The Urban West

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.