Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

I first noticed this place a year ago when I was heading to Sellwood. I just assumed some kook lived there because at the time it seemed to be a private residence and then discovered it used to be a candy store and that it had re-opened about six months ago. Jeez, I had no idea. I really don’t know why I didn’t check it out sooner…

Aside from painting it yellow, it seemed like they had some work on the exterior, which looked nice, though I missed the giant cupcake hanging from the porch.

Inside, every square inch had been decorated with fake candy. The lady behind the counter, Denise, explained to Jeremy and I that they shut down for a year and half to remodel further. She was the grandmother of the family that had owned the place for the last fourteen years and done all the work themselves. And she said that neighbors thought they were witches. I couldn’t put my finger on it if they were Jesus-y or if they were witches. Mainly, I’m just always dazzled by people who take architecture into their own hands and try to make the outside world look like what’s inside their heads. Like Watts Tower or House In The Rock.

Denise said these pies are eventually going to be animated. I’m not sure what that entails, but I’m pretty fascinated by it.

The staircase was decorated in this middle-earth fairy theme and it remained very pixie-ish upstairs, where there was a dining room, a ‘diva’ room and a pretty memorable bathroom.

We bought some of the homemade candy and I bought a chocolate camera with chocolate film.

I really can’t recommend this store enough. Jeremy and I were both kind of in a daze by it, but he did mention the nagging feeling he was having about how troubling it was that someone would do something this extreme to an 1890s house.

Later on we were at the best thrift store on Hawthorne street and I checked out this new 99 cent store next door that opened in an amazing arts and crafts house.

Walking through there, I was like, ‘wainscotting! picture rails!!! unpainted trim everywhere!?!’ I’ve never had such real-estate jealousy in a discount store.

I was most baffled by this etched glass above what was the dining room that I doubt was period.

Oh Pagoda, don’t go changin’. I ate there last night, but not actually in the restaurant. But I had dinner there two weeks ago and got a little nervous when the grouchy (but loveable) waitress wasn’t there (even though the waitress we had was pretty cool too). I guess her shift hadn’t started yet because she showed up when we were leaving.

Here’s where I want to go in 2005 (I know, it’s been 2005 for a while). I hope some of these places still exists, since my youngest guide book is from 2001:

The Elephant Museum at the Washington Zoo
Van Calvin’s Manikin Restoration
Lagniappe
Chinese Village
The Copper Penny
Dinos
The Doug Fir
The Egyptian Room
Lutz
Pix Patisserie
Sewickley Addition
Yukon Tavern
Bush Gardens
Higgins
Culinary Institute
Jake’s Famous Crawfish
Mary’s Club
Portland City Grill
Shanghai Tunnels (tunnels, not bar)
Embers
Wilf’s
The Bagdad Theater
The Paragon
Chins
Yam Yams
April’s apartment
The Carrosel Restaurant
The Willamette Shore Trolley
the horse race track and the dog tracks
Chez What
Pogo’s
The World’s Largest Postage Stamp
OMSI
Chunk’s Bowling Alley
The UFO Museum
Tillamook Air Museum (I tried to go there last summer right after it closed for the day. It’s the biggest wood building in the world and it actually makes you a little queasy standing next to it because of it’s scale, which is accentuated by the vast openness around it. I saw a picture of it recently that showed six or seven full sized blimps inside. I’m sure that’s not what’s inside anymore, but if it were, I think my head would explode).

Outside of Portland
The Prehistoric Gardens
Crater Lake
Trees of Mystery
Boring, Oregon
Alf’s Ice Cream
The Spruce Goose
The Sea Lion Caves
The Lava Tube in Bend
World Famous Fantastic Museum
Highway 99W
Highway 30
Harvey the Giant Rabbit
The Self Cleaning House (alas, one day before it’s too late)
The Grand Coulee Damn
Pendelton Rodeo and Tunnels
North Bend, Washington (it’s the Twin Peaks town!)
Seattle, Washington, still never been there
Vancouver, B.C., ditto
and many more…

28th Ave, day and night.

So I sealed off about a third of the house today to start sanding all the woodwork. It’s kind of interesting how the flow of a building changes when you start making some severe restrictions, but mostly I think we should work fast since this re-routing is going to drive me crazy.

I saw this a few blocks from my house last week. Was it ‘drying’? I was car-less for about two weeks because I needed to replace my clutch, so I was walking everywhere and noticing a lot more unusual details about my neighborhood than I have in the last few months.
Part of my car’s million dollar makeover included this:

I got new tires to insure that my car would make all the roadtrips planned in March and beyond but when the lady behind the counter asked me if I wanted steaks or dried meat, my first reaction was ‘huh’. Then, immediately, ‘maybe both’.
We had the steaks today and they were excellent. The pepperoni wasn’t bad either.

Otherwise, Jeremy and I cleaned up at the big Rejuvination 50% off sale this last weekend. I stumbled in there before the sale started cause I was looking for picture hooks and freaked out that all the sale stuff was already out on the floor days early. We ended up getting a light for our hallway and backyard and a new mailbox (which is really cool looking, but I’m worried it might fluster the mailman and he’ll just retailliate by throwing our mail in the bushes).
We’ve almost finished stripping paint from the front rooms of the house and the sanding will begin soon. That alone is about the most intrusive/miserable thing I’ve experienced so far since the wood dust gets everywhere. I figured I’m just going to completely seal off the front of the house for the next few weeks to try to contain the mountain of dust. Before that, though, it’s important that I find a co-axial cable that will reach one of the bedrooms so I can still watch cable. The idea of going two or three weeks without movies or Simpsons or Daily Show or Melrose Place sounds worse than drinking a can of Jasco.

I re-watched The Wiz last night on tivo in fast forward mainly cause I was just watching it for the art direction, which really disturbed me as a child. I think when I was a kid, I was more bothered by the fact that they were wholesale tampering with the orignal film, which I knew frame-by-frame. Now I found it kind of depressing for what a post apocalypic view of NY it was with monster people running around everywhere. The subway scene remains startlingly scary. Otherwise, it was kind of neat seeing how they tampered with the world’s fair site in Queens, Coney Island and the World Trade Center. And it’s hillarious that Diana Ross is about 50 years old and she’s supposed to be 24.

I need ten acres of haunted house potential, STAT! (via Jeremy). Too bad the fine print would include moving to Ohio.

On Saturday, Katherine, Jeremy, my neighbor and I walked over to an estate sale a few blocks away. It was in a pretty ordinary looking house, but inside it was this insane packrat fantasy. Mind you, it was very ‘granny’ with practically nothing of interest. But it was the shear volume of collecting that was so mind boggling and it was all stuff from the thirties to maybe the sixties. The most contemporary object in the place an old bottle of ‘Love My Carpet’. Every room was jam packed. The kitchen had containers for everything these people had ever bought and I spent some time struggling with buying some old cans of syrup that were forty years old. The basement was more of the same, except add to that a really eccentric home workshop. Dozens of jar lids were affixed to the low ceiling and the glass jars were full of rusty nails and bolts.
And none of it was new stuff. It was like they’d never been to Wallmart. I found the old Sears catalog upstairs in a room full of nothing but xmas decorations and stacks of Popular Mechanics magazines from the fifties. I decided then and there that estate sales are the way to go because even if you don’t find anything, you still get to snoop around stranger’s houses.

Windows that need to be scraped/sanded/stained and varnished.

A semi gutted living room of questionable air-safety levels.

Dead gloves, with holes in the fingers.

The need to go to the dump again (which is actually kind of cool). The green chair violently collapsed yesterday under my weight. I wish this was the first time this has ever happened. The first was in Brooklyn. The suspect was a creaky chair found on the sidewalk.
This chair had a big crack near one of the legs. Fortunately there were no witnesses but it did make a loud noise. An hour before, Donna and I were on the porch drinking coffee and she was sitting in the chair. So I’m glad it didn’t go out then.

The leaning tower of Pizza fence.

Now, I don’t know if this counts as ‘remodeling woes’ but from my bedroom this morning I saw this rock, in the foreground, that looked deceptively like a dead possum and it freaked me out. So much so, I was afraid to go out in the yard and look closer (what if it was faking and then jumped on me when I got close?). I have seen a stray raccoon or two back there at night. They’re not afraid of humans who say ’shoo’, so they’re completely terrifying. I suspected at first there was some kind of animal battle back there and that I’d have to dispose of the carcass of a huge mammal, which seems about a trillion times worse that getting rid of a dead rat.

I’m grateful that it turns out I’m just crazy and it really was a rock.

More on Millenium Park and their unphotographable sculpture from boingboing, who do a very good job reporting on the ever tightening state of copyright law. This is kind of a subject near and dear to me ever since I got kicked out a mall in Syracuse, NY one time for taking pictures. And of course followed up by living in NYC, which is full of its own strange rules of what can and can’t be photographed.

All sorts of observations are swirling together… I got an email today from Onward Oregon about the hearings for the Burnside Bridge development that’s happening tomorrow (wed). I just assumed the fuss was about tearing down some old buildings to set up a cheap big box store with a bigger parking lot. I was kind of surprised/repulsed to see how ‘architectural’ all the bids are. Not Frank Gerhy bad, just American generica fake-nouveau-riche bad. Check them out. What got me fired up, was thinking that Ararat, a bakery that turns into a Russian nightclub might be caught in the path of destruction. I went there a few weeks ago with Leslie and Jeremy and Steve on Bryan’s suggestion. And it was exactly what you’d think Eastern Europe would be like, guys in spandex turtlenecks who seem gay but they’re not; women wearing copious amounts of make-up. And pounding techno. It was pretty great. We’d ended up there after a bowling fiasco at Hollywood Lanes. I can’t discourage cosmic bowling enough. Having strobe lights blinking in my eyes for two hours made me feel like I was going to regress into a monkey like William Hurt in Altered States. The original plan was to go to Grand Central Lanes on Morrison, which turned out to be closed for good and on the chopping block for destruction to become the future home of some forgettable mixed use building (which is a nice way of saying ‘Starbucks with $500,000 condos on top’).
I was really upset they were tearing the bowling alley down because it had been around since the 1950s (it was a huge fruit market before that, dating to the 1920s). It had incredible fixtures and lighting, though sadly, went cosmic like all the others. I had gone in there once and shot a roll of film that came back really under exposed. Needless to say, events like this make me very paranoid that everything good and unique is vanishing. I’m reading Stewart Brand’s phenomenal How Buildings Learn, about patterns of urban development and the adaptability of architecture, and I’ve been trying to make my peace with the idea that ‘cities devour their buildings’ and that poverty and recession are the greatest forces of preservation.
This was really driven home last week when I went downtown to the Oregon Historical Soicety to see if I could find any old pictures of my house (which was built in 1910 and used to be on a streetcar line). Sadly, I didn’t find any pictures of my house or intersection in the thousands of pictures I was allowed to flip through of south east Portland. Though it was shocking to see photos of Portland a hundred years ago when it was boomtown cluttered with massive Victorian homes, which are few and far between now and mainly replaced by four-square homes and bungalows. Despite that, it was almost eerie to see shots of fully corsetted Victorians standing in front of buildings I walk past every day.
On Saturday, Jeremy and I got an earfull from our neighbor, Harvey, who is an encyclopedia of neighborhood gossip. Like the coffee shop across the street used to be a video store, a thrift shop and a crack house (just in the last ten years!). I guess that’s what I like about old cities the most: all the overlapping layers of wallpaper and the folly that there is any permanence to any of it.
But the other thing I’m grappling with is that I’m in the beginning of my second year of living in Portland and I’m going through that passing out of that ‘everything is new and exhilarating’ phase into a more familiar and protective one. Not really. I still’ve barely scratched the surface. But I can’t help but get really emotionally attached to certain buildings and then have to live with worrying about whether they’re going to be okay.

New Orleans, gearing up for Mardi Gras.

Jami sent me the coolest thing in the world. I’m going to post a picture of it tomorrow.