October 15, 2020: Elk Report -

It’s been a rough stretch for Portland public art. I drove downtown today to check on an elk statue and an enormous mural. Elk report herewith, mural report to follow.  

In midsummer, the historic Thompson Elk was removed from its pedestal down near the Justice Center, for safekeeping, a wise move.  

Until July, when you drove into downtown Portland across the Hawthorne Bridge, you drove past the Thompson Elk, which was given to the city by former Mayor David Thompson in 1900. It was nine feet high, way up on a pedestal, “literally in the middle of Main Street.”  (This is true; Main splits and goes around the pedestal.  I love the way the newscaster says it on the video here, because he seems so bowled over about the middle of the street bit, and yet it’s one of those times when “literally” literally means “literally,” a rare and notable occurrence.)

The elk (variously described as “a plain old elk,” or as “a monstrosity of art” by the Exalted Order of Elks, though I don’t know what their issue was, because it’s just an elk), faced west. Since the one-way traffic on Main also goes west, if you were driving your car past it, you came up on it from the rear, and you couldn’t see the elk’s face.  The pedestal was actually a fountain, with a little trough for dogs or horses to get water, though traffic on Main meant that those functions were more a convenience-in-1900 than a feature-in-2020.

I once chaperoned a field trip for my daughter’s high school where we were led around town all day by a guy whose specialty was public art.  He was a terrific tour guide! He pointed out wonders I had never noticed, and told stories about them, and now I show visitors (okay, showed visitors once and will someday show them again) the mountain maps carved into the Hilton Hotel, and the glass statues holding up the fireplace mantel in the lobby of the Performing Arts Center (THAT’s the sculptor’s son, and THIS is the son’s girlfriend). I also explain that the elk is facing the wrong way because it was removed for cleaning once, and they put it back incorrectly. 

Alas, this last factoid turns out to be untrue. Main used to be a two way street, so for years, at least half the traffic saw the elk full frontal. When Portland put in its one-way grid in the 50s, that changed. Now I wonder if it’s even the sculptor’s son and his girlfriend in the lobby, or if that whole public art day was a farce. Sigh.

(Part of the day was definitely a farce! Each chaperone was given 45 minutes to take her charges somewhere with their sack lunches. I recall that I had six or seven girls assigned to me, and someone suggested we go  down to the Salmon Street Springs fountain, one of those modern ones set into the sidewalk so you can walk right in. Down we went. It was a nice June day. I know it was June, because it was Rose Festival, always in June, and the fleet was in, always part of Rose Festival, and there were sailors down near the fountain, and three of my 15 year old charges thought it would be fun to get into the fountain for a wet t-shirt festival of shrieking, and… anyway, it all worked out. At one point, the three merrily said that the rest of us should go on back to the tour, and they’d catch up later, and I thought Yeah, Right, I’m Gonna Tell the Nuns I Left You Guys in a Fountain Being Appreciated by Sailors, But You’ll Catch Up. I still get a little adrenaline remembering this moment, though in fact they came back with the rest of us, and I believe they have all gone on to live productive and highly entertaining lives.)

So the Thompson Elk, which used to face west, is safely stowed until the protests end, and in its place was erected the Nightmare Elk, screaming out against injustice. The Nightmare faced traffic. It was big and black and had extremely large eyes. I laughed the first time I saw it, because of those eyes, and because I didn’t know anything about it, but then when I got up close there were placards with the names of Black victims of police violence, so I sobered up.

This week, the Patriot Prayer folks saw fit to steal the Nightmare Elk (it had a Black Lives Matter sign on it).  They posted things about red pills and blue pills and said Portland’s “evil deer” would be voting for Trump.

The protesters, in response, sent out an invitation for people to come build a replacement, and Nightmare Elk #2 went up. It is made of wooden pallets, and has big wooden branches for antlers. It’s pretty rough, and there is talk of “when it burns,” and of “we will rebuild,” and so forth.

You can read all of this in the Daily Mail today, in a story they dubbed Monumental Farce (ah, there’s our farce theme again). Their story features the new Nightmare as it looked in the wee hours, pretty scary in the red glow of police lights. My picture is from this morning, just sortof sad. 

I so much want Portland not to be in the Daily Mail any more.