Overlook activists spark an art park

Neighborhood Beat • ‘Forgotten’ area to become a multiuse community space

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Dec 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Overlook residents Chris Radcliffe and Marci Macfarlane initiated an effort to make a park out of a stretch of land in the neighborhood. They hope the new community space also will feature artwork such as this bronze sculpture by Dan Das Mann.

Marci Macfarlane and Chris Radcliffe are used to people getting lost on the way to their house in North Portland’s Overlook neighborhood.

They live just west of Interstate Avenue on North Going Court, in a confusingly curvy nook of homes along a highway sound wall and potholed road. Nine houses were demolished here in the 1970s to make way for the sound wall, which separates them from the industrial part of North Going Street leading to Swan Island.

But between the sound wall and potholed road lies an L-shaped stretch of grass, just under an acre, that’s on the fast track to becoming the city’s next park – a project the couple initiated themselves just a year ago.

“It’s pretty much been forgotten space,” said Radcliffe, a visual artist who moved here last year from New Orleans. Before that, he lived in San Francisco, and was, he said, one of the people who helped start the famous Burning Man arts festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

For years, the little-known space has been used as overflow parking for neighbors, as well as open space for dog-walkers and schoolchildren by day and prostitutes and drug addicts by night. So Macfarlane and Radcliffe took it upon themselves to adopt the site, picking up garbage and trying to chase away the seedier elements by informally installing public works of art.

Take, for example, the giant wicker sculpture of a woman’s bodice, stuck in a large apple tree at the south end of the site and titled, “The lady at the end of the road.”

There’s also a larger-than-life bird’s nest made with leaves and branches; a sheet metal sculpture – soon to be replaced by a 16-foot metal Buddha sculpture; a giant iPod-inspired piece dangling from a tree branch; and a Mardi Gras tree, its branches laced with beaded necklaces and disco balls. The works have either been salvaged by Radcliffe and Macfarlane or donated by various artists.

But the couple wants the space to be more than just an informal space for their funky installations.

So they went to Metro late last year and applied for a North Portland rehabilitation and enhancement grant to turn the Pittman Addition, as it’s called, into a public park. Their application was rejected. But Darcy Cronin, a facilities services specialist at the water bureau, heard about their effort, since she already had been looking into developing the space into a park.

“I was intrigued by it,” said Cronin, whose master’s thesis at Antioch University at Seattle was in “sustainable placemaking.” “I came out and saw that people had definitely been there.”

So with Cronin’s help and a $20,000 city budget, the site is now on track to become Portland’s next “hydro park,” a piece of water bureau property in a park-deficient area that’s developed into an inviting community space.

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