Photo: Joel Jensen

Here is the official presentation description from the forthcoming AHC newsletter:

Railroad Architecture and the Northwest:
Economics, Ethos, and Culture

Saturday, February 18, 2012
10:00 am-11:30 am
Members: $10
General public: $18

Railroads were one of the driving forces in the settlement and urbanization of the United States. Through their station buildings, they left a profound architectural legacy on the country. From humble wooden depots that pioneered the concept of franchise architecture through to grand urban depots displaying the power of the country’s new “millionaire society,” these structures embody the story of America’s Gilded Age. Portland and the Pacific Northwest region include a number of fine examples of these structures, and collectively contribute to the understanding of our region’s past.

Alexander B. Craghead will share his approach to railroad architecture as cultural history. Alex is a Portland-based writer and photographer whose work has most recently appeared in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin and Trains Magazine. You will learn about the restoration work of two of the region’s grand urban stations with ties to important works of Italian architecture, as well as the miraculous, eleventh hour rescue of the oldest depot in Oregon. Culminating the presentation is a unique look at the history of Portland’s landmark Union Station of 1896. The presentation is supported by numerous photographs and illustrations, including the depot photographs of award winning photographer Joel Jensen.

Pre-registration is strongly suggested — visit us online at www.VisitAHC.org.

All ticket funds go towards supporting the mission of the AHC to support and preserve the architectural heritage of the Portland area. I’m excited to have this chance to dig into the region’s rail architecture, and I’m including in the program some fun surprises. Hope to see you there!

Fresh from the post and the printers: the “Portland Switching District Project: An Overview” in the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin

It’s been a busy spring, and there’s a few more publications to add to the list. First up: “The Portland Switching District Project: An Overview,” in the Spring issue of the National Railroad Historical Society Bulletin. This is a short text and twelve photos from the series. Unlike the recent show, this article contains images from throughout the switching districts of the Portland area. Many thanks to Bulletin editor Jeff Smith for helping this one fly. Although you cannot find the publication on a newsstand, you can purchase them as back issues directly from the NRHS here for $4, which is a great deal.

I shouldn’t pass on from this topic without also noting that the remainder of this issue is taken up by two great articles by photographer and thinker Jeff Brouws. The first of these is an article on the railroad as landscape, and is illustrated with numerous of his own photographs, along with those of other talented photographers such as Keith Burgess, Wayne Depperman, John Fasulo, Phil Hastings, my friend Scott Lothes, Greg McDonnell, Kevin Scanlon, and the late Richard Steinheimer.

This last name brings up some sad news. If you are a follower of railroad photography, you likely already know that Richard Steinheimer, known affectionately as “Stein”, died on May 4th. The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has been running a tribute to the man on its web site. In addition, in cooperation with Trains Magazine, the Center is running a two part collection of remembrances of the man by other railroad photographers. My own contribution will be up in part two, but for now, I encourage you to read part one, and gather a glimpse of how much the man meant as a photographer, and to those who were fortunate to known him personally, as a human being.

Also while I’m on the subject, I have never taken the time to sum up the Center’s 2011 “Conversations About Photography” conference. The event took place in the middle of last month, and I was privileged to be a part of making it happen. The conference is without question the most interesting rail photography event in North America, and well worth attendance. This year, one of my main tasks was to “live-cast” the event on the Center’s Facebook page. If you’ve been thinking of going, visit there and scroll back to mid April for a bit of flavor of what it’s about. And before I move off this subject, thanks to everyone at the Center — and especially to John Gruber — for including me as part of the team!

For the May, 2011 issue of Trains, I wrote a news story on the continuing efforts of Portland’s Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation to construct a permanent museum complex near the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Also in May, I wrote the lead editorial for Railfan & Railroad Magazine’s issue on Amtrak 40th anniversary. My piece, titled “Amtrak against all odds” examines the nation’s rail passenger carrier today, and makes the case that contrary to conventional wisdom, it has been a brilliant success, as it has held the line against politics and kept the American passenger train from disappearing forever.

For June publications — which in the strange world of publishing has been on the newsstands for two weeks now — the theme is Tacoma, Tacoma, Tacoma. Trains ran a piece on Tacoma’s Union Station, what may be the greatest railway architecture Cinderella story in the Pacific Northwest. This story for Trains focused on the Herculean efforts of those who restored the station, and includes interview material with Jim Merritt, an architect who, in the process of working on the station restoration, undertook some of the craziest stunts I’ve heard of in the name of historic preservation. For Railfan, I produced a smaller story on the importance of the station to the Tacoma community; this one can be viewed online, and includes interior images of the facility, which is now a federal courthouse.

I’ve also been writing a lot of op-eds for the front-of-book in Railfan, filling in after the death of Editor Emeritus Jim Boyd, who previously penned the space. Following the Amtrak column were two more, the first on the mixture of craziness and historic importance that railfanning sometimes plays, and the second on the value of spending time photographing railroads that are more rural and obscure.

Lastly, I have a small feature coming up in Railfan on the Tacoma Link streetcar. The article will be part of the magazine’s Tacoma-focused July issue, in honor of the NRHS national convention in Tacoma from June 20-26.

It’s been a busy spring!

East Second Avenue, 2008. From the the Portland Switching District Project.

This April, I completed the run of my first photo exhibit, a short preview show of selected images from the Portland Switching District Project. The show was hosted at the offices of the City Club of Portland, one of the oldest and most respected civic institutions in the Portland metropolitan region.  

This exhibit did not happen as the culmination of (much less a part of) some larger planned process. Instead, it was an organic outgrowth of the switching district project. Having spent over a year of concentrated work photographing the subject of the disappearing traces of the city’s urban industrial past, I was faced with a conundrum: what now? What to do with all of these images, now that the project was completed? A series of developments — including a call for temporary art exhibits at the City Club — resulted in the show, and I hope will result in another, larger version next year, in the city’s Central Eastside Industrial District, where many of the images were made. 

Is this, however, serving the best interests of the photographs? And what really is their purpose anyway?

Photography is widely varied. Some people are photographers because they want to explore their inner selves, to express emotion or complex inward thought. Others want to document, to preserve in images traces of the world they see around them. Others want something in between, a hybrid mix that is all about telling a story. I previously outlined this basic tripartite theory of photography — expressive, narrative, and documentary — in a story I wrote about detail imagery and the railroad for Trains.com and the Center for Railroad Photography & Art.

For me it is that third, middle way of narrative that matters to me most. It may be no surprise, then, that the most seen photos I have made are those that were published, often beside text-based narratives I wrote, and (to-date) always in periodicals of one form or another. 

For the switching project, documentary is a bit more prominent in my motives than usual, and I am forced to consider what the best way of sharing them is. After all, if these photos merely sit in a box — in this case a hard drive — do they serve the purpose I intended? Do they reach out and tell the story of Portland’s heritage, of the city’s industrial roots? In some ways, storing them implies a value to the images that is more vain than if they were shared, as when something is shared it belongs to the beholder and not just the maker. 

So few images actually are shared, though. Far more photos die ignominious deaths as hard drives crash, orphaned photo albums get donated to Goodwill, or slide collections get tossed into a dumpster. The vast majority of them have their ultimate value to society unfulfilled. To have my photos sit on a hard drive, stored in some semi-altruistic hope that a future historian will value them, then that is in my view a personal and artistic failure. It’s like performing a play to an empty room. 

In this regard, the show at the City Club was a step in the right direction. Here, for a month, they were able to be seen by the public at large. Who, though, goes to gallery exhibits? A select few — even more so a self-selected few. Web sites? These images have been available on the Internet for almost three years, but such digital presentations generally are about as effective as tossing 3×5 prints of the images out third story window in the middle of downtown — the Net is just too vast, too full of competing eye candy, time waster, and the like to be effective on its own as a way of telling this story. What about a book? That would be even more self selecting, even more limited in its reach, although it would at least be less transitory than the former two options. 

This is a question larger than the switching project, and larger than my photography. This goes to the heart of what photography is, and what role it plays in society. Put another way, what is the ultimate intent of the photos we as photographers make? Might the gallery / web site / book formula not be the best way to use our images to tell the stories we wish to tell? And if not, what might be a better way?

After months of work, a project I am quite proud of is about to become available. Nearly a year ago, I was approached by fellow photographer Joel Jensen. Joel has been photographing scenes of the American West for decades, especially images of vernacular landscape such as churches, motels, and railway depots. For this last body of work, Joel issued me a challenge: to write ~10,000 words on the American railway depot to accompany about forty of his images, the whole to occupy an entire issue of the National Railway Historical Society‘s Bulletin,.

Needless to say this was a big task! Joel gave me a pretty free hand to set the details of the piece, so after kicking a few quick ideas around I set to work on one of the biggest single writing projects I’ve undertaken in a while.

To a lover of culture, the American railway depot is particularly fascinating. It is an artifact of the country’s Industrial Age, and as such its changing roles provide a useful yardstick by which to measure vast American cultural shifts. Once the center of the community as well as the prototype of aloof corporate hegemony, the depot has traded its power for a potent and largely misleading symbolism.

They’re here! They’re here!

Joel’s photographs are a stunning review of this glacial-scale decline in power. From the soaring towers of the grand urban terminals to the defeatism of the so-called “Amshack” platform shelter, Joel captures less the typical nostalgia of loss than the somewhat sharper pangs of regret, neglect, and wanton destruction. There is a certain and potent irony in seeing structures built to last for ages tossed aside like a deer carcass beside the road, not yet a century old. Equally moving are the small rural depots, reduced to poor paint, infrequent service, ignominy, and despair.

To try and capture a sense of that in the words I penned for the piece was a tall order, but I hope I might have at least scratched at the surface of some of the truths buried within Joel’s photos. If you can find a copy — the Bulletin is available online here — please pick it up and let me know what you think.

Last but not least, thanks to Joel Jensen for an excellent collaboration, to Buleltin editor Jeff Smith, and to everyone who made this project possible.

What makes up the cultural DNA of Portland? This is a question that, as a student of cities, I constantly ask myself. It is the reason I have travelled to other cities in the region, spanning from Vancouver, B.C. to San Francisco. It is the reason I have a passion for history, a passion for photography, a passion for local food. All of these things help me to form perspective on what makes this place, this urban region, so unique.

A number of weeks ago, friend and fellow Portland blogger Dan Haneckow lead a history tour around his neighborhood, the Overlook area of Portland. Taking place on a fine, sunny, but breezy afternoon, the walk attracted around fifty people of all ages and backgrounds. Dan lead us through the streets north of the old town of Albina, as far east as Interstate 5, and as far north as Killingsworth. Along the way we learned about the filling of ravines, secret basement speakeasy bars, Polish enclaves, victims of the Japanese internment, and all sorts of other historic scraps.

At about 7 p.m., the tour wound down, and about eight of us stuck around (Dan and myself included) to have dinner and a beer at the Lucky Lab and talk history. A gaze around the table was fascinating. Old mixed with young, newcomers mixed with natives, blue collar mixed with white. And what was this diverse crowd doing over beers, in the blue-hour light, on a random Summer sunday evening?

We were discussing where, of all things, the Piggly Wiggly used to be.

Of all the things, this strange mix of backgrounds, ages, occupations, and origins all had one thing in common, and that was an intense interest — perhaps love — of place. By place I don’t mean the grandness of the bridge-hemmed river, the cast iron Gilded Age remnants of Old Town, or the postcard-stock rose gardens and parks. I mean instead the most intimate levels of location. Building by building, block by block, the finest grain of urbanity. These were people who cared who owned the house before them as well as who came before them, and before them, and so on back to the builders. These were people who wanted to know just what used to be in the coffee shop, just why the building on the corner is rounded, just why there’s a tall, odd, green metal pole that stands orphan beside the road.

This love of place is a kind of historic hyper-localism, or as Lost Oregon’s John Chilson recently described it to me, “micro-history.” I hesitate to say whether this trait is unique to Portland, but there is no question to me that this sensitivity to the most intimate levels of historical narrative is a definite part of the Portland DNA, a common element of culture that crosses generational, economic, and social lines.

Naturally, in filling in the answers about the Portland DNA, I unearth yet more questions. Is this hyper-local historicism something that only reveals itself to a person after living in a place for a certain amount of time? Is it accessible only to the native or the local, of importance and available not to the visitor? And, therefore, is it rampant everywhere, but simply unavailable to me without living in those other places? Or, conversely, is it a unique quality or character of being of or from this region that we call Portland? Do we, here, breed and mold a culture of historicism? There has, after all, always been a reflective, contemplative, and inward turning tendency here. Maybe, just maybe, we’re all just a little geeky for what came before. Not a surprise, perhaps, for the city that reintroduced the world to the streetcar.

Recently, over at civics21.org, I wrote about the idea of hyperlocalism and history, or as local history blogger John Chilson described it to me, “microhistory.” This concept encompasses the bits and pieces of the past — the loose strings about the edges — that don’t often get encapsulated in the history books.

This intense and intimate scale interest in place — both in the traces of the past as well as the fingers of the present — is one of the aspects of photography that I am strongly drawn to. For me, photography really is a way to visually explore place, and the more tacticle the better.

The monuments, the vistas, the grand spaces, these have all been documented or interpreted countless times. As beautiful as the slopes of Mount Hood are, what more can I really add to the visual interpretations of that space, what can I contribute that has not already been said better? And no such photograph made by me will ever be able to transmit the holy beauty of that monolith.

However, in the common scramble of photographers to capture the big, the famous, the looming, the grand, we often have forgotten the corners of the world, the places that we pass by day-by-day, and which have so much story to tell if only we choose to listen.

Although such corners have always held a fascination for me, until discussin the idea of microhistory with John I had not really recognized that that was one of the threads to be found within my own visual work. Realizing this thread, however, has given me many new ideas to consider.

As a photographer, it always pays to be thinking about your photographs, even when you don’t have a camera about, and it pays too to talk to the people who know your subject matter, jsut as I did with John. It opens up your mind to new possibilities.

The sweeping view, the grand vista, the bird’s-eye perspective. These are all classic ways of shooting the city, of trying to capture the greatness on a metropolitan scale. Such perspectives have been the staple of urban photography since the medium was born in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Once reformism shook up that genre around the turn of the century, however, it’s been far more in vogue to shoot critical images, photographs meant to provoke social change. While undoubtedly effective and necessary, they too have become a kind of cliche, raising decay to almost celebratory levels.

The two forces tug at my vision and my heart. I love cities, but I also value photography more than candy making. More and more, the tension caused by these two forces has resulted in a more personal take on the urban form, one that emphasizes that which can be touched, that which is intimate, and reduces the grand landscapes and the landmarks and monoliths of civilization to something more akin to context in a very personal quest for sense-of-place.

This image, of a vestigial neighborhood off Portland’s Interstate Avenue, is an example of that thought process, and represents for me a significant new direction in my photography. Or is it, perhaps, a direction that was lurking in my work for years and that only now I have come to recognize? Sort of like waking up one day and realizing that you are in love with a person, a place, or an idea?

Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art
Photographs by Jim Lommasson. Introduction by Inara Verzemnieks. Afterword by Prudence Roberts. Oregon State University Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331; http://oregonstate.edu/; 12.5 x 10.5 in; hardbound; 48 pages, 30 color and 9 b/w photos; $25.00

The transitory nature of art has always been fascinating. Photographs can fade, negatives can stiffen and crack and slides can succumb to color shifts and mildew. Sculptures fair little better; it has been suggested that the features on the statues of St. Mark’s Square in Venice have softened over the years, eroding away from acidic rainfall. And paintings? Even in the care of the greatest museums, many of the masters of the Renaissance onwards have developed crackled surfaces. The resulting revealed lower layers of paint are known as pentimento, but they are not confined to great canvases in the museum halls of Europe. In Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art, photographer Jim Lommasson explores an example of this effect on a Portland landmark, the carousel at the Oaks Park amusement park. The results, far from trivial, create a fascinating juxtaposition of Edwardian and Mid-Century cultures, as well as provide a unique encapsulation of the temporal nature of the arts.

Lommasson’s book is almost the result of an accident. During an assignment from a photography class in 1970, the photographer noted that the paintings on the central pillar of the carousel at the Oaks were peeling away, the victim of age, exposure to elements, and occasional flood waters. Lommasson only shot a single frame in black-and-white, but he returned to the Oaks over a decade later and recorded all the central panels, this time in color. It was a prescient decision: a few short years later, the panels were “restored” to their scenes of northwest scenery by a local painting club, covering over the Edwardian imagery that had been bleeding through in the pentimento.

The slim volume opens up with an introduction by journalist Inara Verzemnieks, who writes lyrically about the nature of time and art. She describes the roots of the park as a competitor to the Lewis & Clark Exposition of 1905, a place of excitement and perhaps moral danger, where young women would cozy up to young men in the darkness and be frowned upon by the local clergy for so doing. The original paintings on the carousel mimic this somewhat naive sense of adventure, with Arabian sheiks on camels, befeathered Indian chiefs, and beautiful women exhibiting a range of behaviors from stately and elegant (strolling under a parasol) to scandalous (can-can- dancing). By the 1940s, such images were dated and old fashioned, and the park had them covered over with scenic vistas of the Columbia Gorge and other northwest scenes, all far more family friendly and far more in keeping with the highway-centric provincial boosterism notions of the era. Yet, as the surface images degraded, they began to merge with the lower layers, almost as if they were interacting with each other, a process that Verzemnieks relates in a haunting way.

Following the excellent introduction, Lommasson provides a short text describing how and why he shot the images of the carousel’s central riding panels, and then come the 18 large color plates. The most striking image is perhaps that of the woman with a parasol, with the Columbia Gorge Highway circling about her legs leading to the Vista House located rather provocatively between her thighs. It is such a strange image, almost like an intentional double-exposure on film, and yet, there was no artist for these images. Yes, there were the artists who painted the original panel of the woman, and also two later artists — the eccentric Chase brothers — who painted the scene of the highway and river. But who painted this image, this amalgamation? Time, nature, God? No human hand with intent created this image. For that matter, is the art in question here the painted panels themselves, or Lommasson’s photographs? Who is the artist, and what is the art? The lines all blur here in ways that are similar to graffiti art. Everything about the panels is provocative.

The book wraps up with an afterword by art historian Prudence Roberts. Roberts tells the story of the panels, from their creation by anonymous immigrant artistis at the carousel factor in 1912 to their repainting by off-beat brothers Waldo Spore and William Corbin Chase. The Chases were painters and wood-block printers, part of the larger arts-and-crafts movement. They were also highly unconventional, living for a time in a teepee in the woods of Western Washington State. The text is accompanied by images of the park and works of the talented Chase brothers.

Overall, the book succeeds in placing the carousel panels in a much larger context of art and regional culture. The texts are rich, and the images largely thought provoking. If I had any critical comments, it would be that there is not enough. I would have welcomed more information on the chases, as well as on the original anonymous painters who created the Edwardian imagery. Then again, in the words of circus promoter P. T. Barnum, who would no doubt have felt at home at a place like the Oaks, “always leave them wanting more.”

The book is the typically shelf-awkward size that photography and art books assume, and it also feels rather slim. This makes it seem, at first glance, a bit pricey for its size. Although time spent pouring over the work ought to dismiss those concerns, it does remain slim enough that it just doesn’t feel good to hold in your lap and flip through. I always felt like the book was awkward and wanting to slip from my hands or lose its dust jacket. It is far easier to view set on a table top, and while that’s probably the recommended way to view any book of art or photography, I really like to relax in a nice chair with my books, and with Pentimento you just can’t do that. The images themselves are all crisp and the entire book is printed on a thick, high quality paper with a satin sheen to it.

Pentimento is a volume that explores history, artistic philosophy, and Pacific Northwest culture through a unique lens. It is far more than a book about an amusement park ride. It should prove valuable to those interested in the esoterica of Portland history, as well as those with a passion for documentary photography and painting in general.

Oaks Park Pentimento: Portland’s Lost and Found Carousel Art is available from Powell’s Books, Amazon, and directly from the publisher.

Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington
By Martin Burwash. iUniverse, 1663 Liberty Drive, Bloomington, IN 47403; http://www.iuniverse.com/; 9 x 6 x 1.1 in; trade paperback; 480 pages, 15 maps; $29.95

In the late Winter of 1910, the largest avalanche disaster in the history of North America struck the tiny railroad town of Wellington, Washington, perched in the Cascade Range. One hundred people died, and the tragedy remains unsurpassed to this day. The cause, according to an inquest held later that year, was determined to be “vis major”, an act of God. Afterwards, the Great Northern Railway abolished the station name of Wellington from its timetable, hoping to eliminate the memory of the disaster from the minds of passengers on the line. The story, however, lived on, becoming a source of legend about the power and danger of the high Cascades. Photographer Martin Burwash is not the first person to write about these events of 1910 — guidebooks to the region often contain thumbnail accounts of the tragedy, while more recently Gary Krist dedicated an entire volume to it — but he may be the author who comes closest to bringing a reader to understand the experience. To do this, Burwash worked within the tradition of Jeff Shaara and Patrick O’Brien, and delivered to the world his life’s work, the historical novel Vis Major.

The book starts with a brief author’s note, discussing the actual event and noting that this novel is the author’s attempt to tell the story of the men who lived through or died in the snow slide. After this short note, the novel begins. The book is organized into a series of chapters, each following one character for the duration of the chapter. Overall it is an effective device, allowing the reader to gain an understanding of the events from multiple perspectives without sacrificing the human point-of-view. The subject matter — an obscure event in the insular context of a railroad from the often forgotten past — is in great danger of being difficult to access. Burwash largely succeeds in avoiding this problem, restraining from overuse of insider technical terms as well as staying away from lengthy esoteric descriptions. Instead, the author strikes a good balance of minimal terminology and the use of context to orient the reader.

The book has a lengthy narrative pace, and this seems to be a deliberate choice made by the author. Although we get only a few key days in the Fall of 1909, once the fateful storm of 1910 strikes the mountains, we follow nearly every move made by the men, day by day, step by step. Burwash has made many public comments about his dedication to doing justice to the men who endured and in some cases lost their lives in this tragic event, and it is no doubt this historian side of the author that is manifested in this narrative choice. Much of the events of the story were pieced together through research and the records of the inquest that took place in 1910. Although the dialogue in the novel is imagined, the movement and actions of the characters are as accurate as the author was able to piece together from the records, as stated in the author’s note at the book’s beginning. The result is generally positive. While the book feels too long both figuratively and literally — it weighs over a pound and a half! — the pace of the narrative is a bit like a horse galloping, and is difficult to resist.

Although Burwash’s first novel, Vis Major shows little signs of it. The biggest weakness of the novel is likely it’s length, as mentioned above. This said, the reader never feels their time is wasted, and the overall effect is to become accustomed to the characters. There are, perhaps, a few too many instances of Burwash trying to put us in the thoughts of the characters, (invariably indicated by italics,) thus using exposition when description might have proven more effective. This said, by placing us on the shoulders of the men (and women) of Wellington, the reader gets a highly sensory ride. We get to know the isolated community of Wellington, the passengers of two stranded passenger trains, and the workers of the Great Northern Railway. Most of all, we get to experience as if firsthand the valiant, frustrating, and ultimately futile battle of the rotary snowplows and their crews as they attempt to keep Wellington connected to the outside world. When the reader finally reaches the penultimate tragedy, the hairs will very nearly stand on the back of their neck.

Following the novel, Burwash provides an epilogue discussing what became of the main survivors, and then includes a list of the GN’s men who were caught in it, noting who lived, who were injured, and who died. Given that the novel is based around a true story, the book would have benefited from a slightly longer epilogue with a bit more detail. Finally, a brief statement of acknowledgements closes out the book.

The fit and finish of Vis Major is very professional. The book is quite hefty but it feels good to hold when reading. Cover stock and paper quality feel standard for a trade paperback, and the typesetting and layout is professional. Considering that iUniverse is a print-on-demand publisher, this is far more than I would expect to see. The biggest question might be, is it worth the price? Even for such a hefty book, thirty dollars seems a bit steep. In the end, however, what you pay a premium for is not the physicality of the book, but the content. (Would Vis Major have seen print through traditional publishing houses? In these days of increasingly thin margins on published material, it is an unknown.) For me, the question was simple: it was worth an extra $5 or so to have a book with rare and interesting content and production values that felt professional. [Note: a hardbound version is also available. The paperback version was used for this review.]

Overall, Vis Major is an effective vehicle for telling the story of the Wellington disaster. Burwash’s passion for the human aspects of this story ring through in the text, in some cases making the novel feel more like creative nonfiction in the tradition of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe. The book will prove of interest to readers of historical fiction, as well as those interested in the Great Northern Railway, the history of the North Cascades, or the futility of attempting to fight nature.

Vis Major: Railroad Men, an Act of God: White Death at Wellington is available from Amazon. [The hardbound version is available here.]

Although industrial parks have had only a spotty rate of success as sanctuaries for true “industry” — e.g. large scale manufacturing — a visit to an industrial park today will show that they have a fairly low vacancy rate. With large, easily subdivided buildings and robust energy and transportation infrastructure, industrial parks are home to businesses ranging from wholesale auto parts distributors to artisinal coffee roasters to small professional offices. Nearly any scale and type of business can be found located within today’s so-called industrial parks.

Where are the smokestacks? Provvista, in Northwest Portland’s Guilds Lake Industrial Park, is hardly an example of what early 20th century planners meant by “industry.” Yet this company — a gourmet foods distributor — is just one of many examples of the vastly scalable and diverse success of the re-tasked economic role of industrial parks.

In many ways, this unforeseen versatility has made the industrial park — re-tasked as a dedicated business zone — a wild success. These districts, set aside specifically for the needs of commerce with wide and gently curved streets, easy freeway access, broad and inexpensive to build upon land, and few residential neighbors have become great economic engines for cities. Their flexibility and relatively low cost of entry when compared with traditional urban core properties makes them a scalable tool for entrepreneurs. They have become both an engine and an incubator of business.

In the Portland region, especially, this is a very important task. Oregon has a significant reliance on property and income taxes. Small manufacturers pay property tax on their manufacturing equipment, and their employees bolster local income tax rolls. Even if such issues were not significant concerns, as others have noted there are other benefits to industrial jobs, notably the social benefits of a city with a healthy middle class.

Yet, even as industrial parks have, through the happy accident of progress, proven to be poster children of how and why form-based-code is a powerful tool for positive urban growth, they are also great examples of why pure form-based-code should not be applied universally across a metropolitan region.

The key strengths of industrial parks include, amongst other traits, their cheap horizontal land uses and a transportation infrastructure that does not need to accommodate frequent single occupancy vehicle movements as would be found in a purely retail environment. Mixing small retail or residential into industrial parks can lead to significant conflicts, including a slow erosion of the effectiveness of that area as a business district, as has been seen first in the Pearl District and can be currently witnessed in the Central Eastside Industrial District, as the area transitions.

The problem, of course, is that if low density business districts — industrial parks reborn — are to remain a vital part of the urban fabric, how can they be integrated without relying on 20th Century transportation and land use models? Spread out and generally distant from the urban core, these areas are almost always exclusively automobile commuting territories. Introducing transit to them is usually difficult as the ridership bases are usually low except during peak hours, but if the system does not operate often enough or fast enough it is unable to attract significant ridership. This — adapting the industrial/business park to modern urban form — will be one of the great challenges of the 21st Century civic revival.