The Return of the Elk

Not quite four years ago, I moved from my former home to pursue happiness here in Portland, Oregon. After some career jostling, I was admitted to the Oregon Bar and thereafter opened up my own law firm. But three months after I first opened shop, the pandemic hit and the world seemed to end. The Bad Summer was 2020: everything was shut down because of the pandemic. The mountains were on fire, the worst fires and smoke anyone could remember. There was significant and continuous civil unrest, aggravated by provocative law enforcement responses. My business was too new to qualify for most of the kinds of public aid and support that were available. After rather a lot of work and other efforts, I’ve recovered from this. Hopefully it lasts. But this post isn’t about me bragging about my professional setbacks and successes. It’s about where I work: downtown Portland, Oregon.

I don’t have to work here. A large number of my peers work at home or in suburban offices. I could too, if I wanted. Google’s search engine believes that Pioneer Courthouse Square is the center of Portland. So when someone does a Google search like “employment lawyers in Portland,” I want to eventually be at or near the top of that list. I feel more productive and serious about my work in a dedicated office.

One of the ways into my office from my home is westbound over the Hawthorne Bridge. This becomes SW Main Street, and after a few blocks it runs through the “civic center.” By which phrase I mean the area including the Plaza Blocks (three city parks, adjacent to one another, called Lownsdale Square, Chapman Square, and Terry Schrunk Plaza), bounded by Third, Jefferson, Fourth, and Salmon Streets. These are surrounded most notably by the Federal courthouse, the Federal building, and the old State courthouse, the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau, the criminal courts building, City Hall, and its adjacent city bureaucracy-housing Portland Building. (Here’s a map, if that helps you visualize what’s going on. geographically.) Longtime readers may remember I tried to assure folks during the Bad Days Of The Summer Of 2020 that the civic unrest and violence they were seeing in Portland on TV was largely (not completely) limited to this three-block area.

The Thompson Elk Fountain, formerly on SW Main Street, from wikimedia commons

Now, at the start of this Summer From Hell, there was a statue of an elk in the middle of SW Main Street. It was put there around the turn of the 20th Century by a former mayor of the city. Roland Hinton Perry, the sculptor that Mayor Thompson commissioned, had apparently never seen an elk before in real life, or maybe was working off of a painting or a photograph that had been taken at a weird angle, or maybe he just kind of messed up. Nevertheless, the elk was placed atop of a fountain in the middle of the road there 122 years ago, necessitating diverting the lanes of traffic to go around it. “Elk” was initially controversial for its oddly long neck; the local Elks Club refused to participate in the dedication ceremony of the odd-looking statue in the middle of Main Street because they didn’t think elks actually looked like that.

Nevertheless, the Thompson Elk was maintained in this spot for over a century. Later in Portland’s history, the grid of streets downtown were re-aligned such that most of them became one-way streets. As it worked out, Main Street became a one-way westbound street so the only view anyone would have of the Thompson Elk, at least if driving a car, would be of the Thompson Elk looking away from you, and the inscription on the fountain was also facing away from traffic. The Thompson Elk was popular with Portlanders. We all loved it, although many of us didn’t realize that we did so until halfway through 2020.

For the first three months of the pandemic, from March to May, it was like The Night Of The Comet downtown. But things changed after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis: people turned out in huge numbers to protest, marching across bridges, filling the squares and parks, and focusing their anger on the Portland Police Bureau. No, PPB hadn’t killed George Floyd but there has been a long and very troubled history between the police and the policed in this city, and the volume of the protests really surprised no one.  The duration of them did though; they lasted until smoke from the wildfires grew thick and powerful enough to create air more unhealthful than Beijing’s. The fires lasted more than a month and protests resumed as the smoke grew less hazardous, although with less intensity than before.

A still from a video of protests which occurred at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares on the night of 01 July 2020. The video may be seen at https://twitter.com/DonovanFarley/status/1278576267328012288?s=20&t=WheZ1NHbyc0X2gl6c-KqRQ.

A still from a video of protests which occurred at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares on the night of 01 July 2020. The video may be seen here and the remainder of the still photo chain of tweets offers one journalist’s perspective on the events of that evening.[/caption]

During those Bad Summer Nights that followed the daytime George Floyd Protests, the fountain was turned off following a large bonfire built by nighttime protestors.¹ This fire damaged the fountain, and the city removed the entire thing in early July of 2020, and just left an empty mound of dirt in the middle of the street. The statute was, and remains, warehoused somewhere under the control of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, which has chosen to keep the exact location secret.

The Nightmare Elk, with protest signs. Photograph by the author.

Within days, an artist (I have no idea who this artist was) had created a new statue and deposited it on this rogue spot of dirt. This new statue quickly enjoyed a wide variety of names at least in my social circle, including “Protest Elk,” and “Funky Elk,” but eventually people mostly settled on “Nightmare Elk” for its partially-skeletal appearance and seemingly-exposed teeth. The Nightmare Elk found its own cadre of fans and attracted a number of protest signs and banners.

In the early morning hours of 10 October 2020, hooligans from Patriot Prayer came downtown and stole the Nightmare Elk, believing it was associated with Antifa. They posted pictures of themselves stealing it and displaying it at an unknown location, flashing “OK” signs for the camera. Later, their ringleader said the “OK” signs were intended to antagonize people and not really to call for “white power.” He also joked that the elk was now registered to vote and would be voting for Donald Trump come November; they brought the Nightmare Elk with them to a post-election Donald Trump rally in Salem. They had repainted it with pro-Trump political slogans and the red-and-white stripes and blue-field-with-white-stars images of the U.S. flag. Some of those people later stormed the capitol in Salem and some of those people also participated in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. But the rally in Salem was the last anyone had heard of the Nightmare Elk.

In February, members of the City Council announced plans to restore the Thompson Elk to its former location. This generated substantial grumbling from a variety of local groups, including activists for various groups who thought a statute commemorating previously-victimized peoples would be better, and others who wanted the tiny bit of park in the street demolished and Main Street straightened and widened for more bicycle access. In other words, things were returning to basically normal in Portland, where no decision of any kind can be made without pissing someone off. And in the face of that pissed-offedness, a more complex and confusing solution giving everyone half a loaf appears to have been the result. The world reverts to its baseline, pre-trauma norms.

It would be simple to say that Portland has other, bigger problems on its plate than restoring the Thompson Elk. Of course it does. If you ask me, the three principal problems here are housing (not enough of it to go around, causing rents and values to increase out of reach of people of average means), housing (not enough ability to create more of it quickly, leaving the currently unhoused to camp on the streets creating a visible and pervasive impression of homelessness), and housing (too much of it from the last two decades’ worth of rapid expansion of the metro area causing strain on natural resources and already-strained infrastructure). These are not easy problems for any city to solve anywhere. They’re hard because you have NIMBY and BANANA types objecting to any proposed solution whether good or bad. They’re hard because they have complex causes and complex solutions, solutions that always require at least some shifting of costs.

And these aren’t the only problems confronting us. The snow on Mount Hood, our principal summer and autumn water supply, melts too fast. COVID hasn’t gone away. PDOT needs to finish the street light and asphalt resurfacing project at the intersection of SE Cesar Chavez and Division which feels like it’s been ongoing since the Obama Administration. We’ve our share of crime (though, I think statistics bear out, not more than our share); you can never know when someone dressed like an elven warrior is going to stab the engine block of your car with a sword while you’re waiting on a red light or the convenience store in your neighborhood is going to get robbed by some dude with a chainsaw (car on fire in the parking lot – unrelated). Inflation sucks, and gas in particular feels super expensive. There’s still a war in Ukraine with awful ripple effects affecting us even here. Racism and other kinds of bigotry haven’t gone away. But some downtown businesses have, and the city is considering trying to get some existing commercial buildings converted to residential use, which is a questionable decision in my opinion. It’s still ridiculously difficult to cancel an unwanted gym membership, ridiculously easy to gain weight, and the Blazers need an upgrade at power forward.

No, things aren’t perfect. It’s sometimes easy to forget that they never were. Indeed, despite these things, Portland feels so much better than it did two years ago at this time. The lived experience here is that all the things that make life in the northwest good have come together again and we’re re-knitting a new permutation of the city. Vaccines are available for COVID and we aren’t walking around masked anymore. The Feds aren’t occupying downtown anymore. The Proud Boys aren’t driving across the river daily to stir up trouble (indeed, the too-slow wheels of justice may finally be catching up to them). Black bloc antifa aren’t lining up nightly against the PPB to wage urban combat against one another and produce TV images that scare the piss out of my family. Every mountain in the state isn’t on fire, creating worse air pollution than Tuesday in Beijing. It appears my house is appreciating in value again. Bluesfest was held on the Waterfront again. The businesses that made it through the pandemic at all are open for business and mostly seem to be busy. Unemployment is low, so low that service jobs are offering wages and other incentives to attract people.

For a downtown area of any city to thrive, a whole lot of the rest of the city and indeed the region needs to be working more or less right. There need to be enough jobs, enough of a tax base, enough commercial activity (as linked above, this may be a lot less office space than before The Time of The Changing), enough transportation, enough policing and safety, and enough culture and community, to necessitate a common area for the city to gather and do all the things that people look to cities to offer. To have museums and newspapers and tour groups dispensing knowledge. To have good restaurants and nightclubs and a spectrum of tourist-friendly hotels from the snazzy to the vanilla. To have live art from Big High Culture like the theater, opera, and symphony, to Middlebrow Culture like stand up comedy, spoken word, and earnest young people with mandolins and straw hats performing for tips in pubs, all the way down to the Low Culture of the graffitied dive bar and improvised skate park in a fenced-off former city park. To have sporting venues with soccer and basketball and hockey and baseball. To have gathering places for governmental and commercial activities to take place in person. To have public festivals and crafts fairs and farmers markets. To have college students in questionable states of intoxication on motor scooters talking of their starry-eyed solutions to all the world’s problems. And yes, to have places for people to speak their minds even if they do so ungently and loudly.

So many of these things felt gone from everyday life for so long! Yet as I walk about downtown these days in search of lunches, to make an appearance in the Multnomah County courthouse for work, or to drop off my dry cleaning, I see these things everywhere, regrown like ferns newly-uncoiled from the winter’s rest. I see lots of other people out in them, locals and tourists (identifiable by their pink boxes filled with donuts) alike.

My great expectation is that Portland is not unique in this respect, that this describes the state of many American cities. Some started back a bit sooner than us. Some aren’t quite as far along as we. We’re part of this nation and part of the wave of things that are happening all over. These are, despite what you may read on the news, mostly good things, mostly promising things, mostly people doing beneficial and productive things. Over the course of this year I’ve been to Seattle and Los Angeles, and seen signs of similar things there too. I have to imagine it’s happening everywhere. I look forward to reading your stories of your communities’ respectives recoveries from the pandemic in comments.

As for us in Portland, it seems to me that we’re basically at as “normal” as the new normal is ever going to be. Business is now pretty much as “usual” as “usual” is ever going to get; it’s never going to be like it was before, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad. So, civic leaders of Portland, the other problems we face demand absolutely your attention too. But it’s well nigh time for us to see our return to normalcy symbolized in a rebuilt fountain on Main Street, once again proudly displaying Portland’s bizarrely long-necked Thompson Elk.

Photograph (and in-picture commentary) by the author, 30 August 2022.

1. It’s not my desire to re-litigate the merits of the protests from that summer here. Suffice to say that I and, I think, most Portlanders readily distinguished between the kinds of people who were there during the daytime and those who were there at night, and this includes both protestors and police. No one liked what happened there at night, and what caused those bad things at night to happen was complex, ambiguous, and not the subject of this essay.