Henry Weinhard brewery, Portland, 1997 (photo by Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Recently I've been spending afternoons with a new favorite toy: a scanner that can accommodate my hundreds of negatives and slides.
At first, as I began to pick and choose amongst the photos I took from 1990-2002 with a focus on New York, where I attended college and lived between 1990 and 1997. It will probably come as no surprise that the World Trade Center negatives were what stopped me in my tracks the most. The twin towers were standing for all of my time living in the city.
Particularly because I lived in lower Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, the 106-story WTC acted as a kind of compass, wherein one would look to the towers as a reference point as the streets below 14th and Union Square abandons the rectilinear grid to shoot off in countless directions.
World Trade Center from Staten Island Ferry, 1990 (photo by Brian Libby)
I'll never forget my first full day in New York City, which included a visit to the observation deck atop one of the towers. After growing up in small-town McMinnville, Oregon, I'd enrolled at New York University without ever first visiting New York. I'd arrived the night before, a sweltering late-August evening that was not only obscenely humid, but brought out the fowl aroma of a garbage strike that had left piles of trash bags bigger than automobiles.
I thought I'd made the worst mistake of my life coming to the city, a victim of my own naivete in thinking I was going to move right into a Frank Sinatra song. But as my mom and I stood atop the World Trade Center with the other tourists, looking out at all of New York's boroughs and western New Jersey, the city and my place in it made a little more sense. It was not just a spectacular view, or an unknowingly fleeting one, but a calmative just when I desperately needed one.
World Trade Center, 1991 (photos by Brian Libby)
The perusal and scanning of my old negatives also made resonant just how much of Portland has changed since I moved here in 1997. My first apartment was downtown, and I remember initially wondering why the city seemed to smell like tomato juice. The answer, which my girlfriend discovered after emailing Oregonian columnist Jonathan Nicolas, was the Henry Weinhard's brewery. Now the brewery is long gone, with Henry's been bought out by Stroh's and the Brewery Blocks having taken the place of the old brewhouse.
As you can see in these photos of the brewery from 1997, just a few years before it was torn down, the various silos and industrial buildings comprised an interesting compositions. The legendary Swiss architect Le Corbusier, on a trip to America, declared that his favorite architecture consisted of agricultural and industrial buildings. And indeed, the forms of some of these structures are so elemental as to comprise a kind of modest but massively scaled minimalist sculpture.
Henry Weinhard's brewery, 1997 (photos by Brian Libby)
Looking at the Henry's brewery photos is a reminder not only of its presence in Portland, but more generally of how large industrial works and facilities used to be so much more of a common presence in central cities. Sure, we still have plenty of it left here. Outside the Rose Garden beside the Steel Bridge is a gigantic ship repair facility. The Central Eastside is still designated for light industrial zoning. The Willamette is still a working riverfront as one travels north.
Yet a substantial amount of industrial architecture and structures have disappeared, too. That was the old identity, of course, of the burgeoning Pearl District and South Waterfront. In SoWa's case, the Zidell shipyard still abuts the OHSU Center For Health & Healing, but its days are numbered as well.
Henry Weinhard's brewery, 1997 (photos by Brian Libby)
I'm not necessarily lamenting the decreasing industrial presence in our city. Although industry brings jobs, it also seems to bring pollution and bar the riverfront from public access. I expect to be able to walk both sides of the Willamette or Columbia in their entirety, and one just can't do that in this century or the last.
Even so, looking at old photos of the Henry's Brewery, it is in its way a lamented lost architecture like the Trade Center. Thankfully, though, its razing was a peaceful affair. Unfortunately or thankfully, we remember the dramatic razings the most.
World Trade Center, August 28, 2001 (photo by Brian Libby)
On August 28, 2001 - exactly two weeks before the 9/11 attacks - I happened to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with friends while on a visit. It was only coincidence that I stopped to take what turned out to be one last shot of the twin towers. I guess I always expect architecture to be permanent, but sometimes reminders to the contrary become a jolt that shapes a whole generation. The lesson? Keep a camera at hand. Or at least save a picture in your mind. It won't fade any worse than my negatives, although I'm sure glad I kept them.
Comments