The existence of the murals had leaked out of the rail yards by the late 1940s. “Art blooms in strange places but in all Portland perhaps the strangest is under the Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway bridge,” the Oregon Journal offered in passing.
A reporter at The Oregonian took a wrong turn coming out of downtown one evening, dodged an oncoming freight train, and unexpectedly found himself “surrounded by birds and animals” as well as “a fantastic half-tree, half-human that grappled with the night.”
In 1962, newspaper columnist Doug Baker mentioned the murals, calling them “Daliesque works,” perhaps attracted to the drawing of the man who’d turned into a tree—an image from Greek mythology.
Baker cheekily pointed out that while Stefopoulos didn’t get to do any drawing at his present Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway posting, he “still manifests an interest in art. On the wall of his shack at NW 14th and Thurman there’s a single picture—a Playboy ‘Playmate’.”
Despite the occasional mention of the Lovejoy Columns in local newspapers in the 1950s and early ’60s, Stefopoulos wasn’t particularly aware that his murals had become a minor attraction. He rarely saw the drawings himself anymore, skirting his old, under-the-viaduct spot when he headed home from work.
Rather than retreat to his cramped, second-floor room at Northwest Couch Street and Third Avenue, he invariably settled in at the nearby Tacoma Café, where he had his mail sent.
“Here, says a woman who knew him, he was despondent,” Portland writer Bill Donahue related years later. “He drank—ouzo, beer, whiskey. When he didn’t show up at the Tacoma Café or one of the all-male Greek coffeehouses Old Town had in those days, friends would go looking for him.”
These were indeed his friends, but they were drinking friends.
Posted 6 days ago.
