The Urban West

This post formerly appeared in the “Hindsight” column, Portland Spaces magazine (July/August 2008)

The Crown Motel sign, a landmark on North Interstate Avenue since 1959, has recently been removed to allow REACH Community Development to redevelop the site as affordable housing. The Atomic Age Alliance, a small group devoted to the popular culture and artifacts of the 1950s and 1960s, is hoping find it a new home for the whole assembly–the big crown that reads “CROWN” and the electrified sword that thrusts through the O in MOTEL.

The sign is an emblem of the golden age of the family vacation. In three decades from the end of World War II to the oil shocks of the 1970, Americans took to the road. “Drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America’s the greatest land of all!” sang Dinah Shore at the close of her TV variety hour from 1956 to 1963. Millions of Americans did just that. Parents packed the kids into the family Plymouth or Studebaker and hit the highways for two week road trips to visit distant relatives and check out national parks.

On the way, they stayed in motels. Before the Interstate Highway system revolutionized driving, motels lined the major highways leading into every city. Americans perfected the breed in the 1950s, replacing funky tourist cabins with shiny, low-slung motels that competed for business with special features–direct dial telephones! free television!–and exuberant signs.

If you were a first-time visitor to a city, the motel strip was like your first date with the city. You entered Denver on Colfax Avenue, Columbus on Broad Street, Seattle on Aurora Avenue. Portland’s motel rows included Southwest Barbur (Route 99W), Southeast McLoughlin (Route 99E), and Northeast Sandy (US 30). On North Interstate the Crown Motel competed for customers with the Monticello, the Westerner, the Viking, the Palms, and many others–most built on the west side of the street for the convenience of travelers driving south from Puget Sound.

North Interstate was Portland’s front entrance in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s an example of what landscape critic J. B. Jackson has called “the stranger’s path,” the routes and gateways that are the a newcomer’s first intro to a new community. These pathways change with time and technology. In the early twentieth century, foreign visitors to New York arrived by ocean liner with the fast-growing skyline of Manhattan filling their view. In the early twenty-first century, they arrive by air at JFK, struggle through baggage claim, customs, and immigration to be greeted by a cacophony of cabs, shuttles, and limousines.

In Portland’s first generation–say 1858–the stranger’s path was the Willamette River. At the end of a wave-tossed voyage from San Francisco, visitors traveled up the Columbia and then into the Willamette past an inhospitable riverscape of sloughs and marshes choked with willow, alder and vine maple and backed by dense forests on the first solid land. Then, finally, the new town came into view as a straggling settlement scarcely two blocks deep on dry stretch on the west bank. The ship tied up somewhere between the foot of Stark Street and Captain John Couch’s wharf north of Burnside. You grabbed your carpetbag and walked off onto muddy streets lined by two-story frame buildings with “Stoves,” and “Bakery” and “Livery” painted on their fronts and merchants ready to take your business.

Fifty years later–say 1908–strangers arrived by train. They stepped out of their Pullman sleeping car or unwound from hard, uncomfortable coach seats, crossed the waiting room of Union Station (opened in 1896), and walked out into the North End (now we call it “Old Town”). This was the bustling, gritty city, filled with affordable hotels for middle class tourists and business travelers intermixed with saloons and brothels for some of the same temporary Portlanders. The experience here was no different than Seattle, where newcomers who detrained at King Street and Union stations found themselves at the edge of Skid Road, or Chicago, where half a dozen railroad stations led visitors into the whirling activity of the Loop.

Today the stranger’s path is far more tame. Portland visitors to fly into PDX, getting a good but often disorienting view of the Columbia as the plane descends and circles for a landing. They’re off the plane, through the terminal, behind the wheel of a rental car and they see . . . what? Mount Hood, if the clouds part, and a huge IKEA sign in cheerful Swedish blue and yellow no matter what the weather.

Fifty years from now, will the nostalgic Petroleum Age Alliance be trying to save the IKEA sign and its big box neighbors? Will every community and shopping street have a hologram hovering in its airspace displaying its enticements? Will a great, silvery-cream, translucent orb float enticingly over the Pearl? Will holographic herons flap gracefully through the air above Sellwood? Or will the post-petroleum age allow us to travel at all? Maybe we’ll visit virtual Portland through on-line avatars, . an option that would allow us an infinite choice of entry routes . . . down an electronically restored Interstate Avenue, by canoe with a recreated William Clark, by virtual rocket glider direct from Shanghai. In the meanwhile, let’s keep our fingers crossed for atomic age architecture.

Robert Moses, the New York planner, builder, and bureaucratic entrepreneur who reshaped the nation’s largest city spent only a handful of days in Portland, but he helped to set Portland planning agenda for the quarter century from 1945 to 1970.

The wartime boom and postwar planning

Portland was a World War II boom city. After 1 percent growth in 1930s, Portland grew almost 20 percent in the next three years (1940-43). War industries in the four-county employed 140,000 people—that’s the rough equivalent of ten Intels (the metro area’s largest private employer in 2010).

The boom of World War I had been followed by a severe nationwide depression, and everyone worried that the same thing was going to happen when World War II came to its close.

Cities all over the country engaged in postwar planning to reduce the feared impacts.

Here the initiative lay with the Portland Area Postwar Development Committee, an organization of business leaders and public officials. A key figure was Edgar Kaiser, who oversaw 100,000 workers in three huge Kaiser shipyards. He admired the park, parkway, and bridge projects that Robert Moses had directed in New York and decided that Portland needed his advice about infrastructure needs.

Here’s how Commissioner William Bowes remembered it: “Mr. Kaiser called the postwar planning group and others into the Arlington Club and laid out the whole program before them. It was just one, two, three with him! I was amazed at the energy and push of that man.” . . . “Don’t be surprised if Moses comes with staff of about forty people,” Bowes told the planning commission. “What they will do is give us a shot in the arm. He is bringing his port engineer and six attorneys. These are the people who know the larger ones in Washington. They know where the money is available.”

The City of Portland, Multnomah County, Port of Portland, and School District together came up with $100,000.

Moses in Portland

Moses arrived in Portland in September 1943 with a team of highway, bridge, and infrastructure engineers. They set up shop in the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites on Southwest Pine). Moses cold-shouldered Mayor Earl Riley, telling him that he’d send for the mayor if he needed him.

Robert Moses went back to New York after a week and left his team to draft a report on “Portland Improvement,” which he returned to present in November 9.

Portland Improvement

“Portland Improvement” was an infrastructure plan and an early version of a public works stimulus package.

As in New York, Moses did not force anything on an unwilling city. Rather, he gave the leadership of Portland exactly what it wanted—a blueprint for keeping the city economically competitive in the postwar world. It proposed a $60 million construction program to employ as many s 20,000 workers. It included $20 for a freeway loop around downtown, $20 for improvements to sewers, schools, public buildings, and airport, $12 million to upgrade existing parks and streets, and $8 million for highways outside the city. Newspapers and business leaders embraced the plan. So did public works commissioner William Bowes (who viewed himself as a local Moses disciple and equivalent).

We might note that Portland, all by itself, had already pushed an expressway—Harbor Drive—through the downtown. We didn’t necessarily need lessons from Robert Moses, but he legitimized a public works agenda.

Proposals and Results of Portland Improvement

We’ve done most of what Moses and his team proposed:

- An inner freeway loop around the downtown.
- A high bridge across the Willamette north of downtown (the Fremont Bridge opened in 1973) . . . although he hoped to expand the Ross Island Bridge for the southern part of the loop.
- An improved highway across the hills into Washington County (the Vista Ridge tunnels open in 1969-70)
- A river-level highway from Portland to Cascade Locks (i.e., I-84)
- Improvements to existing bridges (e.g., new Morrison Bridge and access ramps in 1958)
- Forest Park (we dedicated it in 1948)
- A civic center incorporating the City Hall and Courthouse (we’ve done this piecemeal with two federal buildings, Multnomah County Justice Center, and Portland Building)
- Sewer improvements
- New schools
- New neighborhood parks and playgrounds
- Beautification of the downtown riverfront with trees and landscaping
- A new transportation center with a new bus station and new train station (he thought Union Station was old and obsolete) . . . the new bus station opened in 1985 and MAX just started running there
- Even the East Burnside/Sandy Boulevard intersection was on his project list, now modified by the Burnside-Couch one-way couplet opened in 2010

The Moses legacy in Portland

I can’t emphasize enough that Robert Moses gave Portland’s leaders what they wanted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The city was a happy accomplice, and it would be hard to imagine how we would function without the Sunset Highway/Vista Ridge Tunnels, the I-405/I-5 loop with its high bridges, without the schools, parks, and playgrounds developed during the postwar generation.

At the same time, Moses and his Portland disciples like Bill Bowes had no patience with dissenters and they did some drastic things in the name of progress (the Morrison Bridge ramps, for example, which required clearance of several blocks of the historic downtown waterfront).

Moses vs. the Jane Jacobs legacy

Jane Jacobs was both a political and intellectual nemesis for Robert Moses from her initial community activism in New York in the 1950s, through her great polemic The Death and Life and Great American Cities in 1961, and in New York planning battles that followed. Portlanders began to emulate Jane Jacobs about a decade after her own forays into grassroots organizing and resistance, and most Portlanders today would say that we live in a Jacobean city, not a Mosaic metropolis.

The equivalent of Jane Jacobs’s battle for Washington Square Park in the mid-1950s was the fight to remove Harbor Drive for what’s now Tom McCall Waterfront Park, begun by Waterfront for People with a picnic in the median strip in August 19, 1969.

The equivalent of the battle against the Lower Manhattan Expressway was the successful fight to block construction of the Mount Hood Freeway through Southeast Portland along the Division Street corridor.

The generation of young activists and politicians who took charge of Portland in the early 1970s had read Jane Jacobs (at least some of them had, as well as reading Herbert Gans and other critics of urban renewal).

The city’s neighborhood association system—a product of the early 1970s—owes something, indirectly, to Jane Jacobs.

When she visited Portland toward the end of her life, she mostly liked what she saw, for central Portland is—if not like lower Manhattan—awfully Canadian for a U.S. city.

The irony is that much of what we like about Portland was facilitated by the Moses vision, especially as applied to parks and to the close-in freeway loop that has kept the central core central. A tip of the hat to Robert Moses may be too much, but he deserves at least a historical nod.

This presentation was part of a “History Pub” night at McMenamin’s Kennedy School, a brewpub and community center in northeast Portland, February 21, 2010. The audience were knowledgeable local activists and residents, so it assumes some familiarity with Portland neighborhoods.

Two forces converged on American cities in the mid-1950s and radically changed their cityscape over the next two decades. Each had its own “logic” and momentum that did not have a place for old neighborhoods.

The first was Interstate Highways. In the 1950s, the United States was in the midst of an 80-year project to adapt cities to automobiles. The Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956 was the keystone of the whole effort, funding 41,000 miles of new limited access highways.

System design was controlled by state highway engineers, whose main interest was moving traffic rapidly between cities. They applied the same standards for the short stretches within cities as for the long extensions across the countryside—wide lanes, sweeping curves, long access ramps, frontage roads, wide rights of way. Because the city segments required lots of land, strong engineering pressure to pick routes through industrial areas or low income areas.

Portland got off relatively easy.

I-84 and Banfield and I-5 south were routed through relatively undeveloped land.

I-5 north was placed on the on the east bank of the Willamette and not in the river itself (which was the initial design)!

The city escaped the Mount Hood freeway, the Prescott freeway, the 50th avenue freeway and several other proposed routes.

Interstate 5 disrupted African American Albina (removing 125 residences and businesses) but interstates were never used as racial barricades as in a city like Miami.

The second factor was Urban Renewal, a program created with Congress amended the Housing Act of 1949 in 1954 and 1959 to favor business development. The assumption was that downtowns were still viable business centers, but that they needed help to compete with brand new suburban shopping center.

Everybody did it: Cities acquired and assembled tracts of land in areas surrounding the CBD, cleared “blighted” or low-density uses, put in new infrastructure, and made the land available for private development (offices, apartments) or public facilities.

Denver did it, San Francisco did it, Los Angeles did it, Philadelphia did it, Tulsa did it, Nashville did it, Tuscon did it, Tacoma did it . . . Only a handful of southwestern cities opted out because they didn’t want federal money.

The end of “South Albina”

These two forces converged in Portland at the east end of the Steel and Broadway bridges at the end of the 1950s. . . . but they weren’t supposed to!

The new freeway was supposed to go where it did (logically splitting the geographical difference between Interstate Avenue and Union Avenue (the future Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.), which were the main north-south arterials that aimed at the Columbia River bridge to Vancouver, Washington. Essentially it was the straight-shot, shortest distance, lowest cost option

The Memorial Coliseum, however, was supposed to go somewhere else.

When the Portland Development Commission was created in 1958, its first goal was the South Portland/Auditorium project. The idea was that the area just south of the central business district on the west side would be ideal for the planned Memorial Coliseum.

The problem was an initiative petition and vote organized by east side business interests. In May 1956, Portlanders voted by a margin of 303 votes out of 128,423 cast to restrict any coliseum to the east side. City Council couldn’t believe it, so they sent the issue back to the voters in November, who rebuffed the downtown establishment and reaffirmed the May vote.

On the east side, there were two alternatives. One was the Expo Center area near the Columbia River. It would have had lots of parking, cheap land, and freeway access, but wouldn’t help downtown real estate. The other was between the east ends of the Steel and Broadway bridges.

So the lower end of Albina, south of Broadway, got hammered by an uncoordinated sequence of events. The result was the disruption of an area that had absorbed a substantial African American population during World War II and after (including after the Vanport flood) and also had businesses serving that community. The Coliseum project razed 476 housing units, 46 percent of them occupied by African Americans.

Further erasure of that part of Albina came from the private sector as developers replaced walkup apartments and single family houses with motels, a high rise for the elderly, and other redevelopment that slowly bridged the blocks between Lloyd Center (1960) and the Coliseum.

Emanuel Hospital and the Eliot Neighborhood

The fate of the Eliot neighborhood involved a set of bad assumptions and historical accidents.

The Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project, launched in the early 1960s, was PDC’s effort to balance its South Auditorium land clearance project (which had disrupted the remnants of the old Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood south of downtown) with a housing rehabilitation project.

Both PDC executive director John Kenward and chair Ira Keller believed sincerely in the effort, but it was top down. Keller and his wife spent Sunday afternoons knocking on doors to recruit participants in the target area which was bounded by Fremont on the south, Vancouver on the east, Skidmore on the north, and Mississippi on the west. The area was chosen because the population ratio was 50/50 black and white, and because the housing was in relatively good condition. Nevertheless, PDC demolished two blocks of housing in the center of the area for what became Unthank Park.

The program was popular, but when more than a thousand residents petitioned to have the program extended south of Fremont, PDC refused. It cited the Planning Commission’s recent Central Albina Study which described the area as a “disordered collection of mixed land uses and deteriorated and dilapidated buildings” suffering an “advanced stage of urban blight.”

Was “blight” a code word for “black”? Yes, but it was also a code word for low-cost land with redevelopment possibilities. South Portland had been defined as blighted even though it was largely white.

In effect, city plans in the 1960s wrote off the Eliot neighborhood as destined for transition from housing to industrial and commercial uses (of which there were already plenty) or ideas like a community college (in effect, an alternative location for what became the Cascade Campus of Portland Community College).

The planners applied the understanding of how cities grew that dated back to University of Chicago sociologists who analyzed that city in the 1920s and came up with a model of concentric rings that expand like ripples in a pond (it’s in every sociology and geography textbook). Central functions, like the Coliseum, pushed the edges of the centrtal business district outward into industrial and warehouse areas. In turn, these displaced economic functions pushed into working class housing areas like Eliot, whose displaced residents would move into newer housing a little further out . . . etc. . . . In effect, it assumed that everyone wanted to be suburban and would get there by tiny steps.

What happened instead was a slow demand for new industrial space and a mounting community resistance, both by African American residents and by white newcomers who liked the houses and the convenience. They organized first through the Model Cities program (after 1967) and then through the Eliot Neighborhood Association.

Waiting in the wings was Emanuel Hospital. Universities and hospitals have a hard time being good neighbors. They each know that they serve the public good – which is quite true – but that knowledge tends to make them insensitive to their neighbors, or even at times arrogant.

This was especially true in the 1950s and 1960s. The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and many other campuses in urban locations plunged into deep conflicts over expansion plans and efforts to maintain the “quality” of their surrounding neighborhoods.

In Portland, our own university was too small to get into big trouble in the same period, although it did clear the some remnants of South Portland, ,but hospitals were not.

The Northwest District Association got its start fighting expansion plans of Good Samaritan Hospital, for example.

In the early 1970s, PDC created an urban renewal district to clear land north of Russell Street for Emanuel Hospital expansion. The land was cleared (188 homes and the Williams/Russell business center) but nothing happened for decades! The reason is an irony: When the project started, PDC and the hospital were counting in federal funds to allow quick redevelopment, but the $$ went away in 1973 So those vacant blocks that are finally being filled are the responsibility of Emanuel, of PDC, and of Richard Nixon.

Convergence, not Conspiracy

So why did Albina get hammered between the late 1950s and early 1970s?

There was not a systematic anti-Albina plan that coordinated thirty years of action.

What there was were a set of independent factors and forces that kept finding that Albina was in the way:

• It was in the way of I-5.
• It was in the way for civic leaders who wanted the Coliseum as close of downtown as possible.
• It was seen as being in the way of needed industrial expansion (I’d suggest that this was a bad prediction because the expansion of industry and warehousing on Swan Island and Mocks Bottom was the alternative for industrializing Eliot).

It had lower income residents with limited political clout. Race was secondary (unlike Miami, Birmingham, or Chicago). The Clinton Street neighborhood in very white southeast Portland almost got the same treatment, saved in part because people saw what had happened in Albina.

The PDC leaders were acting within the assumptions they had available. They thought they were serving the public good, even if they blinded by their own point of view. They were shocked—and outraged—to discover that African American Portlanders saw them as heavy handed racists—which they were. It wasn’t a message that they wanted to hear, for example, from Model Cities activists and planners (they tried to get people at PSU’s Center for Urban Studies fired for their role in Model Cities planning).

We look back and wonder “What could they have been thinking!? How could they think they were innocent!?” Forty years from now, an audience is going to gather in the newest McMenamin’s for a history program that asks exactly the same questions about us.

Rivers made Portland. They were the avenues of exploration, pathways for settlement, and arteries of commerce that made–and still make–Portland a commercial gateway to the American Northwest.

The “original” riverscape

Both Native Americans and the first European American visitors traveled by river and judged the landscape from the water. At the site of Portland they found low, sandy islands, separated by shallow channels from tangled bottomlands and backed by rising hills or bluffs, such as Ross Island–Oaks Bottom and Swan Island–Mock’s Bottom. Marshes fronted the banks where streams reached the Willamette through Sullivan’s Gulch, Marquam Gulch, and the creeks the flowed through what are now the Brooklyn and Hawthorne/Buckman neighborhoods. Shores were tangles of willow and vine maple..

There were two large sets of seasonally flooded lakes that dominated larger shelves of low-lying riverfront land. One was along the west shore of the Willamette starting with Couch’s Lake and continuing through Guild’s Lake, Kittredges’s Lake, and Doane’s Lake. The second along the south shore of the Columbia between the river and the slough, where Smith and Bybee lakes were multiplied 6 or 8 times.

When the Europeans arrived, thousands of Chinook speaking villagers had concentrated where it was easiest to harvest fish and waterfowl–especially Sauvie Island, the adjacent Multnomah Channel, and the mouth of the Clackamas River.

For Lewis and Clark, the riverscape was low enough and tangled enough that they missed the mouth of the Willamette on their way to the Pacific. On the way back, they got as far as the Quicksand River before Clark doubled back past Image Canoe Island and found the channel to follow upstream to roughly the site of the University of Portland.

Picking the dry land

Initial European-American settlement had to squeeze onto places where firm land sloped down to the rivers (neither the marshes nor high bluffs).

The future heart of Portland, for example, had already been picked out as Oregon’s first highway rest area. Native Americans and fur trappers had cleared a dry, sloping bank on the west side of the Willamette roughly halfway between Fort Vancouver and Oregon City. It was a good spot to cook a meal or repair equipment. Jesse Applegate later remembered that “We landed on the west shore, and we went into camp on the high bank where there was little underbrush . . . No one lived there and the place had no name; there was nothing to show that the place had ever been visited except for a small log hut near the river, and a broken mast of a ship . . . there was no prophet to tell of the beautiful city that was to take the place of the gloomy forest.”

The commercial/industrial landscape

As the California gold rush created a booming San Francisco market for Oregon wheat and lumber in the 1850s, newly settled Portland struggled to establish itself as the head of ocean-going navigation on the Willamette River, beating out the rival claims of Milwaukee and St. Helens. In particular, it benefited from the Ross Island sand bar that restricted access to Milwaukee and Oregon City.

In the rest of the nineteenth century, commerce paralleled the Willamette. Ocean-going vessels connected Portland to the world. Smaller river steamers ranged upstream to Corvallis and Harrisburg. Riverboats even reached up the saffron-colored Yamhill River to Lafayette and McMinnville. Columbia River steamers and railroads made the young city the bustling entrepot for the vast Columbia Basin. Lumber and grain schooners crowded the banks of the Willamette to take on cargos for California markets. Lumber mills, flour mills, furniture factories, and packing plants soon followed.

There were major factory nodes at Fulton (now the Johns Landing/Macadam area), at the Poulson lumber mill in what’s now the Brooklyn neighborhood, in Albina around the developing railyards, and in northwest (again between rail and river).

Then as now, seasonal floods reminded Portlanders of the power of the natural environment. They built the city’s wharves in two levels–one for low water and one for high–and the great flood of 1894 helped to push downtown way uphill to 4th, 5th and 6th streets.

Landscape manipulation

The Northern Pacific Railroad filled Couch’s Lake for rail yards, and now for the housing of the River District.

Guild’s Lake was utilized for the Lewis and Clark Exposition, then filled for industrial use, adapted for WWII housing, and then returned to industrial development. .

Dredging and fill also extended the Willamette River shoreline on the east side and turned wetlands into real estate. Southeast Union Avenue (MLK) originally ran on pilings over mud flats, leaving Grand the first dry business street. That’s why the warehouses of the Central East Side Industrial District date from the early 20th century rather than the 19th c.

The Port of Portland straightened the Willamette River at Swan Island in the 1920s, shifting the channel from the east side of the island to the west and attaching the island itself to the east bank.

In turn, Rivergate was raised into dry land with the filling of Ramsey Lake..

The shipbuilding eras

World War I brought a large shipbuilding industry, 12,000 workers building steel-hulled ships and 17,000 building wooden-hulled cargo carriers. The Grant-Smith-Porter yard at the foot of Baltimore Street in St. Johns, with 6000 workers, was the largest of nearly a score of shipyards that specialized in wooden vessels, buying their material from booming Portland sawmills and drawing workers from the large pool of men with woodworking skills

In World War II, Tycoon Henry Kaiser, fresh from helping to build Boulder and Grand Coulee dams, opened the huge shipyards at St. Johns, Swan Island, and Vancouver. At the peak in 1943-44, metropolitan Portland counted 140,000 defense workers who built more than 1000 ocean going combat craft and Liberty ships.

The renewal of Portland as an international port since the 1970s has continued land use trends first identified in the 1910s. Modern ports are great consumers of land for container yards and automobile processing, while larger and larger ships require deeper channels. As a result, the marine terminals and docks of river ports have tended to move steadily downstream. We can see this with London, Antwerp, and Hamburg . . . and also with Portland.

The grain elevators at the east ends of the Steel and Broadway bridges are the last remnants of the old “downtown” harbor (there’s also a plaque on the East Bank Esplanade marking the site of Municipal Terminal Two that stretched between Washington and Oak). Terminal One has given way to redevelopment, so the action is now around Terminal 4 and the Rivergate complex at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers with Terminal 5 and Terminal 6.

The shipyards are largely gone, but the river remains our economic focus. Portland is still the regional transportation hub and trading post for Oregon and much of Idaho and Washington. Downtown Portland is part of a vast riverside employment corridor. Within one mile of the Willamette River in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties are rough 200,000 jobs.

There are two key questions for the next decade. First, how will the deepening of the Columbia River channel to 43 feet affect Portland and other Columbia ports (Longview, Kalama, and Vancouver, Washington) as the global economy recovers? Second, will the recovery of Port of Portland commerce be enough to trigger terminal expansion on the west end of Hayden Island, opposite Terminal 6?

Drive up Burnside to Skyline Drive, head north for a few hundred yards, and park by the State of Oregon sign on the west side of the road. At the bottom of a winding path is one of Oregon’s more curious state parks. A marker in the middle of a concrete pad commemorates the “Willamette Stone.” That’s not the famous meteor, but the remnant of a granite post that marked the zero point for dividing Oregon and Washington into saleable real estate.

Portland’s founding generations staked their claim to the city and state by literal inscription. Starting from the Willamette Stone, surveyors ran a grid of range and township lines that parceled out the face of the land itself. They followed by clearing pathways on the valleys and hills that quickly grew edges of stone, brick, and mortar and soon enough with railroads that left traces of steel across the landscape. . With land survey lines and then rail lines, our predecessors marked the face of the Oregon and anchored those marks with monuments in stone, brick, and mortar.

The central survey meridian runs north and south (crossing the Columbia just west of Vancouver Lake). The east-west baseline runs straight and true from the Pacific into Idaho. It’s unmistakable in Portland because it lives an active life as Stark Street from Burnside Street past the Benson Hotel, across the Willamette through Southeast Portland and on to Mount Hood Community College. Across the Sandy River it ducks into the forests on Mount Hood’s north flank but suddenly reappears in Hood River County as Baseline Road cutting straight as an arrow shot past the Parkdale post office and McIsaac’s store and on another 300 miles to Hell’s Canyon. Looking west we can follow it through the centers of Hillsboro and Forest Grove and on to Bay City. Back in town, we all recognize the streets that count off in mile increments from the baseline—Division and Holgate in one direction, Fremont, and Killingsworth in another.

As 19th century wore on, Westerners began marking the land more vertically. The Union Pacific smokestack, for instance, rose brick by brick from the Albina railyards in North Portland in 1887. It anchored the freight yards where railroads from California and transcontinental lines through the Columbia River Gorge first linked up. On a busy day in the late nineteenth century, up to a thousand rail cars rolled in and out of Portland. Nearby was the Pacific Coast Elevator, whose 1,000,000 bushel capacity was unrivaled this side of the Twin Cities, able to simultaneously unload grain from eight rail cars while loading it into two ships. The smokestack for the railroad shops and roundhouse was built, said the Pacific Monthly, on “a foundation that would last for all time.” It has its counterpart in the Garibaldi smokestack along highway 101, the last remnant of the Hammond Lumber Company’s mill.

Skip a century to 2009 and we make our claims differently, not with lines on the ground but with ephemeral traces in the air. There are still points of physical attachment—microwave relays on lonely mountain tops, cell phone towers, the PDX control tower—but spaces they define are virtually invisible.

We know that jets have flight paths that keep Alaska 123 from bumping into United 456 and Southwest 679, but we can’t see them. Sometimes we may hear them, like Horizon flights that sometimes swoop low over my Northeast Portland house or the big bellowing jets when storms force use of the crosswind runway, but where exactly are their paths. All we can see are contrails high in the sky, pointing toward Dallas or Denver but already melting into air. Even the new control tower seems to float against its blue backdrop, a big knob at the end of a thin pillar

The mysterious cells of phone coverage are even less palpable. Has our phone started to roam? Is our call breaking up? Where are we? Where’s our service coming from? We can see transmitters perched on towers and rooftops, but which satellites they talk to? Who do they serve?

Back on the crest of the West Hills, the Willamette Stone rests in the shadow of a cluster of Portland’s tallest red-and-white broadcast towers, where television and radio stations have been transmitting since 1956 (with a brief interruption when the Columbus Day storm of 1962 toppled the first KGW tower). The centuries meet here, the solid stone that anchored pioneer settlement and the soaring steel lattice work that casts its intangible network of information across the same landscape.

Who do we see when we wander through Portland’s parks? We encounter joggers and walkers, dogs on leash and off, kids and picnickers, soccer players and softball players, and an occasional homeless person salvaging returnable cans or curled up in a quiet corner. We see individuals. We see teams. We see families—families in the flesh and, if we’re in the right places, frozen families cast in bronze.

Who are these silent families who have become our permanent neighbors? What were they up to? Would we want to invite them home for dinner? Whether we look at them in passing or pause to ponder them, what do they tell us about ourselves and the way we understand our community?

In the very center of Portland is “The Promised Land,” an imposing curiosity that has finally found a home in Chapman Square. It was commissioned in the 1990s by the Oregon Trail Coordinating Committee, funded with private contributions, and deposited on the doorstep of a somewhat surprised Oregon Historical Society. Pioneer father, mother, and son stand together peering toward their future home in the Edenic Willamette Valley at the end of the Oregon Trail. Portlanders did not universally applaud either the sentiment or its sculptural expression. Some thought it a heroic tribute to undaunted pioneers. Others wondered where the daughter was hidden, where the Indians might be, and where their emaciated and exhausted ox team had been parked. Still others thought it just plain schmaltzy.

When official commemoration of the Oregon Trail faded after 1995, the family relocated to the Lloyd District adjacent to the light rail tracks. Still looking westward, the installation might have been titled “We should have taken MAX.” It’s now moved a third time to Chapman Square to be viewed by people scurrying to the Court House for jury duty. The father still bears a striking resemblance to the fiery fanatic John Brown, who had nothing to do with Oregon but plenty to do with the Civil War.

The pioneer family would certainly be an anomaly if their metallic forms came alive today. According to the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, married couples with children under age eighteen make up only 15 percent of Portland’s households (those are 2003 figures). More than one third of Portland’s households with children have only a single parent present, suggesting that we might want to saw the statue down the middle to represent twenty-first century divorce and separation rates.

The obvious contrast to “The Promised Land” on many dimensions stands in Washington Park, where Sacajawea cradles her son Jean-Baptiste. The Women’s Committee of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition commissioned the Sacajawea statue As historian Deborah Olson has shown, these women worked long and hard to see that Portland business leaders did not completely ignore women as they mounted the first world’s fair on the west coast. They thought that a statue of the famous Shoshone guide would fill two gaps in the fair’s program. Its dedication brought together noted women’s rights leaders including Susan B. Anthony and Oregon’s indomitable Abigail Scott Duniway.

So Sacajawea stands simultaneously for the native peoples pushed aside by the pioneer family and women who played central roles in the history of the Northwest. In “The Promised Land,” mom stands carefully protected by dad (to the side with his arm around her) and junior (in front). Sacajawea has no one to fend off the unknown dangers of yesteryear and the pigeons and picnickers of today. She stands on her own. Have we been pedaling backward from and inclusive to an exclusive vision over the last century?

And speaking of Abigail Scott Duniway, her bronze brother Harvey, a firm opponent of woman suffrage, stands steadfast on the top of Mt. Tabor. Abigail was an adamant advocate for women’s rights (as well as a novelist and journalist). Harvey, editor of The Oregonian, was a rock-ribbed conservative who deplored everything Abigail worked for. Atop Mt. Tabor his bronze gaze is steadfastly eastward, toward the American past rather than its future. That’s an odd stance for one of the state’s biggest boosters and a curious contrast with Sacajawea, who looks toward the setting sun (even if the sunset is obscured by the high ridge in front of her).

There’s another curious connection between Portland’s statuary and a public art controversy in Santa Fe, one that involved an improbable confrontation between future president Harry Truman and the famous writer Mary Austin, author of Land of Little Rain and other portraits of the Southwest. As a rising politician in the 1920s, Truman was all in favor of improved roads for the coming age of automobiles. Missouri boosters had joined forces with the Daughters of the American Revolution to place copies of a pink-hued concrete “Pioneer Mother” at multiple sites along a historic set of roads and trails that spanned the continent—starting with the Cumberland Road in Maryland and ending with the Spanish Trail into California.

Most cities liked the free statuary, but not the self-consciously sophisticated Santa Fe arts community. These are the folks who were cultivating a hybrid “Santa Fe style” and imagining a romantic Spanish-Indian past that they much preferred to the history of American Manifest Destiny. They raised a fuss—Mary Austin haranguing the future president—and the statue intended for Santa Fe ended up in Albuquerque.

What’s the connection? The women of the DAR asked sculptor August Leimbach to model “Pioneer Mother” after a photograph of Portland’s Sacajawea . . . completing a circle back to Chapman Square and “The Promised Land.” This is not to mention that Portland’s statue commemorates the Oregon Trail and the DAR’s project memorialized the Santa Fe Trail as part of their “Pioneer Memorial Highway.”

This brief excursion suggests that we can and should actively look at public art for the cultural claims that it embodies. It is easy not to. Riding MAX we may take a quick glance at station art, but we’re more likely to worry about finding a seat. Running late for an appointment in a public office, we don’t look long and hard at the installations in the lobby that are the fruit of Portland and Multnomah County’s “percent for art” program for all public construction projects.

When we do look, we see a lot more Nature than people. There are petrified trees, aluminum feathers, bronze swallows, an oversized elk, granite diatoms, vines on glass, and many other variations. In Oregon it’s also hard to go wrong with fish, or with cute animal families like the peaceable kingdom of seals, otter, beavers, and bears around the Pioneer Courthouse (make that semi-peaceable, since mama bear is noshing on a salmon).

But even animals can be trouble. A few years back, Dallas real estate mogul Trammel Crow funded a massive bronze depiction of dozens of supersized Texas longhorns in perpetual stampede near city hall. Texas. Cattle. What’s the problem? Neighboring Fort Worth had a fit, that’s what. Dallas was never a cowtown! That was Fort Worth’s claim to fame (along with being the city “where the West begins”). Not only was Dallas bigger and richer, but it was stealing Fort Worth’s history. Better for Dallas than longhorns, said Fort Worthians, would be dozens of bronze oil derricks or jumbo Neiman-Marcus shopping bags.

Portland recently went through a minor version of this controversy when the Chinese American community rejected a dragon designed for the Northwest Davis “festival street” because its head seemed improperly and insultingly ensnared in a wok.

In its turn, the reluctant dragon leads back to another story of families in public art. At the terminus of the Interstate MAX, Valerie Otani constructed traditional Japanese gates hung with simulacra of internee identification tags. The adjacent Expo Center, home to many a boat show and RV extravaganza, was the assembly point in 1942 for Oregon’s Japanese Americans in their way to wartime internment camps.

Internment, as we know, was an intensely family experience. Parents, children, and grandparents were collected and tagged as family units, transported as families, housed at Manzanar or Tule Lake as families. Otani’s installation may not be instantly recognizable as a family portrait, but if we look . . . observe . . . consider . . . we see that it is as much about family as the Chapman Square bronze.

In the total mix of public art, families are few and far between. Teddy Roosevelt overlooks the Park Blocks without the help of his numerous relations. Portlandia is imposing a she kneels to roll dice across Fifth Avenue, but she has neither consort nor progeny (although she’s presumably fairy godmother to everyone in the city).

Maybe one reason is the barbed reception of the forty-year-old curiosity in front of the Standard Insurance Building, the three sinuous bodies officially titled “Quest” but known widely among Portlanders as “Three Groins in a Fountain” and “Family Night at the Y.” More seriously, representations of nature are more comforting to look at, raising no troubling questions of racial absence and gender hierarchy.

Nor does our last quasi-family raise these questions. The Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Grant Park gives us three characters from the perfect time—from the 1950s when the United States still seemed hopeful and innocent, from elementary school years before the tree of knowledge is fully sampled. Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Henry’s dog Ribsy aren’t exactly a family (where’s Ramona’s older sister Beezus?), but they come close to forming a community of values and experiences.

As we look at Portland’s frozen families, what’s our inclination? Self-reliant, isolated individuals staring solemnly at a land to be conquered? Kids whose kinship comes from the experiences of everyday life?

Here’s my preference. Census data tell us that there are still traditional Ozzie and Harriet families to be found in the United States, complete with mom, dad, and two children living at home, but they’re more likely to be Asian Americans or Latinos than the traditional European Americans who pioneered the Oregon Trail and television sitcoms. What we need is two more families meeting to shake hands in Chapman Square—new Americans from Southeast Asia looking east toward political freedom and Mexican Americans (fully documented, of course) looking north to the promised land of Oregon opportunity.