Washington Park

The crown jewel of Portland [1]’s magnificent park system is Washington Park, which encompasses 130 acres of forest, formal gardens, and such civic institutions as the Oregon Zoo [2], International Rose Test Gardens [3], Japanese Gardens [4], World Forestry Center [5], and the Portland Children’s Museum [6]. Adjacent to the park is the Hoyt Arboretum [7].

Washington Park had its beginnings in 1871, and in its early years it was modeled on European parks, with winding drives, shady walkways, fountains, noble statuary, formal plantings, lawns, and ornamental flower displays. At the time, most of Portland’s population lived downhill from the park, and the park entrances were from below.

Nowadays, most people enter the park from Tichner Drive and Kingston Avenue, essentially entering the park from its back door, but in the days before automobiles, visitors would follow footpaths or take the cable car up Park Avenue to the park (TriMet bus 63 still follows this route). This is still the best way to experience the Victorian-era park in the way it was planned.

If you’re driving, biking, or walking, take Park Place west from SW 23rd Avenue and wind up the hill. The road passes a number of fountains and statues as it loops upwards.

In the midst of a central drive at the entrance to Washington Park, the Lewis and Clark Memorial is a 34-foot rectangular granite pillar bearing the state seals of Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho—the Northwestern states through which the Corps of Discovery [8] passed in 1805–1806. Nearby, the Washington Park Fountain is also known as the Chiming Fountain for the sound the water makes as it cascades from one bronze pan to another.

The statue of Sacagawea holding her young son Jean-Baptiste (a.k.a. Pompey) was unveiled in 1905 during the Lewis and Clark Exposition, and in attendance were noted suffragettes and writers Susan B. Anthony, Abigail Scott Duniway, and Eva Emery Dye. The statue was purchased with funds raised by Portland-area women, and its inscription reads, “Erected by the women of the United States in memory of the only woman in the Lewis & Clark expedition, and in honor of the pioneer mother of Oregon.”

Just uphill and to the north is the statue Coming of the White Man, which depicts two Native Americans gazing eastward, as if toward the influx of Oregon Trail pioneers. The older of the two figures represents Chief Multnomah, leader of the native people that lived in the Portland [1] area when the first white settlers arrived.

In a loop of Park Place just below the rose gardens stands the Oregon Holocaust Memorial, dedicated in 2004. The memorial consists of a cobblestone square that represents European town squares, plus stone placards that relate a brief history of the Holocaust. Next to the wall is a vault beneath which is buried soil and ash from the six World War II concentration camps where most of the Nazi-led killing took place: Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.