Olivia the VW, June 2021

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This is the year this girl turns 50. 

I drive a 50 year old car. The styling, though, is timeless. 

I call this Olivia on Sandy Boulevard (Parkrose Interlude 2021). 

She's washed, lubed, the oil's been changed (just in time, I'd say) and the valves have been adjusted. It's hard to fine good VW mechanics and ours is damned good ... and a bit off-the-beam. But classic VW mechanics are like mad scientists, in the good way. 

When it finally cools the hell down, I've the idea to road trip with her down through Silverton because that's where I learned to love VWs. Many pixs should ensue from that ... but that's anon. 

Anonish.

Parkrose: NE 108th Ave, In Living Color

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If they hadn't been setting up for today's Parkrose Marketplace, I never would have glanced. And I've driven by this bit of road for years now. 

About 100 feet or so of NE 108th Avenue immediately off Sandy Blvd ... between the former furniture store withe the guy in the black hat on the sign and the former dive bar ... has these most delightful large dots of color painted on it. And as it happens they're having a neighborhood market today. Of course, the heat being what it is, if you ain't started by now I'd not go, but if you're in Portland and of the mind to do so, might be fun to check out.

Today they started early, at 9 AM, to beat the heat, but it was almost in the 80s by the time I went by around 7:30 AM, so I don't know how successful that move was. I do wish them well, and think maybe we'll go and experience some local color when it isn't so damnably hot.

The Signs Of The Times In Parkrose, Part 1

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I found this bit of prime foolishness nailed to a telephone pole adjacent to the La Mota on NE 99th in Parkrose. People are just too unwise somtimes.

Eat your landlord? Portlander, please. The wealthy are higher up the food chain than we proles are, and that's where the toxins concentrate.

Don't eat your landlord.

Compost your landlord.

I'll repeat this until you people start to listen. Because I am the nice one.

The Portland Immigrant at Sandy and Killingsworth

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It's kind of an inauspicious place to be honored.You can't really pull over to admire this monument.

At the west end of Parkrose's business district, that busy place where NE Killingsworth (or NE Lombard, this time next year) terminates at Sandy Blvd, and where NE Sandy Blvd ceases its diagonal climb out of the Portland's core to align with the historic route of the Columbia River Highway, where traffic to and from I-205 throngs day and night, and where the only neighbors are two hotels and a cemetery, there's a traffic island where the flow parts to go every which way, and there is a landscaped terrace on this island which functions as a plinth of sorts, and on it, a weary-looking fellow casts a tired gaze on the Best Western Pony Soldier Inn.

The Portland Immigrant gazes at the Pony Soldier Inn,
Sandy Blvd dwindling into the background

The Portland Immigrant means to remind of all of us the vitality and spark that those who come from other countries and parts of the world bring to the blend of people and dreams that try to coalesce to form Portland, and that they may come here as weary travellers but with energetic dreams they too want to make real.

The surroundings, as I said, don't lend ones' self the opportunity to pull over and look. Where Sandy Blvd cruises through Parkrose also happens to be the place, once, where most people who came to Portland entered town; at one time, this was Portland's northeast corner, and US 30 the main road into town. There's no real place to pull over to enjoy this spot so, in a certain sort of cosmic sarcasm, motorists tend to race past, not really paying the monument much mind, unconsciously mirroring some of American society's poorer attitudes about the role immigrants play.  

Still he remains, just waiting for you to see him and what he means. It's your move, my friend. 

A Long Look Down 122nd

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I enjoy taking long looks like this with tight, small angles on long lines of power poles and such. My Canon PowerShot is a very capable point-n-shoot, but it lacks an obvious way to take anything like a telephoto shot. So I choose angles and use the perspective I have at hand.

Sort if 'in-camera', as filmmakers might say.

NE 122nd by Rossi's has this nice long stretch of straight sidewalk going uphill, so it also offers just plain eye-catching changes in surface and angle. 

Also, there's a bus stop sign there. Which is nice.

The 73 is the 122nd Ave bus, which I got to know intimately when I was Olivia-less for a while. 

A Piece of I-84 In Rush Hour From A Distance

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Another view that makes me think of Rocky Butte as kind of like Council Crest East. Now, Mount Tabor's fine and the neighborhood around it most charming, but the open views are harder to find there.

Outer east Portland is mile upon mile of flattish, open-yet-cozy mid-20th-Century urban semi-sprawl (we corraled that before it got too out-of-hand, I guess). And, in Parkrose, a freeway runs though it.

Just a bit of Portland rush-hour there, on the left hand side of the road one can see the line up, those are commuters trying to get home to Vancouver at a guess ... I do believe those lanes merge into I-205 northbound heading over the Glenn Jackson. 

A New View: Wy'east from 116th and NE Prescott

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Stumbled on this one. There is a viewpoint not too far from my usual vantage point at NE 122nd and Shaver, by Rossi Farm, that provides a new frame for our beloved volcano.

This is how Wy'east appears from the corner of NE 116th Avenue and Shaver Street, at the northwest corner of the Parkrose High School Campus.

Immediately in front of us is the baseball field at Parkrose HS; the low-slung buff colored affair in the middle distance is the Burgerville on NE 122nd; beyond that, some trees; the point in pointing them out is the perponderance of deciduous trees here, which gives the whole thing a bit of a different feel. 

Not every tree in Oregon is an evergreen. Well ... just most of them.

The framing captures the imposing feeling of the mountain just rather perfectly, and actually a little better than the Rossi Farms POV. In the gestalt, though, it's not better on balance ... different. Supports a slightly different mood, that of the mountain amidst the city, as most of us usually see it.

Covid Vaccination Drive-Thrus At The Old 122nd Kmart?

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It was reported in the media very very recently that the State of Oregon have opened a drive-through Covid vaccidnation site at Clackamas Town Center. I've heard of some people going there. I've heard also that it works really well, so this is good news. More people vaccinated, tougher time for the coronavirus, better time for us all around.

Now, here, out 122nd way, at NE Sandy Blvd, we used to have a Kmart, the last Kmart in the Portland area, I think it was. how it hung on through the wave after wave of closings, I couldn't tell you - access to the location was problematic at best, with 122nd and Sandy coming together as they do, and no possibility for a left hand turn-in from 122nd southbound. But it was the sole survivor, and now it's gone and only its big box remains. 

Although this morning I spied something other than else:

... a phalanx of five drive-through popups each indentically paired with a small tent beside and with lanes defined by orange cones leading into and out.

I'm no epidemiologist, but I'd say we're about to replicate the Clackamas Town Center idea, and I find this most encouraging and exciting.

There's a new crew in charge in the country, and they're getting the job done.

An Epic Show of Sunbeams

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We see in the forecast that it's going to be Hell-degrees-fahrenheit today, but the morning was pleasant enough.

The sky, however, was poetically beautiful. The morning sun rising through the low clouds on the horizon at the low angle it was at about 7 AM gave you one of those skies that get you thinking cosmically.

One of them one-in-a-million views, really

Portland Street Blades: Old and Older

3711A picture snapped from the corner of NE 121st Place and Prescott St, near 122nd and a stone's throw from Parkrose High School.

It's interesting to me the way that tattered old sign directing the sojourner down Prescott St ... a local collector into the Parkrose nabe south of Sandy between 102nd and 122nd ... which is duplicated by the not-quite-equally-but-still-obviously-worn, obsolescent 2nd generation Portland street blade atop the corner post, was allowed to stay.

It's seen a lot of depredation.

NE 121st Place holds a place of import locally because, since Sandy Boulevard and NE 122nd Avenue are grade-separated, it forms he connection between Sandy east and west and 122nd's southbound side. The northbound side is accessed to and from Sandy by a jug handle ramp enclosing he Powell Grove Cemetery, a highly unique bit of street geography which I've explored in the past.

Also, there's more than one way to skin that cat; proceeding south past the access ramp to 122nd southbound leads to a connection to a one-block bit of Skidmore at a traffic signal that one can go north or south at.

The Rainbow Tacqueria Of Parkrose

3705NE Sandy Boulevard east of 99th Avenue is a wholly different Sandy Boulevard. This neck of the woods is downtown Parkrose, a neigborhood of outer east Portland that has, along its commercial axis, seen better days, as many areas are in this time of flux.

Sandy Boulevard - a road named not for the little town way out toward Mount Hood but because it stretched toward the Sandy River, according to MacArthur - stops being a diagonal road at this point and follows the general trend of the Columbia River about a mile to the north. This road, once US Hwy 30, used to be one of the principal east-side gateways to Portland, and architectural legacies of that time can still be seen along that mile-or-so of road ... buildings with vague Art Deco lines, which served interstate travellers at one time with nightly lodgings are now shabby-yet-clean motels and small businesses. It's history through a smudged glass.

At the corner of Sandy and NE 115th, there's a building that echoes that Art Deco detail. Sitting at the corner of a lot containing an L-shaped building that appears to be apartments now but at one time must have been a roadside motel is the Antojitos Mexicanos Taqueria.

Up until a few months ago it was content to wear a coat of bland, oatmeal-hued paint. Nothing special. Then, one day, it exploded in color. Now it looks like this:

From the west:

And, from the east:

Simple yet playful, and anything but boring, thanks to an artist named Pablo, who signed the work in the lower right corner of the facade, with a date of 2020.

It, like many eateries still, is closed, only takeout at this point.

The Hill Going Up 102nd From Parkrose

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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

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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.

Old Parkrose: Adam's Market, NE 111th and Sandy

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One more thing to share today. Adjacent to the lot that contained the Carolina Motel is a lot that holds a little commercial strip building. In any other part of Portland this might hold some artisanal boutique or something. Here, it's much more Old Portland, and much more prosiac.

There's a corner quick-shop, a coin-op laundry (which has pinball, vintage video games and wood paneling straight outta the 1970s) and a little beauty parlor (just out of shot on the left).

It's forlorn in the morning light, kind of shabby but absolutely clean and trim and tidy. Not a spot of trash in the lot. And Adam's Market, open and ready for business. It's the quiet time at 111th and Sandy, though; not a customer in the place.

But this sign? I love this sign.

Adding FISHING BAIT to the mix on the sign? That elevates its game from Old Portland AF to Oregon AF.

Lost Portland: The Carolina Motel, Parkrose, Sandy Blvd

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Today I stopped by the corner of NE 112th and Sandy Blvd in Parkrose.

For those who don't know, Parkrose is a neighborhood of northeast Portland, centered more or less on NE 102nd Avenue and Sandy Blvd. That intersection pretty much anchors the west end of 'downtown' Parkrose, and it stretches just about a mile east, to NE 122nd Avenue and Sandy. The more redoubtable and historically commerical buildings are all between about 102nd and 110th.

There are also a number of shabby motels which nonetheless are trim and neatly kept but which bear names which kind of poke existential fun at themslves: There's a "Courtesy Motel" and a "Prestige Motel", and you know how every town has a "Nordic Motel"? Ours is along the commercial strip in Parkrose.

Of course this was the point at which US 30, the Columbia River Highway, entered Portland back in the day; for a good portion of the 20th Century, Parkrose was pretty much Portland's NE corner. And, at the gateway to town, there were the roadside motels. Travellers stayed there, and people moving to town; I'm no judge of people, but if the zeitgeist is any clue, some people aren't travelling so far any more, and the places some travel to are just a little darker than they used to be.

In 2014, Google Street View showed 11144 NE Sandy Blvd, Portland, Oregon, to look like this:

Sometime during the last year, the property obviously sold. This is what it looks like now.

The neat, trim cottages are gone, leaving a lot so meagrely sized you'll find yourself wondering how any motel could have possibly fit there.

The sign still standing, offering DAILY RATES, CABLE TV HBO SHO, and the rustic amenity of the DD PHONES adds a real touch of surreality to the scene. The fence around, meant to keep Those Who Needn't Be Here off has been breached. I did not take advantage of the freedom of entry.

An additional touch of culture amidst the ruins is positively spooky: Note that the topiary, even after most of a year, is still disturbingly on fleek.