Downtown Portland from Five Miles Away, On Sellwood Boulevard

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SE Sellwood Boulevard isn't a main-street sort of boulevard. It's one of those little, short, charming boulevards that is sprinkled around Portland that rewards you for following it.

This one rewards you with a stellar view of downtown.

I bet I've taken this approximate picture before and if I could only find the picture I took whenever I took it, I cold do one of those throwback pairs, but there's no time right now, and I have so many pictures to look through. 

The hill to the left is topped, of course, by OHSU. I'll be going there tomorrow for reasons which I may reveal at a later time. It the middle distance is, of course, Ziggurat Central, beautiful downtown Portland, with building both recognizable and un-, and I have been in this town long enough to know that it used to be strikingly different.

At our feet, the base of the bluff, is Oaks Bottom, an official wildlife refuge and something we collectively try to keep natural. We are doing a pretty good job over all, because here you can mash together the built and the primitive in one photo ... and it don't look too bad.

Portland is still a beautiful place, after all these years. 

A Palimpsest On Tenth

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This scene still exists within a block of the monolith I maladroitly complained about in episode 4014. 

It's a block of SW 10th Avenue, just before you get to Taylor Street and the block containing the Central Library. It gives an echo of what this entire district used to be like.

With the Park Tower West (in the left background) and the Fox Tower (in the right background) peering down at it, this feels like a pocket of downtown Portland trapped in a little bubble of reversed time, not yet as shiny and chromed and spiffed and upmarketed like the rest of downtown.

The building in the center is called the Medical Arts Building. We can I think safely assume that, back in the day, it was an office building devoted to the private practice of a number of doctors, dentists, and the like. I dimly recall seeing into some of those windows from an adjacent building many years ago. I saw dusty, abandoned medical spaces, some equipment. I don't think anyone's been in the upper floors of that building for years, a decade or more maybe. 

across the street from it there's the parking garage, identified by the faded painted sign on the wall at its back. There used to be parking structures all over downtown like this. Our beloved Pioneer Courthouse Square used to be one. That one even had a gas station in it. 

There are a few little corners of Portland like this ... and they're getting fewer by the years. Redevelopment and shiny new money will come to this corner eventually. 

It's the Portland way.

A View of the Portland Harbor From Mock's Crest, 2009

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About twelve years ago, me and the Brown Eyed Girl were enjoying a mid-summer day on the lip of the bluff that is crowned by the University of Portland - a summit known as Mock's Crest.

It's almost a perfect semicircle. It can be pretty easily identified if you find North Willamette Blvd west of North Greeley Avenue; it clings to most, but not all, of the cliff's top. The remainder is the UP property.

It offers a wonderful view of Mock's Bottom and the lagoon that, at one time, was the man channel of the Willamette River back wen Swan Island was still an island and, not coincidentally, part of Swan Island itself. 

The picturesque sweep of Portland from many angles is what makes me come back to this sort of space again and again and again.

The water is the Swan Island Lagoon and the opposite bank is the north side of the Swan Island peninsula. The Island has gone through many changes; originally a true island, with the main river channel on the north side, it was levelled and graded and connected to the bank with fill and became Portland's airport during the 2nd quarter of the 20th Century. An ill-starred thing, this, as a mere few year after going into operation, aircraft needed landing strips that were bigger and longer than it could provide. The international airport moved out to the northeast side of town, along the Columbia, and Swan Island became Portland's industrial and marine terminal heart. 

In the distance, the Fremont Bridge and downtown Portland, about four miles away from this POV, complete the tableau. An incomparable profile.

Downtown Portland From The Ross Island Bridge, Then and Now

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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.

The Metropolis Down Moody Street

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A view northbound, on SW Moody, past the light at the entry (no private cars!) to Tilikum Crossing kind of compacts the urban history of Portland into visual layers.

The tall tower in the far background, the Wells Fargo tower, is Old Portland, surmounted by freeways, next stage, then transit, rails in the street, then newer development, the OHSU buildings there on the right, and lastly the modern, the entry to the Tilikum Crossing there on the right, closest up.

This ... is the city.

The Steel Gray Of The River On A Cloudy Day

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The POV for this one was just above a short stretch of Willamette River left bank in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge called "Poet's Beach", and the color of the clouds reflected on the water caused the Brown Eyed Girl to exult about the steel gray color of the river water.

There are things about our individual worlds that can't compare to others'. For those of us who grew up in the Willamette Valley, the quality of the light here during days like this is like cloudy days nowhere else in the world; little wonder a great many of us act like Oregon (and particularly northwestern Oregon) invented the cool, cloudy day. But there's something to it, outside of parochial chauvinism; at least one of the actors in the series Grimm mentioned that the particular light of our area gave the production a certain feel it couldn't get elsewhere, like it was a character unto itself.

So, we get steel-gray rivers under torn, cloudy skies like nowhere else in the world, really, and it's not really an idle boast. This sort of light is the light that brings artists from elsewhere.

Downtown Portland Sans Tillkum Crossing, April 2010

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I wasn't thinking of or looking for another picture of Portland's skyline or any sort of throwback action but I was inspired to go back and look through some very old photos ... I mean ViviCam 3705-years-old ... and I couldn't hold back from sharing this.

This is a photo taken in April 2010, on a gray, misty day, of the downtown Portland skyline as seen from the very east end of the Ross Island Bridge. It is notable for what isn't there: there are a number of buildings that are here now that aren't there then, but the big thing that isn't there would be down in front now.

The thing that's missing is, of course, the Tillikum Crossing bridge, which would be between the photographer's POV here and the Marquam Bridge. This is one of those photos I referred to earlier: there are locations that are no longer possible to get the same photo because of the development that has happened here in the last 20 years, things that have fundamentally changed the look and atmosphere of the Rose City. Buildings that now exist where once there was open space, and massive new constructions that have interposed themselves between a still-accessible space and the thing one once went to that place to observe.

I'm thinking it's past time I got an updated downtown skyline photo. Not just of my favorite angle, from the top deck of that bridge there in the photo, but also an update of this one, from the east end of the Ross Island Bridge.

Just Another Photo Of Downtown PDX, Part 2

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In the last episode, I published an angle on downtown PDX taken from a certain vantage point in the Lloyd District near the Metro HQ. It appeals because of the way the buildings cluster upon one another and the way they huddle against the West Hills (this an aspect I've always enjoyed about downtown, that the tallest buildings in the State of Oregon are still dwarfed by the hills just west of that. You can't ask for better backgrounds, really).

Portland, though, tells many stories these days, and instead of the idyll that draws so many new moderns here, some of those stories, that you really can't ignore, tell of stresses that some promotionalists would rather leave off.

All you have to do is zoom out a bit.

Sure, it's a trite expression I make here, and not exactly original. But it is the reality. And it's in places where success is supposed to be the order of the day where it speaks particularly of the lack of justice that are the weft of the fabric of our modern times.

Latterly the homeless camp has become an ubiquitous and longer-lived part of the Portland urban experience. This one, at NE Lloyd Blvd and Grand Ave, has existed for a number of months, perhaps closing in on a year. Undoubtedly the pandemic has allowed for a lower frequency of the periodic law-enforcement sweeps that would keep these in motion. 

One wonders what those whose fortune hasn't routed them into one of these places thinks as they go past them. The tension between this and the mumbledy-million-dollar retail and condo towers dominating less than a half-mile away is palpable enough that you can almost reach out into the air and pluck it like an over-taut string. 

There are good people in this town who are working without enough tools and support to fix this. There are indifferent people in this town who are thankful that this isn't them. There's the money, who goes where it will and will probably miss these people altogether. 

And that's Portland, 2021; a story if you frame it just right ... and another one if you change the frame just a little. I have no solutions myself nor do I have suggestions, so, I guess I offer all this banal stream-of-consciousness to say there's a story here each one of us should tune in to, and not forget about.

It's about them, I guess. Those people in the photo that call those tents home. In a city brimming with opportunity, they have none. That's not the Portland I was hoping to see, at this time in my life.

Just Another Photo Of Downtown PDX, Part 1

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I can't stop taking pictures of Downtown Portland's skyline like I can't stop taking pictures of Wy'east. It's one of my favorite things and every time I do it it's like writing a quick love note to my hometown.

I will say without reservation, still, the Wells Fargo tower ... which I still think of as the First National Bank Tower ... is amongst the most beautiful. I can see beauty in the minimalism, the stark, no-nonsense thrust for the sky. To see so many newjack towers bunch up against it is a strangeness, though. Even though I was born in Silverton and didn't settle in Portland until '85, achieving a long-sought dream, there's been enough new stuff and I've been in town long enough that I'm feeling that sense of displacement that people in a certain age cohort feel at a certain time in the collective history.

Downtown no longer has the things in it ... the cheap eats, the art stores (save Blick) and the book stores (save Powell's, and with the current demise of the Coffee Room as a place to burn some hours on a bookstore night) that used to call us. The pandemic is a big factor, but as the money moved it, it seems the good stuff has moved on. 

I shouldn't get too distracted there; I still see elements of the downtown me and the Brown Eyed Girl so adored in there, and she keeps saying how we should go down, walk around, and see what we can discover. What can I say - I'm game. And when things aren't so panedmic-y, we shall. 

As the title of this episode suggests, I have more to say. It involves zooming out on this frame, taken on NE Lloyd Blvd just a block or so east of NE Grand Ave, in the shadow of Metro's headquarters, and we'll explore that in the very next episode, so away shall we go. 

3855 or bust, campers!

Downtown Portland As Seen From The MLK Overpass

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I've taken many many pictures of the downtown Portland skyline, but I don't recall ever snapping one from the MLK overpass over I-84. 

The brick-red lane almost all the way across the street from my station is the east leg of the inner streetcar loop. Between downtown and me, two lanes of the I-84 ramps to and from I-5 can be seen. And, there are skyscrapers there that haven't been there all that long. 

That's changes. But they don't compare to the changes I'll show off in the next missive. 

Looking Down SW 4th Avenue, ca 2009

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I've been looking for this one for a little while, and this is essentially a bit more of the throwback action I've also been doing latterly.

In 2009, the city wasn't being changed as swiftly as it its now; I suppose if I took this photo again today there may be obvious changes, But, as from a pleasant memory, this is a look northward down SW 4th Avenue, downtown Portland, at about SW Mill St. The small Gothic-ish brick construction on the left there is part of Saint Mary's Academy, and the centerpieces are the Portland Plaza condo tower, center left, and the Wells Fargo Tower, center right.

Both were a little iconoclastic for their day; The Portland Plaza (1975) for being weird before Portland liked weird (weird before weird was cool? Totally Portland, yo) and the Wells Fargo for being bland (and those people are sad and wrong and no you should not engage me on this) but these are two signature bits of Portland skyline and I love them dearly and I will fight you.

Downtown Portland From Mt. Tabor With Bonus Hawthorne Blvd 2010 Throwback Picture

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Last of the throwback treats for the day, this goes back to 2010, and is another composition taken off the brow of Mount Tabor, which is another way Portland's dear to me; I don't get the sort of emotion I get looking at this when I think of any other town I've been in.

In reviewing the photos I'm realizing that that evening, in July 2010, I was really pushing the Kodak EasyShare C813 to its limits. There's only so much low-light goodness you can get out of an 8.3 Mpx sensor designed into a camera meant to appeal to the people who thought, when I was a kid, that Kodak Instamatics were serious picture-taking (this is not the slag it may seem, after all ... I was that sort of person, growing up. Aggravated me that you couldn't take night shots with those cameras. Seemed rather unfair). 

So, sure the view of SE Hawthorne Blvd there in the lower left is a bit fuzzy and downtown set against the backdrop of hills and a bright sunset may be a bit grainy, but it's clear enough to call back that time, just a decade ago, and to those who know Portland's skyline, to remarkably show off that changed skyline. 

So many new buildings there now.

The haze of the physical picture artifacts come off as a kind of an artistic interpretation of memory, now. Warm and hazy, filled with emotion and meaning. Same planet, different world.

And so it goes.

The Sign of All The Times

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Another throwback edition from the dearly departed Kodak: the landmark Portland, Oregon sign looking down upon the Japanese-American Historical Plaza and the Burnside Bridge of 2010.

For lease, navidad. 

Man, Woman, Mt Tabor, and City View, Circa 2010

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Today's throwback photo: A man and woman sharing time on a bench with a view of the tree-covered Hawthorne District and downtown Portland as it was then beyond. A western exposure from the brow of Mount Tabor.

Many things have soured about my beloved home town, but as long as there's places like Mount Tabor and Mount Tabor Park and views like this, then it's still my beloved Portland.

Downtown Portland from the Lloyd District, circa 2010

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I just downloaded about 700, a little more, photos from a Kodak EasyShare camera's card that I found that I had taken in 2010.

Eleven years ago.

So, periodically, when the creative writing well is dry, I'll dip back into this folder and share a shot. Some of them are quite mundane, but they all come from the period of about 2010 through 2013, and some of them are obviously different, and several of them are impossible to reproduce because Portland's growth has become glandular in these latter days: either there's a building in the way, or there's a building on top of where it happened.

This particular one was taken in 2010 from the floor of the Red Lion Hotel near the Lloyd Center that that year's OryCon had its Hospitality Suite on. The view from the window at the elevator lobby was always splendid and gave a great angle. This day, there were clouds muscling over the West Hills that also bulk up behind the downtown towers.

Not only has the profile of downtown Portland changed, likely as not, there's now a high-rise between this viewpoint and downtown, so this is an impossible shot now.

Bridge in the foreground is the Burnside. There are now several high-rise apartment towers that would obscure that view. 

We must go up there, get a 'today' shot, and I'll post them side-by-side. Stay tuned for that.

Positively Southwest 4th Avenue, September 2008

3691... and another throwback photo from twelve years ago. On the same walk me and the Brown Eyed Girl took around the south end of downtown Portland back in September 2008 I found an angle I adore looking north, as I did in entry 3686, which inspired me to take those pictures.

It's a lovely prospect, truly. And in 2008, here's the way it looked:

The Wells Fargo tower on the left, the Portland Plaza on the right. Must be something about being born a country mouse that I have never really tired of looking at and walking amongst the tall buildings in downtown. And there's a thing about Wells Fargo - strangely, it's austere beauty doesn't work for everyone. I can't understand this. It's a lovely simple thing, poetic in its minimalism. Flares gracefully yet modestly at the bottom (a little of that can be seen here if you look), and seems to encapsulate the aesthetic that seemed to inform everything in the 1970s from telephones to the look of the space hardware in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was clean, simple and hopeful. I mean, there are people who bitch and moan about this building but I sure won't be one of them.

I guess it means something to me that's kind of atmospheric and ineffable. and even though I'm a certified city mouse of decades'-long standing, there's still a bit of the Silvertonian country mouse in me, and there always will be.

At least enough to go rapt at the tall buildings downtown.

Photos courtesy of the Vivitar ViviCam 3705. 3.3 MPx of technological wonder.

Portland's Lovejoy Fountain, September 2008

3690There is a part of downtown Portland called Portland Center. This is the part of downtown that used to be a charming and somewhat ramshackle area full of blocks of Italian immigrants and Jews, until the City of Portland got that fever that cities all over the United States got during the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal. They created an area called the South Auditorium Urban Renewal district, created a few nine-square-block 'superblocks', erected posh apartment towers and made it over so thoroughly that you need pictures and a vivid imagination to picture it the way it once was, charming, vital, and ethnic.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Anyway.

Today it sits between the equally-toney Riverplace area on the east (or is that south?) and the still-on-the-rise University district on the west, bounded on the south by the Stadium Freeway and on the north by the south edge of the central business core. The streets that ran through the area have been replaced by wide pedestrian walks, and in the midst of all this tree cover and hidden by the apartment towers, there are these pocket parks. And, despite the acid cut of the jib of this prose, they are very lovely places worth a walk-to.

And when you get to the park, located in the center of the superblock bounded by Southwest Market Street, Southwest 1st Avenue, Southwest Harrison Street, and Southwest 4th Avenue, you'll find a plaza with this in the middle:

Portland does fountains.

This, as well as the picture in the following entry, were taken by my first digital camera, the Vivitar ViviCam 3705, the 'Plastic Fantastic', which had a imaging throw-weight of 3.3 MPx, which was something in 2008, and had nothing but digital zoom which resulted in some delightfully small pictures, and basically obsessing on on the specs of a camera you can now find on eBay and Amazon for as little as five or ten bucks kind of takes the intimidation factor out of the fact that this picture is nearly twelve years old, so there's that there.

So it goes.

Positively Southwest 4th Avenue

3686This is a couple of views northward down Southwest 4th Avenue, one of the princpal north-south through routes through downtown Portland (the other being Southwest Broadway).

The vistas are thanks to Portland's advantageously-hilly geography, the white shadows due to the stuff'n'nonsense on our dashboard (I had to take the picture through the windscreen of the old battle-wagon Subaru):

We are looking north on Southwest 4th from about Southwest Hall Street. Two buildings of note here: the nearer tall one on the left is a triangular apartment complex with rounded corners called The Portland Plaza, and it comes from a day that such buildings weren't so common. Still a pretty posh place, and iconic in its way.

The vertically-striped one has been, since the early 1970s, and still is today, Portland's (and the State of Oregon's) tallest building, despite it having two fewer floors than the US Bancorp Tower fourteen blocks farther north and one block west. I adore the slender lines and the minimalist style of it.

The beauty of Portland cityscapes is that if you frame it just so, you wind up with something that looks much less urban than it really is. Southwest 4th Avenue is one of the most urban streets within the bounds of the State of Oregon, yet if you zoom and frame just so ...

It looks like you're driving into and through a park.

Northwest 11th by Powells On Any Given Late Afternoon In The Long Ago

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This one tugged at the heartstrings, you know, now that we're all in search of lost time.

The point of view is the units block of NW 11th Avenue, between Couch and Burnside. I'm facing north-northwest. Powell's Books is at my back and on the right. The building you're looking at is called the M Financial Center, which impresses me in as much as I know of no other letter of the alphabet that has so much finance devoted to it.

The intersection in view is that of NW 11th Avenue and Couch St.

NW 11th and Couch is unique amongst Portland intersections is that it is the only place in the city of Portland and indeed the state of Oregon where the so-called 'scramble' crossing is implemented. Couch traffic goes and Couch pedestrians can cross; then 11th Avenue traffic goes and 11th Avenue pedestrians cross; then all traffic on the streets stop and the six cross walks (two for each street and two diagonals crossing the middle) flow. It's an innovative thing and maybe it's the mad dash of everyone toward the Powell's entry on 11th and Couch convinced the city to put it there, I don't know. It's been three years and more since it's been put in and I hear nothing about it being put elsewhere, which is strange in our town where traffic patterns seem disrupted on the basis of wish and whimsy in these latter days.

Indeed, the streets there are so very narrow it's hard to see who, if anyone, is really saving any time by cutting across.

Quite a few years ago, as a teenager in Salem, I remember the city there piloting the idea at the corner of High and Center Streets, and in Salem that makes sense as the street widths there amount to a considerable hike. Surprising therefore that it never caught on there. I guess we love it here, we inscrutable, quirky Portlanders who do things, I guess, just for the sake of being seen doing 'em.

Anyway, that was then and this is now and Powell's is still not opening, not yet. We remain hopeful but understand why this is.

So it goes.

Southwest Oak And West Burnside, February 2020, from Powell's

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Our next stop on the daily photo log adventure comes from only two months ago.

Two months ago. Seems like twenty years ago. I see other on-line humans calling it "the time before" and I mean, say what you want about pop culture, I see where this is all coming from and I'm endlessly impressed with the average person's mind's ability to MacGyver coping with a chaotically shifting zeitgeist on the fly. I mean, cultural literacy won't get you through every emergency, no, but when the order of the day is that which we accept as read today might get rewritten in our faces tomorrow, and the day after may contradict that, well, it's no small tool. Intellectually, it can be a swiss army knife.

Anyway, about two-and-a-half months ago. Coffee Room. #BookChurchPDX. Powell's. 11th and West Burnside. Lookin' out the fishbowl. There is, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Portland's skyline, a building at the corner of Southwest Broadway and Washington. Back in the day I knew it as the Bank of California building. It's now called the Union Bank building after its parent company merged a few times. And it's visually notable for the way it's lit at night, with spotlights pointing down the flutes in the building's architecture.

The Brown Eyed Girl looked out the window across West Burnside where Southwest Oak Street split off between 11th and 10th. The Union Bank tower's the tallest and the lighting made it stand out, and she loved the view, and insisted I take a pic.

When someone with good taste insists, one does not demur. So.

In the foreground is a little walk-through mall with tiny retail spaces called Union Way. The passage goes through to Southwest Stark/Harvey Milk Street. The building immediately net door was a branch of Car Toys for years; what it is now I can't recall. The shorter building was the Federal Reserve Bank Branch in Portland for a long time and was, a short while ago, the home of Jive Software before the vicissitudes of intellectual property and corporate merger sharked that away from Oregon. And over that is the Union Bank building in night dress.

All this from the window of the Cathedral of Saint Ursula in Portland, the Coffee Room at Powells, where we would be tonight If Only.

And so it goes.