Urban non-decay: Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, is one of my favorite examples of urban non-decay.  Through hard work, imagination, and intelligent urban planning, Portland has maintained its heritage of late-1800s and early-1900s office buildings, stores, and hotels. And they are in use, proving that historic buildings are most certainly viable in the modern era. In addition, Portland is one of the greenest cities in the United States and encourages bicycle use and public transport. The elected regional government, Oregon Metro, has established an urban growth boundary to separate urban land from rural land and prevent uncontrolled sprawl. On the outskirts, there are some McMansion ghettos, but seemingly not as many as other cities. Why are so many other US cities so far behind?

This is a small selection of photographs from my recent trip to Portland. I suggest this Wikipedia article for readers interested in the city and its history and topography.  Even better, go and visit!

Here is an 1890 photograph of Portland from Wikimedia Commons, with Mount Hood in the distance (to the east).

Readers know I like bridges.  This is the underside of the Burnside Bridge over the Willamette River.

Portland is a big food cart city.  Here are some examples on SW 3rd Avenue. The Big-Ass Sandwiches cart even won a contest in Adam Richman's Best Sandwich in America food reality television program. I ate a great veggie giro at a Greek cart, whose proprietors really were from Greece.

 Portland has an amazing collection of historical office and commercial building.  The carving and decoration are symbols of an era when businessmen and industrialists were proud of their buildings and considered them to be a major contribution to the fabric and culture of their city.  They wanted the best and hired craftsmen and stone masons to make a statement.

Portland is a good pedestrian city, and the streetcar is free within an inner-city zone.

On the odd side, there are some great mannequins in town. These were in a store that sold small underpants (underpanties?) for gents.

Black and white photographs created in-camera with a Panasonic G1 digital camera.

Columbia River Bridges

The mighty Columbia Rivers drains portions of British Columbia, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. It has the greatest discharge of any US river entering the Pacific Ocean and is the fourth-largest river in the United States. Because it drops steeply from the mountains of Idaho and the high plateau of central Washington, it has tremendous hydroelectric potential. Since the early 20th century, the Columbia has been developed with 14 hydroelectric dams, and almost every mile of the once free-flowing river now consists of reservoir pools. The map, from the Wikimedia Commons, shows the extent of the river's basin

I explored some of the lower Columbia River Gorge during a recent trip, and two historic bridges caught my eye. The photograph above shows the spectacular gorge near Cascade Locks, about 40 miles east of Portland. The locks were completed in 1896, but they were subsequently submerged in 1938 when Bonneville Lock and Dam was completed some distance downriver.


The elegant steel truss cantilever Bridge of the Gods was opened in 1926 at a length of 1,127 feet (343 m). But once Bonneville dam was completed, the bridge was too low for navigation, so it was raised and the approaches were lengthened. It now has a length of 1,856 feet (565 m).


About an hour drive east, you reach the The Dalles, once the site of a long series of rapids. This is a much drier climate zone, almost desert. The Dalles Dam was completed in 1957, submerging the rapids, along with fishing platforms and other structures used by native Americans for hundreds of years. The Dalles Bridge is another handsome mid-century steel cantilever truss bridge, spanning the Columbia between The Dalles, OR, and Dallesport, WA. It was completed in 1953.

Photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera.

Great Eating at Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia

When you visit Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Reading Terminal Market should be on your obligatory visit list. You can find almost anything to eat there! The Market occupies the ground floor and basement levels of the Reading Railroad's former train shed and terminal, which was built up above the street level. The railroad part of the terminal was abandoned for many years, but the city revived the amazing shed and converted it into a convention center in the 1990s. Nice work!, especially in light of how many similar engineering monuments were destroyed in other cities in the mid-late 20th century during greedy and misguided disasters of urban renewal.  One infamous example: New York's Pennsylvania Station was demolished to build the cheesy Madison Square Garden.

According to an interesting article in Wikipedia, the Market was one of the first in the USA to include a state-of-the-art refrigerated storage area in the basement. The refrigeration system used brine water and ammonia operated by specially designed pumps, compressors, and other equipment.


This is the convention center and example of the amazing steel truss system that holds up the roof. Thirteen tracks once occupied this area, which now has a marble floor.

From the street level, the market dies not look like much, but the inside contains the emporium of gastronomic excellence and calorific excess. Readers of this blog know I love farmer's markets in all their varieties (Athens, Kathmandu).





The tradition of the farmers' market lives on! Peppers, cherries, corn - whatever you need. (The colors are a bit off because I did not have time to adjust a custom white balance.)

If you want some fish or meat, you can select as much as you want.


This is a cheese-lovers emporium.

Coffee-flavored soda?


Sandwich spreads of mysterious ingredients or buffalo eggs? Come and get them.

I prefer the olive oil varieties.

These are the bee wax products.

Finally, everyone's favorite: the chocolates.




Really, most people come here to eat and socialize and achieve calorie input.

Finally, at night, the crowds are gone and the market cleans up.

Photographs: 2008: Fuji F31fd digital camera. 2012: Panasonic G1 digital camera with color adjustments made in Silkypix Developer Studio 3.0 SE.

Dinks Alley: Another Hidden Vicksburg Road

Dinks Alley is another one of those off-the-beaten-path roads that you would not know exists unless you live there or have a specific reason to visit. Dinks Alley is parallel to Mission 66, with access on the west side of the road close to the intersection with East Avenue. One can hear the traffic on Mission 66, but because of the thick brush, most drivers on the main road probably have no idea that the alley is just to the west. I learned about it from the City's demolition list, printed in the Vicksburg Post. The house at no. 251 was on the list, so I drove there to check it out.


No. 251 had already been razed, but the cottage next door, no. 249, was deserted with its roof collapsing. It looked like it was 1930s or 1940s-vintage and may have once been a cheerful place. The paint was decent, so someone took care of it less than a decade ago.

The roof over the front room collapsed. The nasty paneling suggests this had been a rental unit, although I have seen plenty of privately-owned houses with this stuff on the walls.

The back lost its steps or porch. The house next door was in much better condition and was occupied.

All photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera. Map drawn with ESRI® ArcMap software.

Levee Street, the Lassiter Warehouse, and the Vicksburg Waterfront

Long-term readers may remember my 2010 post on the brick Lassiter Warehouse on Levee Street. This was the last example of this type of commercial warehouse that once lined the Yazoo canal and Vicksburg waterfront. It was partly dismantled to recycle the bricks, and now the shell stands empty and unused.

The casino just to the south is also closed. The barge is still in its artificial cofferdam lake, but the aerating machines are not running and the water is getting fetid. The property opened as Harrah's in November, 1993. It became Horizon in 2003 and was then sold to Delta Investments in 2010. As usual, fate unknown.

A good sign is the visit of the American Queen on May 17, 2012. The American Queen was launched in 1994 and may be the largest steamboat ever built (I assume this means river paddle boat). This vessel and two other others, the Mississippi Queen and the Delta Queen, were regular visitors to Vicksburg before the 2008 recession. The Delta was a classic wood steamboat, originally outfitted in Scotland and operated on the Sacramento River in California for decades. The original operator filed for bankruptcy and the American Queen was taken over by the U.S. Maritime Administration. The current owner, Great American Steamboat Company, bought it from the Maritime Administration and recommissioned it. We are glad to have her back.

The floodwall has a new mark painted on it to commemorate the record high water from the flood of 2011. This 2011 article provides some background to water levels and what the numbers mean. This article shows how the City of Vicksburg blocks the roads when the river level reaches the floodwalls.