west by northwest (by midwest)

a tale of two developments no. 3

This is number three in a series of posts about two urban renewal projects that focus on train stations - one in Portland, Oregon, and one in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Yards at Union Station - Portland, Oregon

Living at the Yards at Union Station meant living between two of the most iconic bridges in downtown Portland.  If I walked one block northwest from my building, I took a path beneath the ramp for the Broadway Bridge, which to me always seemed more like a toy bridge than a real one, with its Lego-red paint job and decks that snapped open to let river traffic pass.  Whenever those decks broke apart, I braced for one of them to plunge into the river, even though I knew the counterweights made that next to impossible. I clenched my jaw, held my breath, waited.  I could not continue walking until the bridge became whole again. Sometimes, even after the decks rejoined, I stood under the bridge for ten or twenty minutes at a time, listening to car tires whistle through the grating above.

If I walked a few blocks the opposite direction, I passed under the ramp to the upper deck of the Steel Bridge, which in contrast to the Broadway Bridge always seemed somber and serious, secretive even. It felt simultaneously heavy and insubstantial: a charcoal drawing of a bridge rather than a real one, smudgy and dusty, as if it would leave a thick black coating on my fingers when I touched it.  In certain light, it looked like a Franz Kline painting, or maybe a Motherwell, but not quite that precise. I loved to watch the lower deck rise up, telescoping into the upper one, so boats could pass beneath.  In the springtime, I always thought the bridge was up to something naughty when it raised the lower deck: lifting its skirt so boat passengers could peek up inside.  In the fall and winter, with Portland’s moody rain pelting down, it seemed more intimate, as if the bridge was revealing a secret.

These two bridges marked the borders of the neighborhood and made it feel snug, intimate, secret.  More than that, they articulated two distinct poles of psychogeographic feeling: a desire to hide, to remain closed; and a sense that the place is not quite real, a Lego playland of sorts, the ultimate toy train station for adults.  Even the apartment buildings, painted in contrasting hues of red, blue, yellow, and green, seemed designed with a toy train station in mind. At times, I would stand in the courtyard and try to convince myself the place was real; that the people were real; that the trains really did screech into the station. I never could win that argument with myself.

At the Gateway district in Salt Lake City, I feel a sense of unreality, too, but it is different.  The mall there, with its heated outdoor walking paths and pale yellow brick, feels like something out of Disney Land or Los Angeles, completely out of place.  Even the main street name - Rio Grande - seems designed to create a feeling of displacement. This feels natural to a shopping mall, which after all, thrives on spectacle.  Without that disconnection from reality, shoppers are far less willing to whip out a credit card. But I wonder about the apartments there, and whether the residents feel like the mall marks a boundary for them, a line across which all reality slips away. Or, since they are otherwise isolated from the rest of the city, if the Gateway Mall actually functions like a Gateway into reality - into the bustling heart of downtown.

In a sense, it is impossible to know for sure.  As an outsider, I cannot experience the feeling of arriving and leaving home at Gateway (or, to be precie, the Northgate Apartments). Nor would I have reason to cross the boundary every day, as I did in the Yards at Union Station.  But I plan to craft some psychogeography experiments to at least get a glimpse of what this area really means.