Parade Photo may show Rough Riders on State Street in September of 1899

For a Veterans Day post, the Historic Landmarks Commission reposted this photo from the Library's historic photo collection.

"Military marching band" on State Street
(Salem Library Historic photos)

It was worth a closer look. A decade or so ago, we remarked here on some lady bicyclists in the background. Was there more?

Ladies on bike (detail)

In the foreground, it certainly does look like a "military marching band." Earlier I had thought a sign on a building might be a significant clue, but that is likely a red herring. It is interesting anyway!

Advertisement for Walter L. Main circus (detail)

In the back pasted onto a building wall is a large ad for the Walter L. Main circus. It appeared a few times in the late 1890s here.

High Crash Corridors: At the MPO

The technical committee for our Metropolitan Planning Organization meets on Tuesday the 14th, and in their agenda is finally some published information on the Safety Plan project. It has not had agendas or meeting packets published in any formal Public Notice process, and so it has been operating largely in stealth mode.

Here is a proposed list of twenty "high injury crash corridors."

High crash corridors

These track closely to any intuitive sense of zoomy, busy streets that are uncomfortable for walking and biking.

One way the table might be improved is to focus less on "daily traffic," as if the primary problem was simply count of cars and drivers, and to replace that column with a measure of speed and perhaps add a measure of lane width. These vary of course over a corridor segment of a mile or two, but we should highlight that a street with 20,000 daily car trips averaging 20mph is less lethal than a stroad with 20,000 daily trips at an average of 40mph. The count of cars by itself is not a very helpful measure.

At number six on the list is Silverton Road from the intersection with Portland Road to west of I-5.

Silverton Road bond project

As it happens, this segment will be one of the first rehabilitation projects funded by the Salem infrastructure bond. Council recently saw the sidewalk projects rolled up into the larger road project.

Over at our Strong Towns group recently there has been discussions of 4/3 safety conversions and of more narrow lane widths.

City Council, November 13th - Scenario Planning

Council meets on Monday and they will look to approve an intergovernmental agreement with ODOT for scenario planning.

From the Staff Report:

The regional scenario planning process requires the Salem-Keizer metropolitan area to evaluate and determine what changes are needed to land use and transportation plans and programs in order to meet the State’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction targets. The process is similar to the scenario planning work that was done with the Our Salem project; the focus then was on land use changes. Staff anticipates that the new regional scenario planning work will focus on transportation changes, including current and future investments in active transportation, fleet and fuels, transit, pricing, parking management, education, marketing, and roads. Specifically, the planning process will establish regional performance targets and local performance measures that Salem will then incorporate into its Transportation System Plan.

I hope that the Scenario Planning process will in fact yield "performance targets" and "performance measures." 

But so far, the scenario planning work in Our Salem has been so very squishy. See the header image for the blog! That "preferred scenario" hardly made a dent in emissions. 

The Climate Action Plan has all this groovy language about a 50% reduction by 2035, just a little over a decade away, and yet our actual planning and progress look remote from attaining this. The link between target/measure and action has not been very close.

Oriented to process rather than a plan
(DLCD, August 2022)

A year ago, a one pager from DLCD used more general language, and talked about helping people "understand issues." That might set more realistic expectations for this round of Scenario Planning.

If Salem only were involved we might be able to attain those firmer performance targets and measures. But the process specifically calls for "consensus":

A regional advisory committee - referred to by the State as a “governance structure” - will be formed to make key decisions during the scenario planning process. The City has worked with staff and elected officials from the City of Keizer and Marion County to propose the following composition of the committee of elected or appointed members: three Salem members, two Keizer members, two Marion County members, and one member from Cherriots. The committee will make decisions by consensus.

Even if representatives from Salem and Cherriots embrace climate action, there is no way representatives from Keizer and Marion County are going to support urgency in climate action. Consensus in governing structure looks like recipe for watering down, and the project outcomes and deliverables will be rounded down to the lowest common denominator (even as the framing rhetoric will round up to the most optimistic outcome).

Still, hopefully the process will be able to give more visibility to current incoherence in our planning.

With Parade from Fairgrounds to Downtown and Back, Klan Celebrated Salem Charter 100 Years Ago

On his 90th birthday in 1978, retired Pastor V.K. Allison of Santa Cruz was celebrated as a kindly old man who loved music and the ministry.

Santa Cruz Sentinel
March 9th, 1978

A full lifetime earlier, on November 10th in 1923, pastor V.K. Allison of Lebanon preached here in Salem at the Fairgrounds as the "Grand Titan" of a local KKK. (In other reports from 1923 and 1924 he was also "Exalted Cyclops.")

November 11th, 1923

The morning paper reported him saying:

All ideas of pure Americanism, no immigration in any degree from southern Europe and Asia, the supremacy of the American race and the necessity of keeping the blood of the Anglo-Saxon race are the objects of the Ku Klux Klan...The Ku Klux Klan is anti-nothing that is not anti-American. It strives to teach the doctrine of pure Americanism. Alien influences have grown to such an extent in this country that they made necessary an organization to teach and sustain the ideals of Anglo-Saxonism. The Ku Klux Klan stands for the principles of Protestantism and believes that the present position occupied by the United States was attained because it was a Christian nation and was Protestant.

November 12th, 1923

The afternoon paper highlighted the "plea for white supremacy" and echoed phrases from the morning paper.

Rezoning the Former Reform School and Prison Annex Area: At the Planning Commission

You might recall an odd story a year ago about some land being auctioned by the State. There were claims of native burials and both the lots lines and the line between family lore and verifiable historical fact seemed rather fuzzy.

State Reform School for Boys, c.1900
(State Library of Oregon)

That land has apparently been sold, and the City's published a Hearing Notice for zoning changes requested by the new owners.

New zoning proposed

As with the former north campus of the State Hospital and with the former Fairview, this proposal for redevelopment of an abandoned state institution is fascinating. The concept here places any project at the intersection of a lot of interesting and important debates we are having right now.

With Events at Armory and Fairgrounds in 1923, Klan had Pervasive Salem Support

Back in March of 1923 there was a Klan lecture at the Armory downtown. For an even bigger rally and parade in November, the Klan used the Fairgrounds.

The morning paper seemed pretty excited about the November event. They wrote about a "great gathering" with a "parade of thousands." The notice was more PR than reported news.

Oct. 21st, 1923

By contrast, the afternoon paper was a little skeptical, and did a basic kind of actual reporting to find out whether the Fairgrounds had actually been rented to the Klan and who was responsible for approving any rental.

October 22nd, 1923

Other than Mayor Giesy's appearance at a Klan banquet earlier in the year, the scope of local approval for and participation in the Klan has not been very explicit. They were a secret society, after all. But the fact that they were able to use the Armory and Fairgrounds suggests the magnitude of local government approval and general popularity.

Earlier this year, Eugene Weekly had written about an exhibit at the Lane County History Museum that extended and built on the Oregon Black Pioneers traveling exhibit, "Racing to Change." (Which just started at Salem Library this month.)

Eugene membership list, October 26th, 1922

They wrote:

In 1922, the Salem Capital Journal published a list of all registered Klan members in Eugene, found during a raid in Los Angeles. In Eugene, however, the story was buried by the city’s paper, whose editor had Klan ties.

As a way to confront this history, the Lane County History Museum now displays the list in its entirety — the first time it has been publicized since its original publication in the Salem newspaper. The names include such community leaders as J.H. Shelton, publisher of the Eugene Evening Guard, and C.A. Huntington, star of the 1917 University of Oregon football team that beat Penn in the third Rose Bowl, and later a UO coach.

So far no similar membership list for Salem has turned up. Still, some glimpses are visible.

Climate Action Plan Committee to see Student Public Relations Project

Yesterday the paper featured on the front page (but not at all online) a new warning from "legendary climate scientist James Hansen": Things are heating up faster than the current standard forecasts say.

Front page yesterday

On Monday our own Climate Action Plan Committee meets, and they might consider more strongly the urgency expressed in this comment from Hansen.

LA Times, Thursday

On their agenda are several items that do not seem to communicate much urgency.

from the UO SCI Open House last month

One item on the agenda is part of the University of Oregon Sustainable Cities residency. It is focused on "public relations," and an ongoing concern here is that the City fundamentally sees response to our Climate Crisis as a problem of public relations rather than a problem of reducing emissions.

from draft 2023 Annual Report

It also appears to repeat the frame of individual responsibility, which you will recall is a discourse of delay.