The Elk statue is just fine

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last Friday I visited an old friend. This friend has been the subject of controversy lately, not only because it has been temporarily removed from its home. Its absence has also been mistaken for the statue's destruction and permanent removal. So I decided to request a visit to to make sure that it's actually just fine.

I call this statue an old friend for a few reasons.

When I moved to Portland in 1997, Elk, as the statue is officially known, was one of a handful of sites that I associated with one of my heroes, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, and his magical Portland-set early films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. A scene from the latter movie takes place at the base of the Elk statue, with Keanu Reeves cradling River Phoenix in his arms. But since 1998 I've been living in Southeast Portland and crossing the Hawthorne Bridge regularly to get to downtown, which soon afterward carries me on SW Main Street past the statue. I also like that this is one of the only statues in the city that is not devoted to a person. There's no hagiography to dispute here: just a tribute to one of the largest, most majestic animals to traditionally call rainy western Oregon home.

Dedicated in 1900, Elk is actually the second-oldest remaining work of public art in Portland. Only the Skidmore Fountain from 1888 predates it.

I was motivated to seek out and assure the statue's safety after reading a series of misinformed social media posts, particularly on Facebook. Several suggested that protesters had destroyed the Elk statue: those demonstrating against George Floyd's murder, the long legacy of police violence against Black citizens and eventually against the federal Homeland Security troops joining local police in attacking these protesters.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

The suggestion was that an angry mob sought to destroy the statue as vengeance, when quite the opposite was actually true. Protesters clearly seemed to love the statue, and though it was a very bad idea to light fires at the base of it, those fires were essentially making the Elk a kind of shrine. In the statue's absence, protesters have used a succession of inflated and other temporary Elk homages in its place. But it is true that the granite at the base of the statue was at some point damaged, so the statue was preemptively removed.

This year is actually the 120th anniversary of the Elk statue's erection, a gift to the city by David P. Thompson, who had been mayor of Portland from 1879-82. Thompson also had served as governor of the Idaho territory from 1875-76, and U.S. Envoy to the Ottoman Empire under President Ulysses S. Grant, serving from 1892-93.

Born in Cadiz, Ohio in 1834, Thompson first came west while herding sheep across the Oregon trail. Apprenticed as a surveyor, he helped build the first railroad in Oregon, around Willamette Falls at Oregon City, which was then the largest settlement here. He then became deputy surveyor for the U.S. government, surveying public lands in both the Oregon and Washington territories. Thompson eventually became rich by investing in some of the land he surveyed: or, more specifically, the railroads that traveled them (particularly the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company) and the mines that were dug by the hundreds after discovery of gold in California. He also gained wealth from banking and manufacturing investments.

As if those achievements weren't enough, beginning in 1891 David Thompson also served as the first president of the Portland Library Association (the forerunner of today's Multnomah County Library), and as president of the Oregon Humane Society, the latter of which may indicate a love of animals that saw him commission this statue instead of one honoring a person.

 

David P. Thompson (Wikimedia Commons)

 

By the time Thompson hired renowned New York sculptor Roland Hinton Perry to design Elk he had reached retirement age. But this actually the first of two statues he commissioned and donated to the city. The other, located in Washington Park and completed in 1904, is called  Coming of the White Man and was designed by Herman Atkins MacNeil and depicts Chief Multnomah and another Native American witnessing the arrival of Lewis & Clark. (Strangely, the name of this statue, with its title inscribed in granite, was used as the fictional name of the Elk statue in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho; the phrase can clearly be seen as Reeves holds Phoenix. In the film, Elk also has a rider.)

Yet Thompson never lived to see the second statue completed. In 1901, just a year after Elk was completed, Thompson fell ill just a few days into an around-the-world trip, returned to Portland and passed away.

Perry, the designer of the sculpture, is worth noting as well. Born in 1870 in New York, he was educated Paris's École des Beaux Arts. At just 24 years of age in 1894, he was commissioned to create a series of sculptures for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, including the Court of Neptune Fountain in front of its main building. Perhaps this was the work that caught the attention of Thompson across the country in Portland.

Four years after Elk, in 1904, Perry designed two sculptures for the Gettysburg National Battlefield in Pennsylvania, and a year afterward the statue atop the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg.

 

Roland Hinton Perry (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Of course this statue on SW Main between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue has seen a lot of change in 120 years.

Today this three-block strip of greenspace, including Chapman and Lownsdale Squares on either side of the statue as well as Shrunk Plaza to the south, is lined mostly with government buildings. The Mark Hatfield United States Courthouse stands just east of Elk, but only since 1997; from 1913-95 there was the Hamilton Hotel on that site. City Hall was completed on its current site, a block southwest of the statue, five years before Elk, in 1895. The Portland Building, nearest to the statue at SW Fourth and Main, dates to 1982. But perhaps just as significantly, before that there was a modest two-story building that was home to McElroy's Spanish Ballroom, a jazz club where Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane played.

And of course there are the three park blocks themselves. The U.S. government-owned Terry Shrunk Plaza to the south, which sits atop underground parking for the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, is where the Portland Trail Blazers' championship parade ended in 1977. It's where star center Bill Walton poured a can of beer over then-mayor Neil Goldschmidt's head.

Chapman Square and Lownsdale Square were donated to the city in 1869. The squares were initially divided by sexes: Lownsdale for men and Chapman for women and children. Chapman square even has all female ginkgo trees. But it also is the site of a small moment in technological history. In 1889, Chapman Square became the termination site for the first electric power transmission line in North America, operating at 4,000 volts of direct current coming from an electric generating station at Willamette Falls in Oregon City, 13 miles away.

For much of the city’s history, the two squares have drawn orators and political protests, including the Occupy Portland protests in 2011 and of course the Black Lives Matter protests of this year.

 

The statue as seen in My Own Private Idaho (Fine Line Features)

 

Visiting Elk at a storage facility last Friday with Keith Lachowicz, the Regional Arts & Culture Council's manager of public art, was a bit surreal at first. As I entered the room, I was surprised that it almost felt like an art museum or gallery with its white drywall and polished concrete floor; that is, if you disregard the Shop-Vac in the corner and a few other miscellaneous accoutrements. This was the only artwork of any kind in the space, standing in the corner and strapped to a wood palette.

I was surprised that the elk depicted in the statue wasn't as big as I expected. Lachowicz told me he believes it's slightly smaller than a real elk would be, but the effect in this case came especially from the fact that Elk was/is removed from its granite base, which itself stands five feet high.

The statue's bronze surface had a few specs of colored paint, which hit when the base was being tagged with graffiti during the protests, and Lachowicz believes there is a small bit of soot stain on parts of Elk as well. Yet the latter is hard to differentiate from the subtle patina taken on by the statue over time. Generally, I thought it seemed to be in very good condition, and Lachowicz agreed.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

Exactly when the statue will be returned to its site on SW Main Street, Lachowicz and RACC do not know. After all, this is still a developing story. The protests have been going on for months at this point, and while in many cases the demonstrations have moved into Portland's neighborhoods, the Justice Center and to a lesser extent the Mark Hatfield US Courthouse have been targets of protesters' demonstrations. These have overwhelmingly been peaceful demonstrations, at least when gun-wielding right wing counter-protesters don't show up. Yet as hundreds of eyewitnesses and on-the-ground journalists will tell you, there is an inextricable relationship between violence used against protesters —tear gas, flash bombs and individual beatings—and the vandalism inflicted on these buildings. Time after time this summer, riots have been declared when the presence of a riot has been questionable.

One wonderful side effect of all this, though, is that in this divided nation, at a time when tensions between left and right are running so high as American democracy itself feels as under threat as any statue or building, everyone seems to love the Elk . Voters on opposing sides of the political fence may be offering different versions of what happened to the statue—facts and their opposite, which some now call alternative facts—but when it was removed, everybody suddenly was talking passionately. A silent majority revealed itself. We may not have talked about it much in the past, but we all love Elk.

 

The Elk statue in storage (Brian Libby)

 

Even aside from the damage to its base and the statue's preemptive removal, Elk is relevant to this summer's racial justice protests in another way: as part of a conversation about the future of public art and especially statues.

In several cities in America and even beyond, statues of Confederate Civil War generals and other leaders with racist histories have been removed and their names have been taken off buildings. If we remove, say, a statue of Robert E. Lee in Virginia, or of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, it ultimately becomes not just a conversation about the removal itself but what replaces it. I'm not the first one to suggest this, but what if it's not just racists whose statues we should consider removing? What if the very practice of venerating individuals, the hagiography itself, comes into question? It's not to say that we can no longer agree on any past leaders to honor in statuary, but instead to acknowledge that people, not persons, lead change.

What's interesting about Elk in this context is that it's a rare statue existing outside this conversation. It's not the only animal sculpture, even in Portland. Yet the practice is still relatively uncommon.

Of course there are animal statues, but not quite the same kind. I think of the lion sculptures outside certain famous buildings like the flagship New York Public Library branch on 42nd Street in Manhattan, or at the base of Trafalgar Square in London, or the bull sculpture near Wall Street in New York. Yet those sculptures are based on the ground, and they're meant to represent something specific: safety and security, or a bull market. I can't think of another animal sculpture that reaches quite this high up in the air, as a subject of veneration. Here the elk doesn't really represent something other than itself. Looking up at the sculpture, one is reminded not of some abstract idea or symbol, but the real elk that probably roamed this one-time clearing along the Willamette before it was settled.

As a result, Elk as a sculpture is partly about power and grace like a heroic-human sculpture usually is, but it's also about humility: our humility, before the natural world. The bronze elk statue in the middle of Oregon's biggest city is a kind of reminder, just like seeing Mt. Hood, that living here we are closer to the forests and beaches than most urban denizens. For a lot of us, it's a big part of why we live here.

I suspect that people on both sides of today's political dramas project ideas like these onto the Elk statue. Maybe for some traditionalists, nostalgists or masculine types, it conjures hunting and a time when life was freer, and Oregon was a real frontier. Maybe for social-justice protesters, seeing that statue is a reminder that Portland is just weird enough to erect statues to members of the deer family instead of just old white men; in other words, it's not drowning in its own history and corresponding misreadings of that history.

If so, that's all the more reason it will be great to have this fella back. It won't be tomorrow, or the next day, but we could say the same thing about a lot of current problems and their resolutions. Even so, the Elk has a rendezvous coming up with its old stomping grounds, and the City of Portland has a promise to keep.

 

 

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Comments

[Judith Brown]

When they put the elk back. ARE THEY GOING TO DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME. NOT BACKWARDS LIKE LAST TIME. THE PARKS BUREAU HAD A BRAIN FREEZE AND FACED THE ELK SO PEOPLE CAN SEE ITS IT HIND END

[Val Ballestrem]

Thanks, Brian, for providing this helpful background on the Elk and Thompson. It is good to know that it wasn't terribly damaged. I wish the same could be said for the base, which, like the one at Skidmore Fountain served a practical purpose, much as the statue serves an inspirational one.

[Bob Clay]

Thank you Brian for sharing an update on the status of the Elk, reminding us of its origins and historic context and the good news that there is a chance for Portlanders to be reunited again someday.

[Mark Appleby]

We do love our Elk! Every time I pass, I feel a sense of serenity, dignity, & power.

Do we know for sure that Elk is a male? were you able to confirm that during your visit?

[Aaron]

It is interesting that this story frames the elk as a shine to BLM and that the BLM protesters were not trying to destroy it. In the Oregonian July 3rd. It states

"A statue of an elk dating to 1900 has been removed for safekeeping after BLM protesters in Portland, Oregon, set fire to its base, The Oregonian reports.“There is concern the elk statue could topple over and injure someone,” police say, according to KATU. The fires have badly damaged the statue’s stone base and tagged it with graffiti. It’s not clear why protesters have targeted the statue, normally part of summer fountain, except that it stands outside the city’s justice center downtown, a focus for protests, KGW reported."

This clearly states that they were targeting it most likely because of it being adjacent to the justice center and that they were fearful of additional damage or destruction from BLM. This article seems to dampen the actual reason it and to be removed. It has stood for over 120 years with no problem. Hmmm.

[Scott]

This was a wonderful article. Thank you for all the history and context. I kept expecting you to talk about how hated it was when it was unveiled, due to its comically long and thin neck. Maybe they could saw off about half of it and piece it back together while they have it there. Still, it's an iconic part of the city and I'll be happy to see it return.