Dinsdale wrote:Mikey wrote:Santa Monica Blvd. in 1924 when they still had electic street cars in LA.
Way back when, they had those in Portland. They took them out.
Now, they're spending a bunch of dough putting them back in.
May the circle be unbroken, or some shit.
Back in the early and mid 90s I was working for the EPA in the indoor environments program. We had a project where we went to a bunch of office buildings in different parts of the country to collect data on indoor air quality and HVAC systems. We set up four indoor stations and one outdoor station in each building that would measure things like CO2, CO, temperature, humidity, particulates, airborne fungi and bacteria for a week, and we'd do detailed evaluatioms of the ventilation systems. At the outdoor station we also collected weather data like wind speed and direction, solar irradiation and precipitation.
One of the buildings we visited was a large old office building in downtown Portland. I can't remember the name of the building, but it was turn of the century vintage, maybe 12 stories tall in a U-shape, with the center of the "U" filled by about 3 floors of occupied space, making the footprint of the lower floors a rectangle. The windows on the inside of the upper floors looked down on the roof of the center section. I'm pretty sure that it was some kind of government building, maybe municipal, but not completely sure.
Anyway, one day the building engineer took me on a tour of the entire building. In the first basement level there was a single door that, when he opened it, looked out into a huge empty black space. He reached in and flicked on a light switch, and several bare bulbs came on to dimly light up the space. It must have been 40 or 50 feet deep and about 100 feet in each horizontal direction. The door opened up on a small landing from which metal stairway descended diagonally down the wall to the bottom of the space.
We walked down to the bottom of the stairs. The floor was somewhat littered with pieces of scrap, broken glass, concrete, wires and shit. Off to the side you could see an area where there were columns and one or two extra floors had been built up above the bottom level, with large rooms underneath. My first impression was that this would make a very cool nightclub. In one of these rooms were a bunch of old metal racks and some glass electric insulators like they used to use on power lines.
It turns out that at the turn of the 20th century, this was the DC generating station for the downtown Portland streetcar system. One of those rooms had been full of huge batteries. It had been pretty much abandoned since they took out the streetcars and never used for anything else since. Very cool of the guy to show me around.
