Dave Knows Portland

Know Your City: Portland’s Social History App

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Know Your CityThe Dill Pickle Club, Portland’s creative cultural club, needs some help with an exciting new project: Know Your City: Portland’s Social History App.

Know Your City will be a free phone app and Website providing a tour of downtown Portland’s cultural heritage. The program utilizes mapping and smart phone technology to create greater awareness of Portland’s history, culture and diversity through video, audio, photos and text. The project aims to provide a holistic view of how neighborhoods change over time to deepen our understanding of place.

The first version will feature photos, text, and short audio clips by selected guest experts on 12-20 downtown sites, including the Goldenwest Hotel, the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, Street Roots, Union Station, and more.

The Dill Pickle Club is raising money for developing the pilot project through Kickstarter, with a goal to complete development in Winter 2012. The tools and code developed will be made available so that other cities will be able to start their own participatory history projects. Subsequent versions will allow participants to contribute their own stories and knowledge, as well as expand the scope of sites to outlying areas.

Visit KnowYourCity.org for more information on the project, and for ways in which you can help!

Storm Day: Commemorating the 1962 Columbus Day Storm (15-October-2011)

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2012 Update: Pittock Mansion and OHS Commemorate 1962 Columbus Day Storm (October 12-31, 2012)

Pittock Mansion in the aftermath of the Columbus Day StormPittock Mansion‘s annual Storm Day event, which commemorates the 1962 Columbus Day Storm, takes place this Saturday, October 15, 2011.

On Columbus Day, 1962, the most devastating wind storm in recorded history to hit the Pacific Northwest, known as the “Big Blow,” caused major destruction in northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The extratropical cyclone, which began as Typhoon Freda, was the greatest natural disaster to strike the West Coast in more than half a century.

The then privately owned, and up for sale, Pittock Mansion sustained significant damage during the storm. A fundraising effort by concerned citizens spurred the City of Portland to purchase the mansion in 1964 (for $225,000!). It was restored and in 1965 the historic house opened as the museum we know it as now.

Learn about the impact of the 1962 Columbus Day Storm on Pittock Mansion and Portland from 11:00am to 4:00pm. OMSI representatives will be on hand to demonstrate a small tornado chamber, a weather balloon, and a Van de Graaff generator. They will also lead hands-on projects to create a wind vane and a rain gauge.

Regular admission prices will apply.

October 9, 1926: Multnomah Civic Stadium is Dedicated

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Photo of crowd (Sunday Oregonian, 10 October 1926)
Portland’s Multnomah civic stadium opened to the public for the first time on Saturday, October 9, 1926 (Morning Oregonian, 8 October 1926). The occasion of its dedication was a football game between the University of Oregon and University of Washington.

Front page comic (Morning Oregonian, 9 October 1926)

Washington sent two special trains conveying 1500 students to the game. About 2000 Oregon fans arrived the night before on special trains from Eugene for a Friday night rally and parade.

The stadium gates opened at 11:45am and the first order of the day was a concert by the Washington high school band, followed by another by the University of Washington’s. Disabled war veterans were honored guests at the game. Grammar school children who bore letters of identification from their school principals were entitled to special $1 tickets.

Stadium map (Morning Oregonian, 9 October 1926)

At 2:15pm the teams took the field and at 2:30pm Portland Mayor George Luis Baker ceremoniously placed the ball for the opening kickoff. Twenty homing pigeons, carrying purple and green streamers, and bearing messages to mayors of 20 towns in Oregon and Washington, were released from the field.

Unfortunately the Huskies came out on top, 23 to 9, and their fans staged a victory parade to downtown after the game (Sunday Oregonian, 10 October 1926). Nevertheless, the stadium’s debut was considered a huge success (and the atmosphere was apparently much like a Portland Timbers game).

Crowds, clamor, color, combat – and Portland’s stadium was dedicated, a massive symbol in concrete and steel of civic pride . . .

Call it pep, call it spirit or enthusiasm, one couldn’t have bought it yesterday for a million. The stadium brought it. So that is what the stadium means – pep, spirit, in amount incalculable.

27,000 Dynamos on Job

Inside the huge amphitheater was enthusiasm in concentrated form – 27,000 cheering, waving dynamos of seeming super-man power energy. But all enthusiasm was not concentrated there by any means. It radiated over the city, was manifest on the streets, in the stores, wherever two more more people gathered.

Amusingly, from the very beginning, parking near the stadium was an issue:

Parking rules for first game (Morning Oregonian, 8 October 1926)

Further reading:

October 8, 1873: Cornerstone of Second State Capitol Laid

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Old State Capitol Building facing Court Street in Salem, Oregon Though Oregon City was the Oregon Territory’s first capital, Salem has been the designated location since 1850 (except for a brief and controversial relocation to Corvallis in 1855). The first Salem capitol building was built in 1854 . . . and burnt down in December, 1855.

A new capitol was not completed until 1876 (the legislature met instead at the Holman Building at Ferry and Commercial Streets in Salem for the intervening two decades).

The corner stone of that second capitol building was laid, with impressive Masonic ceremonies by Most Worthy Grand Master of Masons in Oregon, T. McF. Patton on October 8, 1873 (The Sunday Oregonian, 15 January 1893).

In the large procession on that occasion there were the East Portland Cornet band, Portland City band and the celebrated Aurora German band . . . The address was delivered by Governor S. F. Chadwick, then secretary of state. This address received much favor as a fitting immigration document for which it was extensively used. This was a great day in Salem, and thousands of people were in attendance from different parts of the state.

Sealed in the cornerstone was a copy of the December 25, 1870 London Weekly Times, a February 11, 1723 copy of the Benjamin Franklin published New England Courant, a copy of the New York Herald from May 6, 1835, and a copy of the day’s The Oregonian.

The Renaissance style building patterned after the U.S. Capitol burnt down on April 25, 1935. The four story Modern Greek-style capitol we know today was dedicated on October 1, 1938.