The Portland Waterfront History Blog

A Steamy Polaroid Memory

2012-02-08T22:01:00.000-08:00

The steam paddle wheeler Portland, that iscurrently moored by the seawall at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, was used formany, many years as a tug. Now it serves the community as a really wonderfulmaritime museum, but it wasn't too very long ago it was a river work horse. Theships 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 Milland Irving Dock. They need to have the "pointy end" turned so it willbe aimed down river when the ship goes under its own steam.

One day in the 1980s my brother gave me aPolaroid camera for my birthday. I happened to have it with me one day when Iwas 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 usedvery much longer, so I went to various places in the elevator and snapped away.These pictures I thought were lost in the river of time, like so many otherthings, but the other day my dear daughter brought over some albums for me toscan and—hurray!—my old Polaroids!

They aren't much to look at really, very lowtech to begin with, and after 20 years or so, they are ever cloudier. But thereis something kind of dreamy about them, especially from my nostalgic point ofview. Oh, by the way, the title of an earlier blog, "Nostalgia Will Savethe World" is something I have been meaning to address. It needs a fewblogs of its own, so ensha'alla, I will get to it someday.

Grave Matters

2012-02-04T21:38:00.000-08:00

Few places around here are as wrongly namedthe Lone Fir Cemetery, a beautiful park-like area with nearly every kind oftree known to Portland—including dozens of firs. They could have even named itthe Four Sequoias. One fellow a hundred or so years past had the foresight to havea Sequoia seedling planted on each edge of his final resting place. Today theymake a lovely shelter from wind and rain while passing through the boneyard.

Four Sequoias

Mywife 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 sortof splurge, we bought two plots in the Lone Fir after finding that they stillhad a few left. Today it would be impossible, it's a full house. Back inthe 1960s I used to walk straightthrough the Lone Fir on my way to Washington High. I always enjoyed reading theepitaphs, but it would be years before I realized the fascinating history of theplace and its inhabitants.

The McCleay Crypt (one of my finest snapshots, if I say so myself)

I was delighted that we were given plots abouttwenty yards from the prestigious McCleay crypt, a gothic edifice spooky enoughto inspire a few chills. But recently it came to my attention that we were evencloser in proximity to the Portland's number 1 shanghai boss, the sailor'sboarding house master James Turk. There he lies thirty feet from us, along withhis first wife Kate, and his beloved mother. You will be able to read about Mr.Turk in great detail in my upcoming book. He was on of the ruthless men whomade Portland infamous as Shanghaiing Capital of the World. Besides this he wasa brawler. He was arrested so many times for beating people with his fists thatwhen the Oregonian reported on it, they usually did so beneath the headline"Turk Again". He wasn't the only family member in the papers fairlyregularly, his wife Kate was in and out of the police court for her tendency todrink too much, argue loudly, and beat people with her fists as well. She, atleast, had the excuse that she was Irish.

A shanghaiers's final resting place

There are many other interesting peopleinterred in this lovely place. A good place to start is at the

Friends of LoneFir website.

a. McCleay crypt

b. Blalock's future abode

c. The Turks

Portland and Liverpool

2012-01-27T18:18:00.000-08:00

Loading sacked grain by chutes at an Albina grain dock

Not long after the first shipments of wheatand canned salmon were sent to Liverpool by the trading firm of John McCracken,immediately followed by Corbett and Ma Cleay, Portlanders began to imaginetheir city to be a seaport. I say "imagine" because many months outof the year deep draught sailing vessels could not make it past the sandbars onthe Columbia, let alone navigate the "shallow Wallamat" as the Tri-weeklyAstorian liked to point out. Never-the-less that did not stop the starry-eyedwharfingers from naming their planks of timber resting on fir piles names like:"Mersey Dock" and "Victoria Dock". But for those monthsthat these vessels could come right into town, and the saloons on the north endwere filled with English sailors whose lingo could not be understood even intheir own country, let alone the American west, Portland seemed like a city ofthe world, rough and tumble, wide open, a place of sin and fast fortunes.

I have not blogged for a little while. Thesedays when I lay off the blogging it is because I am finding things toointeresting to allow for a moment away from the mines of the Internet. Today I havediscovered enough dastardly deeds and corruption in this city's past to makes mystomach turn. I have found out many sins to fill the pages of the bookI have promised to finish by September. May God have mercy on me for my ownsins and help me to not judge too harshly the pirates, crimps, and whoremongersof a hundred years past.

Willamette Floods Now and Then

2012-01-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

The Willamette used toflood every spring as the snow melt in the Cascade mountains flowed downto the sea. Flood waters are also fueled by snow melt as far away as the Rockies flowing into the Columbia river. Now the water flow is mostly controlled by dams. But in 1996 a combinationof heavy rains, and sudden warm weather gave Portland a little thrill. I wasworking on the first floor of Alber's Mill at the time. As the water reachedits peak we opened the basement door and measured 14 inches to the waterlapping at the steps. Some of these photos I took out the office window.

McCormick Pier Apartments--notice thee pyramid shape in the water. That is the very tip of the gazebo where people can sit at picnic tables and watch grain being loaded on board ships at O Dock across the water. On this day they would have needed scuba gear.

Willamette River Flood

Alber's Mill Parking Lot is now part of the Willamette river

Willamette River Flood

Some images of earlier floods

Vanport, situated near what today is Delta Park, was a World War II housing project for shipyard employees. The story of the flood is one laced with racism and incompetence. For some really excellent photos of this shameful event in Portland history check out Thomas Robinson's Historic Photo Archives. It is well worth the trouble of creating a free account just to browse his images.

Vanport 1948

Willamette River Flood 1898

The Willamette River Light Station, a lost river lighthouse

2012-01-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

The Willamette River Light Station at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. Photo taken around 1905

On a foggy day in the late nineteenth century the farmers on Sauvie Island would hear the loud, dull tolling of a fog bell every 10 seconds. On rainy, dusky evenings riverboats plying up theWillamette river heading for Astoria, or Cascade Locks would be guided by theblinking red beam coming from a structure sitting on a sand bar at what is nowcalled Kelly Point. This was the long lost Willamette Light Station that yousee in the photograph.

Many is the time I have been to Kelly Point.Having worked for the U.S.D.A. Federal Grain Inspection Service for over thirtyyears I have spent many duty rotations working at the T5 export grain elevatornext door to Kelly Point. Often times I would spend a pleasant lunch hour therebeneath the oaks and cottonwoods gazing out on the placid meeting place ofrivers. When inspecting cargo holds of ships anchored in the Columbia, we wouldusually board a launch at T6, the automobile and container dock on the Columbia river side ofKelly Point. But in all those years no one ever mentioned the long lostWillamette River Light Station, because it was long lost.

I spent some time researching. Now I know most of the facts about the Willamette River Light Station. If I don't fit them into the book I am writing on the history of the Portland waterfront I will write an article on the subject and see if some Portland periodical will publish it. If no one wants it, then I will happily serve up all the details, plus more images, right here on my little blog.

Note: There is a very short Wikipedia article on this lighthouse, but it leaves out some interesting facts, and the facts it has aren't entirely correct. I will add my two cents to Wikipedia when time permits.

The Oregon Steam Navigation Company Dock

2012-01-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

By 1864 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company was well on its way to becoming the largest monopoly Oregon would ever see. That year Captain Ainsworth, one of the early river pilots and a founder of the firm, oversaw the building of a huge dock as a fitting portal to this new and booming town. The dock was built between Pine and Ash streets, and was double decked to accommodate the river at various water levels. By the time this photo was taken, sometime in the 1880s the company had been purchased by the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. The bridge visible behind the masts in the Morrison street bridge.

The Esplanade of Yesterday

2011-12-30T22:36:00.000-08:00

Anyone who bicycles, walks, skates, or jogs on the Eastbank Esplanade wedged between the roaring Interstate 5 freeway and the Willamette river will pass by the Fire Boat Dock beneath the Hawthorne Bridge. In 1905, when this newspaper image was produced (I can't really call it a photograph, can I?), Washington Street ran straight down to the river, ending abruptly at the fire tug dock.

In the nineteenth century things were always catching on fire, including boats. Portland burned to the ground in 1873 (well, most of downtown). There couldn't be two steamboats going in the same direction without it turning into a drag race, so that caused a lot of boiler explosions. Gas lights burning everywhere, cigar stubs, candles, oil lamps--and almost everything was built from timber.

The historic newspaper databases are as close as I suppose I will ever get to a time machine (something Santa didn't bring me for Christmas). But with a few details, a splotchy old picture, and an active imagination I feel like I have walked the streets of this fair city throughout each decade of its short history.

Whitechapel

2011-12-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

There is a useful Pidgin expression I learnedfrom a Hawaiian fellow: "Tengs ah neba no!" It is to be said with themouth slightly ajar and an expression of amazement at having learned a new andinteresting fact. I have been finding myself muttering this to myself a lotlately as I delve into my city's sordid history. Charles Dickens had given a worldwide notoriety to the seedy, whore mongering (in the correct sense), haven ofdrug and drink in London with the ironic name "Whitechapel". Itwasn't long before the name was bestowed on the districts of other cities thatbore a similar infamy. Portland has done a rather good job of stowing itsskeletons in places that are out of the way and hard to find, so when I keptbumping into the mention of "Portland's Whitechapel district" innineteenth century newspapers it took me awhile to realize that this was a"district of the soul" and not one that I would not find on any mapof the day.

I did, however, chance upon a talk given in1901 by the Rev. J. E. Snyder at a meeting of the Men's League of the FirstBaptist Church. The account tells how ReverendSnyder "exhibited a chart he had prepared of conditions of the districtknown as Whitechapel, 14 blocks, bounded by Pine, Second. Flanders and Fourthstreets In which he stated there were 131 dives or disorderly houses, 42saloons, 14 lodging-houses and several pawnbrokers' shops." As shocking asthis may sound Rev. Snyder might have missed a few brothels, if some otherreports I have seen are accurate. Some of these places were actually warehousesdivided into "cribs" for the working ladies.

This district was near the waterfront, whichwas at that time rotting wharfs and docks thrown up in boom times and subjectedto flood, flame, and constant winter drizzle. It was a "colorful"period, but one I am happy to observe from the safe distance of over a centuryremoved in time. The lowlife and infamy of this place will be given someserious treatment in the book I am busily writing. If I don't cover it allhere, I will try to do it there.

Here I have thrown together for your educationand enjoyment what may be the only map in existence of Portland's Whitechapel.

Coal and Stones on Christmas

2011-12-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

This being Christmas Eve I deem it to be an appropriate time for this subject. As all of you know, the supercargoes on the sailing vessels of yesteryear had the difficult task of insuring that their vessels would not keel over and sink due to an uneven, or overly light cargo. So, should there be no other cargo weighty enough to stabilize the vessel at the port, they would take on paving materials, or, if it was available, coal.

I was once told by an Old Portlander named Alice that the paving stones in the garden of our church were brought to Portland as ship's ballast. She had dreamy blue eyes hiding in her wrinkled smile, eyes that inspired thoughts of the romance of Jack Tar unloading stones quarried on the banks of the Mersey River and loaded at Liverpool. Alas! I have punctured my own dream on this cheery Christmas Eve.

It is well known that Portland's biggest trading partner back in "the day" was San Francisco. I have discovered that the streets of that city were paved with ballast from up the Sacramento river. Hundreds of ships each year went up the river laden with supplies, and returning with what is known as "Folsom Potatoes", or ballast stones beaten into shape with sledge hammers by the prisoners at Folsom Prison. The vessels leaving Portland for San Francisco were heavy laden with sacks of grain. It is inconceivable that they would return with anything of equal weight--except for the possibility of the "Folsom Potatoes" and coal.

If you read the Marine Report in nineteenth century Oregonians (as I do, being someone who obviously needs a life) you will see that the vessels coming into Portland first went to a place called Sand Dock to unload ballast. I am yet to identify where this dock was located, so I am open to suggestions. Merry Christmas!

Here is an photo of the prison quarry. Oy!

Image courtesy of:http://quarriesandbeyond.org/

For more info on "Folsom Potatoes" see:

History of the Sacramento Valley, Volume 1
Joseph A. McGowan
Lewis Historical Pub. Co., 1961

Nostalgia Will Save the World, Part 2

2011-12-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

Avast there, messmate--I would read this lingo.
Ha!--may I be water-logged on a lee shore
If our good chaplain's Bible is more true
Than these same statements.

Sailor's in a bawdy house

I do not believe in the reality of many things, including the "good old days," For my light reading on this day before Christmas Eve I have chosen:
Facts Without Fiction and Tales from the Life: Illustrative of the Evil Effects of Spirit Drinking, 1835, Benjamen Bagster, London.
I was drawn to this book by the chapter called: A Scene from Real Life, Or Crimps and Sailors. The introductory poem and etching of the sailors and prostitutes is from the same volume.

Few things have spurred such earthquakes of nostalgia--poems, paintings, and kitsch, as the sailor's life. Yet the sailor was the very bottom of the totem pole, with fewer rights and privileges than any other class of human. The big, many-masted windjammers needed crews, and from time immemorial they were supplied by crimps. These crimps used unsophisticated means to obtain the prospective sailor's cooperation, but almost always it involved liquor. As the line from the sea shanty goes:

Here's to the tar that drinks away,
And values not the score;
But boldly pays his money down,
Then goes to sea for more.

The crimps of Portland became world renowned for their ruthlessness and disregard for any law or decency. Much has been written about Bunko Kelly, Larry Sullivan, and Jim Turk, but they would never have gotten away with it had there not been a complacent civil society abiding the outrages simply because things had always been done that way, and they were only sailors anyway.

That brings me to today. Today we can look back and say, "Tut, tut!" and think that these are better times. What will the Portlanders of the future think when they read about the thousands of homeless men, women and children who sleep in the temporary shelters, vehicles, and beneath tarps on days like this cold day in December?

Adventures in the Grain Trade, Part 1

2011-12-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

M/V Panamax Sun loads 120,000,000 pounds of Soft White Wheat at O Dock 2011

Way back in the 1970’s I was struggling to support a familyby working at a music store. This would be pathetic enough on its own, but thestore manager was addicted to heroin and needed to steal my commissions to feedhis habit. One day it occurred to me to go to the state employment office downtownto see if I could make a career move. Something that caught my eye was atemporary job, “30 day appointment” doing what sounded like driving atruck and picking up samples of grain. I thought that would be easy, that Iwould get laid off after the 30 days, and then I could collect unemploymentuntil I figured out what I could do with my life.

I then stepped into a rabbit hole leading to the wonderland ofthe waterfront world at a peculiar time in history. The United States had beengiven a black eye around the world for the nefarious and greedy practices ofits grain exporters, especially in the Gulf Coast. Congress had decided thebusiness needed to be regulated nationwide and had authorized a new agency todo so—the Federal Grain Inspection Service—and they were scooping up people towork for them wherever they could find them. Portland had never had areputation for extreme corruption in the grain industry. Not to say things werelily white here, but by comparison to New Orleans the industry here was prettystraight arrow. Still, suddenly the four grain docks in Portland were floodedwith an army of young people, many of whom didn’t even know that bread was madeout of wheat, supervising the shipping of grain. This army was required to wearorange coveralls and orange hardhats, because a safety officer from somewhere thought it would be easier to find the bodies after a grainelevator explosion. I was sworn in as amember of that army on the 11^th floor of 911 NW Broadway by thefield office manager, Gary Wasson.

Those early days were lively ones. Many of the old time heroesof excess were still working the docks, taxi loads of prostitutes showed up daily.Ribaldry and practical joking broke up the monotony, and everywhere I wasassigned new and bizarre characters appeared in a Dickensian sequences ofunfolding drama. The “30 day appointment“ (we were called 30 day wonders by the fulltime employees) turned into 33 years. Ronald Reagan came and the workforce diminished.Big agricultural corporation lobbyistsworked away on congressmen, and the workforce diminished. Terrorismbecame popular and the docks were wrapped in razor wire fences and guarded withguards. The taxi loads of prostitutes disappeared. The heroes of drug and drinkdied. But the grain keeps getting shipped.

They never could get us to wear those orange coveralls. Long,long ago the safety officer fell through a hole on the shipping gallery at Globedock (where there is a big warning sign with letters ten inches high) and retiredfor medical reasons. As soon as he retired his wife gave him “the old heave ho”and took half his pension, so he moved into a rat trap apartment in Tacoma. Thestory goes, he hired a kid to go to the liquor store with him in his stationwagon and a hand truck. He filled the back up with cases of vodka, which he hadthe kid carry up the stairs to his apartment. A month or so later, Cortney, aSeattle FGIS man, went to visit.

“Can I get you a drink?” queried the bleary-eyed retiree.

“Yeah, sure.” Cortneyreplied with hesitant courtesy.

The retired safety man then went to the refrigerator, whichwas stuffed full of Hood River Vodka bottles, and proceeded to pour Cortney awater glass of vodka to the brim.

A few weeks went by and the neighbours noticed an unpleasantsmell coming from the apartment.

This is a cautionary tale for all of us. It would be for me, except that I have lost my appetite for alcohol. Also, I have not retired butwork sixteen hour days supervised by Ralph, my kitty. And, I don’t live alone. I thank God for that. I definitely thankGod, and my lucky stars to be married to someone who is, among many other finequalities, an editor. She is also very busy—too busy, in fact, to be botheredwith editing my loquacious blog. So, if you have noticed that it is filled withtypos and hyphenation peccadilloes, she bares no blame.

Nostalgia Will Save the World, Part One

2011-12-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

crossing the river 1912

My uncle Miles once told me about comingthrough Portland the spring of 1912. According to Miles my grandfather, who wasa Baptist preacher, had been "run out" of Condon by the two old"hardshell spinsters" that ruled the local church. They were on theirweary way back to my grandmother Mae's birthplace, the green, moist valleys ofTillamook. They crossed the Willamette river at dusk on the Morrison Streetbridge, and then, a very odd thing happened. My grandfather, who was as tightfisted as a Scottish miser, headed the team of horses over to the newlybuilt and grandiose Multnomah Hotel. Thathe would stay in a place of sin, tango dancing, drinking, and other highfalutin vices was nothing short of amiracle; but it was a miracle of love for his frail and sickly wife who, at thetime, was nursing my newly born father.

Then the waterfront would have been a longseries of dilapidated wharfs where a great variety of vessels would have beendocked. The majority of these would have been small (by today's standards)steamships, but there would have also been groupings of masts up and down theriver from the schooners, barks, jammers, and wind powered vessles of all sorts still inuse at that time. I can actually vividly image the scene, as if some sort ofgenetic memory was passed on to me by my father. I can imagine the pedestrians,the slow puttering motor cars (the speed limit on the bridges was the speed of abrisk walk), the gas and electric lights reflecting in the waters. The soundswould have been of horses hoofs, shouting bargemen, motor cars, and a waftingof music from the houseboats beneath. The air would have been filled with the smellof the river sewage mixed with chokingly thick coal smoke, and wood smoke, and thesmell of cabbage cooking somewhere nearby.

Now, in this 21st century, there are no smells and nothing is heard butthe swishing of cars as they speed across an empty river, and over an emptywaterfront into a modern city where life is carried out in brilliantly lightedrooms on shiny screens connected to small, flat typewriters.

The Hazards of Research

2011-12-17T00:24:00.000-08:00

The very worst thing about writing and researching is that my cuckoo clock keeps singing the hour every five minutes, and then the day is over, and I find myself deep up some side creek and far from the stream I should be following. Today it was the simple act of looking into who this man Albert Deane Richardson was, the fellow who wrote such an interesting account of his journey west--including the Columbia and Willamette rivers--in the mid eighteen sixties.

It turns out that he was a Union spy, a Secret Service agent, who was captured and spent a year and a half in a Confederate prison. As a journalist he ended up living in New York City where he fell for a woman who was married to a rich Irish man who abused her greatly. Finally she separated from her husband, and during this time period the husband--blind with jealousy- attempted to kill Richardson. When a divorce was finally granted the husband showed up at Richardson's office and shot him, giving him a wound that would shortly kill him. Before Richardon died he managed to marry the lady he loved. The Irish boys at Tammany Hall made sure that the husband got off lightly, being acquitted on grounds of insanity. etc. etc.


The murder of Albert Deane Richardson

This man's life would make a good subject for a book. Maybe if I live as long as my father who turned 100 on November 3rd of this year I will get around to it. I am afraid this book would have to wait in the queue, lately I have bumped into a whole passel of interesting characters.

A Perspective on Pillars

2011-12-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

Many of the adventuresome young men who cameto Oregon while the Hudson Bay Co. wasstill the ruling force lived here long enough to see the log cabins turn intogigantic stone edifices, such as the Portland Hotel, or Meir & Frank. Theentertainment went from being some fiddles at a barn dance to operas and orchestras,and the frontier wives were transformed into queens of high society. They rodeto entertainments in carriages with beveled glass windows, and then in Packardtown cars. I imagine that they learned how to talk in that fake British accentthat you hear "cultured" Americans using in the old movies—at leasttheir daughters did, after being sent to "finishing school" in theEast.

Pillars of Society in Portland, Oregon

This takes me back to York, in the U.K., aplace I mentioned earlier as being very, very old. In fact, York is where theemperor Constantine was crowned as Roman Emperor, and it was an old city then.My friend Randy Giles (d. 2009, Pondicherry, India) grew up in West Lynn,and ended up studying music at the University of York. His main tutor was anelderly British gentleman who had the habit of saying, "Pillars of societyin Portland, Oregon!" He wasn't aware that Randy was from Portland, it wasmerely and expression he had acquired that conveyed the meaning that someonewas putting on airs. For instance, if a student were to spout some knowledge ofsome obscure musical fact, instead of raising his bushy white eyebrows andsaying, "I say! Well done! He would scowl and mumble, "Pillars ofsociety in Portland, Oregon!" Randy thought this was hilariously funny.

Dr. Randall Giles

How very American to take a forested arealarger than England, peopled with a culture that had existed for many longcenturies, come in with guns and disease, cut down the trees, can the fish,fill the meadows with wheat fields, build some palaces and declare yourself apillar of society, and have it all done by suppertime. This is something thatwon't happen again, we have run out of wilderness (of course the people wholived here didn't think of it as wilderness, they thought of it as home).

These are the sorts of thoughts that comes to mindwhen I am searching a newspaper database for a sea captain and keep findinginstead his wife on the society page.

Pilot No. 1

2011-12-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

Poking around in the attic of old mariners Ihave discovered a puzzle, Captain George Flavel. He is reported to be the firstperson to be issued a Columbia River Bar Pilots license, branch license No. 1. He received this license in the year 1851, according to lots of sources, including theCRBP website. http://www.columbiariverbarpilots.com/columbiariverbarpilots_history.htmlBack in the days of yore the mouth of the Columbia was known around the globeas a good place to lose a ship with all hands and cargo, so getting them acrosssafely was the first order of business for the entire region.

What makes the Flavel story odd is that thefolks in Astoria had decided to have a Board of Pilot Commissioners in 1846,and in January of 1847 the territorial legislature passed a section of rulesand regulations for this commission to follow (Spectator,Oregon City, Jan 7, 1847). So that means they had to wait for someone to showup who was brave and skilled enough to be pilot number one.

Capt George Flavel

Captain Flavel made a huge pile of money over the years and built a monstrosityof a Victorian mansion in Astoria (now a museum). But as of today there isn'teven a Wikipedia article about him and he only gets a few words in Lewis &Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest. If I had an intern workingfor me, like Cosmo Kramer had working for him, I could fix that omission to the wiki.

The Famous Harbor

2011-12-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

Portland harbor postcard

I try to keep my eye one the ephemera connected with our city's past. One image that keeps coming up is this postcard of a busy Portland harbor that was sold during the Lewis and Clark Fair of 1905. They must have sold by the thousands because they turn up on Ebay regularly, and can usually be found in local antique stores in their postcard box.

Here I have to brag about have purchased a collection of well over one hundred antique Portland postcards on Ebay for around seventeen dollars. I though it was a scam until I had them in my hands. Most of them were over a century old.

At the fair of 1905 not only did a lot of postcards get sold to the tourists, but one of the exhibits sold, or gave away monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) seedlings. Now there are 106 year old monkey trees throughout the city. Most articles on the subject say that it was the Chilean exhibit. I searched the Historic Oregon Newspaper Database but could find zilch. Once an old lady with a green thumb told me they were a part of the New Zealand exhibit, but they are a native of Chile. They look out of place around here, just like the occasional unhappy, scraggly, shivering palm tree.

A Rainy Workday Day Dawns

2011-12-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

I always knew that I would miss this place, even at the end of an eleven hour shift--of which there were many.

In the morning I came mentally prepared to spend some time sitting at the top of the hill. The road into O Dock is the only private road in the city crossing the Union Pacific tracks. As a private road it can be blocked by the train for quite awhile, sometimes hours. One never knew if a train would be sitting there waiting for its time to move into the Albina yard. So, every morning I came with a travel mug of coffee and something to read. One day I had my camera with me. The first photo is when I got there and joined the line of longshoremen, company men, and FGIS inspectors, the second photo was taken when the train finally moved on, letting us all get to work.

Wading Across the Willamette

2011-12-10T07:43:00.001-08:00

The bar at the mouth of the Clackamas

The earliest stories of our city are well known,even the legendary coin toss between Maine and Massachusetts. It is still a bitthrilling for a nerd like me to run across a bit of very early history. I cameupon this letter by Captain John H. Couch to the Oregon City Spectatordefending the notion that Portland was as far as anyone could reasonablybelieve that ocean going vessels could navigate. He even mentions seeing natives wading across the river at the Clackamas bar. The letter receives an amenfrom gentleman farmer, and riparian land owner Thomas Stevens.

The Spectator, Oregon City, Jan 10, 1850

The main obstacle tonavigation is the bar that is formed from sand pushed out from the mouth of theClackamas river. I have canoed that area many times. Once, during high watersin the spring I was surprised and terrified to come upon a place at the bend belowHog Island that had turned to standing waves higher than anything I had ever maneuveredin my cumbersome Klickitat canoe. Time is relative, and so is white water. Forme it was a terrifying rapids, for the average kayaker, a piece of cake.

Sunny day reflections on Stumpville (Did I get that right?)

2011-12-09T14:27:00.001-08:00

I started off the morning trying to see if Portlanders ever actually referred to the city as Stumptown back in the early days, as the legend goes.But maybe I should wait for the rains to return. On a beautiful, bright sunny day like todayit is hard to remember the endless drizzle and the heavy clouds hiding thehills.

Our soggy winters are infamous. Lewis and Clark complained about thewetness, and then pulled up camp and high tailed it back to dryer regions asfast as they could. In Portland the rainy season (some say it lasts for elevenmonths out of the year) is bad enough to make the necessity of good pavedstreets and sidewalks a given. But I have friends who live well within the citylimits, and the city street in front of their house is an unpaved, mud-cakedsinkhole without sidewalks and only traveled by 4 wheel drive. (I am notexaggerating, and can provide images if called upon to do so.)

courtesy: http://www.museumofthecity.org

It has been over one hundred years sinceRudyard Kipling condemned a road out of Portland as being "worse than anIrish village". He also commentedthat "Portland is so busy that it can't attend to its own sewage orpaving" and then goes on to tell the story of seeing a foundation dug outin the downtown where sewage had been seeping for twenty years. (From Sea toSea, American Notes; Rudyard Kipling 1907)

A few years earlier, (Oregonian Aug 5, 1895)Mark Twain visited Portland and mentioned the need for paved streets. Hesuggested that the city purchase a fleet of bicycles and then rent them out topay for the streets.

Portland streets must have been something to navigateback in the beginning of the city. I came across an account in an 1851 editionof the Oregon City Spectator of a trip from Oregon City to Astoria. The authorwanted to visit with the editor of the new Oregonian newspaper, ThomasJefferson Dreyer and this is what he had to say:

"We were not able to penetrate the town to anydistance on account of the vast quantities of mud and water that lie in ourcourse. We screwed up our courage to a point sufficient to wade through andwend our way to the printing office in hopes to grasp Bro. Dreyer by the hand.In this we were disappointed. We were informed that he had gone out to rusticate—hehad gone to Vancouver."

Last May the WillametteWeek ran a story called "Dirt Roads, Dead Ends" looking at the 59miles of dirt roads within the city limits. It shows that some things don'tchange over time. It's almost as though bad streets are a part of the cities heritage.I know my friends wouldn't want the street in front of their house paved. Itcuts down on traffic and give a nice rural kind of feel to the neighborhood.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the waterfront. Well, I was once told by Alice Frasier, a woman far older than me, and much better informed, that the streets of the old city were paved with paving stones that served as ballast in the sailing ships that came to collect cargoes of wheat and lumber. Is this true? I certainly hope to discover the root of this, and many more of the "unsorted waterfront facts" I have cluttering my memory as I try to assemble a readable book on the subject.

Good old O Dock

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O Dock, foot of North Holladay

When I started working on the waterfront the first place I was assigned was to a place that was indicated on the dispatch roster as "LDC". This stood for Louis Dreyfus Corporation, but few people called it that. It was known to the longshoremen and most everyone else as "Globe". The dock has gone through a number of names over the years and is now wearing the name O Dock. I am of the opinion that this is an older name than Globe, harking back to the Portland practice of naming docks after the streets of which they were the "foot". "O" referring to Oregon Street. At one time Victoria Street ran all the way down to the river having its foot in this same area. In those days there was a Victoria Dock. It was burned to the ground in 1902 by an arsonist who had spouted threats while spending a bit of time in the Oregon State Penitentiary that he was going to "burn Portland to the ground." He got as far as lighting Victoria Dock and some businesses in Albina ablaze before being apprehended.

Aunt Sally

My mother and father lived in an apartment overlooking Globe Dock back in the late nineteen forties. (My father had been a missionary in China and had brought some orphans home. I might add that my father and the three Chinese children he had with him were detained in the Philippines for nearly four years in a Japanese internment camp in route home, but that is another story entirely.) One of the children lived with my parents in the apartment (I was yet to be born), a girl I have always known as "Aunt Sally". This is a photo of Sally taken on the bank of the river below the apartment and just above O Dock.

I always felt at home at O Dock, or LDC, or Globe, whatever its name is. And it is a good thing that I liked it there because we often worked double shifts. Sometimes at 4 in the morning, getting off of a double shift the railroad would be blocking the only exit home. Getting stuck for sometimes up to an hour or more came with the territory, and still does. Peek over the railing of the Steel bridge sometime and think about how you would get out of there if the Union Pacific was parked across your doorstep.

The End of Navigation

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After having spent thirty three years working at export grain facilities on the Willamette river I have entered a new phase--retirement. I am also starting to write a book about the history of the Portland waterfront. I have been collecting things for years; a photo here, a newspaper article there, with the idea of putting some of it together, if not into a book, then a largely improved Portland Waterfront History Website.

Providentially, right when I was busy doing a thousand other things, I was contacted by the commissioning editor from a prestigious (in my way of thinking) publisher specializing in American history. She had seen the website was wanted to know if I had any interest in writing a book on the subject. After recovering from the shock of such a sudden prospect leaping into my path, I consented, and put together a proposal, the long and the short of the matter being, a book is in the making.

This brings me to the blog at hand. I see it as a place to toss bits of flotsam to see what floats, and what sinks. It is also a means of alerting the public to my efforts in the hopes that some kind-hearted souls will add to my collection with offerings of their own. I can't see that I need much more of a preface than this, so blog post number one is getting the "Publish" button pressed.