Some cities have icons of engineering to put on the covers of their tourist brochures. The Eiffel Tower celebrates the century of steel. Bilbao snagged Frank Gehry’s first anthem in zinc in its Guggenheim Museum. The Golden Gate Bridge shouts “San Francisco.”
But other places have roadside attractions. Has anyone driven I-94 past New Salem, North Dakota and not turned their head at the 38-foot-high fiberglass cow that stands sentinel on a rolling hillside? Giant fish seem to migrate over Canada—a musky at Kenora, Ontario, a catfish at Selkirk, Manitoba. North Dakota has a turtle made from 2000 tire rims, South Dakota has a pink and yellow prairie dog . . . you’ve all captured their images with your cameras.
Often size matters most in determining which cities build what. But for two premier cities of the Northwest, the equation is more complex. Consider the stories of how Seattle got the Space Needle and Portland, Paul Bunyan.
Up until World War II, Seattle and Portland had been fairly evenly matched. Then in the war years, Seattlites turned out airplanes and Portlanders built cargo ships, a premonition of things to come. In the late 1950s, Seattle was busy reinventing itself, building on Boeing and casting off its gritty timber-town past for a cosmopolitan future. The University of Washington was grabbing scientific research money and turning itself into one of the top-ten research universities in the country. The Port of Seattle invested in new technologies to handle containerized cargo. Boeing hit the jackpot with its first commercial jetliners.
Both Oregon and Washington were hatching plans for big events that attract national attention and tourism and during the mid 1950s—a state centennial celebration for Oregon and a world’s fair for Seattle. Oregon got cranked up first and Seattle, which had wanted to do something in 1959 (fifty years after their Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition that gave the University of Washington its campus), postponed its event to 1962.
The resulting Century 21 Exposition was designed to put Seattle on the map, “recapturing prestige. . . as the gateway to the Orient.” The global theme was “the wonders of the ’space age’ science.” Approval by the Brussels-based Bureau of International Expositions allowed the planners to attract exhibits from around the world and to draw on national expertise that ranged from the Walt Disney organization to the Na¬tional Science Foundation. Reams of favorable publicity, the exciting new monorail, and 9,600,000 paid visits made it the most successful of all post¬war American world’s fairs, teaching outsiders that the Northwest’s metropolis started with an “S”.
Oregon, in contrast, had already mounted the Oregon Centennial Exposition on the cheap. The 1959 event in North Portland started ambitiously but ended up more like local “pioneer days” than a world’s fair. The frugal legislature doled out $2.6 million in grudging installments, barely in time to remodel a livestock exhibition hall into display space. Portlanders themselves quickly learned to stay away from what turned out to be little more than an interminable county fair. Paul Bunyan was its most enduring legacy.
The statue was a typical Portland DIY project before anyone knew the initials. Because Oregon’s celebration of a century of statehood took place at the Portland Expo Center, members of the Kenton Business Club decided to greet visitors driving up North Interstate Avenue with some local color. Volunteer iron workers fabricated and erected an I-beam skeleton, covered it with wire mesh, and troweled on concrete skin and clothing.
Today the Space Needle still stands against the backdrop of Mount Rainier as a symbol for Seattle’s forward-looking aerospace and software industries, its global trade and finance, and its cosmopolitan character. Ambition and impressive civic emblems, however, may not necessary ensure civic success. Seattle continues to built icons—the Experience Music Project, public library, huge stadiums—but ambitions are sometimes short lived. Boeing headquarters have moved, the SuperSonics no longer play in the shadow of the Space Needed, the monorail keeps breaking down, and light rail is just now under construction after many fits and starts.
Meanwhile, Portland recycles the old—library, city hall, armory—in preference to paying for icon—and passes on big league baseball. The Kenton Neighborhood Association, which owns the statue, has taken steps place Paul Bunyan on the National Register of Historic Places. His stout presence is a reminder of the past, even as Tri-Met nudged over by a few yards to make room for the fourth spoke of our light rail network– the light rail tracks.
1agricultural…
…