Above video shows Brian Libby at Jake’s Famous Crawfish in downtown Portland, the site of many exciting discoveries, such as the Battling Bogarts in his book “In Search of Portland, Exploring a Transforming City.”
When Brian Libby first moved to Portland in 1997, he and his girlfriend lived behind the Portland Art Museum in a leaky apartment building that still remains. Most of the rest of the block has been bulldozed, improved or gone vertical. They spent Friday nights walking around downtown Portland, ending up at Powell’s City of Books. They’d pass the Galleria, the Sentinel Hotel (the Governor, then) and the Ritz Carlton (then the food carts) and the Clyde Hotel. They’d collect books and sort through them in the coffee shop.
These days, Libby is still exploring a changing Portland. He brings 25 years of study, close observation and personal anecdotes to his book comprised of six distinct walks. Walks can be taken individually or in one continuous trek. Walking and reading at the same time is up to you.
Libby hopes bringing the book along is like “walking through the city with a friend.”
Tom Booth of Oregon State Press was a driving force behind the book. In 2018, Booth approached Libby about updating 2001’s “An Architectural Guide to Portland.” But Libby was already busy working on this book, which would end up taking another eight years to finish.
An early publisher was skeptical because the book had too many layers, no clear genre. “Where would it be shelved in the bookstore?” Libby recalled the publisher asking. But Libby fundamentally disagreed and thought the book’s appeal could be that it transcended genres.
“My north star was (the book) is like taking a friend on a walk, and you never say to someone, I’m only going to talk about architecture on this walk, or I’m only going to talk about historical periods on this walk.”
In that spirit, I asked Libby to weigh in on the Keller Auditorium.
“You can’t talk about Keller Auditorium without talking about Keller Fountain,” he said.
Libby grew up in McMinnville, but recalls going to the see the musical “The Wiz” at the Keller Auditorium with his mom in 1979.
“We got there early, and we went to the Keller Fountain, and it was a warm summer day, and there were lots of kids frolicking in the fountain, and I remember thinking I’d rather stay here and play in the fountain instead of seeing this show.”
Internationally significant, the fountain is by one of the great landscape architects of the 20th century, Lawrence Halprin.
“It has been argued that the best work of design in Portland is not a building, it’s the Keller Fountain. So I’m a huge fan of the Keller Fountain,” Libby said. “The way it extrapolates the Cascade mountain waterfall into this modernist, cubist language is amazing. What I also love is the way you descend down into the street, and you get all this white noise and you sort of forget you’re in the city at all.”
I shared how my siblings and I basically learned to swim in it.
One wildly remarkable fact about the Keller Fountain is brought to life in Libby’s book.
“The fountain is credited to this famous landscape architect, but the real designer is a woman from his firm who never got proper credit named Angela Danadjieva, a Bulgarian immigrant.”
Libby interviewed her for the book.
“In Search of Portland” is a must-read for anyone who cares about Portland even half as much as its author.
Libby will be at Powell's later this month in conversation with Richard Speer.