The Garden At South Waterfront

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There is a lovely park just off the circle where Montgomery becomes River Drive in the Riverplace nabe; it has lilyponds and colorful flowers and all sorts of botanical niceness.

It makes for great photographs of irises with this great freeway bridge in the background, I'll tell you that much.

I've got a couple of others to share in episodes to follw.

Kʰunamokwst Park: A Cully Place To Be Together

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I was drawn here by a couple of firsts. But it was the type that beckoned me.

If the constant reader had noted the quizzical bit about the title ... because where do you usually see a super-scripted 'h' in any normal parlance ... I'm glad. There's a story there. Seeing it on a map sure caught my eye, and a gradually burgeoning interest in the indigenous culture of what we now call Oregon and Washington, got me and Olivia to the corner of NE 52nd Avenue and Alberta Street here, during the August 2020 heatwave, at a clement hour in the morning.

This is where you'll find Kʰunamokwst Park.

The arrival of Kʰunamokwst Park (since 2015, so, really, new to me) signifies two geographic breakthroughs which deserve to be noted. In no particular order:

First.

 It's the first developed park in the Cully neighborhood. That's big and dissonant news for Portland, which has a reputation for public green spaces and plenty of 'em: in some areas it seems as though you're never more than a few minutes away from even the most modest Portland park. But there are areas of the city which were just outside of it for a great long time, and Cully is one of them. The area was annexed into Portland back in the 1980s, when Portland and Gresham finally began to devour the land between them, but it wasn't until 2015 before Cully got its first honest-to-goodness city park. 

It's a lovely place. Here's the ingress at 52nd and Alberta, with Olivia striking a pose:

And another thing.

This is the very first Portland city park commissioned with an indigenous name. The word kʰunamokwst (pronounced KAHN-uh-mockst) comes to us from the Chinuk Wawa, the language that started as a trade jargon then evolved into a pidgin then matured into a creole that first peoples all along the lower Columbia, from Celilo on down, and through the area we now call Portland, where the Multnomahs once lived, spoke amongst each other.

And speaking of speaking, if the constant reader is wondering about that supered 'h' next to the k, here's the thing about that: Most of our words that we annexed from the first peoples have been anglicised into English, and the sounds of English are not wholly congruent with that of the Wawa. We do, however, have the International Phonetic Alphabet at our disposal, and it allows for a more precise written representation, and, briefly, in this cast, the sound 'k' makes is still 'k', but adding the ʰ like a diacritical mark to create the kʰ glyph makes it an aspriated k sound, which more approximates the way the sound was actually made by a speaker of the Wawa. Sort of saying "k" but breathing out like you're saying "h" at the same time.

And what's the meaning of all this? Well, kʰunamokwst means "together", which is a great thing for a lovely park to make happen. This continues an evolution I'm seeing in which we make a collective effort to honor and acknowledge the peoples that our ancestors displaced by keeping some shred of their intellectual tradition alive and in front of us. 

We can see it beginning to happen here, in these modest ways. I'm hoping they catch on.

The foliage at Kʰunamokwst Park is mighty lovely, as well. It's a park that's been too long in coming. Cully got a real gem.

And here's a link to the Portland Parks and Rec press release that has a lot of good background.

And so it goes skookum.

[PDX] Downtown, Trompe l'Oeil and Church - The Corner of SW Park And Madison

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On Monday, yesterday night, we saw the talk that Jack Ohman gave at the Oregon Historical Society. That wonderfulness will be for the next missive. Before we entered the building, of course, the surroundings on the Park Blocks, at SW Park Avenue and Madison Street, caught my attention, and I was, of course, smitten.

Aw, you know how I do.

There are two sets of what we call 'Park Blocks' in Downtown Portland. The north wing starts at West Burnside and runs north between NW Park Avenue and 8th Avenue until one block south of the Main Post Office on NW Glisan. The south wing runs south from SW Salmon beween SW 9th Avenue and SW Park Avenue into the Portland State University campus.

The newbie to Portland would probably figure that the pattern of these skinny blocks, only 100 feet wide to the standard 200-foot Portland city blog, running to within a block south of Burnside then jogging as it crosses Burnside to continue north, meant that they were all meant for greenspace, and that newbie would be right. But early Portland business dynasties didn't always give stuff away, and as a result, the blocks north of Salmon and south of Burnside went mostly over to business. Some takeback is occurring; the space known as Directors Park used to be mostly parking. I don't expect to see a greenspace connecting to north wing to the south wing even within my lifetime, so this will have to do.

The history also makes the nomenclature a little tricky. When originally planned out, the South Park Blocks were bounded by streets called West Park Avenue and East Park Avenue. Today, north of Salmon, what was West Park is known as SW 9th Avenue. south of Salmon, both sides of the Blocks are bounded by SW Park Avenue, West Park apparently becoming 9th Street, then SW 9th Avenue, as development occurred.

So much for all that. Back to the pictures.

This is the South Park Blocks, looking north from SW Park and Madison. It's easy to see how the narrow block makes a green corridor. The two wings of Park Avenue on either side are very narrow, even for Portland downtown streets, so the area feels very cozy.

That edifice above is the First Congregational Church, whose construction was completed in 1895. A United Church of Christ congregation is  headquartered there modernly. The top of that campanile is about 175 feet straight up. It's an imposing building but not without a certain comforting weight and presence.

This is the east wing of SW Park Avenue between SW Salmon and Main Streets. Like I said, cozy. The blue-awninged building on the right just up the street is the Oregon Historical Society main building. The real architectural treat is here, though:

Between the new main lobby of the OHS and the corner of Park and Madison there's a courtyard, and overlooking the courtyard is the west side of a building called the Sovereign Hotel, a building that the OHS also owns and is on the Historic Register. The optically-illusory painting on this building face has entranced me for a long time, and it's so well-done that you really think it's a feature of the building.

The French have a word for it: Trompe l'oeil (pronounced, approximately-enough for the English tongue, trump-loy). Literally, 'trick of the eye' or 'to trick the eye', it is exactly that … it delights the eye by fooling it into seeing something that's not there.

In this case, by decorating up what would otherwise be a bland, flat building side into something that truly does delight the eye. It pulls a foolie on you … but you appreciate the joke.

[pdx] The Legend of Piccolo Park

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Just about everyone reading this may have heard of something called a piccolo. In orchestra, it's a half-size flute that plays an octave higher than written, though in Italian, the instrument is called an ottavino.

This is probably due to something being lost in translation. Outside of Italy, piccolo means piccolo. Inside of Italy, piccolo means small. The long-time Portland toy store, Piccolo Mondo, translates to 'small world'. And so on.

In Portland particularly, Piccolo is a park whose size befits its diminutive name. It stretches between SE 27th and 28th Avenues, and is midway between SE Division and Clinton Streets. It lays in a place where SE Ivon Street would be, if it ran through. It marks an especial place where something would have run through, had a slightly earlier generation of Portlanders not done something about it.

The following I'm about to relate has been gleaned from years of reading and absorbing. The gentle reader is going have to take my word for this, as I have no references to share. That said, here goes:

Back in the 1970s, Portland was set to go on developing a city-girdling grid of freeways. Particularly pertinent (and iconic of a sea-change in Portland growth) was the Mount Hood Freeway. This brobdingnagian monster was set to diverge southeastward from the east end of the Marquam Bridge, following the diagonal portion of SE Division Street, laying between Division and Clinton until about SE 42nd Avenue, swerving south to SE 52nd and Powell, and obliterating Powell Blvd from SE 52nd Avenue all the way out to I-205. Traces of the freeway that was to be can be seen if you know where to look. SE Powell Blvd's design from 52nd out to 82nd takes advantage of the fact that the strip on the south side of the boulevard was vacated in anticipation of freeway construction; that's what all those off-street parking areas that the cross-avenues feed into are doing there.

The only bit that you can find west of there, aside from the stub ramps from the eastside approach to the Marquam Bridge, though, are in this neighborhood …

SE 28th Avenue at Piccolo Park, looking south. This would have
been about the median of I-80N (later I-84) had the Mount
Hood Freeway been built.

 … and it would have went through this piece of property:

The SE 28th Avenue entrance to Piccolo Park.
This would have been a freeway.

According to my measurements on Google Maps Classic, the frontage on SE 28th Avenue is about 150 feet; that on the SE 27th Avenue side is about 100. Three house lots were acquired and cleared for the freeway-that-never-was; then the project died the death, its funds going toward regional transit, eventually toward MAX, and burnishing Portland's reputation as one of the front lines in the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 70s and helping establish our reputation as a smart-growth Mecca.

But without a freeway to run through it, what to do?

What we always do around here. Grow a park in it.

A small park. Un piccolo parco. And, instead of a raging freeway, we have neighborhoods, funky places to go, and a park where a cute young couple and their dog can hang out …

… where public art includes a sundial with the gnomon broken off …

… a totally adorable compass rose with unfinished jigsaw puzzle detail …

… and what has to be the most exquisite hopscotch setup I have ever seen.

 Today's Piccolo Park could have been six lanes of traffic, but, instead, it's plants and flowers …

… grass and dappled sunlight …

… and flowers attracting bees. These particular ones the bumblebees were totally nuts about; I couldn't get a picture of the bees, they were too busy and having too much of a good time macking on that sweet, sweet nectar …

… I'll tell this much though … those rear shanks on those bees were absolutely loaded with pollen. they were making hay …

… while the sun shines, and the spring moon came out. I couldn't help but look up; I took even more pictures of the tree tops than this, so very many, but the  light diffusing through the trees made for the most luminous green. I couldn't help but snap away.

While I adore the gray skies and cool days, I was ready for this fair weather. It was fine, and there was something for everyone …

… including that little guy who. but for some sane heads about forty-odd years ago, wouldn't be here, either.