Balch Creek Sound & Vision
Contemplating the Witch's Castle, the Lost Forestry Building & Two Centuries of Change.
This is Sound & Vision, a series of soundwalk recordings made in concert with a photo essay. This time out, I reflect on the legacy of two curious buildings in Portland, Oregon’s natural backyard, in addition to the flora and fauna. Kindly press play and read on!
Say “Balch Creek” and Portlanders are like, whose creek? Say, “the creek with the Witch’s Castle,” and they’ll be like, Oh, yeah I’ve been there!
Balch Creek flows right into the urban quarter of NW Portland. There it enters a pipe and flows under the an industrial section of the city to the Willamette River. The canyon is home to the tallest tree in Portland. It’s a strikingly beautiful place, but what most people remember about it is the moss-covered stone-walled ruin at a trail junction, deep in the canyon.
Somewhere along the way it got the name “Witch’s Castle” and it has captured imaginations for decades now. (Nevermind the Forest Park Conservancy prefers to call it “Stone House”.) With the passing years its weird significance in the mind of visitors and citizens alike has become more entrenched, more mythical, and more colorful. Literally:
To me, it’s become a lurid spectacle, in part because I have a memory of it, not long ago, with markedly less graffiti (see this Wikipedia 2008 photo). I find graffiti particularly repulsive in a natural setting. The graffiti seeps out onto nearby tree trunks, logs, posts, signs, etc. Some take it as a signal for permission to litter, for getting high, doing weird stuff, or all three. Lifting it up as a Keep Portland Weird pilgrimage site…I dunno…I’m not hip to that, personally.
There’s certainly some urban legend mixed with historical lore and researched history that fuels the intrigue. But, at the end of the day, it’s just the stone walls of a bathroom / shelter completed just prior to the Great Depression.
Before you look at these two photos and conflate my malaise with the notion of decline, and nostalgia for the works of a great generation, keep in mind that among the reasons the Parks Bureau decommissioned the structure—following damage sustained in the 1964 Columbus Day—was vandalism. As long as there have been bathrooms, it seems, there’s been people scrawling on them, making a mess. It would be impractical to restore the building, to make it great again.
But, historical photos have an aura of greatness, don’t they? Look at the craftsmanship, the elegance of the architecture, the heft of the materials. “They don’t make them like they used to,” we say, earnestly. Heck, it seems like half of the public bathroom buildings in park settings around here are shuttered now, post-Covid, in favor of maintenance-outsourced portable toilets. What often doesn’t enter into this vision of past greatness are the decisions that led to such short-lived utility. Why build bathrooms a mile away from any road in a forested city park? Who requires such high maintenance and gentile infrastructure? What underpinned the societal ideals that made it seem attractive in the first place? Ideas of modernity, class, and civilized society? Dominance over nature?
What dominance over nature seems to have accomplished with astonishing speed is to raise global surface temperature 1.5˚celsius over the last two centuries. This is contributing to all kinds of destabilizing problems we are confronting today, and will contend with in increasing severity, for decades, possibly centuries, to come.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? I’m here to notice small things, to reconnect with nature. Let’s get a bird’s eye view, shall we? See this green canyon? That’s where I am, just under that little bridge in the foreground.
This is what the canyon looks like at the entrance.
Within a couple hundred yards the paved trail surface gives way to gravel. The canyon walls steepen and the creek is one vignette after another of little cascades.
Mushrooms abound in this mossy wonderland.
A Song Sparrow works its way along the bank, singing and dipping its feet.
Soon enough I come to this 78 foot-long steel bridge with a kink in it.
The reason for the kink becomes clear. Here the trail crosses over a small waterfall. The design facilitates the pretty view:
Above the falls is a broad section in the creek with large stones.
The trail winds along through the canyon.
Invasive English ivy thrives here. Volunteer crews take to the slopes in the spring to beat it back.
The creek tumbles and burbles.
Near Portland’s tallest tree is a fallen giant, blown over in a storm a year ago. As it fell, it sheared off many large branches of its champion neighbor.
I took a photo of its cross section and counted the rings as best I could after it was cut and bucked last January. I estimated 200 rings. It’s a reminder of massive change this area has seen in the life of one Douglas-fir tree. Indeed, the massive change the planet has seen.
And just up the rise, beyond the Witch’s Castle is a lovely little natural wall. Flowering trees brighten this little nook in the spring.
For now the mosses and dormant Western maidenhair ferns offer a rich, jewel-toned backdrop.
Heading back now, I hear the chip call of a Pacific Wren. I look for movement. I see you, there. Hello!
Pacific Wrens are among the smallest of the wren family. These little forest ambassadors greet you with exquisite trills of allegro molto song in the spring.
Down the trail I stop to take a photo of the ferns emerging from a rock wall embankment.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a flutter. The blur could have been a Robin, but wasn’t it too small to be a Robin? I follow its movement and get a few captures as it emerges from the brush. It’s a Hermit Thrush. Not much larger than a Song Sparrow. And from this angle, quite similar in color.
But not this angle. This is a boldly patterned creature! Look at those smudged spots! I wonder what led to that adaptation? Is it camouflage? Is it dazzle to confuse a predator or prey’s directional and spatial awareness? Whatever it is, it’s a thrill to see.
Finally we emerge from the canyon, back into the urban jungle from whence we came.
But before we go, let’s remember another building that also met its demise in 1964. A much, much larger building than the Witch’s Castle that stood just three blocks from here, for 60 years.
The Forestry Building.
Designed and erected for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition, the interior of the Forestry Building featured colonnades of 54 massive, unpeeled six-foot-diameter Douglas-fir tree trunks. Look at the worker dwarfed by the column he stands atop, like the wick of a candle:
It was designed on the scale of the Parthenon in Greece, and soon dubbed the “world’s largest log cabin”. The equivalent of more than one million board feet of lumber went into its construction.
The rustic vernacular architecture stood out among the Spanish Renaissance and Beux Arts structures designed and built for the exposition.
It proved to be quite popular among visitors, and may have set a strong precedent for national parks lodges and WPA buildings built in the following decades. Completed in 1914, Glacier Park Lodge was modeled after the Forestry Building, and still hosts visitors and guests today.
This wondrous building met its fate on August 17th 1964, when the original electrical wiring sparked a fire which soon grew to inferno proportions.
“The flames were almost ten stories high,” reported an eye-witness. “The fire illuminated the sky for miles, the neighborhood was an orange glow.
The windows on the entire south side of the Montgomery Park Building were blown out. The heat was so intense that the windows were popping out.
Glass was falling down to the street below. Ashes the sizes of large snowflakes fell to the ground within a mile of the structure. It was surreal, an amazing sight.” (rarehistoricalphotos)
Here we have another example of building that captured the imaginations of many that is both impractical and nearly inconceivable to build again. In retrospect, was it really that surprising that it went down in flames? The day after the fire, The Oregonian concluded the front page story with this statement from an official, “There was no insurance on the building. Premium costs would have been prohibitive.”
It was framed as a given, but really it was a choice. It was a risk that was tolerated for other priorities. Yes, a policy on an enormous log building with 1905 wiring and no fire suppression sprinkler system (the first of such codes were written in 1898) would have been hard to defend as a line item in the parks budget, no doubt. But it was a choice not to install such a system in the late 50’s when the building underwent a significant restoration. It was a choice to not update the wiring. It turned out to be the losing choice, and arguably shortsighted.
Taking the long view is often unpopular, it requires clear-eyed discernment and investment, it’s often a thankless job in the short run, sometimes even in the span of a lifetime. But the generations to come will inherit the choices we make today.
Thanks for joining me for this installment of Sound & Vision. Thanks for reading, looking, and listening. Til next time, stay curious.
This is a wonderful entry! Beautiful photos. I need to add this location as a stop the next time I head down to Portland. Thank you for sharing the history of these buildings.
First Soundwalk for me here! Atop of the meditative field recordings, as an architect, I really appreciate the blending of building history with your commentary. Cheers!