By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
They say Portland's gotten expensive.
Well, look at what gathers on the riverbank these days. Pretty soon, you'll have to earn six figures just to camp out in the park.
Tilikum Crossing: Bridge of the People, meet Big Ol' Yachts: Marina of the Rich People.
This is a view of Tilikum Crossing from the seat of a car travelling northbound on Moody Avenue, just south of the intersection where all the transit traffic comes and goes from it.
It's quite a beautiful bridge, and that's actually a change of mind for me. I love the way the cable-stayed design makes it look like a suspension bridge. At first, I wasn't that big a fan, but that was then.
They're going to try to build a new Interstate Bridge, while I'm woolgathering about it all, and I hope they take some inspiration from this, amongst other things. Columbia River Crossing 1.0 was going to be a dreary, boring thing. A bridge in that spot, linking Portland and Vancouver, should be a majestic, impressive thing.
Maybe a suspension bridge? I can hope.
In this posting on the 17th I shared a photo I took in April 2010 of downtown Portland from the vantage point of the east end of the Ross Island Bridge, and it struck me how amazing it was to see it without the Tilikum Crossing Bridge there. I figured it was past time to get an updated picture of this, to document the change.
This has been done. And here is the result.
This day it was warm, in the upper 60s, and the high overcast was nacre-like, in contrast to the gray low-overcast of the 2010 pic. It diffused the light a great deal and I was not able to get contrast on many of the buildings that I wanted. But the difference is pretty striking, I think.
I mean, that new bridge there.
In a book very close to my heart, Ursula K LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, the main character, George Orr is described as living in a Portland that, instead of going the way we did, doubled and tripled down on the growth, had become a moribund city of millions with subways and innumerable bridges across the Willamette. We, as I said, didn't go quite that way, but the multiplying ways to get across the river make me think of the picture of the Portland-yet-to-come that she drew.
I mean, what a difference 11 years makes. This was just in 11 years, there seems to have been more change and more change more faster than in the thirty years previous. Nearly asymptotic, really.
A most agreeable angle can be had of the Tilikum Crossing (full and complete title: Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People) on the walkway along the extension of River Parkway south of the Marquam Bridge.
The cable-stayed span is a rather beautiful design, if only because it resembles a suspension bridge. It's a change to the landscape, and I adore it.
To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.
There were nine train and truck tunnels under the Willamette, sixteen bridges across it, and concrete banks along it for twenty-seven miles. Flood control on both it and its great confluent the Columbia, a few miles downstream from central Portland, was so highly developed that neither river could rise more than five inches even after the most prolonged torrential rains.
The Willamette was a useful element of the environment, like a very large, docile draft animal harnessed with straps, chains, shafts, saddles, bits, girths, hobbles. If it hadn't been useful, of course, it would have been concreted over, like the hundreds of little creeks and streams that ran in darkness down from the hills of the city under the streets and buildings.
But without it, Portland wouldn't have been a port; the ships, the long strings of barges, the big rafts of lumber still came up and down it. So the trucks and the trains and the few private cars had to go over the river or under it.
Above the heads of those now riding the GPRT train in the Broadway Tunnel were tons of rock and gravel, tons of water running, the piles of wharves and the keels of ocean-going ships, the huge concrete supports of elevated freeway bridges and approaches, a convoy of steamer trunks laden with frozen battery-produced chickens, one jet plane at 34,000 feet, the stars at 4.3+ light years.
Orr returned to downtown Portland by boat. Transportation was still rather confused; pieces, remnants, and commencements of about six different public transportation systems cluttered up the city. Reed College had a subway station, but no subway; the funicular to Washington Park ended at the entrance to a tunnel which went halfway under the Willamette and then stopped. Meanwhile, enterprising fellow had refitted a couple of boasts that used to run tours up and down the Willamette and Columbia, and was using them as ferries on regular runs between Linnton, Vancouver, Portland, and Oregon City. It made a pleasant trip.
