Portland's Lost Waterfront

The steam paddle wheeler Portland, that is currently moored by the seawall at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, was used for many, many years as a tug. Now it serves the community as a really wonderful maritime museum, but it wasn't too very long ago it was a river work horse. The ships that load at O Dock (the grain dock by the Steel bridge, AKA LDC or Globe) need to be turned around in the wide section of the river between Alber's Mill and Irving Dock. They need to have the "pointy end" turned so it will be aimed down river when the ship goes under its own steam.  One day in the 1980s my brother gave me a Polaroid camera for my birthday. I happened to have it with me one day when I was working at LDC (as it was called then). The ship was being moved by tugs, including the tug Portland. It occurred to me that this tug might not be used very much longer, so I went to various places in the elevator and snapped away. These pictures I thought were lost in the riv...

Few places around here are as wrongly named the Lone Fir Cemetery, a beautiful park-like area with nearly every kind of tree known to Portland—including dozens of firs. They could have even named it the Four Sequoias. One fellow a hundred or so years past had the foresight to have a Sequoia seedling planted on each edge of his final resting place. Today they make a lovely shelter from wind and rain while passing through the boneyard. Four Sequoias My wife and I were visiting our final resting place today—a fine, crisp sunny day, more like Spring than early February. Almost twenty years ago, as a weird sort of splurge, we bought two plots in the Lone Fir after finding that they still had a few left. Today it would be impossible, it's a full house. Back in the  1960s I used to walk straight through the Lone Fir on my way to Washington High. I always enjoyed reading the epitaphs, but it would be years before I realized the fascinating history of the place and its inhabita...