There's just a lovely winter wonderland beauty shot on the front page today.
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| Front page today |
The piece talks about ski resorts and the adjustments they will have to make during our Pandemic Winter. Demand may be up in some ways, but capacity at each resort will surely be constrained.
Just two years ago, there was a piece about parking lot expansion and prospects for growth.
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| Optimism, January 2019 |
Mid-decade there were pieces about climate, drought, and pessimism.
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| Pessimism, April 2014 |
Last Friday University of Iowa Law Professor Gregory Shill, whom you might remember for an article, "Should the Law Subsidize Driving," was behind a symposium, "The Future of Law and Transportation."* One of the panels, "Rights of Way & Public Space," talked about the ways we conceive, interpret, and enforce particular understandings of the public space we call a road.
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| Law, Public Space, and Rhetoric - U Iowa Law |
The next day, on Saturday we got to see some of these understandings in the way public space and protest were policed.
"Obey all traffic laws" and "get out of the road" seemed to be refrains for the second protest, with reporters highlighting police actions at Trade and Church. It is hard to interpret them as neutral, an instead they show an autoist bias. Requiring people on foot to be in the sidewalk is part of the way we normalize "accidents" when drivers crash into people they didn't see or didn't expect in the road. The default expectation is that people on foot will not be in the road, that drivers and their cars should enjoy unimpeded access, and when people on foot are in the road they are interlopers and do not have a legitimate claim to the space. ("All lives splatter" relies on this configuration of power.)
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| "Obey all laws" - via twitter |
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| People on foot must use sidewalk - via twitter |
A problem with our Public Art funding may seem like a small and minor detail, but it's really emblematic of the way we slight the whole lives of things and people, privileging the gaudy and ceremonial moment of acquisition or creation, and rarely giving enough thought to care and maintenance, especially at end-of-life.
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| January 2020 |
Salem’s Public Art Fund supports the Public Art Collection and is funded by donations, grants, and through the dedication of one-half of one percent of eligible publicly funded capital improvement project costs. As part of the City of Salem’s 2020-21 Budget, the Public Art Fund was allocated $10,000 from the Transient Occupancy Tax fund to help support future acquisition, management, and maintenance of art in the City’s Public Art Collection. The October 2020 balance of the Public Art Fund is $60,024.
Per Salem Revised Code 15.030, 70 percent of these funds are to be used for acquiring public art, 20 percent are to be used for the purposes of managing the Public Art Collection to include program management and community education, and 10 percent are to be used to support maintenance, conservation, and deaccessioning of artworks in the Public Art Collection.
The present percent allocations within the Public Art Fund mean that minimal funding is available to care for and repair existing artwork in the Public Collection. At present, this means funds are available for new acquisition, but not for maintenance. With an aging collection and growing maintenance needs, this makes caring for the City’s valued collection a challenge. The proposed revisions to SRC Chapter 15 remove the existing percent allocations to allow the existing funds to be used for maintenance and care of the existing collection.
Across so many areas we need to align capital funding for acquisition and creation better with ongoing operations funding for maintenance and replacement.
Without real transportation news, we've been hitting the history more, but here's some real news.
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| Six Salem-area projects recommended for funding (ODOT map) |
ODOT and its Safe Routes to Schools program announced today it was recommending funding six Salem-area projects to the OTC in December for final approval.
We are excited to share that the Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee recommends funding 43 projects totaling $28.3 million for ODOT’s Safe Routes to School Competitive Construction Grant Program. These funds will focus on under-resourced communities and safety.
In August 2020, ODOT received 99 applications from across the state for the SRTS Competitive Construction Grant Program totaling $73 million in needed safety improvements
Thc successful City project applications were:
Projects near Morningside and Pringle Elementary Schools were not recommended for funding. It's likely they didn't meet the equity tests as strongly.
All three of the County project applications were recommended:
The City and County had a very good batting average here on this round. (See previously here and here.)
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| July 26th, 1920 |
Back in July of 1920, the downtown Armory, where the Grand Hotel is today on Ferry and Liberty, hosted
The most gigantic Show of Mystery ever staged...a full Spiritual Seance, demonstrating the Ouija Board, Materialization, Spirit Slate Writing, Astral Dead, Trance Seance and the great Spirit Cabinet Mystery.
It was a spectacle and entertainment, much more like a magic show than a religious ceremony. You could take it seriously if you wanted, but you could also just wink and nod and go along for the ride.
In the Sunday paper, the Mill published a note about a different spiritualist and his presentation in 1886.
The column was part of a tease and promotion for a Halloween fund-raiser for the Mill, a mobile tour and podcast on downtown spooky history. The main information was presumably in the audio materials and tour booklet, and the piece published in the paper had to talk around that a little, not give away too much.
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| In the Sunday paper |
As the piece is promoting the tour and podcast, like the ad from 1920 they focus on entertainment and spectacle.
Salem was on the circuit for many famous mediums and Spiritualist lecturers. Can you imagine queueing up in front of the Reed Opera House (at that time the performance mecca in the city) on a warm June night in 1886 to see the famous mind reader and spiritual medium J. Randall Brown, fresh from performances in San Francisco.
But Spiritualism was not merely fringey. It was important for women, like Lucy Rose Mallory, who started a Spiritualist newspaper here that grew to be distributed world wide, and offered a space for accomplishment, leadership, and politics. There was meaningful overlap between Spiritualists, Temperance advocates, and Suffrage advocates, and there were home-grown Spiritualists who were not dependent on a traveling circuit, even if they might welcome it also.
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| November 3rd, 1920 |
The morning Statesman had been intensely pro-Harding, and the afternoon Capital Journal critical of Harding and preferred Cox. (See here for a little more on CJ criticism of Harding.)
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| November 3rd, 1920 |
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| The Map, via Wikipedia |
Cox's running mate for VP, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came back and won in 1932, and we know the rest.
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| July 19th, 1920 |
The strangest thing about the ceremony for the Jason Lee portrait in 1920 was the bit with Maria Campbell Smith.
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| "oldest native" Oregonian, November 20th, 1921 |
As "the first female white child born in Salem" she was featured during the dedication. Being "the first white child" for an area, large or small, was a common claim and honorific. It appears in multiple obituaries and death notices at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century as those born here in the 1840s and 50s died. Whenever Maria Campbell Smith is in the paper, it is mentioned about her.
That claim to fame is her birth and infancy, but the claim is displaced and complicated quite a bit for the portrait ceremony. She showed up wearing "the bridal robe of her sister who came around the horn with Jason Lee on his second trip...." In the tableau, her role is not infant, even grown up. It is bride.
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| October 27th, 1920 |
The costume made a big impression, and a few days later, on the 31st in the "Society" column, they noted
What is going on here? Why is the sister as bride the active symbol rather than the baby?Probably no visitor in the Capital City this week was more interesting nor interested than Mrs. Maria Campbell Smith of Portland, whose part in the Jason Lee exercises in the house of representatives Tuesday afternoon, was really the feature of the afternoon....Much interest was manifested by the feminine representatives in the audience, in the quaint gown which Mrs. Smith wore. It had served as a bridal robe for her sister, who had made the journey to Oregon with Jason Lee on his second trip. The gown a deep majente was of pure Lion silk, in a remarkable state of preservation.
Though they haven't broken ground yet, plans remain conceptual still, and the prospect of tariffs and deportations with anti-immigrant s...
