Toasted

Crane
Last Vestige of Industry at North End of South Waterfront

Previous photo of crane.

East Side Snarl

Railed: It’s the most annoying traffic jam in Portland. (Whitney McPhie and Sophia Mick)

I thought getting to South Waterfront was the most fouled up road mess in Portland. Seems I was wrong (unbelievable, I know). Willamette Week tells us that the eastside has a real problem that makes my complaints about South Waterfront sound like entitled white boy whining:

It’s the Most Annoying Traffic Jam in Portland. Here’s How to Fix It by Garrett Andrews

Long trains moving extremely slowly equal maddening waits for drivers on the Central Eastside.

Problem is the railroad cuts the eastside in two and there are only a few place to cross it that are not grade level crossings, which means at rush hour those few crossings are going to be jammed as well.

Here's some more pics from the story:

The railroad crossings at Southeast 11th and 12th avenues. (Brian Burk)

A Union Pacific train passes through the Central Eastside. (Brian Burk)

Portland Railroads

The portion of eastside of Portland near the Willamette River is full of railroad tracks. It's hard to get a clear view of the situation. If you zoom out you see orange lines running from top to bottom. 

Union Pacific Albina Yard Portland
(black blotch on previous map)

Zoom in to see how many tracks and you can only see five percent of the line.

Brass Door

Spella Coffee

Stopped in Spella Coffee yesterday for coffee. It's a tiny place, maybe ten by ten, no seating, no food, just good coffee. Noticed this door right off and even without coffee I realized I needed a pic. The pic doesn't do it justice, it is much more impressive in person.

Aluminr

It got me to wondering if anyone still makes brass doors. Not many, but there are a few.

Moroccan brass double door

1920s Raised Medallion Brass Elevator Double Doors

Crazy

Multnomah Athletic Club on Monday evening. (Aaron Mesh)

Willamette Week has a fine example of the difficulty in balancing civil liberties with public safety.

Multnomah Athletic Club Attack Inflames Civil Commitment Debate by Andrew Schwartz

The man who smashed a car full of explosives into the upscale Portland athletic club early Saturday morning has several earlier encounters with law enforcement.

I-5 Tunnel?

Tunnel Roadway Profile and Upstream Alignment chart

The I-5 bridge between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington is an antique. They've been talking about replacing since forever, but all the talk has gotten nowhere. Maybe we should consider a tunnel. At the least.

Willamette Week has a few words to say on the subject:

Shouldn’t We Be Talking About Constructing a Tunnel Under the Columbia River?

Clark County Today posted a story three years ago:

Is a tunnel actually viable for crossing the Columbia River?

Previous post about the bridge.

Early photos of the river and bridge.

My hare-brained idea for a bridge.

Downtown

Matador Bar

Went downtown yesterday for a meeting. Meeting was on the umpteenth floor of a high rise. Walk in the front door, tell the man at the desk our names and he gets up and walks over to the elevators, unlocks the console and programs it for our floor. I've never run into this kind of security before. On the upside I successfully navigated our way back to our car that we had parked in the Fox Tower parking garage.
Go in the wrong door of the building and take the wrong elevator and you can end up hiking for hours trying to find your car.

Matador Wallpaper

After the meeting we went to the Matador restaurant for lunch where I saw the most impressive bar (top) and the scary wallpaper in the bathroom (bottom).

Downtown Portland

418 SW Washington St. Portland Oregon

A couple days ago we heard that the fancy new Ritz Carlton had been reposessed by the lender. Now we hear about this. Things are looking kind of grim for the commercial real estate market. Well, grim for owners, but maybe opportunity for newcomers.

Willamette Week reports:

The Merchant Banker Building—the former home of landmark restaurant Greek Cuisina—has a new owner. . . . The sale price was $1.2 million. . . .  The 1898 building is 22,920 square feet. Its last sale price in 2019 was $6.1 million.

$50 a square foot is a pretty good price for a building. No telling what kind of shape it's it, but as old as it is, it is surely going to require some work.

 

War on Drugs

Stolen entire from Willamette Week.

Have Illegal Drug Prices Increased Since the Military Started Blowing Up Boats?

Even if U.S. drug policy weren’t being created by people with the analytical skills of a meth-addled raccoon, it probably still wouldn’t make much of a dent.

By Marty Smith

Now that Trump has “closed the border” and blown up “drug boats,” are there fewer illegal drugs available? Have illegal drug prices increased? —Just Curious

I’m sure you will be stunned to learn, Curious, that the Trump administration—normally so careful in its research and planning—appears to have no strategy in the Caribbean beyond “reach new heights in dickishness.” That might win you a Republican primary, but it won’t have much effect on the drug trade beyond making Latin American authorities less inclined to help us stop it.

There are two tiny mitigating factors, however—nothing that will keep Pete Hegseth from burning in hell, but worth noting. The first is that, shockingly, drugs from Colombia really do leave Venezuela in small boats bound for distribution hubs in the lesser Antilles. It’s cocaine, not fentanyl, and it’s mostly bound for Europe, not America, but by Trump administration standards, getting even this much right is an intelligence coup to rival the cracking of the Enigma code in World War II. If the military were to interdict these boats rather than blowing them up, they might even find drugs. Too bad we’ll never know!

The second caveat is that even if U.S. drug policy weren’t being created by people with the analytical skills of a meth-addled raccoon, it probably still wouldn’t make much of a dent. Drugs are kicking ass—if cocaine were a person, it would probably act so arrogantly you’d think it had just snorted a massive rail of itself. Over the past decade, the yield of coca per acre has doubled, while the number of acres devoted to the plant in Colombia increased by two-thirds. The fact that U.S. officials seized a record amount of cocaine last year almost certainly reflects a bigger crop rather than better policing.

Mind you, the Trump administration is still finding ways to make things even worse. In spite of those record seizures, drug prosecutions are down 10%, thanks to the pivot from drug enforcement to immigration. And the fact that federal prosecutors have been leaving the reeling Justice Department in droves will only accelerate this trend.

Meanwhile, back here on the home front, two young people at the hippest bar I can get into confirmed that retail prices for blow are still holding steady at around $100 a gram, with no recent supply or quality shocks. Further evidence that drugs won the drug war: It didn’t even occur to them to worry I might be a narc.

Bistro Alder

Bistro Alder Ceiling

Had dinner with wife and older son at Bistro Alder yesterday evening. We lucked out when we got a table because they were pretty much fully booked.

The ceiling in this place is nuts. Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to create this.

Detail

Doom Loop

I've always enjoyed Willamette Week though I seldom read it. I would pick up a print copy whenever I was in Portland and saw one, but that didn't happen often, maybe a couple three times a year. I added it to Feedly a few weeks ago and while there is a lot of fluff, there are some stories that nobody else is talking about and Doom Loop is one of them.

Want to roll a grenade into holiday conversations in Portland? Bring up the “doom loop.”

At WW, we’ve decided it’s the term of the year. In the strictest definition, a doom loop starts when remote work frees people from commuting downtown. Office buildings tumble in value, shrinking property tax collection. Restaurants and stores that rely on the lunchtime trade go out of business. Foot traffic suffers.

The decline in government revenue means services get cut—like police and social work—so crime increases along with the number of homeless people per capita downtown. More people opt to work at home, many out of fear, and a kind of tornado spins into being, silent and unseen, but capable of great devastation.

One example:

On Dec. 15, the Morgan, a landmarked, eight-story building in the heart of downtown, sold for $6 million in cash, or $40 a square foot. Eight years ago, it fetched $27.6 million, or $184 a square foot. That decline is what doom loops are made of. Last year, Morgan’s owners paid $271,472.36 in property taxes on an assessed value of $13.6 million. 

Tatas for Toys

Tatas for Toys (thomas chamberlain/Tatas for Toys)

Strippers Are Now No. 1 Donor of Toys to Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Willamette Week has the story.

Addiction

District Attorney Nathan Vasquez. (Nathaniel Perales)

Oregon has been trying to figure out what to do about recreational / dangerous / addictive / narcotic drugs for a while. We haven't found a solution, but we keep trying different things. Some people say we should just lock up all the drug addicts, but keeping people in prison costs a lot of money, and the prisons are overcrowded anyway, and nobody wants to spend more money on prisons. Anyway, Nathan is going to try tightening up the existing laws. We shall see if that makes any difference. Willamette Week has the story, wherein I found this quote:

Finallynelson50, via Reddit: “Clearly, none of you have ever had an addiction to drugs problem. This new shit on the streets is bad. Starts out delivering an immense high and you love it. Feels like everything in your life has just disappeared. Abused sexually, physically, emotionally, childhood issues, you name it, it’s all gone for the time being. Then you notice that you need more to achieve the same high. You want to quit, but you can’t! No one except an addict knows what it feels like to get ‘SICK,’ you’d literally sell your soul to not get sick! It literally makes everything in your body excruciatingly painful like you can’t imagine. Most users you see out there are looking for the drugs so they don’t get sick. None of you know what you’re talking about. The only thing that this is going to do is keep the jails full! And that, of course, makes the government money.”

I don't see how keeping the jails full makes anyone any money, unless it's a private prison, and I don't think we have any of those here in Oregon.

 

Culture Comes to Foster Road

Foster Theater lobby in November 2025 (Foster Theater)

Foster Road in Portland used to be kind of a rough and tumble neighborhood, but it seems to have outgrown that. The Classical Ballet Academy pushed to revamp the nextdoor Foster Theater.

Clyde's Prime Rib

Clyde's Prime Rib

Had lunch here last Friday. The place is like a throwback to the fifties with a dining room, cocktail lounge and live jazz at night. Very plush, and very good food, even my low rent cheeseburger was delicious.

Clyde's Dining Room

There was a sign near the entrance proclaiming Wall to Wall Soul, and photos all around the dining room of black musicians, most of whom I had never heard of. I did recognize some of the tunes being played.

Boss 302

This fine Mustang was in the parking lot when we left. Just amazing since it's at least 50 years old.

& Juliet - Keller Auditorium

& Juliet | Official Broadway Trailer
&Juliet Broadway

Light weight, comic book comedy. Very funny, I recognized some of the tunes, but the body of the songs sounded very different than the version you hear on the radio. Here it was mostly full vocal chorus, with not so much emphasis on the instrumental portion.

& Juliet is a 2019 coming-of-age jukebox musical featuring the music of Swedish pop songwriter Max Martin, with a book by David West Read. The story focuses on a "what if" scenario, where Juliet decided not to kill herself at the end of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.- Wikipedia

Knowing who Max Martin is will give you a clue as to this show's flavor. Never heard of him? Me neither, he just happens to be ze most profilic pop-hit writer ever:

Karl Martin Sandberg, known professionally as Max Martin, is a Swedish record producer and songwriter. He rose to prominence in the late 1990s with songwriting credits on a string of hit singles, such as:

• Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" (1998), 
• The Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" (1999), 
• Celine Dion's "That's the Way It Is" (1999) and 
• NSYNC's "It's Gonna Be Me" (2000).

Martin has written or co-written 27 Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles; 25 of which he has produced or co-produced, an all-time record for the chart as of March 2024. His credits include 

• Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (2008) and "Roar" (2013),
• Maroon 5's "One More Night" (2012),
• Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space" (2014), and
• the Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" (2015), "Blinding Lights" (2019) and "Save Your Tears" (2020).

 "Blinding Lights" is the best performing song of all time according to the chart. Martin has written the second-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32), having surpassed John Lennon (26) with his 27th number one in March 2024. Many of Martin's hits were used in the 2019 jukebox musical & Juliet. - Wikipedia

 

Go Play in Traffic Kid

Space Age Quik Mart

Drove to the airport to pick up dangerous daughter this afternoon. Google Maps tells me traffic is going to be bad, so I opt to take Germantown Road over to St. Johns and thence Colombia Boulevard east to the airport. Things were going along swimmingly until I got about halfway down the far side of Forest Park and then traffic came to a halt. It was creepy crawly until the bottom of the hill. 

Often, at the bottom of the hill there are a dozen or so cars backed up waiting to turn onto the ramp for the St. Johns Bridge, but this time it was about a mile, so it took a little while to get through that. Get to the bottom of the hill and there is no sign of any problem. However, go up the ramp and onto the bridge and we find that a car had broken down there. A tow truck had just shown up when I drove by. At least the plug hadn't been on the road coming down the hill. I'd probably still be there in that case. The rest of the way to the airport was smooth sailing.

Coming back I wanted to turn left on MLK, but there was a honking big gas truck trying to pull into the Space Mart station there. He was blocking two lanes of traffic, so the opposing traffic ended up having to use my left turn lane to get around him. Yeah, with all this traffic I'm not making a left turn here, which means taking Vancouver which is a drag because it's loaded with speed bumps. 

These days, I often find myself driving down streets I've never been on before. Call me Chuck, the intrepid street explorer.

P. S. I have written a dozen or posts that mention Germantown Road. 

Big Pink

U. S. Bancorp Tower - aka Big Pink

I get a newsletter from a realtor I know. We've bought and sold several houses in the 30-odd years we've lived here. He's not perfect, we didn't get as much money for one house as I thought we should, to the tune of a few thousand dollars. On the other hand, one house that I bought without him, I overpaid like a hundred grand. Well, in hindsight it seems that way. But that might just be my own internal criticism. I looked at the house and I could see there were some problems, but I thought they could be easily fixed. Conceptually they were, but it took a heck of a lot more work and money than I imagined. The upshot of all this is that having someone that you trust, tell you that you're looking at a fair price, that is invaluable.

Anyway, this newsletter pointed to this story from KATU:

Sale of Portland's iconic 'Big Pink' could spur city's recovery, economist says

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — The advertised sale of Portland's largest office building has the Rose City back in the national news. However, an economist says the transaction could spark the city’s recovery.

The Unico/US Bancorp Tower building last sold for a little more than $370 million in 2015 and is expected to fetch a fraction of that if and when it sells. But, despite some people viewing the sale as proof of Portland’s fall, Mike Wilkerson said the possible sale marks a turning point.

“This will be individuals, institutional investors putting tens of millions of dollars into Portland [and] saying, ‘We believe in the future of the city, and we're willing to invest at this rate,' and from there, that's how the growth cycle starts. We've been stuck at the bottom because we needed this activity. This will be the beginning of the recovery,” Wilkerson, director of Economic Research at ECOnorthwest, said.

Wilkerson said the bad news is the possible impact the reduced market value of the property has on property tax collections for the city of Portland and Multnomah County.

A previous KATU investigation found many of Portland’s largest office buildings have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in combined market value, contributing to budget deficits in both local governments.

The advertised sale of Portland’s largest office building has the Rose City back in the national news. However – an economist says the transaction could spark the city’s recovery.

“The good news far outweighs any of that bad news damage because, effectively, what it's doing is saying, ‘Let's reset Portland as a place that is on a trajectory for upward investment,’” Wilkerson said.

The challenge for a buyer is what to do with the building after buying it. An advertisement for its sale indicated the building is 55% vacant; it has more vacant space than some entire office buildings downtown.

That vacancy level outpaces the vacancy rate of Class A properties in downtown Portland, roughly 35%, according to market research that real estate broker Colliers shared with KATU.

Wilkerson said even the possibility of selling the property, along with PacWest, which is also for sale, shows buyers and sellers starting to discuss what downtown properties are worth.

“Once you have two of the largest buildings transacting, the market now will have confidence that, OK, if it's selling at $100 a square foot or $70 a square foot or $50 a square foot, everyone in the rest of the market will say, ‘OK, now as a seller you're realistic in what that building is worth,’ versus holding out hope that it's worth closer to what you purchased it for five, 10 years ago,” Wilkerson said.

“What kind of impact do [sales like this] have on the economic recovery of a city,” KATU asked Wilkerson.

“Massive. What we need as a city is economic development or growth, and that starts with dollars coming into the region that don't exist here today,” Wilkerson said. “So, for us as a region, attracting that scale of capital flows all the way downstream into jobs, into income, into growth, and so these are some of the most crucial steps that we need to facilitate a recovery.”

Asked Google what it costs to build a skyscraper and this was the reply:

The cost to build a skyscraper can vary widely, but generally ranges from $300 to $600 per square foot in major urban areas.

If the price per square foot drops to $50 or $100, it might make it worthwhile to turn all this office space into living spaces, like apartments or condos. Talking to eldest son about this and he pointed out that just cutting up the floor with new partitions wouldn't cut it, you'd have to rework all the plumbing and all the wiring. Reworking the plumbing might be done more easily if you could raise the floor by one or two feet. That would depend on whether the ceilings are tall enough. And you might have to do something with the windows, like replace all of them. In any case, you would need some clever people to figure out the details and how to get it done without breaking the bank.

Thinking about all this, I am beginning to understand why what-look-like-perfectly-good buildings get knocked down to make room for a new ones.

Integrating Nature & Machine

Fire Hydrant

Saw this while I was out walking around somewhere in northwest Portland.

South Waterfront Portland Oregon

The John Ross Building

We've been visiting medical offices down in the South Waterfront neighborhood. We've been making infrequent visits for several years, but lately it seems like we head down there every week. Getting down there is a pain, and getting out of there is a pain as well. When you only go down there once a year, it's tolerable, but with our trips becoming more frequent it's becoming a real pain, so I've started looking for alternate routes. All routes are still ridiculously annoying, but at least I have my choice of misery.

The standard route down South Kelly Avenue results in you having to make an unprotected left turn across a stream of traffic exiting the Ross Island Bridge, and that stream is nearly continuous, so you will likely be stuck, waiting to turn, for what seems like an eternity.

My next choice was taking Southwest Barbur Boulevard south to South Hamilton Street and then turning left. Barbur is a main drag, and busy, but at least there is a light at this corner. However, the one time I tried this route there was a line of cars so long that it was backing up on the main route. Made me nervous, sitting there with my ass end sticking out into traffic.

Our latest route is taking Southwest Market Street all the way down till it goes over the edge, down the hill and round the corner to South Harbor Drive. This one is the best so far, but the last half-mile involves crawling down South Moody Avenue. Here you are beset with a stream of pedestrians, bicycles and streetcars.

Now that I have a way to get down there, it's time to start thinking of how to get out of here. There isn't a good one. When we were visiting the OHSU Plaza on Southwest Whitaker Street it was a simple matter of turning right onto South Moody Avenue and retracting our steps. Turns out this is is only way to get onto Moody heading north. If you are anywhere else in South Waterfront, you still need to go by the OHSU Plaza on Whitaker, and that block can sometimes be a cluster fuck with everyone and their mother trying worm their way in. It's where people are getting dropped off or picked up, and it's also where the entrance to the parking garage is. It might be the only public parking garage in the entire area. There are plenty of parking garages, but they are all locked and gated and for residents only.

There is another way to get onto Moody, but you have to go south several blocks, then west to Macadam, which takes you up a small hill, out of the neighborhood and into the realm of high speed traffic. Then take Macadam north and then turn right on Southwest Curry Street, which takes you back down the hill to Moody.

The standard way to get out is take Macadam north, take freeway on ramp to Kelly and then get in line with a zillion over fools all crawling up the hill till you can get on the freeway and escape this nightmare.

On our latest visit, I decided to try going south on Macadam. There is only one place where you get onto Macadam going south and that is at the far south end of the area on South Bancroft Street. Head south until you get close to the Elephant Deli, and then head west up the hill one block to South Corbett Avenue. Take that north to Hamilton and thence onto Barbur. Not a bad route, but it does take you a couple of miles out of your way.

I don't know how this place got to be such a mess, but part of it is no doubt due to the way I-5 was built 60 years ago. At that time South Waterfront was an industrial area so the only reason anyone went there was to go to work. Now industry has mostly moved out and the high-rises have moved in. I've spent some time walking around down here and there are a few businesses like coffee shops, but there are also numerous unoccupied conference rooms, aka presentation rooms for condo sales. I mean, you never know when you are going to need one of those.

Anyway, I looked about a bit to see if Portland had any plans to improving access and they only thing I found was a plan that talked about bicycles and walking paths and transit. Portland is waging a war on cars, but that policy discourages anyone outside the area from going anywhere in downtown Portland.

South Waterfront Portland Oregon

The only good route into South Waterfront is to take Macadam north from Lake Oswego, which is great if you live there, but miles out of the way for me.

Update the next day. Replaced map with one that has routes highlighted. Only one color available for drawing driving routes. Also fixed half a dozen typos.

Tweakers

Fentanyl pills on the streets on Portland, where such doses of the great annihilator cost as little as $1 apiece. (Credit: Tara Faul)

IAman is looking to move to Bingen, Washington. Bingen is about 60 miles east of Portland across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon.

The main reason for the move is our neighborhood is the drug / murder epicenter.  3 middle aged good Samaritans murdered in last few months. 

This article captures the bad stuff that I see. 

Oregon’s Drug Apocalypse - Matt Thompson

The linked story is pretty horrofic.

Previous posts about IAman's current residence:

• Witness to the end of Civilization
• The Borg Have Landed