The Artist of the Lovejoy Ramp, by Carl Gohs - The Oregon Journal Northwest Magazine March 12, 1967

The following article appeared in The Oregon Journal - Northwest Magazine March 12, 1967:

The Artist of Lovejoy Ramp - (Abridged)

"A Lost Innocence, A Naivete"

By Carl Gohs

I first saw the bridge paintings about 1948. I didn’t know Portland at all well then, and driving home one night, Harbor Drive suddenly became NW Front; I was cut off from the city by the interminable length of the railroad yards.

I turned into a theoretical street which led straight into the heart of the yards. I bumped and rocked across the no-man’s-land of tracks smack into the blinding light of a switch engine which bore down bellowing like a wounded bull-elk.

Suddenly I was surrounded by birds and animals. In the light of the headlights on one column, a wolf, deer, and lion battled; on another, a fantastic half-tree, half-human grappled with the night. Doves and eagels in lovely, flowing lines seemed to roost everywhere.

It was a stunning sight. Soon after, an article in the Oregonian carried pictures of the paintings and identified the artist. Then recently, for Northwest Magazine, I searched out the artist and his story.

I revisited the site. Rain beat down, but in the shelter of the viaduct which ran overhead like the roof of a mammoth cave, I examined the paintings for the first time on foot. Time has dimmed some. Vandals have virtually obliterated a portrait of General MacArthur and another of Abraham Lincoln. Here and there obscenities are chalked by crude hands.

Most of the paintings are remarkably preserved, however, considering the weather and all. There still is Diogenes in flowing robes, life-size; above in handsome script is the legend: "Diogenes, the Greek Cynic Philosopher Walking the Streets of Athens with a Lantern Looking for an Honest Man."

The artist, I recalled, was a railroad man, a crossing watchman at this place under the ramp. There was no one about, so I inquired at a nearby SP&S Railroad office. The people there were most helpful; the artist was Tom Stefopoulos; he had retired about six months before. A call to the company personnel office produced his address.

Shortly after, I climbed the stairs to the second floor of a skid road hotel. The building was clean and orderly. A courteous Japanese gentleman directed me to Tom’s room. I was not admitted, but talking through the door, Stefopoulos and I agreed to meet in two hours down the street in the Tacoma Café. The Tacoma, it turned out, is Tom’s "living room" and mailing address. We met at the appointed time.

A miserable, cold, wind-driven rain whipped the street outside. Shabbily dressed men would enter, stand for a time warming themselves, then depart. It was quiet at the bar, except for an occasional burst of laughter or a hearty, backslapping greeting. Most eyes were on the afternoon movie on television – an old western.

Stefopoulos and I stood at the bar. He occasionally glanced at the movie with faint contempt, otherwise between careful answers to my questions he shifted from one foot to another, thoughtfully sipping his beer.

As a youth in Greece, Tom had been handsome – is so still. White-haired now, less than middle height, stocky, with proud and military erectness, his movements are swift and easy. The cane he sometimes leaned on is pure decoration. He’d carved it himself. He wore a dark blue suit, blue striped shirt, tie, and a vest decorated with an assortment of badges and pins, on one of which I could make out "SP&S Railroad." His vest pocket bristled with pencils and pens, befitting the master penman he is.

Tom’s English is limited, but he compensates for it with "body english" – he emphasizes a point by putting his shoulder into it, or leans forward or back or twists from the waist, chops the air with his hands, or tosses his head with all the flashing, dark-eyed histrionics of his race.

In America he lived first in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, working for seventy-five cents a day. That was in 1910. Life was hard and he slept in his share of boxcars. As suddenly as he broke into speech, he was silent again, listening.

Stefopoulos spoke reluctantly of his childhood in Greece. His father was the village attorney.

"Three times after I get to America, my father sent me ticket to go back, but I not go," Tom snapped. "I want to become artist. America I like; everyone have chance. I can do what I want.

"My sisters are still here," he said, "I have nieces, nephews, all grown now – married."

He was quiet, thinking.

"But I never go back," Tom continued. "I send money every Christmas. Other times too. I work. Hard."

Tom was christened Athanasios Efthimiou Stefopoulos. As he pronounced it, it is musical, graceful. He came to the U.S. as a lad of 18; since has been factory worker, railroadman, commercial artist -- but above all, a champion penman.

Stefopoulos taught himself, working late every night after ten hours in his Milwaukee factory job. Hour after hour, day after day, he practiced with a pen a language he scarcely knew, intrigued by the fancy scripts with swirls and flourishes so much in vogue then. He was persistent; he had a gift; he became an expert.

"Restaurants and saloons need signs like that," Tom said, pointing to a price list behind the bar. "I young kid, go out every night after practice. Penmanship! Do signs."

Chuckling, Tom told how one night in a saloon he was challenged to copy a drawing of a eagle that hung over the bar. The eagle was drawn in one continuous line of loops and curves. He succeeded in doing it, and the crestfallen better had to buy drinks for the house.

If Tom’s English is limited, his zest is not. It is this that at times makes understanding him difficult. When he warms to a subject, he seizes and runs with it – words tumble out, Greek and English intermixed.

People moved in and out of the tavern as we chatted, shaking off the rain as they entered, or putting up frayed collars for defense as they left.

Tom was ever alert for friends, signaling to the waitress to send down a beer. Watching all this, it soon became obvious that Stefopoulos is one of the area’s soft touches. One old fellow wandered up and after a whispered conversation, Tom without hesitation handed him money from his wallet. Another, a little in his cups perhaps, whom Tom waved off with embarrassment, insisted he owed Tom over a hundred dollars, and that Tom refuses to accept repayment.

It occurred to me that the term "skid road" is probably as much abused as many of its inhabitants, whose tattered lives feed the concept of decay. We forget that for every head tipped back in a dirty doorway draining the last of cheap wine, there is another, clear eyed – the man on a slender old-age pension, or the one whose wage scale simply prohibits his living any place else, or those temporarily down on their luck.

Tom, I was later to learn, could within reason live most any place he liked. But he had better things to do with his money then spend it on himself; much, I felt, went back to Greece. And so it was I watched and listened to this typical outgoing Greek who in one way or another had been giving of himself for a long time.

The young Stefopoulos soon moved west from Milwaukee , first to Duluth, where he worked for a railroad, then to Seattle in 1920, where eventually he was able to open his own art studio.

In Seattle he taught classes in penmanship and built a thriving commercial art business, painting posters and designing everything from letterheads to greeting cards and invitations. I had often wondered who were the men who decorated the vault and safe doors one sees in so many old buildings dating from the first third of the century.

This, I learned, was one of Tom’s specialties. First, in gold paint, he drew the fancy border around the door. At the corners he placed clusters of arrows or cupids, eagles, doves and other such decorative devices. Tom was a master of art nouveau lettering techniques (which now, 40 years later, are making a strong comeback in advertising).

Tom is one of those who was born 30 years too late. By the time he reached the peak of his ability, the styles for which his talent seemed best suited had already faded. By the 1930s, companies no longer wanted letterheads, trademarks and lettering styles in flowing lines. New forms emerged and these were foreign to the styles and manners Tom knew.

In World War II Stefopoulos moved to Vancouver to work in the shipyards. After the war, he joined the SP&S in Portland as a crossing watchman under the Lovejoy ramp of the Broadway Bridge. There waiting for him were those tall, blank pillars.

Crossing watchman or no, draw he must. Whiling away time awaiting trains, Tom drew with chalk on the rough, concrete columns. The weather too easily scoured these, and as trainmen and others in the neighborhood encouraged him, he switched to paint.

I asked Tom how he’d managed some of the paintings which are over ten feet high.

"When train stop at crossing, waiting for other trains to switch," he explained, "I climb to top of boxcar next to painting, reach out like this, and paint," he demonstrated, clutching his cane and balancing on one foot. "Sometimes, when I’m not finished, the train wait a minute – I paint – then climb down and waver her on."

Greek mythology supplied themes for many of Tom’s paintings, and he composed his elements with skill within the vertical limitations of the columns, as in the painting of the battle of the wolf, lion and deer, with the lion triumphant over all. In another there is the man who turned against the gods and fled to a forest to escape their wrath. The gods found him and turned him into a tree, and there he is in Tom’s painting – a man-tree with a great nose protruding from the trunk and with a branch growing from the pupil of his eye.

One of the finest paintings is of a great brooding owl – the owl of wisdom, the sage. Unfortunately (and perhaps ironically) it has, of all the paintings, suffered the most from weather. Beneath it, barely visible, is the legend, "No man is free who is not master of himself."

There is a little house beside the tracks at the Lovejoy crossing provided so watchmen may keep warm and out of the weather while awaiting trains. In it, Tom stored his painting supplies. Most of the paintings are a system of white lines against the dark gray concrete. The paintings are largely one color, although Tom occasionally introduced red or blue as an accent. The polychrome Lincoln and MacArthur portraits are the exceptions.

The Stefopoulos bridge paintings evoke a certain nostalgia. Apart from their intrinsic merit, they seem to symbolize a lost innocence, a naivete. The sidewalk artist who drew caricatures and elaborate, fanciful designs on walks and walls has passed from the American scene. Now all is planned and calculated; little is left of spontaneity, of doing just for the joy of doing.

One afternoon I visited the paintings with Mrs. Rachael Griffin, curator of the Portland Art Museum. She’d seen the paintings before, but had not had an opportunity to examine them carefully, and was charmed anew. She sensed immediately their background in Spencerian script styles. Mrs. Griffin pointed out that Stefopoulos’ style, however, was by no means totally derived from that, indicating the strong drawing of the figures in the battle of the wolf, deer, and lion, which Tom handled in a manner entirely apart from the other paintings. There the figures are solids, rather than lines. But there, as elsewhere, she noticed the tendency of the primitive artist to fill every available bit of space, and praised the skill with which this was done. She also mentioned a curious motivational relationship between the Stefopoulos drawings and Simon Rodia’s Watts towers in Los Angeles.

Previously, I had asked Stefopoulos when he has last worked on the Lovejoy paintings. He explained that he was transferred in 1952 from Lovejoy to the railroad’s new 14th and Thurman crossing and had worked on them very little since. (The railroad had once seriously considered moving Tom back to Lovejoy to be able to continue to paint, but by that time his retirement was imminent and the idea was dropped).

The Thurman to NW Front Avenue crossing where Tom moved, is one of the busiest in the yards, with heavy truck, automobile, and train traffic.

"At Fourteenth and Thurman," Tom said, "Nothing to paint, and also many cars – thousands, thousands, must watch all the time. But sometimes, when trains sit and wait – blocking crossing – I have time, draw with chalk on boxcars.

"Once," Tom said laughing, "I draw picture on boxcar and sign it – Tom Stefopoulos – and I write my address – Tacoma Café, 22 NW 3rd, Portland , Oregon.

"Two, maybe three months later, I get letters from old railroad friends in Duluth I not hear from for long time. They see boxcar with drawing in railroad yard in Duluth. They say, ‘Look, look – there’s Tommy Stafopoulos,’" Tom gestured excitedly. "And I get three letters."

The next day I again met Tom at the Tacoma, and he brought with him a bundle of drawing from his commercial art days in Seattle.

"Ti kanis?" (how are you, Tom said in Greek, and translating, explaining my reply should be, "Poll kalla.") We ordered beers.

Lifting his glass, he said, "Esigian," (pronounced ay-say-ean) – "Good health," and unrolled the drawings.

Among them was a photo-copy of a diptych he had painted during the war years, depicting in one panel, Diogenes presenting his lamp to a figure of Uncle Sam; in the other panel, Uncle Sam presenting the lamp to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then president.

Tom mailed the painting to Roosevelt, and proudly produced the letter of acknowledgement from the White House, and another from the president’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, then living in Seattle.

While working in his Seattle studio, Tom also used the name Tom F. Brown (somewhat less formidable than Athanasios Stefopoulos), which explains different signatures appearing on some of his work.

Many of the samples from that period are astonishing pieces of craftsmanship. Among these is a certificate including a portrait head of George Washington within a three-inch diameter circle. The portrait is a single, continuous line, beginning at the center of the circle and moving out in a tight spiral. Each circle of the spiral is separated from the other by less than a sixteenth of an inch. The features of the Washington head are achieved by varying the width of the line from thick to thin – a marvel of precision and control. It had to take thousands of hours (literally "thousands, thousands") of practice to achieve such control. But those days of hard work and long hours are past.

Tom said now that he is retired he will travel some. He has cousins in Victoria, B.C., whom he can see more often now. He plan a trip East soon, by railroad, of course. He has a pass, and will stop along the way to visit friends and relatives – other cousins in Duluth and in Milwaukee. He will take his time, moving as the spirit moves him.

He still paints some, and would like to touch up his Lovejoy paintings sometime. Although best known for these, his great and original love in penmanship. When he takes up a pen, it is a serious thing. He pauses – thinking – and makes studied, precise spirals in the air above the paper before the pen touches it.

The hand of this 74-year-old is still remarkably sure. Sefopoulos took a page from my notebook. He studied the blank space carefully, resting his arm on the counter – resettled his arm, made a few practice movements in the air, repositioned the paper. Then with lightening stokes he effortlessly drew in great flowing lines one of those doves he so loves to draw.

"This is for you," he said, handing it to me.

It was signed, "Tommy, Friend."

Saved By a Prayer, by Karen E. Steen Willamette Week July 28, 1999:

SAVED BY A PRAYER

By Karen E. Steen

Anyone who happened to be passing my the July 11 ceremony underneath the Pearl District’s Lovejoy Ramp might have asked themselves: "Performance art, religious worship or activist rally?" The answer was all three. It was also a reminder of what makes Portland so, well, so very Portland.

On that Sunday morning, lovers of public art honored the Greek murals painted on the supporting columns for the ramp, which will be demolished this summer. RIGGA, an architecture and design firm dedicated to saving the murals from destruction, led the tongue-in-cheek invocation.

"We wanted to let the spirits in the columns know not to panic when the chain saw hits them – that someone is looking out for them," says RIGGA’s James Harrison. "Damned if it didn’t work!"

Four days later, Vicki Diede of the Portland Department of Transportation called RIGGA to say the columns would not be harmed during the ramp’s demolition. Instead, the department would follow all of the advocates’ technical recommendations to preserve them.

For a while, it didn’t look like that was going to happen. While PDOT had agreed to save the columns, it had not committed to the specific recommendations, citing cost and liability issues ("Urban Mythology," WW, June 16, 1999). Without those promises, there was concern that PDOT’s removal methods would not be sufficient to prevent damage to the art.

Now the transportation department, overseen by Commissioner Charlie Hales, is making sure its intentions are clear. The contract for the ramp’s demolition includes provisions to "(go) out of the way to save the columns in a manner that would preserve their integrity," says Ron Paul, Hales’ chief of staff.

"(Adopting the recommendations) really didn’t result in a change as much as just adding emphasis that this was very important to everyone concerned."

The recommendations – which include protective wrapping of the columns and keeping the crowns and bases intact – are important for two reasons: They increase the change that the columns will make it through the demolition unscathed, and they create more options for displaying the columns as public artworks after the demolition is completed.

Responsibility for the murals’ future rests with the Friends of the Columns, a committee that includes Harrison, Paul, developer Homer Williams, neighbors and arts groups. Plans include conservation work on the murals, which were painted by railroad watchman Tom Stefopoulos in the 1940s, and a design for re-erecting the columns in a new neighborhood park.

Eulogy for the Lovejoy Ramp, by James Harrison July 11, 1998

EULOGY for The Lovejoy Ramp

July 11, 1998

Friends, Dearly Beloved, Loved Ones, and the merely curious-

We are gathered upon this hallowed ground to prepare a friend, this homely yet noble edifice, for the great beyond . May the strength of your construction sustain you through the gates of entropy. All composite things must decay.

A Ramp is a funny thing- curious, not a full bridge per se, a ramp can only get

one halfway to somewhere, such is the plight of all ramps- placing the weary traveler in the neverland of perpetual arrival or departure. Let us have a moment of silence for all ramps.

And yet! a ramp is also glorious! It is the inclined plane that has given humankind the ability to traverse over large objects. Witness the daredevil on his motorcycle- what does he use to leap, to soar with the eagles, but our friend the wedge.

No less an authority than the philosopher Luctretius has referred to this wedge as the clinamen, the very thing which creates turbulence in the laminar flow of existence, allowing life to happen.

But enough platitudes- our attention is on this homely structure-

 Dumpy of proportion yes, but strong of rebar- with beams thicker than a man is tall. Bridge over industry! Connector of commerce! Friend to the wino!

No prizes of beauty you’ve won in your day, true, yet even the inebriate uncle who overeats and scares the children remains a part of the family. It is your banality we cherish, for you remind us that the bulk of history is comprised of the uninteresting, the unimportant, and the unwritten. What was banal for our forefathers will remain banal for our children’s children, and so on, and so on , ad expurgatum. So goes the cycle of life.

Nay, your past ablutions consisting chiefly of the urine stains and excreta of those dispossessed souls who would call you simply- Home. We now give you the ablution of- fizzy champagne.

Witness now, as the egg of life hurtles through the hoop of death. Fertile becomes fallow , the brackish milk flows forth from the bosom of the blighted.

- please, strike the gong of remembrance! Now let the fog of amnesia roll across the landscape of absence towards the hamlet of forgetfulness.

Tilting at Columns, Finding Marvels, by Randy Gragg The Oregonian Oct 1, 2000

Tilting at columns, finding marvels

Sunday, October 1, 2000

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By Randy Gragg of The Oregonian staff

The goal is $1.5 million. The amount raised so far? A whopping $2,500.

But in the effort to save the Lovejoy Columns, it's just business as usual. Courtesy of the architecture collective Rigga, the columns -- covered in beautiful, if faded and peeling, 50-year-old paintings by a train-yard worker named Tom Stefopoulos -- have already been saved from demolition. Now the collective wants to make a gateway to the River District with the columns at Northwest Ninth Avenue and Naito Parkway.

Through performances, parties and even a documentary film by Vanessa Renwick, Rigga has made the columns a strange sort of civic event, gaining allies as varied as developer Homer Williams and City Commissioner Charlie Hales.

Their most recent convert is Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian-born writer and publisher whose wry observations of America have won a following on National Public Radio.

With his Old World roots and surrealist sensibility, Codrescu sees the columns as part of a genre he calls "disaster architecture," the "demolished or half-demolished that contain essential ingredients for urban survival." Tuesday night, he will deliver a benefit lecture tentatively titled "The Eruption of the Marvelous" in honor of the columns.

The Oregonian caught up with Codrescu as he took a break at his Louisiana home from working on his new novel, "Casanova in Bohemia," to chat about Rigga's project, Portland and "the marvelous."

Q: What is the "Eruption of the Marvelous"?

A: Andre Breton used the phrase in the "Surrealist Manifesto." In the mundane existence and the continual boredom we are immersed in, now and then something strange makes an appearance and you feel awake. The marvelous has the quality of that, whenever something escapes the plan and comes out jagged. It can be horrific, too. Horrifically marvelous.

Q: Like war?

A: Yes, beautiful explosions. Like where I live, in Baton Rouge, Exxon has the largest oil refinery in the Western world. It's just evilly beautiful at night, but it's not very good.

Q: That, of course, runs counter to the whole idea of Portland. We're one of the most planned cities in the country.

A: That's part of the problem. It's great that Portland plans for development. Baton Rouge has no planning whatsoever and it's turning into disgusting sprawl like Houston. But you can also plan your utopia to the point that you kill the life within it. A classic case is Ellicott City, Maryland, which was planned as a utopia where people could live within walking distance of work, human-scale. Ten years after it was built the teen-agers started vandalizing it. They're bored. They want jagged.

Q: Is it possible to build the marvelous anew?

A: It's possible to let it happen. You can't actually plan it. Great cities like New York and Paris grew organically and, at times, quite wildly. There's an unpredictable thing that you have let happen.

Q: So what about city planning movements like New Urbanism, which seek to revive American cities?

A: I'm not a big fan of New Urbanism, at least not in its later development. Originally, it was seen as a kind of working-class panacea that would somehow give people better living conditions -- the garden cities, etc. What's happened is you have a lot of design. It's all very rational. But it doesn't provide for the irrational -- the marvelous. Bureaucrats run everything and they understand nothing of the original impulses of New Urbanism. Every bureaucrat should be doubled by a poet.

Q: What draws you to Rigga's effort to rescue a series of viaduct columns painted with old graffiti?

A: It's like parts, like a serial novel. The first part is terrific itself: an urban rescue project. The second part where they ritualized the disposition of the columns was very poetic: a performance. The fact that they continue carrying the project into the local culture is part three. I'm an actor coming to help out. All the extensions of the project are great. They are not deadly serious. It's using this thing as a ritual space for all kinds of artistic statements.

Q: Have you ever seen anything similar?

A: Not really. I've heard of various rescue projects of threatened works, but never road columns. They've been made into literal worship objects for God knows why. It's pure Dada.

Q: As a proponent of the marvelous, would you agree with Winston Churchill's saying, "We make our buildings and then they make us"?

A: The question of how we live now is incredibly important, especially after the last gasp of postmodernism in architecture . . . well, maybe it's not over yet. But design was everything. The discussion never involved the people who live there.

My mother lives in one of those old folks' nightmares in Florida with endless streets that look the same all built around little patios and swimming pools. This place makes people feel old. She moved away. It imposed its spirit on the people.

It's clear that cities are looked at as very highly developed wildernesses. Yet, they really won't accommodate nomadism. There is a kind of urban nomadism that exists in London or Paris -- probably not New York anymore -- which is this return of a different kind of culture in the heart. People who might have lived in tents in the desert suddenly are using the undergrounds and empty buildings. The best places start to get these other functions that aren't intended by architects. They are way beyond design.

Q: So why live in Baton Rouge?

A: I live in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. New Orleans is probably the new New York/Paris/San Francisco. There's an incredibly live artistic scene and the rents are still cheap. There's an awful lot of young people moving here to be artists. I can't work very well in New Orleans because it's too exciting. But Baton Rouge is just full of trees, refineries and college students.

Q: Do you have a recipe for creating more of the marvelous?

A: If you take poets, particularly of the Dada/monster flavor and mix them with features of buildings that escape stylistic definition and you take them out in public, you might get something.

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