South Park Blocks

Story

The South Park Blocks form a city park in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Oregonian has called it Portland's "extended family room", as Pioneer Courthouse Square is known as Portland's "living room".Twelve blocks in length, it is intersected by the Portland Streetcar and forms the Portland Cultural District and the greenspace at the center of Portland State University. The New York Times stated the blocks are "literally at the heart of the city's cultural life." Every block contains public art, such as Shemanski Fountain (1926), designed by Carl L. Linde, with drinking wells, including special drinking wells for dogs. Other art includes Paul Sutinen's In the Shadow of the Elm (built into the pavement), and three large blocks of granite titled Peace Chant (1984). Two large statues are in the block: a $40,000, bronze equestrian statue called Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider, designed by Alexander Phimister Proctor, commissioned by Roosevelt's personal friend and Portlander Henry Waldo Coe and added in 1922, and one of Abraham Lincoln, "facing north, slump-shouldered and pensive", added in 1928, commissioned by Coe in 1926, sculpted by George Fife Waters. The park also contains approximately 337 elm, oak, and maple trees valued at $3.4 million, as well as roses. A plaque from the Lang Syne Society was placed in the South Park Blocks at Jefferson Street in 1991, commemorating the Great Plank Road.