The demolition and reconstruction of Fifth and Sixth Avenues for the train offers Portland a chance to install a few small works of public art, literally underfoot.
I’ve had occasion to walk a long stretch of SW Broadway for the last few days, and I noticed that several of the streetcorners have the names of the streets in black and white tile embedded in the sidewalk at the intersection. Here’s one example. 
It’s at the corner of Broadway and Salmon, outside one of Portland’s most traditional (and Laquedem-like) haberdasheries. Five blocks to the north is another example, this time at Washington Street. These tile street labels appear to be the remnants of a consistent plan of placing the street names at the intersections, but unfortunately only a few of these bits of Old Portland remain in place today.
.
The Washington Street title appears to be newer and is perhaps a restoration done in conjunction with the adjoining building.
My favorite, the source of which I figured out only last week, is the corner of Broadway and Stark outside the old headquarters of the United States National Bank of Oregon, where handsome brass letters identify the intersection. 
Why there? Only recently did I notice that letters of the same style are embedded in the entrance to the bank building, identifying that august financial institution of yesteryear. 
(The institution now called "U.S. Bank" is a North Carolina bank that bought a Minnesota bank that had bought U.S. Bank of Oregon.)
No doubt most of the sidewalk corners along the Transit/Train Mall will be cut out and rebuilt as construction proceeds. Here’s an opportunity to add a little bit of public art, with the practical side benefit that when it rains and we’re all marching with heads down, we can still see where we’re going, or at least where we’ve gotten to.
Comments
2 responses
This is a great idea! It’s 99% likely that it’s too late for the transit mall since they’ve already completed construction documents and begun pouring several of the new intersections, but it got me thinking about what it would take to do it on other streets. We pour new curbs pretty frequently downtown, and it could just be something that’s done incrementally as they need to be replaced. It’s too bad nobody thought of this when they were designing 5th & 6th…
The Washington corner you saw is indeed a rebuild. The contractor destroyed the original one (which PDOT had instructed him to save), and put this in. It’s very clumsy and uneven letter widths as compared to the old ones, and is done with 1 inch square tiles, instead of te 3/4 inch of the old ones. They could have cut down some tiles. Or, these days a couple of sources make 3/4 inch square tiles.
Apparently these tile names only show up on Broadway (including NW Broadway at Davis)
Another set of brass or bronze street names is at the NE corner of Belmont and Grand, and it’s in an Art Deco typeface, and obviously reset when the wheelchair ramps was put in.