Washington Park reservoirs

Personally, I find the Washington Park reservoirs (well, OK, the Tabor ones too) lovely, so much so that they evoke in me a certain starry-eyed naivete about Portland. They speak to me of a place which values elegance in design, nurtured early visionaries who developed a very particular sense of the place they wanted to leave to their children, is clean and safe enough to hold its drinking water open and above ground, and places great pride in its resources.

I only say this with my tongue part way in cheek: thank goodness the EPA has their feet firmly on the ground. They have little need for the nostalgia I like to get lost in, after all. I won't even touch their recent, seemingly uniformed decree that the city build a cryptosporidium prevention plant to treat the water Portland gets from the Bull Run reservoir. But I will admit that while I paid a lot of attention to that news last winter, I somehow missed the second part of the EPA rulings: that Portland replace their open-water reservoirs by 2014. In other words, it's hard to say if scenes like these will soon be missing from the Washington Park experience.

The latest news I could find on the matter is that the city drilled under the reservoir in May to ascertain the suitability of the slope for upgrades. There is talk of burying the reservoir, which seems in truth to mean constructing a "real" reservoir beneath the one you see in these photos and perhaps using the existing reservoir for another purpose. However, all plans seem a little up in the air at this point (or it could be that they've not yet been finalized or published). So I'm just going to let this post stand as a grateful gesture backwards towards a time when municipal projects kept an eye on design as well as functionality, and keep my fingers crossed for the future project, whatever it may be.

On a lighter note, to see the reservoir and other local landmarks in a hip and stylized recent Levis commercial, click here. Isn't it pretty? You know, if the powers that be featured our area in more commercials, we might just find our way out of this recession.