WWP's evening commute takes him daily past the slowly emerging taxpayer-subsidized eyesore that is the South Waterfront District. In the last few months and weeks, we've been witness to new and oversized signs announcing the SoWhat, weird local traffic diversions that surely gladden the hearts of Portland's most ardent and overrepresented car-hater class, and buildings so hideously bland that even Mies van der Rohe might be embarrassed at the idea of having invented the glass tower in the first place.
But today came the pièce de résistance: The first tower of The Portland Underpants, aka, the aerial tram, was put into place. And let it be noted for the record:
Is it ever ugly!!
Uglier than even we could have imagined. If you liked the U.S.S. battleship Missouri, you're gonna love the new aerial tram towers. Gray and dull ... steel plated with unsightly seams and rivets showing ... and it's hideously huge, and by virtue of being situated "in your face" about three inches from Macadam Avenue, it's ill-placed, to boot. It's everything the Corbett/Lair Hill neighborhood association said it would be. Only less.
How do you spell eyesore?
P-D-C, of course.
I'm looking forward to the booming tilt-a-pen industry that this will create in Portland. If they don't already have tilt-a-pens with the tram in them at Urban Outfitters or The Saturday Market, then someone's missing a huge chance to productize the eyesores in Portland.
One thing that struck me about it, from far away it looked like it was a solid concrete pillar, but up close it looked like a flimsy thing that will crumple the first time they put any weight on it. Let's hope they shore it up (They could reinforce it with stacks of $20 bills and it would still be cheaper than the current estimates).
Posted by: adams | Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 08:12 AM