Traditional Street Blade Pair In Johns Landing: Macadam and Boundary
This photo demonstrates a good example of the traditional Portland street blade style, including the affixion of tabs to indicate the street blocks and how they have to do it if there's two named streets:
The pair is the only ones on a pole like this at the corner of SW Macadam Avenue and Boundary St. Some notes perforce:
The block numbers, since they aren't included in the standard design, have to be affixed after the main blade is made. If the cross is a named street and numbered avenue, there's no problem as long as the named blade is on top. If the numbered blade is on top or both blades are numbered, then the block index on the bottom blade has to be put in such a way that it won't be missed and that it does not obstruct the top blade (the end of the bottom blade does a handy enough job of that per se).
It's worth again pointing out the particular way Portland street blades deliver information. The block indexes do not denote the block face of the street that they denote, but inform you of the block the crossing street defines. That is to say, you aren't in the 0500 block of SW Macadam or the 5300 block of SW Boundary, rather, Macadam defines the start of the 0500 block on Boundary Street, and Boundary Street defines the start of the 5300 block on Macadam.
Put perhaps simply, Boundary Street is 53 standard blocks south of the Burnside base, and this point of Macadam (it's not a straight street) is 5 standard blocks away from the Naito Pkway/Front Avenue base.
Another notable feature of PDX geography I'll comment again on: the zero part of the 0500 in front is important and necessary. Directional quarters of Portland in this area are defined by not only Burnside Street but the Willamette River. Anything South and West of Burnside/the River is SW; anything South and East of Burnside/the River is SE. South of downtown, though, the riverbank swings west of south while the surveyed baseline of Naito/Front remains, more or less, a straight line doing due south. This opens up a sliver of land that slowly grows wider as you go out. However, addresses have reached Zero at Front/Naito?
The solution was to start increasing addresses as you approached the River and came away front Front/Naito, affixing a zero in front of the hundred. These addresses have a zero in front of them so they didn't have to distort the street grid the farther south you went. Zero-hundred address can reach as high as 02000 in the Dunthorpe area, along cross-streets such as SW Military Road.
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Samuel John Klein
