7 NE Oregon Street, Portland, Oregon

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Back to the present day, then.

There is a building on the corner of NE Oregon St and Interstate Avenue, in the shadow of I-5 and the Convention Center, and it is covered in wonder.

It is merely, in function, a TriMet facility where trucks are parked and mechanical stuff no doubt happens. 

There is much to see on this building and I'll share some closeups in episodes to come. but, for now, the idea of a blue rose with the legend spelt out in thorns PORTLAND OREGON THE CITY OF ROSES is a pretty keen thing to assay, I think. 

Steel Bridge and Pedestrian Overpass

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Another view of the Steel Bridge; this time through the trusses of the pedestrian overpass allowing the walker to pass over the railroad tracks from the area around NE Oregon St and Lloyd Blvd to the walks leading to the Eastbank Esplanade and the bridge itself.

Just an interesting view of human construction, straight lines, triangles, steel. Very urban, very interesting.

That's all, really.

The Grain Elevators At River Mile 12

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Just north of the Steel Bridge, standing between the Rose Quarter and the Willamette River, is a hulking grain elevator and shipping facility that seems increasingly out of place in the evolving cosmopolitan atmosphere that seems to obtain there.

This has been an active grain-shipping facility for a very long time now. Since approximately 2010, it's been owned by the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the biggest firms you never heard of. It's glandularly huge in world commodities; chances are, if you eat, it's touched the ingredients in your food at some point along the line. If you don't eat ... well, good for you, you android you.

Also, fun fact? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she who was Elaine in Seinfeld and the title character in Veep, is the daughter of the late Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who ran the company for a while. It's a family-owned joint. 

And this is the name I've known it under; working in transportation dispatching as I have, I've known it as the Louis Dreyfus Dock or just the Dreyfus Dock. But that has come to an end apparently, according to the Portland Business Journal, in '19, LDC sold the facility to an outfit called Rabin Worldwide, who buys and sells industrial properties. It'll either remain empty for a while, remain a grain terminal, or maybe suffer the fate of so much of old Portland: redevelopment. 

So that goes.

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. 

Next Stop: Rose Quarter Transit Center

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Everything deserves a beauty shot, and here's another one of the MAX Blue Line, taken as though I was documenting it for TriMet (allow me a fantasy here). It's leaving the Steel Bridge from the east end and about to pull in to the Rose Quarter Transit Center bound for Gresham ... and no other points east.

At a time when there was only one MAX line, and it was just called the MAX, no color-coded lines or any of this gallimaufy we call transit in Portland these days, The Oregonian's Jonathan Nicholas (the latter-day Doug Baker and our fin de siècle version of Herb Caen) noted that a correspondent, noting that it didn't quite and was never going to route any farther east than Cleveland Avenue in Gresham, mentioned it would therefore never be the Boring Train ...

... but one could think of it as the Almost Orient Express. Which I do.

Steel Bridge With Railway Line

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Another of the Steel Bridge, but this time from a slightly more distanct POV.

Just back of the Oregon Convention Center, NE Lloyd Blvd curves northward to meet Interstate Avenue and Oregon Street at the east end of the Steel Bridge. By aiming the camera lens through the bars that prevent people from throwing stuff and climbing down, we get a view that includes a bit of the railway line for a foreground effect that's kind of iron-punk.

I enjoy the graffiti here. The graffiti in these areas always has the artistic touch to it, not some sloppy hit'n'run tag, but some real detail and thought.

The Multimodal Bridge

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Multimodal is a funny word. It's clear what it means but it gets used so much by city and transit planners it sounds like one of those power-buzzwords that get hammered to death on resumes.

But multimodal is what the Steel Bridge is, a bridge that, in its hardworking way, links the halves of Portland like no other. Here it is, doing what it does best. Multimodally.

There was, back in the 1980s, before there were multiple MAX lines, the possibility of driving through the middle part of the structure, where that oncoming MAX is right now. It was fun to find yourself driving in front of a train, or with one on the left side of you. As the lines multiplied, though, they took the middle of the bridge for MAX lines only, and relegated cars to the two outside lanes. 

The approaches to the bridge have seen much revision over the past 40 years. 

Willamette River Close-up at the Steel Bridge

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The zooming in to make the bridge frame the glimpses of city beyond is always a bit of an irresistible compulsion to me, as is bumping the color up a little.

It's the struggle between fidelity to reality and fidelity to memory; the colors may be more vivid than they were in reality, but they're exactly as vivid as they are in memory. And the satisfaction in devolving the shapes in the girders and the structures they frame by disconnecting them from what they connect to in the greater sense, that makes them make more sense, and making them a more abstract thing is something I also cannot turn away from, and it's satisfying

.  For information's sake, the red truss over the river beyond the supports to the Steel is part of the Broadway Bridge, and the small blocky apartments was once known as McCormick Pier, though it may well have changed its name. Everything down in that area of town has. 

Even the graffiti seems to support the artistic view of the place.

The Steel Bridge, Portland, Oregon, 2021

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This is a steel bridge, and it's called the Steel Bridge, and, at one time, it connected the east and west sides of the Willamette River, in Portland, in a pivotal way by being the route US 99W, later OR-99W, crossed the river. Now, it's the pivotal point in the TriMet rail system, carrying all MAX lines over the river except, I suppose, the Orange Line, though the Orange, which brings people in from Milwaukie, becomes north Portland's Yellow Line as it courses through the Transit Mall. At least, I think it does.

It's not the first photo I've ever taken of the Steel, but it's one of the best. It shows off all the charming detail and some of the structural features that make it so unique.

There's an elbow bend of the Willamette in the center of Portland, just north of where the Burnside Bridge crosses, and this is about the narrowest point of the river within Portland city limits. It's at this point the Steel crosses. 

The original Steel Bridge was a swing span in this location, but the current bridge dates from 1912, making it 119 years old, more or less, at this writing. It can be seen from this angle that it's a double-deck bridge and that rail and bike/ped traffic has the bottom whereas car and rail traffic has the top. What's unique about that drawspan is that the bottom retracts into the top, meaning when river traffic needs to pass, if it can clear the un-lifted traffic deck only the lower rail deck needs to lift. 

This makes the lower deck dangerous to be on if one should be so foolish as to use the inside rail deck as your crossing. We recall stories of people being trapped on that deck on lifting, before there was a ped/bike walkway there; their destiny was to be crushed to death between the two decks. 

The bridge in this shot is doing what it does best, linking the east and west sides of the Rose City via transit-rail; a newer MAX bound to the Rose Quarter, an older MAX bound for the Portland Mall. Wikipedia claims it's perhaps the most 'multimodal' bridge in the world; the only double-deck lift bridge with independent lifts, and the second-oldest vertical-lift bridge in the world, second only to the Hawthorne, which is just around the corner. 

It's old and new, rustic and modern. A contradiction in terms that somehow makes perfect sense.

Four Portland Bridges In One (Picture): 2018 Throwback

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Other cities have more bridges, other cities have fewer but more spectacular bridges, but Portland, with a mere seven traffic crossings over its modest yet muscular dividing river has a rep as Bridgetown which extends well beyond its limit.

Maybe because, in the gestalt way, Portland's bridges draw the line between number, function, design, and majesty to accidentally arrive in a certain picturesque sweet spot. The modern lines of the Morrison Bridge are sublime; the antiqueness of the Burnside, the rusticness of the Steel, are, to me, more memorable than the majesty of the suspension spans linking New York boroughs. Even the Saint Johns, despite its quaintness, emanates a combination of poise and elegance that the Golden Gate Bridge can't match. 

But that's me; I, even in the evolved Portland of today, am ever the PDX-chauvinist. Home-town pride and all that.

There's another more practical niftiness about the bend of the Willamette through the dead center of the Rose City; it affords unique angles that allow me to combine more than one bridge most attractively into one shot. For instance, if you situate yourself in the proper place, about 2/3rds of the way east over the Burnside from downtown, you get this:

Four bridges in this shot: in the distance, the arch of the Fremont; next nearer, the red trusses of the Broadway; one more in, the prehistoric Steel, and the balustrade of the one I'm standing on here, the Burnside. Through the gaps in that balustrade you see a car cruising along a ramp from the Banfield Freeway westbound to I-5 along the river southbound; if you look carefully between the supports of the Steel you see a bulk ship standing by to either unload or go; and on the right peeks out the Louis-Dreyfus grain dock elevators.

There are probably other river scenes in other river cities where you can combine nearby elements for an interesting view, but my heart tells me they can't really compete with this even before I've looked at them. 

Interestingly, despite the preponderance of 2010-2013 throwbacks from the now-decommissioned Kodak EasyShare C813, this was actually taken in 2018 according to the EXIF data, so it isn't a throwback ... more of a gentle shoveback.

The Steel Bridge, April, 2010

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This was taken the same day the previous entry's was, too; end of April, 2010, this being Portland's venerable Steel Bridge as seen from the parking structure at NW Naito Parkway between Couch and Davis. Beyond that, the Louis-Dreyfus grain dock. 

The framing of the picture probably means that you could take the same shot and it wouldn't look terribly different.

Two Bridges, Five Days Ago

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In the missive previous I mentioned our inbound and outbound travel. Two bridges were involved:

The Broadway Bridge, here seen from N Interstate Avenue back of the old Memorial Coliseum:

And the transport outbound was the venerable Steel Bridge. The smoke is not as evident in this, but the drabness of what is usually a fairly colorful shot should be obvious.