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flaneurs2012-06-17 12:03 pm
sanguinity) wrote in flaneurs2012-06-17 12:03 pm
June Challenge: Outer SE Portland Beer Glass Walk
For the June Challenge: IId, Beer Glass Walk. We went through our Big Box o' Portland Maps looking for something that had a scale that we could live with; all but one of them were Too Magnified or Not Magnified Enough. The one whose scale we could live with was a bike map of Outer SE Portland. Then we plunked our glass.
Map: the glass and the resultant walk.
Portland has a reputation for being a very walkable city, but just how walkable it is depends on the neighborhood. East Portland is not one of the more walkable areas, unfortunately. It was annexed by the city fairly recently, and has never gotten much love nor money from the civic planners. There's an interstate bypass plunked right through the middle of it, and it trends toward being car-centric. We'd had kind of a bad feeling about using an Outer SE map for our beer glass, but had decided to go ahead anyway: we really don't know East Portland all that well, and maybe there would be some pleasant surprises.
There were indeed pleasant surprises. And an awful lot of car-centric East Portland-ness, too.
Photos are a bit half-hearted, sorry. There were many perfectly nice neighborhoods that wouldn't have photographed worth squat, so I didn't try. There many other areas that I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to photograph whatsoever, because they were so mugh. So. You get idiosyncratic and incomplete.
We began at the intersection of 103rd and 104th Drives, just north of Division Street, in a neighborhood that I'd never heard of before: Cherry Park. It's very not-Portland, as I think of it: all immaculately groomed Atomic Era ranch-style homes, with frequent cul-de-sacs. We used to live next to a similar Atomic Era mini-neighborhood in Eastmoreland, and we always avoided it on our rambles: it always felt hostile to us. Some of that is simply the way the architecture and planning shunts people away from their sidewalks and front yards, but I also always felt glared at from behind the windows. Cherry Park felt that way to me, too, a little bit. I bit my tongue pretty much all the way through the neighborhood, trying not to sing "Somewhere That's Green."
It's very clear, btw, why it's named Cherry Park: a good two thirds of the street trees -- and all of the mature street trees -- are cherry trees. Old, gnarled, beat-up, rotting out, very abused cherry trees. They made quite a contrast to the ultra-groomed-ness of everything else.
We were expecting the next bit to be kinda horrible: we'd be walking through/around/past a shopping mall, a hospital, and several other big "we have a huge campus with lots of asphalt on it and no through-streets" areas on the map. It turned out to be not bad at all. Indirect -- the big jag deviating from the NW corner of the beer glass circle is essentially unavoidable -- but not the asphalt horrorshow I was expecting. The hospital grounds were very pretty for short-cutting through, and this pretty-enough undeveloped street ran just beside Mall 205's uber-expanse of asphalt.
Along Cherry Blossom Drive, there's a mini-mall that is so protective of its back parking lot, and/or so scared of the pedestrians who use the sidewalk, that it erected a barbed wire fence along the sidewalk. Weirdly, the fence doesn't butt against anything: anyone who pleases can walk around the end of it. So, for no apparent reason that I can see, sidewalk users have to walk down a long, fenced-in tunnel, completely screened from traffic on the street. I'm not much freaked by walking at night, but this is a stretch of sidewalk that I would very much like to avoid during more deserted hours.
Here, have a picture of a brand-new baby Douglas Fir cone. I adore the pointillism of Douglas Firs when they're putting on their spring growth.
We next walked through a nice-but-boring neighborhood of 70s-era split-level condos, then cut through Midland Park, reaching Midland Library fifteen minutes after it closed, so no tour of the library, boo. And that put us onto SE 122nd.
That's nine lanes of asphalt, there, if you count the bike lanes and parking lanes, and I do. This is about as pretty as it got: behind us, it was all used car lots, ahead of us, it was all dentist offices. Technically, we should have been walking on the other side of it, around about where 123rd should have been, but there is no 123rd, and we didn't want to go through the bother of crossing that mess twice.
The upside of 122nd: we could stop for Slurpees at a convenient 7-11, and so we did.
Around in there we willfully deviated from the beer-glass circle. The edge of the circle was a (non-existent) block to our east. But one or two blocks to our west there was a city park. And really, we'd much rather walk through that park, then along 122nd.
A bit later, we found a foreclosed house that no one was caring for.
And then we were back around to Division Street -- again, nine lanes of asphalt -- which we would need to cross twice. The mountain was out.
Quite unexpectedly, we came across (what the internet tells me is) a Buddhist Sangha. Linh Son Temple, on SE 118th.
Lots of Douglas Firs along this stretch. Very pretty.
Somewhere in there we got a bit... not quite lost, but had a difficult time figuring out where we could get through, east to west. Thus the big southward deviation off the circle. I'm sure we could have done a bit better staying on the circle if we'd been more familiar with the neighborhood. My mapping of the walk isn't quite accurate, because there were odd little accessways from streets to schools to parks like this...
...which I could not find any trace of on Google maps. Actually, that was one of the awkward things about this walk: we had a car map and a bike map, neither of which agreed with each other about where one could and could not get through -- each map optimized for different modes of transport, of course -- and neither one terribly accurate with respect to walking. But so it goes.
You'll see by the map that we swung quite close to Kelly Butte before we were done, but the sun angles were all quite horrible for taking photos of it. But 'twas lovely, indeed: steep hill rising sharply out of flatland, covered in Douglas fir, one of the Boring Lavas. 'Twould be nice to explore some time in the future.
And then one more crossing of Division, and back into Cherry Park, completing the circle.
Map: the glass and the resultant walk.
Portland has a reputation for being a very walkable city, but just how walkable it is depends on the neighborhood. East Portland is not one of the more walkable areas, unfortunately. It was annexed by the city fairly recently, and has never gotten much love nor money from the civic planners. There's an interstate bypass plunked right through the middle of it, and it trends toward being car-centric. We'd had kind of a bad feeling about using an Outer SE map for our beer glass, but had decided to go ahead anyway: we really don't know East Portland all that well, and maybe there would be some pleasant surprises.
There were indeed pleasant surprises. And an awful lot of car-centric East Portland-ness, too.
Photos are a bit half-hearted, sorry. There were many perfectly nice neighborhoods that wouldn't have photographed worth squat, so I didn't try. There many other areas that I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to photograph whatsoever, because they were so mugh. So. You get idiosyncratic and incomplete.
We began at the intersection of 103rd and 104th Drives, just north of Division Street, in a neighborhood that I'd never heard of before: Cherry Park. It's very not-Portland, as I think of it: all immaculately groomed Atomic Era ranch-style homes, with frequent cul-de-sacs. We used to live next to a similar Atomic Era mini-neighborhood in Eastmoreland, and we always avoided it on our rambles: it always felt hostile to us. Some of that is simply the way the architecture and planning shunts people away from their sidewalks and front yards, but I also always felt glared at from behind the windows. Cherry Park felt that way to me, too, a little bit. I bit my tongue pretty much all the way through the neighborhood, trying not to sing "Somewhere That's Green."
It's very clear, btw, why it's named Cherry Park: a good two thirds of the street trees -- and all of the mature street trees -- are cherry trees. Old, gnarled, beat-up, rotting out, very abused cherry trees. They made quite a contrast to the ultra-groomed-ness of everything else.
We were expecting the next bit to be kinda horrible: we'd be walking through/around/past a shopping mall, a hospital, and several other big "we have a huge campus with lots of asphalt on it and no through-streets" areas on the map. It turned out to be not bad at all. Indirect -- the big jag deviating from the NW corner of the beer glass circle is essentially unavoidable -- but not the asphalt horrorshow I was expecting. The hospital grounds were very pretty for short-cutting through, and this pretty-enough undeveloped street ran just beside Mall 205's uber-expanse of asphalt.
Along Cherry Blossom Drive, there's a mini-mall that is so protective of its back parking lot, and/or so scared of the pedestrians who use the sidewalk, that it erected a barbed wire fence along the sidewalk. Weirdly, the fence doesn't butt against anything: anyone who pleases can walk around the end of it. So, for no apparent reason that I can see, sidewalk users have to walk down a long, fenced-in tunnel, completely screened from traffic on the street. I'm not much freaked by walking at night, but this is a stretch of sidewalk that I would very much like to avoid during more deserted hours.
Here, have a picture of a brand-new baby Douglas Fir cone. I adore the pointillism of Douglas Firs when they're putting on their spring growth.
We next walked through a nice-but-boring neighborhood of 70s-era split-level condos, then cut through Midland Park, reaching Midland Library fifteen minutes after it closed, so no tour of the library, boo. And that put us onto SE 122nd.
That's nine lanes of asphalt, there, if you count the bike lanes and parking lanes, and I do. This is about as pretty as it got: behind us, it was all used car lots, ahead of us, it was all dentist offices. Technically, we should have been walking on the other side of it, around about where 123rd should have been, but there is no 123rd, and we didn't want to go through the bother of crossing that mess twice.
The upside of 122nd: we could stop for Slurpees at a convenient 7-11, and so we did.
Around in there we willfully deviated from the beer-glass circle. The edge of the circle was a (non-existent) block to our east. But one or two blocks to our west there was a city park. And really, we'd much rather walk through that park, then along 122nd.
A bit later, we found a foreclosed house that no one was caring for.
And then we were back around to Division Street -- again, nine lanes of asphalt -- which we would need to cross twice. The mountain was out.
Quite unexpectedly, we came across (what the internet tells me is) a Buddhist Sangha. Linh Son Temple, on SE 118th.
Lots of Douglas Firs along this stretch. Very pretty.
Somewhere in there we got a bit... not quite lost, but had a difficult time figuring out where we could get through, east to west. Thus the big southward deviation off the circle. I'm sure we could have done a bit better staying on the circle if we'd been more familiar with the neighborhood. My mapping of the walk isn't quite accurate, because there were odd little accessways from streets to schools to parks like this...
...which I could not find any trace of on Google maps. Actually, that was one of the awkward things about this walk: we had a car map and a bike map, neither of which agreed with each other about where one could and could not get through -- each map optimized for different modes of transport, of course -- and neither one terribly accurate with respect to walking. But so it goes.
You'll see by the map that we swung quite close to Kelly Butte before we were done, but the sun angles were all quite horrible for taking photos of it. But 'twas lovely, indeed: steep hill rising sharply out of flatland, covered in Douglas fir, one of the Boring Lavas. 'Twould be nice to explore some time in the future.
And then one more crossing of Division, and back into Cherry Park, completing the circle.