Looking Down The McLoughlin Viaduct

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This is a view northward from the part of the Ross Island Bridge that goes over SE McLoughlin Blvd.This viaduct has a bit of history.

The viaduct as it stands is only around 15 years old. It replaces one which existed there for decades and was something of a roller-coaster ride, because the low spot it goes over, where SE Division Place and the SPRR mainline, is one of the legendary places where Portland leveled the ground with fill and, as such, was imperceptibly moving in the general direction of the Willamette River. By the time the 2000s came along this was enough to make of it a wiggly, serpentine trip. 

The new viaduct is a has lovely art deco touches. Those pyramidal pylons are the past's idea of the future, angular yet graceful and poetic on a subliminal level. I dig its personality.

The lanes on the north bound, the right, side devolve into Grand Avenue, which can be seen dwindling into the increasingly-inaccurately named Central Eastside Industrial District. The ones on the left receive outbound traffic going south from SE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. 

The highway itself dates back about a century.

Staring Down The Sunset On SE Morrison, July 2017

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This is a photo that reminds me of some semi-apocalyptic role-playing game art I've seen online lately involving sightlines down city streets with a low sun-angle.

In this case, it's just looking westbound on SE Morrison St just east of SE 7th Avenue on a July evening in 2017. 

The tall building on the left, close-by, is the Weatherly Building, southeast corner of SE Grand and Morrison, a 12-story edifice constructed by the man who once sold more than 90 per cent of the ice cream in Oregon ... well, about 100 years ago, anyway ... and it was hoped that the Weatherly would be the nucleus of a business district to rival the one on the west.

Well, here it is, 2021 and there are enough bulky buildings in the MLK/Grand corridor that the Weatherly is now just a little taller than the rest and the new 5 MLK building at MLK and Burnside exceeds that by 5 floors. So, as it turned out Weatherly and his cohort were right about the inner east side.

They just had to wait 100 years.

The Burnside Bridgehead Has A Skyline Now

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... and no, its not a brand new thing. But it is a thing which struck me of having some big-town weight all of a sudden, when I stood back to look at it, this day.

Once upon a time, both 25 years ago but also a hundred million, the area where the east end of the Burnside Bridge tied into the street grid ... the corner of MLK and E Burnside ... there was homeless men's service center called Baloney Joe's. And there was a building that was famous for being in a state of semi-renovation, the Bridgeport Hotel; about five floors of disused building and three or four more floors of just steel girder frame, and the big question was, would anything ever come of that. 

Well, come forward a quarter-century and hundreds of millions of developer dollars, and we have our answer. Fashionable renovations, if-you-have-to-ask-you-cant-afford-it apartment high-rises, and a complete obliteration of what-was-once-was in favor of what-it-now-is. And now, in a place where we once fretted there'd be a Home Depot (seriously, that's what they once had envisioned for the block bounded by MLK/Couch/Burnside/NE 3rd) we have been bowled over by what now looks like a second downtown, or a shiny new business district any town of 75,000 to 100,000 would be thrilled to call their own (even with the Fair-Haired Dumbell). 

Once, just a homeless shelter and a handful of old buildings with furniture stores. Now, same planet ... but a different world.

The View From The Portland Tram, 2008

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Since I did the dive into my photographing past, I stumbled on this and it made me feel antic.

In 2008 me and the Brown Eyed Girl treated ourselves to a ride on the then-still-pretty-novel Portland Aerial Tram. These photos, also taken with that old ViviCam 3705, are a little shaky and blurry and indistinct in places. I punched them up with the GIMP as best I could. They show vistas looking northeast mostly, in the direction of the then-much-less-developed central Eastside. Still, the changes jump the hell out at you.

 

Back then, the old Lloyd Towers - 500 and 700 NE Multnomah - were the tallest buildings in that district. These days, they're getting kind of lost. And are hardly as alone.

I think actually this is a slightly better view of that.

And bridges, of course, always bridges with Portland. In the middle of the shot, the Oregon Convention Center, once the signature landmark in the area. Just to the left of that, what we call today the Moda Center, and we still, I think then, called the Rose Garden.

The above and below photos jog the George Orr in me. Ask me what I mean by that if you're curious, constant reader.

 

Southeast Ash And Grand, 2017

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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.

Plague Year Diary: 20th and East Burnside Looking West

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One of the places we went was down Burnside Street. Those of you have been following along for any length of time know that Burnside is an important street in the Portland layout: it splits town north from south: NW and NE Portland are north of Burnside and west and east of the river: respectively are placed SW and SE Portland.

This is 20th and East Burnside, looking west, on a weekday afternoon that would otherwise be quite busy.

But everyone's gone to the Moon.

Storm Clouds over Foster Road, December 2019.

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Looking through my personal photo stock for picture approximating the mood. This was taken outside Speedboat Coffee on SE Foster Road, looking west. The looming upper cloud boundary and the way the dark velvet sky gradated into the light twilight blue made the whole scene click together in a memorable way.

They Call It The Fair-Haired Dumbell. No, Really.

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Portland is in the midst of a building-boom, of course, economics being what it is here in terminal-stage capitalism, of properly Erisian proportion. It's only natural that someone or something in the collective psyche would snap.

Here's what happened with it did.

Back in the days of Mayor Sam Adams, someone got the brilliant idea to turn E Burnside and Couch from NE 14th to the Burnside Bridge into a one-way couplet; Burnside going east, Couch going west. Not only did it ruin a great visual approach to downtown on East Burnside, but it also improved property values (like any other corner of Portland really needed it; pretty soon, you'll be renting the air).

This caused a change in geography in what we sometimes still call the "Burnside Bridgehead", that area where the east end of the Burnside Bridge comes back to earth. The sole corner used to be Burnside and Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Now, Couch was changed to go one-half block west, s-curve south, then join Burnside to channel the westbound flow onto the bridge. The architecture, such as it was, was swept aside. An open space was created, and that's the way it stood for more than a couple years.

Well, bring us up from 2014 to the present day. Ladies and gentlemen not of Portland, allow me to introduce you to what is actually called "The Fair-Haired Dumbbell"

Looking SE from NE Couch St and Couch Ct, a street belonging only to bicycles

When built, a local alt-weekly exulted Finally, architecture we can argue about. Across the river, on SW 5th, The Portland Building breathed an almost-audible sigh of relief knowing that there was finally a building in town that would attract more opprobrium.

Looking SW from the corner of MLK and Couch

The building looks as though what you'd get if you engaged Willy Wonka as an architect.  Your eyes do not deceive you; non of the sides are plumb. It's all angles. The windows are of various sizes and in seemingly random array.

It's apparently an attempt to redefine the concept of 'building' as 'a structure you walk into and do things in'.

The middle of the Dumbbell, showing the connecting walkways.

As can be seen in the above picture, strictly speaking, the Dumbbell isn't just one building, it's two smaller ones connected by a sort of stacked set of skybridges. Just as you figure you have it figured, you find you figured wrong.

Looking NW from the corner of East Burnside and MLK Jr. Blvd.

There's another thing that one might have surmised in looking at this building; it is stranded on a smaller-than modestly-sized Portland block, surrounded with some of the heaviest street traffic in Portland, with minimal parking. That street parking you see on MLK is all the parking there is next to the building proper. There is a parking garage in that Death-Star-looking edifice behind it and on the left, and while I didn't peep the prices, I understand easy financing is available for well-qualified parkers, if you follow me here.

Looking NE, from the Burnside Bridge

And what a paint-job there, hey? Positively painfully Portland psychidelic.

The Fair-Haired Dummbell is one of a kind; if Portlandia put a bird on this one, it'd have to be a cuckoo. But it casts a kind of a spell, you see; one begins to enjoy it despite every instinct in one that insists that this is quite possibly a crime against architecture suitable for prosecution at the International Court of Justice.

Now, I've loved buildings and I've hated them. I have alternatively loved and hated them. But never before have I simultaneously loved and hated a building. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is both joyously antic and fun and also rage-inducing ... and I hold these emotions concurrently. 

That alt-weekly was right. This is architecture we can argue about.

I just don't know if they meant you can argue with yourself about it.

[art] The Mural Of Surreal Toys

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There is a building I've just heard of here in the anytime-now-to-be-formerly industrial central east side of Portland called Kidd's Toy Museum. It's at the corner of SE Grand Ave and Main Street, and, accessable from Grand just south of Main is a small pocket-parking lot, and in that lot, if you're looking quite quickly, you'll see this:

It's rather beautiful, isn't it? It's like Dali by way of Maurice Sendak via Picasso's 'blue' period. The icy blue monotone makes it all a rather sere dream scene, and seeing as the Kidd's Toy Museum bills itself on Google as exhibiting toys through the first third of the 20th century, it has the feel of a forlorn, yet happy dream. My wife was looking sharp, else we wouldn't have seen it at all, and really wanted the picture, and that much I owed it to her; after all, she'd been sherpaing me around the outer southeast in Sellwood. It was the least I could do.