Columbia Slough resources

Back in December 2009, I took a bike trek along a portion of Columbia Slough. In this post I wanted to provide references to some resources about the history of development and restoration efforts in the watershed to serve as a repository in my continued work on the Willamette River pollution book. I welcome other references in the comments.

Lawrence Barber, Columbia Slough (Portland, Oreg., Columbia Slough Development Corporation, Oct. 1977).

Center for Columbia River History Columbia Slough Community History Exhibit.

City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services resource page on the Columbia Slough watershed.

Columbia Slough Watershed Council web page.

"Columbia Slough," wikipedia.com [surprisingly thorough].

Lewis & Clark College Environmental Studies Program, Situated Research: Columbia Slough Research Site.

Ellen Stroud, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon,” Radical History Review 74 (1999).

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Portland civil defense, 1940s-1950s

Portland's Civil Defense program of the 1940s and 1950s was once a national model. In 1956, Portland became the first city in the nation with an underground emergency response headquarters, built inside Kelly Butte. The CBS networked featured the city's civil defense program in their 1957 film A Day Called X. By the early 1960s, however, state and city leaders deemed this civil defense project a waste of funds and canceled the program.

A Day Called X, Part I:




A Day Called X, Part II:



Here are some additional sources on this topic:

Harry Rasky, dir., A Day Called X, CBS Television, 1957. [IMDB]

Peter Ames Carlin, With nuclear annihilation imminent, Portland keeps its cool, Oregonian, May 9, 2009.

Scans from 1955 Portland Civil Defense pamphlet.

Historical and recent images of the Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center, Portland.

Trudy Flores and Sarah Griffith, "Civil Defense Underground Headquarters", Oregon Historical Society's Oregon History Project, 2002.

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Construction of Portland Harbor wall, 1927-1929

I recently discovered a source detailing the planning and construction of Portland's west-side harbor wall, written by the city engineer who planned and implemented the project, Olaf Laurgaard.[1] There will be a short section of one chapter in my book that will provide an overview of the construction of Portland's sewage infrastructure up to the 1930s, and Laurgaard's source will help me immensely in describing the construction of the west-side harbor wall--which also included an intercepting sewer.

Laurgaard first proposed the project in February 1920 as a way to re-develop this portion of the harbor and protect a large section of downtown that was prone to seasonal flooding. This part of Portland Harbor was a center of waterfront warehousing, commerce, and transportation through the first years of the twentieth century. By the 1910s, however, the area became increasingly run-down, and by 1920 the area from Clay Street on the south to Flanders on the North was marked by abandoned buildings, empty lots, and derelict wharves.

Twenty-eight gravity-fed raw sewage outfalls lined this portion of the waterfront, a number of which were exposed during low-flow periods of the Willamette River. These gravity-fed lines backed-up during seasonal freshets, causing raw sewage to fill the basements of downtown buildings.

Decrepit infrastructure, crumbling buildings, vacant lots, and periodic inundations of sewage appreciably reduced the real estate values within a 425-acre swath of the downtown business district. The Portland City Council requested plans of City Engineer Laurgaard to clean-up this area and resolve the flooding issue. Laurgaard submitted his plans in May 1925, and City Commissioners awarded the J. F. Shea Company the $2,135,000 contract in November 1926.[2] On May 1, 1929, Laurgaard and his team ran an official pump test for the entire interceptor and pump station to check the quality of the contractor's work.

Below are a selection of images and diagrams from Laurgaard's 1933 treatise on the Portland Harbor wall project, supplemented by a few images from the City of Portland Auditor's Office Historic Photos website (as indicated)

On sports & media-manufactured role models

Tim Keown has written a thought-provoking piece about one of the most recent big-time sports stars who got caught acting like a sociopath. In this case, it's Ben Rothlisberger, star quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers.*

Keown includes a fascinating take on this topic that did not occur to me until I read it (most fascinating part for me in italics):

The whole role-model thing might be the most ludicrous idea ever imagined. The concept of our coddled and impressionable youth drawing life lessons from a guy with a big curveball or an ability to move in the pocket is solely a construct of the industry and its mouthpieces. It was born on the back of myth: the slugger promising the ailing boy a homer, the fearsome defensive tackle tossing his jersey in exchange for a soda. In real life, a kid might model his seven-step drop after Roethlisberger, but beyond that they're both on their own.

I don't specialize in this field of history, but identification of the source of the myth of the sports role model seems accurate. To add to this, consider other corporate- and media-manufactured "role models": Babe Ruth and Red Grange. I don't have time to list them all.

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* Who have two very lucky Super Bowl victories to their credit over the past few years to add to their amazing run in the 1970s. Did I mention the part about them being very very lucky? Particularly against those plucky Arizona Cardinals. Lucky bastards.

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Blueprint America on PBS

I haven't yet gone into any depth on the materials associated with PBS' Blueprint America project, but there does seem to be some fascinating stuff there.

From the Introduction:

Blueprint America is a precedent-setting multi-platform initiative — developed and produced by Thirteen/WNET, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation — that will harness the power of public broadcasting’s most prestigious programs, primetime documentaries, community and educational outreach, and the web to shine an unyielding spotlight on one of the most critical issues facing our country, yet one that has been under-reported by the traditional news media: America’s decaying and neglected infrastructure. We hear about infrastructure only when it results in a catastrophic bridge collapse or levee failure, but in fact, it is placing our quality of life and our ability to compete in a global economy at risk.

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"A book is a part of that author's restless curiosity about the world"

I'm writing a book.

Well, I'm writing two chapters to accompany a book proposal and, if external reviewers and the editorial board at the press find these satisfactory, I'll be under contract to write a book. There are still some "ifs" involved, but, at the very least, I'm in the process of composing two book-chapter-like pieces of writing. For the first time in my life, I would add.

The book is about early water pollution abatement efforts along the Willamette River, 1920s to 1962. It is a thorough re-casting of the research I conducted for my M.A. thesis, "Working for the 'Working River.'"

To prepare for the book project, I've completed more research on various threads of the topic, and presented some chunks of my findings at various academic conferences. However, having a completed MA thesis under my belt and hundreds (thousands?) of digital and hard-copy pages of research stacked on my real and virtual desks does not a book make.

I need to learn how to write a book with the potential to garner a readership of more than myself. Below are some recent reflections about how to do this . . .

Lies and the lying historians who concoct citations for them

Uh-oh. More questions about Stephen Ambrose's scholarship.

Why do people plagiarize, fabricate, and otherwise make things up in this manner? Historians, in this case, but in journalism, "non-fiction" books, and other media as well?

I know some of the primary excuses: authors under deadline, authors doing it for the money, authors making mistakes, etc. The thing that I can't understand, even considering these excuses, is why a historian--in particular--would make stuff up and/or plagiarize when the conventions of the discipline demand citations and foster de facto fact checking as an historian's works are read by their colleagues and incorporated into other works?

In other words, why lie about something in this way and then hand every potential reader the tools to prove the lie?

Maybe there's nothing more here than individual failings that are not tied together into some larger social context? Or, maybe the larger social context is simply that these authors are just particular examples of the fame- and money-centered aspects of our culture, or the seemingly widespread belief that something bad "won't happen to me?"

As far as my own work goes, I take it as a sacred trust to present the information I find as accurately as possible, both in terms of the individual bits and pieces of evidence I find and in the analytical lens through which I look at this evidence. I understand clearly that we've all got biases of one kind or another, and that one can't possibly be absolutely 100% objective. However, there are still valid arguments to be made in spite of our biases, and valid critiques of these arguments.

Further, I'm also humbled by the notion that anyone could pick up my work and track down my sources and check the facts that I present. Though it would be ego-deflating, I would welcome critiques of my work at this level, and at the level of interpretation. My goal is to offer interpretations that rise from a base of solid research so that we can spend our time having fun arguing about differences in interpretation.

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My view of the Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group meeting, April 14, 2010

In a previous post, I reported on a meeting I attended of the Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group in December 2009. The present post provides some of my thoughts after attending the April 14, 2010, CAG meeting.

Willamette River pollution film, 1940

A version of the film above was shown at the April 14 Portland Harbor CAG meeting. I wrote a brief post in November 2009 about the Willamette River film. In this post today I'm going to expand on what I wrote previously to clarify the film's provenance and provide a bit more historical context for the film.

Great uses of the Internet for history-related purposes

To accompany this post from the other day, I have two more great examples of the wonderful things being done with technology these days--in this case, the kinds of fascinating projects that are becoming increasingly more ubiquitous on the web ("web 2.0," as they say). The tools identified below make important historical and cultural information available to anyone in the world using just a few clicks, which, in turn, has the potential to help broaden understanding.

PhilaPlace is an interesting project:

Retrographs from Retronauts

 
Wow. This is really cool. I love this kind of stuff.

(Image above from here)

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