7 NE Oregon St Part 4: The Worker Must Have Bread, But She Must Also Have Roses

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REturning now to 7 NE Oregon Street, that delightfully-marvellously decorated TriMet service depot building, let's look at that side actually fronting Oregon Street.

It's quite a work of art, in itself.

The real appeal of this art is its graffiti feel, it comes from that marvelously chaotic place where the the militant meets the working class and it's not afraid to show it. The text in the design states where its heart is, in a very clear way: The worker must have bread, but she also must have roses. The art is militant, with more than a hint of feminism and revolution to it, and I like it quite a lot for those reasons. 

There's a lot to see here, and I encourage embiggening the picture and spending a while letting your eyes do the wandering. At the time I took the picture I was kind of walked-out, though, and the Brown Eyed Girl had come through the vaccination line over at the OCC and was waiting on me so I started back. As I'm looking at the picture I'm finding that I wish that I had taken more detail shots. The artists really did a splendid job.

We can always go back.

The Front Door of The Oregon Vaccine Center

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During the emergency, the Oregon Convention Center has been the headquarters for getting your jab on.

This is an angle looking northward up MLK, timed to ensure the marquee is announcing the vaccination event, thus ensuring this image's proper place in local history.

The high-rise beyond is the new Hyatt Regency, a building that I don't expect to see much inside of during my lifetime, because what would I be doing in a Hyatt Regency? I'm just not of that stratum.

The Peace Bell of Sapporo

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Portland and Sapporo, Japan, are quite similar cities, I've found out today:

• Both cities are the pivot of metropolitan areas numbering about 2.7 million residents.
• Both cities are near the 45th Parallel: Portland, a s'kosh north, Sapporo, a s'kosh south.
• Both cities area the economic and cultural centers of a large frontier region (Sapporo's prefecture encompasses the entire island of Hokkaido; Oregon is the 10th largest state)
• Both cities inhabit memorable natural surrounds and have a remarkable river running through them
• Both cities built their legacies on exploiting the natural resources of their hinterlands and displacing the indigenous peoples (it is what it is).
  

 It was perhaps natural for the two cities, early in the era of the sister city, to choose each other. The Portland Sapporo Sister City Association dates from 1959, and has just notched its 60th anniversary.

There's a monument to this at the southeastern corner of the Oregon Convention Center. Overlooking the intersection of NE MLK Jr Blvd with Lloyd Blvd, and sheltered by a pergola with a glass roof, is a rather large Japanese bell.

This bell has a significant history of its own. It was gifted to the city of Portland in 1986 and, as part of a renovation project at the OCC culminating in 2019, the bell was rededicated, celebrating its more than 30 years of being here. 

The ceremony was meaningful, not only featuring Sapporo's Mayor Akimoto and our Mayor Wheeler and 90 delegates from Sapporo but also including members of the local indigenous community (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Cowlitz and Chinook Nation) as well as centering the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido. 

It's in the open there at the corner of MLK and Lloyd, and you can walk right up to it and enjoy it for the work of art that is, and all that it means, and can mean.

You Down With OCC? Yeah, You Know Me

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The Oregon Convention Center is a remarkable structure, memorable for the two glass spires which pierce the center of the structure. Built in 1989 and opened in 1990 (yes, it's now more than thirty years old ... one supposes that makes it a Millennial) for about 15 years it was the only remarkable landmark in that area and was so visually pleasing that small square signs iconized it for the purposes of semantic guidance.

If one stands at the east end of the Steel Bridge, where eastbound vehicle traffic debouches onto about two and a half blocks of NE Oregon Street, you can frame things just so, and come up with this view ...

If one looks at the directional sign above and on the right, one will see a washed-out square, and that is one of those iconized directional signs mentioned earlier. They, like the signs on the gantry themselves, have been neglected as this is not really that important a through-route anymore. If you want to get to the Lloyd District and its surrounds from inner NW Portland, you're more than likely going to be using the Broadway Bridge, the next one north. However, it does serve as a somewhat forlorn monument to a past that had this as a major connection to North Interstate Avenue ... and a time when the major destination in the area was the Memorial Coliseum, because there was no Rose Garden Arena/Moda Center yet. 

That colorful building on the left there? That's a TriMet facility that I'll use a number of blog entries to explore the artwork on ... but not yet. Soon though, very soon. 

The Oregon Convention Center At Night

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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.