarily interesting POV on Portland's City Center. Thus:

This is just about four miles away from that red rocketship-shaped building. Iconic Portland landmarks you can see from here is that rocketship (the KOIN Center), and the stalwart Wells Fargo Tower on the right. Visible in front of the KOIN Center is the new Multnomah County Courthouse. Just to the right of that, recognizable by its tilted chapeau, is the Edith Green/Wendell Wyatt Federal Building. Right and alongside that is the bland striped buffness of One Main Place. That's the south side of downtown.

To my right here, out of shot, is a lawn and within that lawn is a plinth in front of the German-American Society, and at one time upon that plinth was a statue of George Washington, but then the protests came and began serious iconoclasm. The statue, pulled down, has been pulled off the field of play. We wish it well.

Holgate Slough, Corbett and California

3680

Most of the photos I've been exploiting over the last few instalments have been from the picture-taking expedition to the wilds of South Portland. The ideal viewpoint we located was the intersection of SW Corbett Avenue and California Street ... that's where the big downhill grade begins.

It offers gifts in more than one direction, though, it must be said. As witness:

What you can see from there is the Willamette, where it widens out to encompass Ross Island and Hardtack Island, two large gravel bars that would eventually be tied together at the south end to provide a lagoon for Ross Island Sand & Gravel to quarry for all those years. That charming floating home community is lined along the side that becomes what is called Holgate Slough. Of particular note is the blue building perched on the bluff overlooking the river, in the upper right of the frame. The mural on it is famous and the target of many a fellow amateur photog and blogger, and it's on the back side of Wilhelm's Portland Memorial Funeral home. It's reputedly the largest mural in the United States of America.

We journeyed to this corner of town to find street blades with the new South directional; we found none (though those odd brown blades in the South Waterfront continue to annoy in more ways than one). We expected something since the City o'Portland is apparently locked and loaded to run out and slap a decal on all suitable blades and then replace those that need replacing, but nothing. Nada one. So despite the City insisting this be a problem and fixing it nonetheless, we can still go out there and pretend to the preferable reality that it didn't happen. However, looking at the weathered blades at the corner, it's still a known thing that they went from merely worn to instant antiques. Sic transit gloria mundi.

OK, City Of Portland, If You Insist

3676

A bit of wry humor from the City O'Portland as far as describing the feature Corbett Avenue goes into from California Avenue north through the Johns Landing area.

Oh, it goes down at about a four or five percent grade about a hundred and fifty feet and then up a little over the course of about half a mile, but, OK, we call it a 'dip' for now.

Heh, heh, heh.

That 10MPH advisory? I'd take that seriously.

The Ziggurats From Three Miles Out

3674

This is an edit of the picture previous, that points out three great buildings in Oregon and suggests the grandeur ... human, certainly, but grand nevertheless ... of the cityscape of Portland:

Mostly blocked by the rise that the Lair Hill neighborhood perches upon, you have the Wells Fargo Tower (or one I still think of as the First National Tower), built in the 1970s and still the tallest building on Oregon; in the middle, the KOIN Tower (which still contains the TV station ... you can't count on that sort of thing anymore) and on the right, the US Bancorp Tower (which no longer houses US Bancorp, thus proving the previous parenthetical point).

The views I get are a great amount of the reason I love my hometown as much as I do.

Via Southwest Corbett Avenue

3673

Two days ago we went in search of South Portland. We found that Southwest was still where South was supposed to be, but we did rediscover Corbett Avenue.

Corbett Avenue runs north and south and parallels Naito Parkway and View Point Terrace; it's the fifth street east of that line, but still west of the Willamette River. As of the First of May, 2020, it's South Corbett Avenue, but all the street signs say SW Corbett Avenue. Maybe it's pandemic rules, but all those decals that were supposed to have changed the signs from SW to S haven't appeared yet, not even in the toney-a-la-toney South Waterfront.

As far as we were concerned, we were still in Southwest Portland.

My route for viewpoints intended to take us via SW Macadam Avenue outward then inward via SW Corbett Avenue. I should have indicated a right onto SW Nevada Street but we went up Taylors Ferry Rd to LaView Drive, a narrow, winding way that fairly drips poshness, just like everything on the prosperous west side does, in the way that it does.  LaView winds and corners up hills that goats should be so lucky to climb, then we get to Corbett Avenue.

I love Corbett Avenue. It goes up and down some pretty steep hills, and as some interesting touches to it you won't find in any other town. And here is one reason, one big reason, why I love my hometown so much. You just don't get sight-lines like this in any other city in Oregon:

From the intersection at California Street, Corbett fairly falls down a steep hill down to a low point at Boundary Street, where you can hang a quick ralph for a block and get back over to Macadam, or ascend another hill and go into the thick of the Lair Hill nabe. That hill can be seen in the distance; right up there, above and to the left of where the road disappears again, one sees the bright green of a freeway exit sign, and that's the Corbett Avenue offramp from I-5 northbound (Exit 298, if that helps). But for the fact that I-5 here is below grade, you'd see that, too.

This was a major landmark for traffic reporters during radio's local drive time, back in the day.

Over the top of the hill in the distance, three of Oregon's tallest buildings; that's downtown, and the ziggurat on the right, Big Pink, is at Burnside Street. California Street is the 6900 block south; at 20 blocks to the mile, we're about three and a half miles from that.

The zipline would be insane.

One other unique thing worth noting is how the street splits there. One upper half, one lower half. Two way traffic may or may not be how it's sanctioned, but that's how they locals do it. And all down these streets are the kind of houses George Orr, in The Lathe Of Heaven, survived the destruction and rebirth of the world in. This is the Portland you couldn't have anywhere else.

Northwest 11th by Powells On Any Given Late Afternoon In The Long Ago

3672

This one tugged at the heartstrings, you know, now that we're all in search of lost time.

The point of view is the units block of NW 11th Avenue, between Couch and Burnside. I'm facing north-northwest. Powell's Books is at my back and on the right. The building you're looking at is called the M Financial Center, which impresses me in as much as I know of no other letter of the alphabet that has so much finance devoted to it.

The intersection in view is that of NW 11th Avenue and Couch St.

NW 11th and Couch is unique amongst Portland intersections is that it is the only place in the city of Portland and indeed the state of Oregon where the so-called 'scramble' crossing is implemented. Couch traffic goes and Couch pedestrians can cross; then 11th Avenue traffic goes and 11th Avenue pedestrians cross; then all traffic on the streets stop and the six cross walks (two for each street and two diagonals crossing the middle) flow. It's an innovative thing and maybe it's the mad dash of everyone toward the Powell's entry on 11th and Couch convinced the city to put it there, I don't know. It's been three years and more since it's been put in and I hear nothing about it being put elsewhere, which is strange in our town where traffic patterns seem disrupted on the basis of wish and whimsy in these latter days.

Indeed, the streets there are so very narrow it's hard to see who, if anyone, is really saving any time by cutting across.

Quite a few years ago, as a teenager in Salem, I remember the city there piloting the idea at the corner of High and Center Streets, and in Salem that makes sense as the street widths there amount to a considerable hike. Surprising therefore that it never caught on there. I guess we love it here, we inscrutable, quirky Portlanders who do things, I guess, just for the sake of being seen doing 'em.

Anyway, that was then and this is now and Powell's is still not opening, not yet. We remain hopeful but understand why this is.

So it goes.

The Hill Going Up 102nd From Parkrose

3661

Maps can, of course, be unintentionally deceptive: Anyone looking at a map containing northeast Portland who have never been here may be forgiven for thinking that's a simple way to go, from NE Halsey in the Gateway district to NE Sandy in the Parkrose district via NE 102nd Avenue.

That first step, as they say, is a doozy. Here's a look up that hill from the street in front of the market I wrote about in the chapter immediately preceeding:

To give some idea of scale, the distance from the traffic signal in the foreground, NE Prescott St, at the 4500 block north, to that signal in the distance, at NE Fremont St, at the 3500 block north, is 10 blocks or 1/2 mile. The distance from where yours truly is standing to the crest of the hill is about six-tenths of a mile. The change in elevation? About 170 feet.

That is a steep hill. Think of it whenever someone goes on about 'Portland's flat eastside'.

The Dog On the Sign: The 102nd Street Market

3660

At NE 102nd Avenue and Wygant Street, in the Parkrose area of town, there's a c-store ... a quick shop ... a bodega, what have you, a shabby but not unclean corner store called, inaccurately, the 102nd Street Market.

Numbered streets are avenues, you see, with few exceptions in Portland ... and none of them anywhere near here.

Anywhoozle, This charming little place looks a little loved-on by time, but is neat and clean and serves its neighborhood well. And, it has a store dog, and that store dog has a bit of a rep, see. You don't even have to go in to see the dog because ...

 ... the pup's on the sign.

The architecture informs you that this was an old-school Plaid Pantry back in the day.

4646 NE 102nd Avenue in Portland, in case the reader wondered.

Southeast Ash And Grand, 2017

3659

Just an inner-eastisde street scent, Southeast Grand at Ash, looking west. The big building is, of course, Big Pink; one block away, on the right there, a Salvation Army building; visible along the left side of the frame, that old architecture which gave East Portland (and this is part of the original city of East Portland, when there was such a thing) its charm and continues to inform it in a low, slow tone.

 

Also visible in the picture that you don't see so often now: parked cars and people.

Multnomah County's Only Covered Bridge: Cedar Crossing

3586Oregon has many covered bridges, but up until historically recently, none of them were in Multnomah County.

In 1982, though, the county deemed that we deserved to join the party. So a secluded spot was selected where a back road that connected the SE 134th and Foster neighborhood (almost-but-not-quite-Pleasant Valley) to the backside of the then-still-small-and-charming backroad burg of Happy Valley crossed the upper reaches of Johnson Creek.

The road becomes SE Deardorff Road in an unsigned change as you round a sharp bend and dive into the gully there, then you turn a corner ... and there suddenly, is this:

If it seems a little new looking for a covered bridge that's because it is: as I noted, it was built in the 1980s to make up for the fact that Multnomah County had no covered bridges within its boundaries; it was dedicated, in part, by County Executive Don Clark (a political titan back in the day when MultCo only had three commissioners), and its name was selected from a naming contest held amongst David Douglas High students.

This bridge is as East County AF.

It's also pleasant, secluded without being too far out, and there's a turnout on the south side of the bridge where you can chill and listen to the forest and the flowing creek below.

Ukulele Player On Woodstock Blvd

3580

On Wednesday last week, My Brown-Eyed Girl was down in the hidden southeast part of Portland, taking the car in for a bit of necessary, and while waiting out that process, spotted this genuine human on SE Woodstock Blvd ...

They were exhoriting us to do our homework naked, and eat our cereal with a fork.

Amanda Palmer music, I understand.

The SJKPDX Portland 2019 Calendar Is Still Available!

3577

I had the calendar finished and was publicizing it on Facebook last month and it only now occurred to me to feature it here. Silly me! I've always been much better at designing than marketing.

But here it is and it's still wonderful, and there is still 360/365ths of 2019 to enjoy it, which makes the $13.99 asking price still a very good value!

It's a unique work; you've seen Portland on many calendars and posters, but never the way I do. And I have a most unique eye.

Below you'll find a embed that'll let you get a preview, but don't stop there! Go ahead and treat yourself: If you can't be in Portland, you can at least have it on your wall. And it is the one part of Portland that anyone can afford.



 

The Oregon Convention Center At Night

3502/A.

Before Portland came all stylish and popular and such, and condo silos started sprouting like an invasive species, one of the premier skyline signatures of Portland and perhaps the most memorable was the Oregon Convention Center. Its twin glass spires were as nothing ever seen before in the skyline of the Rose City. It was kind of our Syndey Opera House.

Now, believe it or don't, it has so much competition that it's just another interesting signal lost in a ton of architectural noise, but it still knows how to put on a show. Here, from earlier tonight, is the edifice lit with an indigo-blue light, which looks vibrant here but in person had a quality that doesn't quite make it to the photograph:

The photograph doesn't do full justice to the reality, but the blue in it is kind of otherworldly still. Seein in the distance between the towers is downtown Portland: the tower closest to the right-hand spire is the Wells Fargo Center, and the one smack in the middle is the KOIN Center. Some lights from Marquam Hill, where OHSU is, can also be seen to the right of that.

The construction site on the other side of NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd between the POV and the OCC is the site of the so-called "Headquarters Hotel", which is going to be a high-rise, so we're about to lose this view, too.

Get down there while you can, troops.

The Fremont Bridge from Kaiser South Interstate

3529.

It's not hard to get a bridge photo in Portland. The challenge is to find unexpected settings.

The Fremont Bridge is an architectural marvel and one of those things one only needs look at to know this is Portland. It is north of the city center, for those of you who aren't of here, and both the east and the west ends are in industrial areas (which are getting less industrial by the day, given that this is Portland, but they still wear that heritage proudly.

The Kaiser medical complex at the top of the hill on North Interstate Avenue faces that area and provides some vantages that look more blue-collar worker than the effete population that seems to be washing in like a tide.

The growing (!) city in the background, but in the foreground, the old, grubby, working, Albina rail yard side of old Portland which, while the character of the work seems to have changed a little, still looks the way it did thirty years ago, only if you don't look too close.

There are artist's studios down there now. I'm not against artists and studios, aspiring to be an actual one with one myself, but it's just kind of a dislocative thing.

There's a cement plant down there. It was going full-throat when we were there, as see above.

Of course, as above, if you pull in close enough, you see the encroachment of the Beautiful New People, with that signature crop of the time, the building crane. They're in full bloom lately.

The Union Pacific yard house's chimney, still more or less unchanged over the ages, holds sentinel duty against a wind of change that threatens to push it over, but who knows? In ten years, it'll be the centerpiece of some lovely lifestyle community maybe.

Old Portland, With Clouds

3528.

Today we went on a personal mission that was a something of a fail. Not a disaster, but something we could have done without.

Digital photography, though, means that no fail is a thorough fail. We at least have some photos that scream Old Portland.

NE Broadway in the Rose Quarter area. A lot has changed, but it still looks like Old Portland when you get this angle.

On N. Larrabee Avenue, which is the name of the street that you approach Interstate Avenue northbound from the Memorial Coliseum, there is this grain elevator. It's part of working Old Portland; I'm cheered by, despite all the up-towning we done around here lately, the Willamette harbor is still a working harbor all the way into the city center.

And, if you take a picture at the right moment, the city seems deserted, just like scenes out my favorite apocalyptic movies.

Fremont Bridge from the Larrabee merge onto N. Interstate Ave. Same feel, same deserted look, same cloudbank being held back by the range of the Tualatin Mountains in Forest Park.

[pdx] Signs of the Sellwood Bridge

3506.

There's a bit of information there, on the top of the Sellwood Bridge.

There are signs in the city that we no longer celebrate our history in Bridgetown; it's a struggle documented in the war over housing prices, rents, what gets torn down and what gets built. Portland, thankfully, still looks a lot the way it used to between the new stuff and the strange stuff (I'm looking at you, Burnside Bridgehead - but that's for another time).

At the east end of the Sellwood Bridge, as is true is most public works, there is a brass plaque recording the date, the when, the how, the who. Centered is the list of 2016 county commissioners, five in number, headed by a Kafoury (that's a Portland political verity: if you missed this Kafoury, there's gonna be another one along in about five minutes):

... but, at the bottom there, inset into the parapet? That's the original, now-92-year-old dedication plaque from the original Sellwood Bridge. Portland is conflicted right now about her history, but at least we remember there is one. There is hope in that.

There's a cosmic humor to me in this sign:

... because as everyone in Oregon knows, you have to go LEFT to get to Portland and RIGHT to get to LakeO.

And this is how we tell cyclists that Riverview Cemetery is right across the street, at the west end of the bridge.

Of course, you can take the scenic route, which may take up to 5 minutes. Plan accordingly.

And, in every city that has bridges like this, there are people who care about those who find their way onto them in times of crisis. One is sometimes not as alone as they think.

[pdx] Sellwood Bridge: We Love Our River

3504.

The river traffic was fairly bustling this day in 2017.

There's a line out of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, after Dr. Haber begins toying with reality via George Orr's dreams. He's in his new office suite, overlooking Portland and the river, and Heather Lelache has just witnessed, with knowledge, Orr's dream rewrite the reality of a 21st-century, overbuilt, overpolluted Portland into the Portland that's more like it was back in the 70s, and Haber relates how he, in the new reality, came out to Oregon, and the thing that stuck with me from that scene was the line:

The ecosystem out here was still fairly intact.

And that came to mind as I looked out and saw the blue sky and the water of what was once one of the most polluted rivers in America, the Willamette, a river that's all Oregon's, and that we are as proud of to have as we are proud to be able to pronounce it correctly.

The Willamette is a pulchritudinous river along her entire length from Eugene through Salem to Portland, but it attains a certain mightiness north of Willamette Falls. Not only that, it's influenced by ocean tides ... there's a gentle tidal bore that causes the river to go up and down from the mouth all the way up to the falls at Oregon City.

I was skeptical, then me and my wife spent an lazy afternoon watching the water rise off Sellwood Riverfront Park. Then I was just boggled. Still am.

There wasn't just pentiful fun craft frolicking on the river, but there was some serious work going on under the bridge as well. This crew seemed to be doing some sort of maintenance on the bridge pier:

Men with hard hats on the barge, marine industrial equipment of every description, but it was the bubbling coming up near the top of the picture that intrigued me the most.

Wondered what they were doing down there. Still do.

Meanwhile, Maria kept everything snug and in place. What a cute little boat she is, too.

We love our river.

We're positively ... ah, Chipper about it.