The ability to reveal the hidden layers of hydrology can take many forms. Public art is a great mechanism for telling stories in ways that engage and reveal that which is often missing from our day to day experiences. These artworks also highlight key contributions of communities that are often marginalized in the official histories we are taught. Artists Shu-Ju Wang and Lynn Yarne developed a vibrant example of this at the new Lincoln High School in Portland with a large exterior mural called Restoration Roadmaps which locates the hidden hydrology story within the context of the urban high school. The summary of the project, from the artistโs website for Restoration Roadmaps provides some of processes and the outcomes:
โThe process enabled us to come to a final design that is a combination of several forms of maps to describe the neighborhoodโfrom historical to a hoped for future, from topographical to ecological, from google map to the old fashioned foldout map. Student and community responses are recorded as part of the topographical contours and inset panels.โ
The images are rich with detail, focusing on the high school site and the contemporary grid, juxtaposed with the Tanner Creek historical route with other water bodies that have been erased. The creek gulches were the locations of highly productive garden areas farmed by Chinese immigrants and also provided historical areas of Native American occupation. The mural includes smaller square panels with community work done by other artists and students, and the perimeter of the mural provides detailed assemblages of 40 species of flora and fauna Indigenous to the area.
It was fun to see the process evolve and the final product โin the wildโ below. Let me know if youโre local and have seen the mural, or if there are other murals in your community celebrating hidden hydrology. Would love to hear from you.
Beyond helping with some mapping for the mural, my other contribution was this short video, Tanner Creek Hidden Hydrology, walking through the history of the area in the context of the historical water. Iโve included the video below:
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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 02/28/25 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/20/25.
In Northwest Portland, Oregon, red-legged frogs living in Forest Park face a dangerous commute in the fall and winter, traversing from their upland homes down to the spawning grounds adjacent to the Willamette River. The species typically is found in conifer hardwood forests that have an aquatic-terrestrial connection to ponds and wetlands as part of their life cycles.
Northern Red-legged Frog
The degree of landscape changes inherent over time is seen in a series of maps spanning the previous century and a half of urbanization, centered near present-day Harborton, the location of a critical habitat connection for the frogs. From the original surveys in the 1850s, the area was lightly developed, and the areas noted as โTimber, Fir, Cedar, Maple, Hemlock, Yew, etc.โ showing the zones that would become modern Forest Park and the uninterrupted upland to lowland connections along the Willamette River.
By the 1900s and the mapping from the USGS Topographic Survey, some development was happening along the water in the early town of Linnton, and the rail lines were built that started to sever these historical ecological connections.
1897 USGS Topographic Survey (via TopoView)
The current aerial image shows the clear line marking upland to lowland as separated by roadways and more impervious industrial development located along the Willamette River, reducing the amount of shoreline habitat.
2024 Aerial Image (via Google Earth)
The historical upland to lowland conditions has been radically disturbed along the entire margin of Forest Park. We could infer from the series of maps that historically, the frogs had significantly more habitat options along a much larger zone (and even more if you look at maps south of here showing additional lakes and wetlands), and that over time, a series of human-made linear barriers (railroad, roads) and urbanization cut off connections while reducing overall shoreline habitat. This ultimately resulted in a severe decline in several species populations, including the red-legged frogs.
As you see from a zoomed-in area, the major impediment for the frogs is a gauntlet, including a four-lane Highway 30, another smaller side road, and railroad tracks that prevent frogs from safely accessing the breeding area around the Willamette. Described by many as a real-life game of Frogger, the result is documented mass killings of frogs that attempt migration to these zones in rainy seasons.
As a response to the negative impacts of the species, an intrepid group of volunteers has implemented what they call the Frog Taxi. Starting in 2013, as documented on the site Linnton Frogs, the group has mobilized annually to collect frogs from Forest Park, transporting them across Highway 30 and other roads and railroad tracks to get to the breeding around along the Willamette, and then relocating them back across the roadway to the upland. You can see some stats of the groupโs work from 2013-2021. The work has continued, and Oregon Field Guide recently did a story on this yearโs Frog Taxi, which provides a great overview of the process the volunteers undertake to save this remnant population of red-legged frogs.
Taxi to Where?
Making it across the barrier alone or via taxi only solves one part of the equation. To fully connect the life cycle, viable habitat conditions need to be provided for suitable breeding conditions on the waterside. The landscape of the entire edge of the area used to include the multiple connected ecosystems lakes along a long riverfront edge, including Guildโs, Kitteridge’s, and Doaneโs, which is notable as their surrounding wetland margins have been impacted.
Once the frogs can reach the site, the original habitat must be restored to provide suitable conditions. Currently owned by PGE, the taxi โdrop-off’โ site is the locus of additional restoration efforts, as noted from the PGE site related to the Harborton Habitat Project:
โThe site is one of the largest known breeding grounds for northern red-legged frogs, an amphibian species classified as โsensitiveโ by the state of Oregon and a โspecies of concernโ under Federal listing status. Additionally, the property is situated where the Willamette River meets Multnomah Channel โ a perfect spot for juvenile salmon to rest and find food on their way to the Pacific Ocean.โ
The overall goal is to move from taxi service to more uninterrupted connections from the upland forest to the pools to eliminate the game of Frogger, as well as eliminate the need for volunteers to fill the role of taxi drivers. The next iteration involves increasing overall habitat mobility through an amphibian tunnel that will funnel the frogs along the edges and allow them to move under the roadways and rail lines, connecting Forest Park directly to Harborton. As noted, the Harborton Frog Crossing Project proposed this new connection:
โIn an effort to save the dwindling frog population, local wildlife officials and the Oregon Wildlife Foundation have proposed to build a highway underpass to grant the amphibians safe passage. The project calls for a concrete culvert beneath Northwest St. Helens Road and Marina Way to help the frogs reach their preferred breeding grounds.โ
Other studies are helping pinpoint more specifics related to the locations and magnitude of the problem. There is funding to assess the mortality of the frog populations is underway by Northwest Ecological Research Institute (NERI), and funded by the Oregon Conservation & Recreation Fund Projects and the Oregon Zoo. The specific goals hope to inform the amphibian tunnel, as they state:
โA wildlife undercrossing and/or creating improved wetland spaces that do not require road crossings are the primary proposed solutions. These are expensive, infrastructure-based solutions, and more data is required to find the most appropriate path forward. Specifically, increased data on the rate and location of frogs being killed at road crossings will inform timing and movement patterns to find the best solution.โ
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Wildlife Ways
The Oregon Wildlife Corridor Action Plan (ODFW, January 2024) notes that there are naturally occurring barriers to wildlife movement, but the most critical are human-caused barriers that block movement. Within the context, they also discuss how barriers are relative to species, as quoted:
โThe most readily apparent human-caused barriers to animal movement are the physical structures that impede or outright prevent connectivity, such as buildings, fences, roadways, solar developments, and dams. The response of wildlife to structures varies by structure type and by species. For example, a fox may be able to make its way around a large industrial complex, whereas for a frog the complex might represent an impassable barrier. While not all physical structures will completely block animal movement, these features are often associated with increased risk of mortality for wildlife due to collisions, entanglement, entrapment, and persecution. Two of the most prevalent physical impediments to wildlife connectivity are roadways and fencing.โ
Wildlife crossings, in general, are gaining momentum with various overpass and underpass options that direct and funnel species from habitat areas and provide safe passage through dangerous areas. The focus is often on larger species, specifically deer and elk, here in Oregon, moving between fragmented parcels of land. There is also the potential to reduce vehicle-wildlife collisions, with specific action plans to provide more solutions. These are dynamic opportunities to connect large habitat patches but come at a steep price.
The types of crossings also need to be adapted to the species’ needs. My favorite is the Crab Bridge on Christmas Island in Australia, which provides an almost vertical climb and spans over a roadway to facilitate the migration of red crabs.
Another analog is the work being done for fish passage, including strategies for repairing culverts to provide better access for fish, installing tidal gates to better allow movement up and downstream in fluctuating water cycles and implementing fish screens to limit access to certain waterways while providing access to certain areas necessary for the species to thrive. These are less visible than the larger wildlife connections; however, they also come at a significantly smaller cost and can be localized to specific species migration corridors.
The amphibian connections are a microcosm of these types of projects. More modest in scale, but growing in popularity, there are numerous examples around the globe of different types of passages that work for different amphibian species. The hope is that these will continue to do some of the necessary repair work for the severed connections between critical hydrological habitats, hopefully helping the Harborton Red-Legged Frog populations survive and thrive and give the taxi drivers a break.
Amphibian Crossing example from Doรฑana National Park, Spain (via Research Gate)
If you are aware of other examples of strategies being used to allow amphibians or other species to facilitate movement in fragmented landscapes, particularly those that are disconnected from historical waterways via development, I would love to hear about them.
Anyone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest for some time is acutely aware that the intensity of rainfall events has dramatically shifted due to climate change. When I moved to Portland in the 1990s, the default was a constant, misty drizzle, which has now been replaced at regular intervals with a winter full of torrential downpours amongst a slew of other climatic shifts like hotter summers and significantly colder and snowier winters.
An occasional โPineapple Expressโ or โChinook Windsโ were outliers, with occasional wet periods caused by shifts bringing warm air and moisture from the Tropics to northern latitudes. These, we know now, are a form of an atmospheric river, a term from the 1990s that has re-emerged as a new addition to our new climate-change-focused lexicon. Atmospheric rivers are water vapor channels in the atmosphere, which can be up to 300 miles wide and over 1000 miles long, typically occurring in the mid-latitudes.
These storms are part of the water cycle, providing a range of positive benefits and negative impacts. Positively, they can help reduce drought and increase snowpack which can help reduce wildfire risk. The negatives result in too much water, too quickly, causing flooding, mudslides, and other damaging impacts. Researchers have been developing methods to predict atmospheric rivers to prevent some of these negative consequences. They have developed a scale ranking the intensity and danger from AR1, noting a weak system that is โprimarily beneficialโ up to AR5, which is noted as โprimarily hazardous.โ
The scale of intensity of atmospheric rivers is a product of the quantity of water vapor by the duration of the event – via USDA Climate Hubs – Atmospheric Rivers
The cycle and intensity of atmospheric rivers will continue to change along with our changing climate, and the water vapor stored in these systems will increase with the continual rising temperatures of the global air and ocean systems. This will mean longer seasons of rainfall, more intense storms, and the need to reconsider our approaches to stormwater management that worked a decade ago but may be falling short.
Connections to Hidden Hydrology
A recent op-ed piece โComment: Atmospheric rivers require new approach to water management.โ (Victoria Times Colonist, 09.31.24) by Alan Shapiro, an environmental consultant, and Tim Morris, director of B.C. Water Legacy, outlines how hidden hydrology can be instrumental in providing resilient green infrastructure for these atmospheric rivers, specifically by reversing the root causes of the problem and reducing resilience: originally removing steams from the urban landscape, paving surfaces, and draining wetlands. They note several ideas like โsponge parksโ and well-tested green infrastructure solutions including โGreen roofs, permeable pavement, and rain gardens mimic natural water processes by absorbing and filtering rainwater like a sponge before returning it to waterways.โ
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The on-the-ground application of this idea can be found in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is highlighted in the article โB.C. atmospheric river a successful first test of community-led rain management project.โย (CBC, 09.26.24) which describes the St. George Rainway and the performance of this green infrastructure system during recent extreme rainfall events. I wrote about this project earlier this year,ย โVancouver Rainwaysโ, (05.03.24) where I described the goals of the project and the context of hidden hydrology in Vancouver. The recent article highlights the hidden hydrological connection, showing how the rainway follows the route of โan ancient, buried creekโ that is a tributary of False Creek:
โThe road and homes along St. George Street are constructed above a creek that historically emptied into False Creek. The creek still runs underground, through a series of pipes and culverts โ where it hasn’t offered the community adequate drainage for at least a decade, often leading to street flooding and damage to the roadway.โ
Daylighting the creek was not feasible due to the impacts on the neighborhood homes and infrastructure. However, the metaphorical river solution of rain gardens utilizes biomimicry principles to provide a linear landscape that provides many of the same benefits of the original creek corridor. The recent atmospheric rivers presented an opportunity to see the project in action where it accommodated large amounts of runoff from adjacent streets.
The ability to trace routes of buried streams provides us with a watershed-based framework to implement green infrastructure solutions that mimic the original hydrology. As you see from the map of Vancouver, B.C. we could start with numerous corridors, using linear green infrastructure solutions like St. George Rainway as a model following closely the street networks. These could be supplemented by larger solutions on public and private property to recreate the functions of wetlands, ponds or other water bodies lost to development over the years. Finally, green roofs and rainwater capture from adjacent buildings and permeable pavements could reduce runoff โ finalizing the holistic, integrated strategy.
Hidden hydrology provides these strategies with a watershed-specific framework for green infrastructure that can provide community-wide resilience to extreme weather like Atmospheric Rivers. This is not meant to be full restoration and daylighting, often challenged by site constraints that make it overly expensive or impactful. Linear green infrastructure is a tool in the toolbox, mimicking the function of urban creeks and streams, providing the same benefits, including absorption of runoff, provision of habitat, urban cooling, and visual access to nature, all following the routes of our lost waterways.
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 11/11/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/22/25.
The article โReaching the Light of Dayโ (Orion, May 23, 2024) is compelling if youโre interested in hidden hydrology. Author Corinne Segal recounts some of the larger themes and projects around โghost streams,โ including work in New York, Baltimore, Auckland, Istanbul, and a handful of other locations. Beyond some of the projects they note, the article poses a larger question regarding our ancient โkinshipโ with water. This struck me as essential to the conversations around hidden hydrology, so took this as an opportunity to explore further. Various nuances and definitions of kinship span from biological to sociological. For a reference point, I grabbed this quick definition:
kinยทship /หkinหSHip/, noun. blood relationship; a sharing of characteristics or origins.
One could make a case for both parts of this definition. While weโre not technically related, there is a physical biochemical connection between our bodies and water, as our lives ultimately depend on water for our existence. Thus โblood relationshipโ takes a literal dimension: healthful when we talk of life-sustaining properties; harmful when we talk about, for instance, toxicity due to water pollution. The negatives are often of our own doing, caused by abuse or neglect of our โkinโ impacting our bodies in negative ways with disease. It is a kinship of reciprocity, reflecting a link between our treatment of our โkinโ and how it is tied physically to our survival.
The second definition here is most compelling, diving into our deeper emotional relationship with water. The โsharing of characteristics or originsโ resonates powerfully with our relationship with water. This summer I read the 2023 posthumously published dialogue with Barry Lopez and writer Julia Martin titled Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects. Much of the discussion focused on how Lopez engaged that kinship early in life through language, as a way to know, only later in life, expanding the relationship through a deeper dive into โsyntaxโ to develop understanding and attain wisdom.
An excerpt from his elaborates on this idea:
โI think when youโre young you want to learn the names of everything. This is a beaver, this is spring Chinook, this is a rainbow trout, this is osprey, elk over there. But itโs the syntax that you really are after. Anybody can develop the vocabulary. Itโs the relationships that are important. And itโs the discerning of this three-dimensional set of relationships that awakens you to how complex this is at any one moment.โ
The only way to develop these three-dimensional relationships is through consistent contact, which requires occupation of and awareness of place. As he visits and revisits his local McKenzie River, he partakes in constant unfolding. He notes some of these observations: โThe water has a slightly different color during the four seasons, depending on how much snow and glacial melt is in it. And the parts of the river that are not visible in the summer are visible in the winter, because of the loss of leaves of deciduous trees.โ
This connection with water, as Lopez describes it, requires spending time physically interacting with these environments, and conducting actual visits with our โkinโ to deepen ties. The wrinkle here is how we adapt this approach for the โlostโ or โforgottenโ, those hidden streams and buried waterways that no longer have a discernable physical presence. The relationship is no longer about observation in the present but about memory. This perhaps is similar to thinking about our lost kin, to think of lost streams in terms of death. In this way. This could be a way to reframe the relationship as grief and loss, allowing us to draw from the deep well of resources to rethink how we remember and celebrate those lost relationships.
Iโm reminded of one of the origin stories of Hidden Hydrology, with author David James Duncan recounting a tale in his fabulous book โMy Story As Told By Waterโ, of the death of one of his favorite fishing spots in his stomping grounds east of Portland:
โAt six-thirty or so on a rainy April morning, I crept up to a favorite hole, threaded a worm on a hook, prepared to cast โ then noticed something impossible: there was no water in the creek. โฆI began hiking, stunned, downstream. The aquatic insects were gone, barbershop crawdads gone, catfish, carp, perch, crappie, bass, countless sacrificial cutthroats, not just dying, but completely vanished. Feeling sick, I headed the opposite way, hiked the emptied creekbed all the way to the source, and there found the eminently rational cause of the countless killings. Development needs roads and drainfields. Roads and drainfields need gravel. Up in the gravel pits at the Glisan Street headwaters, the creekโs entire flow had been diverted for months in order to fill two gigantic new settling ponds. My favorite teacher was dead.โ
It is sometimes challenging to think of hidden hydrology through the lens of grief, but you can feel Duncanโs pain at the loss of this urban creek. Itโs one cut in the death of a thousand cuts that makes up the global tragedy โ the devastation wrought throughout the world on waterbodies in the name of progress. However, the impact is muted for several reasons. First, we, unlike Duncan, are often not around when most of these creeks and streams existed in the first place, so we donโt comprehend what we lost. Second, there are remnants and surviving resources that we can still connect within our cities, so the erasure is not complete enough to equal extinction. Finally, these places fade from memory, and, out of sight, out of mind, we forget as we trod over their buried pipes and filled depression blissfully unaware.
When we lack a strong presence of these historical remnants, we tend to feel greater disconnection, the subtle traces not sufficient for us to feel a connection. This drives our need to reveal and reconnect using a variety of methods: artistic, metaphorical, and ecological. This is hidden hydrology as a practice: the reason for us to study old maps, trace the lines of old creeks, and attempt to restore kinship.
Hidden hydrological features, unlike humans, can physically be restored and brought back to life in a sense. Beyond just memory, we have the potential for rebirth, through our creative endeavors: historical ecology mapping, painting the routes of streams on roadways, ecological restoration, and daylighting. โBack from the deadโ seems a morbid way to think of the processes of restoration, but it gives us the ability to reconnect and restore.
Several other themes can intersect and expand this idea. I recently re-read a portion of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of the Grammar of Animacy. I am struck by the similar themes of kinship, as she discusses how we relate to and reference these ecological systems. An excerpt from an Orion article from 2017, โRobin Wall Kimmerer on the Language of Animacyโ hints at this idea:
If itโs just stuff, we can treat it any way that that we want. But if itโs family, if itโs beings, if theyโre other persons we have ecological compassion for themโฆ Speaking with the grammar of animacy brings us all into this circle of moral consideration. Whereas when we say โit,โ we set those beings, those โthings,โ as they say, outside of our circle of moral responsibility.โ
We connect our morality to things we understand. Another theme that this also evokes is the writings of Robert Macfarlane, particularly when he speaks of language and how words connect us to the natural world, another form of โkinshipโ. I wrote eons ago about this lost language of nature, including Macfarlane and Anne Whiston Spirn, both of who also have written about lost rivers. Along with Lopez and Kimmerer, these authors prod us to rethink our ability to connect with our kin, hidden or visible, degraded or pristine.
Iโm curious to hear your thoughts on how we can develop and expand these relationships, our โkinshipโ, specifically with places no longer visible and viable. Are there good examples you know of where lost relationships have been reestablished? Do you feel a kinship or even see this as a goal, with other species or with the wider landscape?
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 11/06/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/22/25.
Stories of loss around hidden hydrology are not confined to the environmental impacts and the erasure of natural waterways. They can also include the loss of community and larger societal impacts resulting from impacts like flooding that can result from building communities that are out of balance with the larger hydrological systems they inhabit. This month is an appropriate time to remember Vanport, the community built along the Columbia River in North Portland in the early 1940s by Henry J. Keiser to house World War II shipbuilding workers, and the devastating flood on Memorial Day in May 1948 which destroyed the town.
Aerial View of Vanport, looking (OHS Research Libary, Oregon Encylopedia)
The Oregon Experience documentary from 2016, โVanportโ is available to watch online for free and gives an in-depth history of the evolution of the community and its tragic demise. I wrote about the documentary back in 2019 in my post โVanport, A Story of Lossโ if you want a summary of the evolution and fate of the community.
The rapid development of the community quickly made Vanport the largest wartime housing development, with over 40,000 residents, making it also the second largest city in Oregon at the time in the early 1940s. The community was built around water, nestled near the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette, with channels of the Columbia slough and smaller lakes providing amenities for residents.
I love the two images from the documentary showing the engagement with water, including an informal beach area adjacent to either Force Lake or Bayou Lake, and a group of kids near one of the sloughs.
There is some debate about whether the rail embankment to the west between Smith Lake and the Vanport community was meant to be a dike or protection from flooding or merely the berm for the railroad lines. For Vanport the question was irrelevant, as the waters rose quickly and breached the raised earthwork, which allowed the floodwaters to quickly inundate the entire town with a โwall of waterโ.
The devastation was compounded by the location within the historical Columbia River floodplain and the ephemeral nature of the construction which was rapid and not meant to be long-lived. Other breaches occurred and the entire area inland became a lake. The images, such as below, of houses floating amid the floodwaters, hint at the lack of solid foundations.
The devastation was immense and swift, leaving behind the wreckage of the community. Over time the debris was cleared and new uses emerged to erase the remnants of the Vanport community, as it is now part of the Portland Expo Center, Heron Lakes Golf Club, Portland International Raceway, and adjacent industrial development.
Vanport was never meant as a permanent community, and the occupation of the site continued well after shipbuilding activities had wound down following the war, providing a refuge for residents who found barriers to housing elsewhere. The suddenness of the destructive forces, the lack of warning and accountability to residents about the dangers of the flooding, and the displacement of numerous residents who became refugees overnight due to the disaster. These compounding forces give this site and its history special meaning for Portanders and the need to discuss, remember, and confront our histories, with lessons to be shared with other communities. The fact that the Vanport has been physically erased from the map also led to its erasure from our memory. It is the same as the burial and erasure of streams, and wetlands, and deserves the same attention to the ecological, hydrological, and cultural forces at work.
The legacy continued with displacement, as a product of racial housing discrimination led to difficulty for groups to find other housing. As mentioned by Abbott in the Oregon Encyclopedia entry:
โRefugees crowded into Portland, a city still recovering from the war. Part of the problem was race, for more than a thousand of the flooded families were African Americans who could find housing only in the growing ghetto in North Portland. The flood also sparked unfounded but persistent rumors in the African American community that the Housing Authority had deliberately withheld warnings about the flood and the city had concealed a much higher death toll.”
It also is important to consider the vulnerability that still exists today. While the installation of Columbia River dams provides some moderation of flood levels that didnโt exist in the 1940s, and the bolstering of true levees and dikes meant to protect from future floods, risks persist along the waterโs edge. This protection is aided today through efforts such as Levee Ready Columbia, working to protect from flood risk in the context of development and climate change in the slough.
Vanport Mosaic
As a reminder of our history and place, additional resources provide the background of life at Vanport and the people who called it home for a brief time. This video โVanport: Legacy of a Forgotten Cityโ, below, is worth checking out for more context about the community and the work being done to keep the memory alive. The video is part of a great resource, Vanport Mosiac, which calls itself โโฆa memory-activism platform. We amplify, honor, and preserve the silenced histories that surround us in order to understand our present, and create a future where we all belong.โ
Their annual Vanport Mosaic Festival is upcoming this year from May 18 to June 1, 2024, which features speakers, tours, and events on-site and at nearby community venues (program here). Iโd recommend taking the bus tour (if they still offer it) to see parts of the site not accessible outside of festival hours around the original Vanport community. I wrote an extensive post about the festival and tour in June 2019 โVanport Mosaicโ and they were kind enough to provide a link to it on their site for others to access.
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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 05/15/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.
After bit of a break I’m hoping to write more frequently on all things Hidden Hydrology. For some context, in this time away I have been researching more deeply Portland’s Hidden Hydrology, delving into archives for stories of my local disappeared streams, buried creeks, and filled wetlands around the metropolitan area. I’ve also compiled a composite map of Portland spanning the 1850s through the 1900s to piece together the most complete version of the hidden hydrological layers that existed pre-settlement. I’ve kept up doing research more informally in the broader and mostly sharing on Twitter and Instagram, which are both simpler media for messaging, but also seem lacking in depth that more expansive writing can capture. While it may be true that blogging is no longer a viable medium, I feel a need to write more deeply, and more often, and more personally about my home, my history, and my places. This will hopefully lead to writing more broadly as well in journals, and culminate in my ultimate goal — to write a book (or more than one) on hidden hydrology.
A few recent thoughts, ideas that I take with me into the next journey.
Every story has a uniquely human interface and the phenomena of hidden hydrology is no different, with a variety of actors involved in the discovery, use, manipulation, destruction, protection, and restoration that are all story arcs of urban streams, wetlands and other water bodies. I have always seen the people involved in more broad strokes, as populations and groups acting against nature and natural processes, or conversely communities and coalitions being often negatively acted upon and attempting to preserve and protect systems. Rarely did I connect people to places in a meaningful way beyond faceless groups, only rarely placing individuals and their stories and essential ingredients to unlocking the true history of place.
Sketch of Indians Fishing by Willamette Falls – 1841 by Joseph Drayton (Oregon History Project)
As origin stories, the native Chinookan people have occupied and shaped the waters of Portland for centuries. There are specific narratives of leaders, like Concomly as part of the larger Chinook territory in the late 1700s and early 1800s and Kiesno (aka Cassino) who was located near Portland on Wapato Island, who was also an important figure through the early to mid 1800s , The native stories and start to take shape via early explorers, whereby they drift into settler narratives told about those indigenous people and never told by them. Thus we remember ‘discovery’ and the snapshots of what written narratives and maps were documented, but know less about the life and the interaction with many of the places in the region beyond a few major areas of significance that were spiritual centers and places of food gathering and trade. I challenged myself to weave these stories into the narratives, and although I feel more informed, I’ve barely scratched the surface, so the next steps are to engage and learn from descendants and hear stories of places that were of significance to Chinook people in the past, and those that are still resonant today.
In Seattle, I walked and wrote about Licton Springs, which explored the deep indigenous connections to place in a remnant urban stream – weaving together the long and contentious history, which was recently given protection as a landmark of cultural significance to Coast Salish people. Many of these stories need to be told, and the opportunity to connect our diverse history to water places – the water stories and human stories, continues to intrigue me.
Licton Springs (Photo by Author)
Broadening the cultural lens, I’ve written about Tanner Creek and the Chinese farmers who cultivated lands adjacent to the creek using the amazing resource by Marie Rose-Wong on early Chinese residents of Portland, documenting the erasure of the creek and the Chinese farms in tandem, both slowly disappearing from Portland in the wake of ‘progress’ that wanted neither the Chinese people, nor the messiness of flooding, steep gulches that stood in the way of a modern metropolis.
View of Chinese Farms in Tanner Creek Gulch – circa 1892 (Portland Archives)
The narratives feature places like Guild’s Lake, a contested area with a variety of actors working to destroy, displace and erase historic waterways to pave the way for development and industrialization, with little thought to the impacts ecologically and socially to these actions. As you map out the timeline of erasure for many waterways, it’s never one person or one big move, but a variety of consistent, incremental actions, driven by the need for progress and growth, that privileged the needs of few over the impacts to many. The missing piece of this is again the human dimension, the root of all of these stories were the people who occupied these places, and how they, and their actions, gave life to the unique water places in the community. And as other forces removed the waterways, how they were impacted by the places are lost. The places are not coming back, but but hopefully through the stories some idea of that experience can re-emerge and remain.
Chinese man fishing in Guild’s Lake – circa 1890 (Oregon Historical Society – OHS-bb016278)
Another significant narrative in Portland’s water history is the intersection with the African American story, told through the emergence and eventual destruction of Vanport City. There are many narratives as to the cause of the flooding and destruction of in the1940s worth exploring, and the eventual displacement and segregation that happened after the city was destroyed continues to shape the city today.
As my post documenting the amazing OPB documentary “Vanport” shows, these, too are human stories, with interviews and first person accounts of the development and occupation of this novel community, and the lead up to the destruction and displacement of larger populations of people that had lasting impacts and left an indelible mark on the racial history and social structure of Portland.
CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
While Vanport was not a result of climate change per se, this larger narrative of catastrophic flood events also provides a hint at more extreme future scenarios that intersect with my research on hidden hydrology: the connections between the lost and buried streams, wetlands, ponds and water bodies, along with made-land through filling and manipulating shorelines, and how these ultimately give clues to and exacerbate our present impacts related to climate change.
Stories in the mainstream media are reinforcing these connections, and through recent research, and continues to gain prominence and momentum as a dimensions of climate change evolve and the impacts are played out in communities more frequently and in more extreme forms.
There are a number of drivers for the ‘creative destruction’ of water systems in cities. Making land for development by piping creeks, filling gulches, ponds, wetlands and shorelines to make developable land offers the chance to grow and continue to build. Much of this was also an element of the modern safety movement that was concerned with life and property damage from flooding creeks, and the related sanitary movement was driven by public health concerns, often by removing access to polluted waterways. In short term and in earlier times, these efforts may have seemed good approaches but come with some unfortunate baggage in loss of ecosystem function, and lack of resilience.
Flooding is obviously not a new thing, and is not always the result of removal of waterways not of climate change. However it is not difficult to make general connections that flooding often follows the historical shape of water in cities, and that removal, filling, and piping of creeks, streams, wetlands and ponds has lasting impacts to the hydrology and that the impacts will be more evident as climate change raises sea levels, increases extreme precipitation and storms, and increases urban heat.
A recent NY Times editorial by Eric Sanderson makes this case, unpacking impacts of recent extreme weather and hurricanes and tracing that to lost streams that wove through New York City. The simple statement of “Water will go where water has always gone.” sums up the phenomenon, while giving us an interesting new (old?) methodology for predicting impacts by using historical hydrological systems in new ways. Beyond that in the past year, my Twitter feed is filled with stories of flooding in Europe, UK, and around the US, a global climate change induced impact all traced back to the link between historical waterways and current, human-caused climate change. Lots more on this topic to come.
EVOLUTION
As I researched more from the archives of local newspapers and uncovered more unique, human stories, the narratives became less about places and the lost waterways, but how these created a tableau of life. Rarely were stories these idyllic and utopian, but painted a picture of daily life and the struggle to build a city carved out of the forest at the confluence of two rivers. Often they were narratives of greed, racism, and exploitation, focusing on power and money which were allowed to run rampant in a time of very little environmental policy and awareness of impacts.
The water stories become stories of native people who developed thriving communities that were in a short span of time decimated by disease, violence and displacement from their lands and waters. The stories of Chinese farmers who lived on the margins of gulches and ponds in Portland, who contributed to the building of the community and were rewarded with racism and erasure from their places of productivity and community. The devastation of a flooded African American community of Vanport left ship workers and their families, engaged in supporting the war effort while building a life in Portland left many without a place live and led to a continuing and marginalization that continues today.
These historical water stories connect people to place and add a human dimension to an ecological history. When woven together with more contemporary climate stories, it also provide a solid foundation for why this work matters in design and planning for the future. It is far from a nostalgic looking back of what’s lost, but rather an opportunity to think about lessons learned related to how we can live and thrive together while growing a diverse community. It is also a blueprint for action on climate resilience, a future-focused approach to planning for urban heat, flooding, and other key resilience measures to make our communities more livable. Call the preliminary phases of this project a good information gathering, understanding what hidden hydrology is. The evolution becomes how to use this information to shape our communities in positive ways. Look forward to exploring and continuing to evolve.
Building on my recent post about the anniversary of the catastrophic flooding of Vanport, I had the opportunity to visit some of the events at the Vanport Mosaic Festival from May 25-June 5. One highlight was a series of tours being offered as part of the events on Memorial Day weekend. The tour started at the Portland Expo Center and looped through key areas of the site, and it was exciting to get access to a few areas that are typically off-limits to people on a regular basis. It was also available as a self-guided walking tour, so they had maps for referencing key Vanport locations overlaid with current conditions
Vanport Tour Map (via Vanport Mosaic)
The back side of the map is supplemented with imagery of sites along the route, giving a feel for what it was like during the height of Vanport. It’s interesting to see these spaces and activities from 70 years ago, and for the most part discover that few traces of this still exist on-site.
Vanport Tour Map (via Vanport Mosaic)
The tour took a bit over an hour, and was led by Clark College professor of geography Heather McAfee, who layered stories and facts onto the tour, and demonstrated a passion for the need to tell the stories of Vanport more widely. While I wished we were able to hop out and explore a bit more, there were a few stops along the way, including this kiosk at one of the parking areas.
A Place in Time Called Vanport – Kiosk
The trail adjacent to the site led Force Lake, one of the amenities of the original Vanport community that was formerly adjacent to the original Recreation Center, and had beaches at the margins. The perimeter is now overgrown and a large wetland zone that is mostly inaccessible except from some narrow paths or to golfers on the west side.
Force Lake
Those other uses are a part of the story. South of the kiosk is a good orientation to the current land use of the majority of the Vanport site today with the western portions occupied by Heron Lakes Golf Course and portions of the east side of the site occupied by Portland International Raceway (PIR), making most of the site not publicly accessible.
Heron Lakes Golf CourseTrack at Portland International Raceway (PIR)
Both of these uses contribute to the lack of remnants that remain from the original Vanport site. As our tour wove between the two atop short levees, we struggled to look from map to site and make any meaningful connections, so disconnected these areas were from their original site, with staring golfers wondering why a seemingly lost tour bus was lumbering around in the middle of nothingness as they went about their rounds.
One area that was protected, through the advocacy of groups wanting to preserve some remnant, the old foundation of the original Theater is still visible on a small margin adjacent to one of the sloughs, protected from construction of PIR (Another remnant area of roadway, a portion of North Cottonwood Street) was incorporated into the straighaway of the racetrack). While indistinct, even this tracery of crumbling foundation serves as a powerful marker, even more so due to the almost complete erasure. Many on our group walked on the surface, paused in a moment of silence, and then moved on. It seems odd, but it had a power, and seemed almost sacred, becoming a tangible touchstone for the past.
Remnant foundation of original Vanport Theater building
McAfee (here pictured) used this location, pointing up at the top of a tree to show the relative height of the floodwaters, which were between 22-28′ high depending on where on the site one stood. As McAfee mentioned, people came into the theater to warn of the breach, shouting:
“The Dike has Broke!”
Seeing this and imagining a water line many feet above your head, coupled with the fact that there was a direct sightline here to the original railroad embankment breach point along the western edge of the site, it hammered home the immensity of the event. It also left me in amazement that even more people hadn’t perished.
Tree marking the height of flood waters
The southern apex of the tour swung by Drainage Pump No. 1, which was built in 1917 and worked to remove water from the interior of the levee bottoms. While it helped slow the flood a bit, the fact that it pumped water outside into already swollen creeks meant that it was fighting a losing battle. The pumps still work to dewater the interior the areas today as part of the larger drainage system.
Original Drainage Pump Station
The tour looped to the southeast and a second breach point, then wove back by the original site entrance along Denver Court before returning to the EXPO center. One stop adjacent was a larger wetland area, with another public sign adjacent to the dogpark that also tells the story of Vanport.
Informational signage adjacent to dog parkAdditional information marker from Oregon Travel Information Council
The Vanport Wetlands were adjacent to the site, nestled between PIR and the original Vanport site, and the EXPO center to the north. These and are protected today and support a range of wildlife, according to the Travel Oregon site: “This is an excellent site for waterfowl in winter, and southbound shorebirds in late summer, including Pectoral Sandpiper. Summering ducks include Cinnamon and Blue-winged Teal. Many swallows forage over the water in season. Check the wooded edges for warblers, vireos, and tanagers. Yellow-headed Blackbird has nested here. Red-shouldered Hawk appears occasionally, while American Kestrel, Red-tail Hawk, Osprey, and Bald Eagle are expected. Another 0.5 mi NW on Broadacre is Force Lake, a good place to view migrant grebes, ducks, and shorebirds.”
At the EXPO center post-tour, there were a number of exhibits and groups showcasing topics related to Vanport, social & environmental justice, arts, and culture. The Vanport exhibit was a chance to explore many of the themes around Vanport flood, not just as a historical retrospective but as a way to use this to have new conversations around race. From the site:
“Join us for two weeks of memory activism opportunities, to explore and confront our local past and recent history of โotheringโ and its tragic consequences. ย Through exhibits, documentary screenings, tours, theater, and dialogues we will celebrate the lessons of resilience and resistance as defined and told by historically oppressed communities.”
โ…itโs important to remember because I feel like we are experiencing yet another wave of collective historical and cultural amnesia.โย
Vanport Spirit mural
Lots of interesting side stories, including learning more about Levee Ready Columbia, working to protect from flood risk in the context of development and climate change in the slough today, as well as finding all the ways to access some local waterways via the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s ‘Paddlers Access Guide‘. From the artistic side, a few related events include a documentary of Portland stories around trees, Canopy Stories, and a cool project exploring stores of place through music from the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble “From Maxville to Vanport”. Similar geography, the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center highlights a fascinating slice of Oregon history, and many other stories can be found via the Oregon Heritage Tradition, which “recognizes events that are more than 50 years old, reflect Oregon’s unique character, and have become associated with what it means to be an Oregonian.” Lots more folks at the event, so this is just a snapshot of a few.
Additional Stories
For a more permanent look at some of the art that looks back at Vanport, you take the yellow line north and stop at the Delta Park/Vanport MAX Light Rail Station. From the TriMet site outlining the Public Art on the Yellow Line, there are a number of elements that reference Vanport. Artist Linda Wysong was the primary creator of this stations installation, built in 2004. Elements include foundation remnants embedded in sidewalk, and a range of other specific elements.
These mosaic tile (the original Vanport Mosaic?) of community maps overlay the current Delta Park site onto the city grid of Vanport. Another map shows local river context within the location of the station.
Vanport MosaicClose-up of Mosaic
There are also these beautiful bronze railings, which are a nice touchand easy to miss if you’re not looking, featuring “cast artifacts from the Chinookan culture, Vanport and the Portland International Raceway.”
Bronze railingClose-up of artifacts
Another piece that slipped my attention was some “CorTen steel sculptures recall rooftops adrift in the 1948 floodwaters”. There are also works by Douglas Lynch and Timothy Scott Dalbow are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel, and “…a cast-bronze scupper channels stormwater into the bioswale below.” Lots I missed as it also seems like there an adjacent water quality pond a sculpture called “Waterlines” which had “Massive steel arcs allude to the engineered landscape and Liberty ships made by Vanport residents” as well as a “glowing monolith of stone, steel and acrylic symbolizes the unity of human and natural worlds.” Guess I need to make another visit.
The stories of Vanport are told in multiple locations, with the help of groups like Vanport Mosaic and local artists. However, as mentioned in the OPB story, our “collective amnesia” about historical events, especially those that involve racial inequities and displacement, requires us to first understand and next confront these narratives. As I talked with people around Portland, it was a mixed bag of whether people even knew about Vanport (many had not) or had any real knowledge of the significant (many, myself included, had not). Hopefully the Vanport Mosaic Festival continues, and energy around more ways to discuss, celebrate, and interpret this spatially, so that these hidden histories and made more visible and persist.
HEADER: Force Lake – image by Jason King (all images in post by Jason King unless otherwise noted).
We take for granted much of the modern system of mapping and cartography. In the United States, this system is very much derived from our Jeffersonian grid, established in the late 1700s, and expanded along with US western expansion, this (mostly) unwavering net draped over the country as part of the Public Land Survey. I’ve written previously about the General Land Office (GLO) Cadastral Survey, in more general terms, but in that post, I mentioned a unique feature in Portland — the location of one of the few starting points — the 0,0 point which started the mapping for the entire Pacific Northwest on June 4, 1851.
In the most lovely case of serendipitous map-nerdiness, this point has been protected and celebrated, and is thus both visible and accessible by visiting Willamette Stone State Heritage Site in Northwest Portland. A quick drive from downtown Portland, for anyone remotely interested in maps and Portland history it’s a simple trip up Burnside and winding along the back side of Forest Park.
I’ve been staring at the GLO maps for years, and knew it existed but had yet to visit this spot, so the hint of a nice Spring day last weekend was a pretty good opportunity for a short walk and to check this off my list. A small pull-out off of SW Skyline Drive opens up to trailhead, with a informational board offering a brief introduction that outlines the purpose of the park, and some background on the survey, including a sketch by Roger Cooke showing an illustration of the surveyors at work.
From a short blurb on the sign:
“This short trail leads to the Willamette Stone, the surveyor’s monument that is the point of origin for all public land surveys in Oregon and Washington.”
The monument itself is simple. A short walk through forest, a few steps down and a square paved zone, measuring 20×29 feet, surrounded by benches and immersed in a remnant of northwest forest. From the Oregon Encyclopedia: “The surveyors selected a high point on a ridge along the Tualatin Mountains (known today asย Portlandโs West Hills) for the intersection of the meridian and base line and the location of the survey initial point established on June 4, 1851. Known later as the Willamette Stone, the first marker placed at the survey point was a cedar post. It was replaced in 1888 with an obelisk marker, but the stone marker and bronze plaques were vandalized in 1951, 1967, and 1987. A stainless-steel marker, set into the original obelisk, was rededicated in 1988. The Willamette Stone site is now enclosed in Willamette Stone State Park near Northwest Skyline Boulevard. “
A plaque provides more information, and the marker (a stainless steel version that was installed after other had been vandalized), with the words ‘Initial Point’ of the Willamette Meridian with the T1N/T1S marking townships above and below, and R1W/R1E marking their east/west counterparts. It was a sunny day but early afternoon was casting deep shadows on the spot, giving it an austere, and somewhat ominous feel. It felt, to me somewhat sacred.
The Willamette Stone Park monument captures some of element of the survey in subtle ways. Embedded metal strips highlight markings on the ground surface, representing the meridian and baseline, a typical township broken into it’s requisite allotment of 36 equally spaced, 640 acre sections, ready for development.
It’s interesting for something so innocuous to hold such power, a simple disc of metal that references something much larger, and more meaningful. The hours I’ve spent staring at the maps derived from this point and the rich history that unfolds. It includes both a snapshot of what existed in the mid-1800s, but by extrapolating back as well to Native settlement and use, shows also a network of pathways worn to common points – a boat launch, a ferry, a significant landmark. These hints of pre-colonial use were shaped for many years, and some have persisted in our urban development – a path turning from a trail now a road with some odd, informal alignment. Ecological mosaics now transformed, consisting of coniferous forests and deciduous lowlands, with marshy margins near meandering rivers whose shorelines continue to weave their way through the pull of northward flowing water. And, all of those now disappeared waterways – the buried creeks, the long forgotten lakes, the now filled wetlands.
Township 1 South, Range 1 E (the Willamette Stone would be the upper left hand corner of this map)
Sitting on one of the benches, I close my eyes and transport myself back to this spot in 1852. I remark on the integrity of some of the remaining verdant ecosystem in this unassuming spot. The verticality of Douglas Fir spires towering skyward, mixed with moss-draped Bigleaf Maple and understory Vine Maple pushing their bright green spring leaves. On the ground, dense clumps of Salal weave around in abundance, punctuated with the complementary textures of Sword Fern and Oregon Grape, lighter margins of Snowberry and Currant. And, to mark the season with a punctuation mark, the fleeting display of Trillium.
Then, slowly, as I peer around, at the edges, I spy a hint of invasive English Ivy and English Holly (both of which were absent from this ecosystem of 170 years ago), beginning to creep out to the margin of my vision. A witness to our human impacts. Panning right, the faint etchings of guy-wires intrude into the viewshed amidst the trees. I’d been so focused on the ground, and the stone, head down focusing on the monument, I’d been unaware of this neighbor. I slowly follow their paths in an about-face, craning my neck straight up to the apex of the radio tower close-by. Not looming, but its red and white paint, and geometry in sharp contrast to the lush greenery.
Thus the scene, as the origin point, took on a double meaning. Although lush and natural on the surface and very much of the place in the Oregon landscape, this survey point was also the origin of our rapidly changing environment. This is evident in the burgeoning city that exists today, and the irreparable impacts on ecology and hydrology that make it barely legible from where it all started. The origin point of our discovery, what we have now experientially only in maps as a record, also being the origin point of our changing landscape and humanity.
The bench I sat on had double meaning also. Surrounding the monument, these contained the names of significant surveyors relevant to this westward documentation. William Ives was responsible for running the Meridian northward towards the Puget Sound, and Eastward along the Baseline as well, according to the history of the Oregon Land SurveyJohn B Preston is also acknowledged, as the first Surveyor General of the Oregon Territory and Western US, his name is pervasive, affixed to many of the GLO maps. And finally, one dedicated to C. Albert White, who was at BLM surveyor with the General Land Office who started in the 1940s, and is know as an expert in cadastral surveying history, which is seem in his 1983 publication, ‘The History of the Rectangular Survey” which is the definitive tome on the Public Land Survey, and fitting for him to be celebrated here as well.
A map excerpt shows these ubiquitous gridlines – the work of Ives and Preston notably on, “A Diagram of a Portion of Oregon Territory,” from 1852. This map highlights this point where the Baseline runs east and west from ocean to the state borders, and the Willamette Meridian runs north-south from the southern border of Oregon up to the US/Canada border. The origin made manifest.
It’s amazing how this GLO survey left an amazing resource for hydrology of cities that were relatively undisturbed, as these surveys were done in a relatively youthful United States, and in the west the mapping in the 1850s was done concurrent with the establishment of many settlements. The resulting maps show small, nascent grids, which predate much of the late 19th and early 20th creative destruction that forever changed the landscape and led to hidden hydrology. It’s good to know your origin story. And in this case, the origin is close at hand.
HEADER: Willamette Meridian — this and all images in post, unless otherwise noted, also by Jason King
The story of Vanport is a critical narrative woven into Portland’s water history, and gives a hint at the dynamic nature of river/city interactions, along with formative context for race and class relations that shaped the community, both in positive and negative ways. This 2016 documentary from the Oregon Experience provides a compelling and well illustrated history of the Vanport community that’s worth a watch.
From the cover of the video: “During the early 1940s, Vanport, Oregon was the second largest city in the state and the single-largest federal housing project in the country. Built quickly to house men and women coming to work in the Portland/Vancouver shipyards during World War II, Vanport boasted some 42,000 residents at its peak and offered progressive services for its diverse population. But one afternoon in 1948, a catastrophic flood destroyed the entire city, leaving about 18,500 people still living there suddenly homeless. Vanport tells the story of a forgotten city: how it was created and once thrived; and how it changed the region forever. It features first hand, personal accounts of former residents and dramatic, rarely-seen archival film and images.”
The origin story here is around World War II, and the wartime shipbuilding, and Henry J. Kaiser, who operated 3 major shipyards that built over – two in Portland, in St. Johns and Swan Island, and another across the river in Vancouver, which built over 750 ships and employed around 100,000 people at their peak in the early 1940s.
In order to house the growing and diverse population of shipbuilders, who were coming for a mix of opportunity and patriotism, Kaiser proposed in 1942 to build what would become the largest wartime housing project in the United States, a new community of over 40,000 people in a 650 acre tract wedged between the Columbia River and Columbia Slough in North Portland. The plan of the community, completed in 1943, shows the general layout, including over 9,900 individual apartments, built cheaply and quickly. The size and diversity of the community, which included a diversity of White, Black, Asian, and Native American workers, as well as a large percentage of the workforce made up of women, who were recruited from all around the country to come to Portland to support the war effort.
From the documentary, the community also had a hospital, police station, library, fire station, transit, shopping, grocery, schools, recreation centers and even a move theater. While there was an effort to make the community livable, and improve ‘quality of life’, the goal was also production, with buses ferrying workers to and from shipyards, which operated 24 hours a day.
The relationship of the plan is woven around water, and the history of flooding of the wetlands and sloughs within which Vanport was built could be said to be both amenity and omen. Some images from the documentary show life around these waterways, including beaches on one of the two lakes, and some exploration around the Slough and it’s tributaries that wove throughout the community.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience) Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
As mentioned in the documentary, the cafeteria was located adjacent to the beach on one of the lakes, with water-loving cottonwoods woven throughout. And beyond what was referred to as a “slightly ill-kempt public park”, kids found waters of the Slough the real playground, using make-shift rafts to find turtles, bullfrogs, and tadpoles.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
Post World-War II the idea was for the temporary city to be demolished, and as people starting moving out, some structures were removed. A housing crisis kept Vanport a necessity, as a combination of post-internment Japanese, blacks who could not find housing due to red-lining in the greater Portland area, and lack of housing for post-war returning soldiers, all combining to provide affordable, if somewhat ramshackle, housing for a variety of residents. There was also a Vanport College, founded in some of the vacant buildings, which eventually became Portland State University. For the growing Portland area, “mud on the shoes” meant you were from Vanport, which was seen by the greater Portland community through the lenses of racism as a slum.
In the winter of 1947-48, conditions started to shift towards catastrophe. Heavy snowfall coupled with more intense spring rains swelled the Columbia Rise, which flowed in mid-May at a rate of 900,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), which was almost double the normal flow. This led to the need for reinforcing dikes and sandbagging, along with regular patrols by the Army Corps of Engineers to ensure the perimeter was solid. At this point, there was a question of whether to evacuate, and an emergency meeting was held, but the thinking was that the dikes would hold, and if not people would get plenty of warming. A few days later things changed dramatically.
River Stage levels in late spring 1948 – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The entire Vanport area, as former lowlands, was surrounding on all four sides with dikes in order to keep the adjacent waters at bay. The massive vulnerability of the perimeter meant a lot of potential failure points. The dike along the railroad lines to the northwest of Vanport separated Smith Lake from the lower-lying Vanport area was just that failure point, seen in the map below.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience) Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The 30′ berm was ostensibly about protection of the railroad, so the integrity to hold that massive amount of water back during a huge flood event was less a priority, so water levels from Smith Lake started spilling over the dike, the railroad berm started degrading with water boils appearing and seeping thorugh, and on 4:17pm on the May 30th, the breach happened, as mentioned, a “600 foot section melted away.”
Railroad embankment failure – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
Sirens blared, and people grabbed anything they could get their hands on to evacuated to nearby Kenton. As people recounted stories of “a wall of water” and climbed to their roofs to be rescued, it was exacerbated by the housing, which was built cheaply and without solid foundations, which began to float around, knocking into each other, as seen in the images below.
Houses in the aftermath – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The sloughs filled up with the initial flows, so people had 30 minutes to escape. With only one route available, Denver Avenue, the road was quickly jammed, and people started fearing that this area would also fail, so continued to sandbag and reinforce this zone, and people started walking through water as vehicles and buses were stuck. By Monday morning, Denver Avenue was also breached, along with other perimeter dikes, inundating the entire community. The extent of flooding wasn’t localized to Vanport, as it impacted the entire city and it was estimated to have caused over $100 million in damages throughout the basin. The displacement of 1000s of people meant that the flooding of Vanport was some of the biggest impacts, and they were long-lasting well after the water subsided.
via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
There have been a number of stories that have covered the events around Vanport life and flooding, including loss of life, as well as its aftermath, such as investigating the absence of accountability for inaction on evacuation and the lack of dike maintenance that could have prevented the disaster. I’ve not seen critical analysis in general of the general wisdom of occupying the spaces and places like Vanport and its flood susceptibility, which were chosen hastily to fill a need, such as emergency housing in war-time, but are perhaps much less suitable for people to live long-term. Should the city have been demolished after ship-building slowed? It shows the impacts of larger social forces on disasters, and the brunt of that impact being felt by frontline communities.
Some of that aftermath is capture in this snippet from the Oregon Encyclopedia: “Refugees crowded into Portland, a city still recovering from the war. Part of the problem was race, for more than a thousand of the flooded families were African Americans who could find housing only in the growing ghetto in North Portland. The flood also sparked unfounded but persistent rumors in the African American community that the Housing Authority had deliberately withheld warnings about the flood and the city had concealed a much higher death toll.”
Iconic image of man holding boy – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The erasure of that history is part of this larger story, with little remnant or physical marking of the place and event as what was left of Vanport was demolished, burned, or auctioned., which is now occupied in parts with West Delta Park, Portland International Raceway, and Heron Lakes Golf Course. As summed up in the Oregon Experience, there is to this day:
“Little to remind anyone of a ‘once thriving city.'”
It an important piece of history around both race, building, and hydrology to investigate in Portland, so expect to hear more about this. The Vanport Mosaic site provides a great opportunity to learn more, and there are some other films on the topic, including a documentary ‘Vanport and the Columbia River Floods of 1948‘, produced by the National Weather Service, and ‘The Wake of Vanport‘, produced by local independent paper The Skanner in 2016.
HEADER: Image of flooding with newspaper Headline – via Oregon Experience
It was great to attend a talk by historian James V. Hillegas-Elting at Powells earlier in the week, where he gave the highlights of his recently released book “Speaking for the River: Confronting Pollution on the Willamette, 1920s-1970s“. You can read more about his work here at his blog, and I will definitely have some follow up as I dive into the book as it paints a history closely in alignment with hidden hydrology in Portland. The arc of degradation and restoration of the key waterway through Portland and the Willamette Valley is woven together with urbanization, industrialization, and our relationship to the river, as well as the evolution of an environmental ethos that shapes the way we continue to confront existing pollution today (and yes, there’s still lots of it).
In the interim, one highlight worth sharing is this silent film from the 1940s, which is available via streaming from OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center. A brief synopsis to go with the film:
” The Willamette River Pollution Film depicts various point sources of pollution in the Willamette River and its tributaries. The film begins near Springfield and progresses downstream to Portland and includes footage of various forms of industrial, agricultural, and municipal effluent being dumped into the Willamette River and its tributaries, including the Pudding and South Santiam Rivers. The footage includes tests of the length of time that small fish can survive in water from the Willamette River and chemical tests of the river water. The film includes footage of the river or its tributaries at Springfield, Eugene, Corvallis, Crabtree, Lebanon, Salem, Woodburn, and Portland.”
The production quality is rough at times but you get the gist, with visible pollution from multiple sources, floating dead fish, rats, and all the visual evidence to make the case of an unhealthy river, devoid of dissolved O2 and lifeless. From the OSU Special Collections listing, “The film was probably made by William Joy Smith, of Portland Oregon. Smith was State Manager of the National Life Insurance Company and President of the Oregon Wildlife Federation. It was made before establishment of the state Sanitary Authority and fostered much of the original interest in water quality in Oregon. The film may also have been known at the time of its creation by the title “The Polluted Willamette”. “
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HEADER: Still image from video showing men fishing adjacent to an active outfall. (32:11)
