Mural artist Paola De La Cruz paints a column under the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland's Central Eastside in June 2025.
Sara Sjol
Under the Hawthorne Bridge on Portland’s Central Eastside, there’s an open-air art gallery quietly waiting as cars rumble above and the trains roll through.
Graffiti turns the sides of warehouse buildings into sprawling canvases and, over the past few years, the columns supporting the bridge above have transformed into colorful art pieces.
“So all the columns have a different theme,” said Paola De La Cruz, one of the artists who painted the latest installment on the columns under the bridge. “For this one, one thing I was inspired by was dance in Portland.”
De La Cruz said some of her inspiration came from the community surrounding the area.
“Right across from the columns is an art studio, and one of the artists there invited me in,” De La Cruz said. “And I also had a houseless neighbor who hung out the entire time I was painting. He even gifted me his paint box. It was nice to just talk to people. They were just super interested in seeing what was happening.”
Tiffany Conklin with Portland Street Art Alliance said PSAA came up with a grab bag of significant historic and cultural moments for the Central Eastside to guide the artist’s designs.
“There were more topics than funding for the columns, so we can probably keep going down an entire other viaduct with the content that we have,” said Conklin. “Produce row, of course, the produce and the shipping and the warehouses. OMSI and science/technology, so we have some representations of the submarine and things like that on the columns.”
The viaduct paintings are part of a larger project that started in 2018 with a grant from the Oregon Community Foundation to create a Central Eastside mural district.
“And we just, of course, love the gritty and kind of grimy nature down there,” Conklin said. “The trains are coming through and there’s always crazy activity happening. And that’s really where artists were for many decades, that’s where a lot of the cheap artist studio spaces used to be.”
The Hawthorne Bridge Viaduct paintings are now complete, but it’s far from the only project to utilize art in Portland’s streets and corridors.
During the pandemic the city had tons of places use murals painted on the street to create a temporary outdoor meeting space.
The Portland Art Museum hosted events on Madison Street where they painted a giant mural of a rose. Stephanie Parrish remembered how the space felt like a natural extension of the museum.
“We called it a parklet, right there between the park blocks,” Parrish said. “In this plaza for those two summers, we had concerts and DJs and fashion shows and little pop-up markets.”
Parrish manages PAM’s community learning partnerships and said during difficult times art can take on special importance.
“Art is essentially ... what makes us human,” Parrish said. “To connect … to ideas and each other. We need spaces where we can be together to feel human. Art helps ease that.”
The Portland Street Art Alliance started painting columns under the Hawthrone Bridge as part of a larger project to create a mural district in the city's Central Eastside.
Jess Hazel / OPB
John Goodwin, the director of community philanthropy at the Portland Art Museum, helped secure funds for a new and improved parklet.
The grant is part of the Asphalt Art Initiative — an international program focused on funding projects that use art to improve street safety and build community.
“I just thought it was something beautiful. This is just beautiful — I like pretty things,” Goodwin said. “No, it’s way-finding. In other places where they’ve done it, it slows down the traffic. They stop and look for a little bit longer than they would when they’re just walking across the street.”
Look for that mural next summer, when Yinka Ilori, a British Nigerian artist specifically selected for this mural, will use his bold, geometric style to depict different iconic images of Oregon, from Mount Hood to the Hawthorne Bridge.
Back under that easy-to-recognize Hawthorne Bridge, Paola De La Cruz said she’s felt inspired by the response to her painted column from the folks who live or work in the Central Eastside.
“It’s hard for someone that isn’t an artist or around a lot of artists to walk into a gallery and feel comfortable,” said De La Cruz. “But with public art, we’re bringing the art to you, and it’s in your space. Even the tagging… it feels like they’re adding on to the art. It’s just really interesting, it feels like a collaboration and it kind of speaks more to people just feeling ownership of the art that’s here.”
Corrections: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Stephanie Parrish’s last name and misstated John Goodwin’s title. OPB regrets the errors.
