Portland: Washington Park

In part to adjust to Pacific Time, and in part because I wanted to see Portland instead of the inside of yet more buildings (the cabin fever of conferencing in a hotel set in early), I planned most of our activities to be outdoors. There are a number of parks in and around the city for walking/hiking, among them Washington Park on the west side, where the zoo, Hoyt Arboretum, a children's museum, Japanese Garden, and the famous International Rose Test Garden are located. There was hardly anything blooming this time of year in the City of Roses.

First we hiked up a residential hill in search of “Portland’s favorite tree,” a redwood that won the honor in a in the last popular election of the kind, in 1987. I had noticed a pin in Google Maps, but the GPS was slightly off that day, so we sort of cast about for several minutes until Dear Husband finally noticed the small metal plaque buried at the base of the trunk that declared this particular tall tree (and not the tall ones 50 feet away) as the supreme tree in a city that has many lining its streets and filling its green spaces. I didn’t get a good picture of its towering greatness, but this snarky blogger did.

Then it was on up the hill even further—DH: Pittsburgh, I thought you prepared me with hill training!—to Washington Park. Right there at the entrance is the Lewis and Clark column, donated by the good people of the states of Oregon, Idado, Montana, and Washington in 1903. It enjoys pride of place at the formal entrance to the park, but as monuments go, it’s one of the less ostentatious I’ve ever seen. 

Down the slope a little ways stands Sacagawea’s statue. She carries her baby, Jean-Baptiste, on her back and points west (away from the Lewis and Clark column, incidentally). Alice Cooper sculpted it on commission by the Committee of Portland Women for the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exhibition that was held in Portland in 1905. (This was earlier than I suspected--I assumed she hadn't been added until the 1990s.)

We continued deeper in the park to find the Oregon Holocaust Memorial, which may be one of the best (read: most accurate) I have ever seen. A brick path leads from a “European” streetlamp toward an arc of granite. It is strewn with discarded items in bronze: a suitcase, a violin, eyeglasses, a teddy bear, a baby shoe. On the memorial wall is a large chunk of text expertly describing how the Nazis dragged Europe into chaos and destruction. Then come a series of quotations from victims, including the one that seemed to tie the memorial together: "If you got off of the train with your little bag the Nazis knew you had something personal, something special inside. That bag was the last thing they took before they took your life." On the back side are the names of murdered relations of Oregonian Jews. This visit was especially poignant as we were there on Rosh Hashanah.

Last stop on our monument tour was “The Coming of the White Man,” by Hermon Atkins MacNeil (1904). Two Native men, one older, one younger, stand on a pedestal amongst the trees facing east, toward the Columbia River. It was the most difficult statue to find, as there was no signage, although a parking lot had been conveniently provided for anyone arriving by motor vehicle (we were on foot). We were not entirely sure what the point is: Chief Multnomah appears resolute, while the younger man is agitated (to violence? Is the object in his hand part of a torch or a dagger?) or maybe just surprised. The title does not name the figures we see, but rather the historical figures they saw: the white man/men not represented in metal. In this way the statue and its title appear to erase the Native American presence all over again, although they are standing right in front of us. Why did the designer decide to “honor” Native Peoples by depicting a Native reaction to Lewis and Clark, rather than as members of nations and cultures that existed independently of Europeans (and continue to exist)?

Did you miss the post about the Japanese Garden (I've added a new photo since it went live)? Have you ever seen a Chinese Garden?