The Once-Cozy Cornelius

A few years ago when I was on the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission, a long-hoped-for proposal came to us, to renovate the Cornelius, a downtown hostelry on Park Avenue that had long been vacant and neglected. The Cornelius has something of a mansard roof, and huge, heavy, openable double-hung windows, and is located right in the heart of things at the corner of Park and Alder. Designed by John V. Bennes, it was built in 1907-1908. It's a handsome structure, very dignified, nicely detailed. A small Europeanish remnant of the Portland a century ago, but one that still fits comfortably into its corner of town.

But suddenly the economy fell, and the project fell with it. Now, the owners say they want to demolish it. Just get rid of it. To do so, they will have to go through not only the Landmarks Commission, but City Council, but what the heck. Why do we so blithely throw away buildings like the Cornelius?

All images courtesy Steve Dotterrer

The Phantom Streetcars

Oregon Historical Society, OrHi 101742

Here is what collectors call a RPPC--a "real photo postcard"--depicting a street scene in Stanford, Montana, postmarked June 9, 1913. It looks a little funny, doesn't it? The streetcar seems to be kind of disproportionally large, and the trolley pole appears to be drawn in with heavy ink.

Yes, the postcard is a real photograph of the main street of Stanford, and that is a real photograph of a streetcar--but the streetcar photo has been carefully cut and pasted onto the street scene. The penciled scrawl says, "Not yet but soon."This is a booster postcard, promoting the future metropolis of Stanford, so up-to-the-minute that it has streetcars. In 1910 the growing Stanford district had a population of 1,176; but prosperity did not continue, and the town's population today is less than 800. It never had a streetcar.

I recently ran across another RPPC with a faux streetcar on eBay. This image is of Jordan Valley, Oregon; "all cars stop" = all streetcars stop. This card is most likely a novelty item, for the remote sheep ranching trade town of Jordan Valley never had a reason to aspire to the status of Stanford, which is a county seat town on a mainline railroad line in a prosperous farming area. In the 1920 census, Jordan Valley had a population of 355, and like Stanford it has seen a decline since then, to about 230 people today.

There was a brief period from about 1905 to 1920 when streetcars represented the acme of metropolitanism, and postcards were the modern way to send a quick note--they were the Tweets of their day. If your town lacked a streetcar, you could still hope one might arrive, or you could admit to living in a small place and make a joke of it. In any case, it pays to advertise.

French Cuisine on the Streamliner!

Here’s a picture postcard of dining on the train, circa 1930. That’s the year that the Union Pacific Railroad introduced the Portland Rose as its premier through train from Chicago and Omaha to Baker City, Pendleton, The Dalles, and Portland. This was white-linen-tablecloth dining, and the car’s décor, as well as the diners’ attire, is pretty down home even if it is dressed up: there is no Art Deco folderol here.

But the Union Pacific got with it in the 1930s. This was a time when their passenger train service was being hacked away at in great chunks by the Depression, the automobile, the airplane, and even the motor bus (the railroad established its own bus lines in 1929). In 1934, Union Pacific came out with its first “streamliner,” a sleek bullet train that set speed records and wowed the public.

Their second snappy streamliner went into service in 1935 as a new train, the City of Portland, “sailing” from its terminal ports of Portland and Chicago five or six times a month. And lo! in the dining car not only did the décor get smartened up over that of the Portland Rose, the solid but mundane menu got shaken up, too. (And no doubt the diners dressed more fashionably, yes?)

For a time, the Union Pacific offered continental cuisine! Here you see the menu in an advertising folder from 1937. The full dinner price of $1.75 is roughly equivalent to $28.00 today: not outrageous, but Union Pacific also ran dining cars at the time that catered to those pinching their few pennies, where you could get a full plate dinner for 35 cents (about $5.60 in today’s money).

In case you are wondering, tranches au sauman [saumon] Montpelier would have been a hunk of [Columbia River] salmon with a butter sauce of herbs and anchovies. Potatoes Delmonico are smashed with cream and topped with cheese and breadcrumbs and browned. The Union Pacific had a fondness for fruit fritters as an accompaniment to main dishes, and it especially favored pineapple fritters. While apple fritters have survived as a fairly popular sweet treat at the doughnut shop, pineapple and cherry versions seem to have disappeared. What’s the story, do you suppose? And remember, prohibition had ended only a few years earlier, so your choice of wine was red or white, and probably from California.

French cuisine apparently did not last too long, but here we have a 1939 menu from the streamliner City of Los Angeles, showing a few variations on the theme. Railroad dining cars had habit of occasionally promoting regional products on their menus, or of pushing particular foods (see “National Food Day”), but an entire “ethnic” menu was pretty rare. The only other one that springs to mind (it, too, did not last for long) was the “Italian Dinner” served on the California Zephyr in the 1950s, between Chicago and San Franciso. Don't you think a Thai menu would have a following on the Amtrak Cascasdes trains to Seattle?

Little Known Aspects of [Oregon] History

Talk about Oregon oddities: these are odd. What are they? They are three postcards created ca. 1955 by S. Dave Babbett on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, in particular their over-wintering at Fort Clatsop in 1805-1806. While I have three cards, there may have been more in the series.

The cards include lots of faddish period-specific references: coonskin caps were hot, deriving from the popularity of the Disney television series “Davy Crockett” (my sister had a white one, shoddily made of ratty rabbit fur); USO shows were hot, with the troops in Korea; the Cuban dance and music known as the mambo was hot; comic-strip police hero Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio were hot.

Other references? Not so hot. Sacajawea as a hotsy-totsy. Oy. So, who the heck was S. Dave Babbett, and why did he draw these things? Dave shows up in the Portland Oregonian in 1955, when a book of his photographs was issued by Cascades Press of Corvallis, called Cannon Beach, an Essay in Pictures. According to entertainment columnist B. Mike (July 9, 1955), “Babbitt, the author, came from New York last September where he did TV and commercial art on the east coast. Right now he’s doing free-lance art work and teaching painting at Cannon Beach. He wanted to come to the west coast to do some painting, saw Cannon Beach on the map, visited it, and settled down. Calls it the most beautiful ten-mile stretch of beach he’s ever seen.”

In 1956, Babbitt was reported to be a new staff member of Pacific National Advertising Agency, where he was to supervise television advertising production; he was noted as having previously been a television writer for the prominent New York City ad firm, Ted Bates, Inc. The last mention of Babbitt was on November 4, 1960, when he exhibited an oil painting at the Portland Auto Show, "Be Home Before Dark"; “The oil shows two lovers in the back seat of a car. In the distance is Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach. And it’s not dark, it’s broad daylight.”

Any additional information on these peculiar cards, or on their creator, the elusive S. Dave, would be much appreciated.

"It will soon be the largest town in Oregon"

"Below we give a fine view of the town of St. Helen's, in Oregon Territory, situated on the Columbia river, about fifty miles from its mouth. It was settled and named by Mr. Wm. H. Tappan, artist, formerly of Boston, in 1849. The river is rather more than a mile wide opposite the town. The fork, where is seen the schooner passing, is the lower mouth of the Willamette, but the mouth frequented by vessels bound up the Willamette river, is eighteen miles above. The island which divides the two is called Souveis Island, and is large and fertile. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company have made St. Helen's their depot, and are at once to erect large buildings and wharves. It will soon be the largest town in Oregon."

From Gleason's Pictorial (Boston, Mass.), August 14, 1852, p. 105

St. Helens was platted as a future city by Capt. Henry M. Knighton and William H. Tappan in 1849-50; Tappan was the first postmaster (the post office name was initially Plymouth). I am not familiar with this view of the town in its early incarnation, but it is fitting that it appeared in a Boston publication. Tappan (1821-1907) came west from Fort Lawrence to Fort Vancouver, as an artist with a U. S. Army regiment in 1849; the men were sent to help protect the Oregon Trail, and they are celebrated in Pacific Northwest history as the "Mounted Riflemen" (see The March of the Mounted Riflemen by Cross, Gibbs, and Loring, 1940). Tappan stayed in the region for several years, serving in the first Washington Territorial legislature from Clark County, was an Indian agent, raised stock, and did surveying. He moved to Colorado in 1864 and later returned to Massachusetts. There he wrote a history of his home town of Manchester, and was president of the Manchester Historical Society. Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, in their Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859-1959) say of Tappan, "He appears to be the region's earliest resident professional artist."

The Pacific Mail Steamship Company did build a dock at St. Helens, and for a brief time designated this its Oregon port of call, but the siren call of Portland could not be ignored; soon, Portland was the largest town in Oregon, a position it has never relinquished.

Cosmopolitan, Portland? Really?

It's a long-standing exercise to characterize American cities. We debate today just how "weird" is the city of Portland (of course, it's about as weird as Akron or Omaha or Pensacola, which is to say it's not). It might be better if we looked for what is distinctive about Portland (Akron, Omaha, Pensacola). A century ago, Edward Hungerford wrote The Personality of American Cities (New York: McBride, Nast & Co., 1913), which includes a vignette of Portland as "New England transplanted"; here is "a town [sic] that is so absolutely American, that it seems as if she might even boast one of the innumerable George Washington headquarters somewhere on her older streets." Those streets "are conservatively narrow, her staunch Post Office [Pioneer Court House] suggests a public building in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about thirty percent of them given over to the retail vending of chocolate. Our Portland guide was grieved when we made mention of this last fact. 'I once went to Boston,' said he, 'and found it an almost continuous piano store.'"

But this is not an essay on The Hazelwood and its sweets, but rather to the point that Portland does not have, nor has it ever had, a reputation for cosmopolitanism. Yes, it has had its share of immigrants and sojourners, travelers and traders; but that New Englandish pall seems to have kept the manifestations of cosmopolitanism to a minimum.

Still, sometimes, in some ways, the city has grasped for the exotic and the worldly. Consider the early 1960s, in the flush aftermath of Oregon's statehood centennial of 1959. That celebration brought foreign exhibitors to Portland! (I still vividly remember an exhibit that included the chance to smell attar of roses from Bulgaria, behind the forbidding Iron Curtain.)

Oregonian, February 6, 1963

In December 1962, the Cosmopolitan Motor Hotel opened at the corner of NE Grand Avenue and Holladay Street, plonked sort of halfway between the new Lloyd Center shopping mall and the new Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Though only a modest five floors in height, it boasted a rooftop dining room touted as "Top of the Cosmo," headed by a Swiss-born chef, Ernest Herzog. Herzog had experience in Puerto Rico and at the Portland Sheraton (another new hotel, located at Lloyd Center) before coming to the Cosmo, where his menus featured "Oregon grown fresh chicken" in 1963.

By 1964, Herzog and the Cosmo were advertising a menu that went "Around the World in Seven Days." While the Top of the Cosmo may not have made much of a difference in advancing Portland's cosmopolitan credentials, over time Herzog did make an impact. He was one of the first members of the Chefs de Cuisine Society of Oregon, and he went on to head his own restaurant, the Swiss-themed Matterhorn in the early 1970s. The Cosmopolitan Motor Hotel is today the Red Lion Convention Center, and the Top of the Cosmo is called Windows Skyroom and Lounge. It appears that what goes on there today is almost entirely pre-sports-event drinking--no longer is it a place to go for some adventuresome, cosmopolitan dining. Fortunately, now there are many other options for culinary explorations.

Springtime: Creamed Potatoes and Peas

When I was working on the cookbook Eating It Up in Eden, I sorted through more than 200 contributed family-favorite recipes. Somewhat to my (pleased) surprise, there were very few offerings that duplicated one another--but another surprise was that one of those few duplicated recipes was a dish unfamiliar to me: creamed potatoes and peas (pages 42-43).

The recipes varied slightly, but the essence was fresh peas, small new potatoes, a basic white sauce, and a hefty infusion of springtime dairy products. On a family farm, this was a dish that absolutely depended on seasonality: there's only a short window for peas overlapping with new potatoes, and springtime brings more and better milk for the butter and cream.

I recently acquired two real photo postcards that tie right into those creamed peas and potatoes. Both were taken by an amateur photographer who printed them up on postcard stock. The view of two women shelling peas was mailed from Astoria June 28, 1912, to Mrs. F. M. Merwin of Portland, from Harry. "It has been raining all day. It is bad enough when the sun shines which is seldom": this indeed describes Astoria. I infer from other clues that Mrs. Merwin is Harry's mother, and that the women are Mrs. Merwin and her mother; so the location of the photo is, very likely, Portland. (N.B. this photo was also used as an illustration in Eating It Up in Eden).

The other postcard view is unlabeled and unused, but it was acquired from the same source and it dates from the same period; are these the same two women? Drinking warm milk direct from the source was once a savored treat (though when I was a kid and my Uncle Ted offered me a slurp, I thought it was plum awful). We don't know the story of why these two well-dressed women are in the barn, or who or where they are, or who the fellow is lurking behind the cow's tail. But we can know that the year is about 1912 or so, and that the milk is fresh and good.

Here's a slightly edited version of the recipe that was contributed by Mapril Easton Combs for creamed potatoes and cream. Mapril lived and cooked and ate (and still does) on the Oregon Century Farm that was established in 1898 by Robert and Emma Easton near the Coos County community of Dora, about 18 miles east of Myrtle Point along the East Fork Coquille River.

Creamed Potatoes and Peas
6 medium potatoes
2 cups fresh peas
milk or cream
flour
salt and pepper
butter

Scrub skins off new potatoes and boil spuds until done. Cook peas in a little water until just done. Drain  potatoes, add to peas, but don't drain peas. Mix a couple of tablespoons of flour into cold milk or cream to make a thin paste, add a little hot water from the peas and stir. Add flour mixture gradually to peas and potatoes; stir to thicken. Add milk or cream until it looks right; add salt and pepper to taste. Add butter just before serving. If too thin, make up a little more flour paste and add gradually. This is really good if made with thick cream and lots of butter.

Isn't it, though!

Addendum: A quick perusal of the 1912 Polk directory for Portland shows the residents of the household of Mrs. F. M. Merwin were Frederick M. Merwin, harness maker and head of the household; Mary E., a clerk for Clarke, Woodward Drug. Co., Harry E., an electrician, and Wyman W., a telegraph operator. Lucy J. Merwin, widow of William A. and a dressmaker, lived less than a mile away. N.B.: in the summer of 1912, Clarke, Woodward opened their new offices in the Woodlark Building, still standing at SW Alder and Park and designed by Doyle, Patterson & Beach. The firm, dating from 1865, was "the first to carry dental, surgical, and photographic supplies in the Northwest," according to an article in the Oregonian, June 2, 1912. Amateur photographers were good customers of  Clarke, Woodward.