The Flow Below

I hear the water before I see it. The concrete basement is cool and dark, though a sliver of light sneaks in through a small rectangular window about ten feet above me, in what was once a boiler room. Traffic noise from Belmont Street seeps in, too, but it’s muffled, and the rhythmic trickling of the water is louder, gently quieting the busy sounds of Southeast Portland. 

I look down and realize that what appears to be a black hole is actually a pool of water. Its stillness reflects the room’s gray walls and ceiling. I notice submerged sandbags and a yellow rubber duck. Bricks that once surrounded the boiler are now falling into the pool, eroding, like scree dropping into an alpine lake.

In the basement of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, a buried creek still flows. Below the 36,000-square-foot building, on 10th Avenue between Belmont and Morrison Streets, the clear water moves in and out, its level changing with the seasons. This creek once met the Willamette River in this spot, a confluence before commercialization. It was part of the area’s expansive wetlands that surrounded a larger, separate creek, referred to as “Asylum Creek” or “Asylum Slough” in early 1900s newspaper archives. The slough originated from a sizable spring at what is now 12th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard. The water meandered through Southeast Portland and was noted on a federal government map from 1852, a small squiggle reminding us that it has been here all along. 

This is the first time I’ve seen or heard the presence of a buried creek in the city. Ever since a friend told me about it, how it runs through the building’s basement, I couldn’t shake my curiosity. I grew up in North Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood, and despite living between two big rivers—the Willamette and the Columbia—I never gave much thought to all the creeks and springs that once fed those rivers. Urban streams, now hidden underground in pipes and sewers, are often described as “forgotten” or “lost,” but, for me, these streams couldn’t have been forgotten, because they never existed in my mind. I didn’t know what to remember.

From Southeast 21st Avenue, I turn west onto Morrison Street. The road slopes downhill, and I imagine the slough’s path, through reeds, willows, beaver ponds, springs, and gulches that once textured the area. The land flattens around 10th Avenue, where part of the open body of the Willamette River would have transitioned to wetlands, soft with mud and birdsong. A map from 1874 shows the slough cutting through the block just west of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. In 1908, a business owner from the Midwest built the Yale Union Laundry Building on the site, turning the marshy land into a steam-powered industrial facility. 

Newspaper articles detail the extensive work of filling the eastside marshes and ponds with gravel dredged from the bottom of the Willamette. “Nothing can impede the progress of a city whose destiny it is to be great,” a 1909 article in The Oregonian stated, describing the wetlands as “vast holes in the ground.” Streets stood over the marshy landscape on wooden trestles. What’s now known as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was initially built on pilings near the mouth of the slough. Elsewhere in the city, timber mills and slaughterhouses scooped up properties near water, attracted by their proximity to shipping channels and a place to dump waste. 

What is now the city of Portland was never a place for people to live, says David Harrelson, the cultural resources department manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and a tribal member who descends from the Willamette Valley’s Kalapuya people. Instead, it was a traveling place with few trails. “The river was the trail,” he says. Chinookan people would have simply passed through in canoes on their way to village sites upriver at Willamette Falls, or downstream, on the bluffs at present-day St. Johns. Other villages were located on Sauvie Island and along the Columbia River, near what’s now the Portland International Airport.

Downtown and Southeast Portland were once hunting sites and places to gather plants. All of the shallow, slow-moving water in the area produced an abundance of food, including wapato, a wetland plant with an edible tuber that is a traditional food for many Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples. As White settlers filled in the wetlands and piped the water away in the late 1800s and early 1900s, wapato went away. So did ducks, especially canvasbacks, who favored the tubers. Thousands of the black-and-white ducks with auburn heads lived in the area. “Our urban environment was just a place of ducks,” Harrelson says. “Imagine being outside and not being able to hear yourself because there are so many waterfowl.” 

Remnants of these marshes and lakes still exist aboveground, like Force Lake in North Portland (labeled “Force’s Lake” on an 1891 map), which sits between the Portland Expo Center and Heron Lakes Golf Club. It’s one of only a few places to see canvasbacks in the city, though their numbers are low. Bird watchers would consider themselves lucky to see ten of the ducks at the lake now. Their presence reminds me that, at least from their perspective, this remains a watery place, where two big rivers meet.

Surveyors hired by the federal General Land Office mapped the Portland area in 1852 to create a streamlined system for the government to take unceded Native land and give it to White settlers. Thousands of settlers, though, had already made land claims in the region, more than a decade before local tribes ceded their lands in the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855. Much of the city’s east side was described in these early maps as “land gently rolling” with fir, cedar, maple, hazel, hemlock, and ferns, though a large portion of the present-day Boise, Sabin, Alameda, and Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhoods was labeled as “burnt timber.” These maps are often understood to represent what the landscape looked like before Portland was heavily developed, but by the time the government surveyed the area, disease brought by earlier fur trappers and explorers had devastated Chinookan people. Their land management, especially the use of fire, had been disrupted several decades earlier and was not well reflected on the landscape of 1852. High points, like Mount Tabor, would have been regularly cleared with fire, which favored trees like oaks, Harrelson says. Beaver populations had also been decimated by the 1850s, and the wetland complexes the animals created with their dams had been erased.

As the city transformed Southeast’s wetlands into solid ground during the early 1900s, business owners and residents of other neighborhoods buried creeks and marshes themselves, covering them with sawdust, dirt, gravel, and garbage. When, in the 1920s, the Port of Portland filled in Guild’s Lake in Northwest Portland, a business owner said, “We want smokestacks and not swamps.”

The presence of the slough proved to be one of the biggest hurdles to the development of Southeast Portland. The spring at 12th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard produced 1.5 million gallons of fresh water a day, which meandered northwest toward Belmont Street, carving out a twenty-five-foot-tall ravine in some places and just skirting the current site of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation before meeting with the Willamette River near Oak Street. 

In the 1860s, Drs. James C. Hawthorne and A. M. Loryea opened a private hospital for the mentally ill near the spring, which was outside of the city limits at the time. After James Hawthorne died in 1881 and the state of Oregon opened a public psychiatric hospital in Salem, the building was abandoned; it burned down seven years later. Rachel Hawthorne, James’s wife, leased twelve acres of the property to the city for a public park, called Hawthorne Park, bounded by Belmont Street and Hawthorne Boulevard between 9th and 12th Avenues. A 1902 advertisement in The Oregonian called it the “prettiest spot on earth.” Fir trees with circumferences of fifteen feet shaded the “almost ice-cold water” of the spring. An 1895 photo of the park shows long picnic tables and boardwalks surrounded by tall deciduous trees. Residents urged the city to buy the park, but as the area developed, people dumped trash and waste into the water, blocking its flow. Newspaper articles from 1905 called the spring a menace, full of “malarious pools.” An outbreak of typhoid fever was tied to the water. The creek’s steep ravines were soon packed with gravel, and the Hawthorne estate sold the property. The spring was buried underground in 1913.

Today, a wooden pipe located below the Burgerville at 12th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard carries the spring water to a sewer line, where it flows beneath the Hawthorne Asylum food-cart pod. The water is carried not to the Willamette River, but to the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant in North Portland. Its path through the city’s sewer system is unique, as it doesn’t follow the tidy vertical and horizontal sewer lines. Instead, it cuts across several city blocks at a diagonal, heading northwest toward Belmont Street, like it always has. The spring is hidden, but the water is still there, and around us, falling, then seeping belowground until it appears again. It’s entombed in pipes for now, but it shows itself at times, like it does in the basement of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation building—a reminder that even though the topography is erased from street view and memory, it’s not lost.

As I drive around the city, I pay attention to the unassuming dips and hills that are still present, though paved over. These were shaped, in some way, by water. When I drive north up the steep hill on Northeast 33rd Avenue, I’m traveling over a massive mound of gravel deposited by the Missoula floods some 15,000 to 18,500 years ago. When I approach the Columbia Slough from the south, I notice that the land slopes down, toward the river, and I can see the Columbia’s broad floodplain, even if it’s covered now by big-box stores and the airport. When I walk through Southeast Portland, I think of the spring and the substance below the concrete—gravel stuffed into stream channels—and I wonder if those channels are still intact.

Water’s presence in a city is difficult to notice. It’s like training your eye to see negative space—absence is the story. Colonialism exists in levees, dams, and dredging. It’s alive and well in the filled marshes, piped streams, and straightened rivers of Portland. It’s present in our collective forgetting of how this place was once managed by Chinookan peoples—and the reparations that are owed. 

The presence of water is still evident in some local place-names, like Swan Island, which was noted by White explorers in 1844 as “Willow Island.” Located just below the North Portland bluffs, the island was separate from the mainland until the 1920s, when the Port of Portland connected it to the river’s east bank with gravel dredged from the Willamette. My grandfather later dredged there, and downriver at Kelley Point Park, when he worked for the Port. My mom remembers the island before the industry. She rode her bike in the sandy areas and says that some parts were marshy. 

I travel through ancient channels carved by water: Highway 26 was built into the canyon cut by Tanner Creek, which now flows through a pipe under downtown Portland until it meets with the Willamette River somewhere between the Broadway and Fremont Bridges. I-84 cuts through the Northeast Portland neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch—a “gulch” being a place where water has created a steep ravine. The soil in some parts of the gulch was so mushy that the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company estimated solid ground was located at least two hundred feet below the surface. Near Northeast 19th Avenue, a spring seeped from the ground where the road meets the southern end of the gulch. From the spring, a waterfall flowed over the cliffs. Today, a spring appears to still exist near the railroad tracks below the freeway exit for Lloyd Center. The ground there is always wet, and while its surroundings and size are not remarkable, its persistence is. 

In several cities across the country, communities have worked to “daylight” buried streams, removing pipes and allowing water to flow aboveground again, as detailed by Corinne Segal in a recent article in Orion magazine titled “Reaching the Light of Day.” In Southwest Portland, parts of Tryon Creek and Restoration Creek have been daylighted. As the Pearl District developed in the late 1990s, some residents dreamed of daylighting the entire length of Tanner Creek, and it could have been done, says Carl Abbott, a Portland historian, author, and professor emeritus in urban studies and planning at Portland State University. But the city deemed the undertaking too expensive, and the water would have taken up developable land, so the stream remains underground. Tanner Springs Park, a small green space at Northwest 10th Avenue and Marshall Street, marks where the creek flows. 

Reintroducing water into urban landscapes requires making room not only for the water itself, but for animals too, like coyotes, raccoons, beavers, and birds. People would also have to learn how to take care of the water, David Harrelson says. “A lot of people like the idea of [daylighting], because water is an amenity,” he says. “But when we don’t take care of it, it turns into brackish water, algae blooms, like Ross Island.” I think of the fate of the Hawthorne springs, or the neglected stormwater filtration system near my house, where tree of heaven saplings have replaced native plants. “The best outcomes come from people and water being in a reciprocal relationship to each other,” Harrelson says.

The water below the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation had historically been used as a place to dump waste. When Shyla Spicer became president of the Native-led arts and equity organization in 2023, the water worried her. The basement was one of the first places the organization’s outgoing president, Lulani Arquette, took her to see. When Spicer saw the dark, flooded basement, she feared the building’s foundation would need expensive work. But Arquette told Spicer that the building had been located near the creek on purpose, so the water could be used for industry, and that the water poses no threat to the building’s stability. This creek has been a part of Southeast Portland for more than a century, its clear water flowing gently in and out of the building. The industrial world is still a relatively new phase for the water, but it understands the people in this place, Spicer says. The organization plans to renovate the building, and initial designs depict natural light shining in on the basement and native plants growing along the stream. Arquette imagined it as a space for healing and connection. Spicer does too. 

“We haven’t taken good care of that water,” Spicer says. “That water has been taking care of us for as long as we’ve been here. Now it’s our turn to take better care of that water.” 

I drove home one afternoon on North Willamette Boulevard, not far from my childhood home, as the September sun delivered a warm glow to the West Hills. Fluffy cumulus clouds blocked the golden light at times, casting shadows on the mountains and giving them more definition. I could make out several drainages: The closest layer appeared deep green as subsequent ones grew softer, fading, as if the light was reaching back in time. Water’s path was visible, generations of droplets patiently cutting through basalt. The West Hills often look two-dimensional to me, and I notice these drainages only in a certain light. The water has always been there, cascading down the hills, moving through the marshes, flowing under the city, shaping this place, but sometimes it’s hard to see.    

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