The miracle of Timberline Lodge
Many hands made it happen, and in record time.
To get in the “white Christmas” mood, I’m spending a couple of days at a friend’s cabin on Mt. Hood. Last night we went up to the monumental Timberline Lodge for a look-see and light supper.
Timberline looks almost the same today as when it was completed in 1938. Along with the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Rural Electrification Project, LaGuardia Airport, and many other impressive projects, Timberline was one of the great achievements of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. From 1935 to 1943 the WPA gave paying jobs to 8.5 million unemployed men and women, several hundred of them here on Mt. Hood.
Despite its massive size, the warmth and humanity of the Lodge moved me almost to tears. You can still feel the personal energy and commitment of the people who made it happen.
In 1935 unemployment was still high (20%) and families were going hungry. A Portland skiing enthusiast and Democratic party activist, Emerson Griffith, brought the idea of a ski lodge along the lines of the great National Park lodges of Bryce Canyon, Zion and Yosemite to the head of the WPA. But instead of being built by and outfitted with furnishings by private enterprise, this lodge would be hand-crafted top-to-bottom by federally-funded workers.
Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who had designed those park lodges a decade earlier, was hired to create the master design. At the start of the project most of the workers were unskilled. They were trained on the job as stone masons, carpenters, furniture makers, weavers, seamstresses. (Yes, even the bedspreads and draperies were hand-woven, the rugs hand-hooked, the chairs hand-carved!). A skilled person in the trade would make a prototype and teach the workers how to replicate it.
The project broke ground in March 1936, but the first three months were spent digging through the snow to open the six-mile road from the tent camp where the workers were housed to the job site. They worked like beavers to finish the building’s interior frame and exterior sheath before the snows returned in December. The massive logs came from trees felled in the Gifford Pinchot forest across the Columbia in Washington State, then hand-chiseled into shape. Over the winter they focused on kitting out the interior spaces.
Most amazing, the lodge was finished in just 18 months! When it was done, at the dedication many workers wept—moved by what they had accomplished together, and how much they had learned.
The lodge has been proof of what results from a hand-wrought object…I feel there is spirit in objects that are made by loving hands. Every workman on the job was thrilled by his work because he felt that his creative skill was an integral part in a very significant whole. —Margery Hoffman Smith, the remarkable interior designer who pulled elements from Native and northwest forest themes to give the space a unified hand-crafted look.
I can’t help but think how much America could benefit from a 21st century version of a New Deal WPA project: subsidized worker training, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, re-envisioning how we grow food and use energy, new models in human services like nursing, child care, elder care. From Wikipedia:
The WPA built traditional infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, schools, libraries, courthouses, hospitals, sidewalks, waterworks, and post-offices, but also constructed museums, swimming pools, parks, community centers, playgrounds, coliseums, markets, fairgrounds, tennis courts, zoos, botanical gardens, auditoriums, waterfronts, city halls, gyms, and university unions. Most of these are still in use today.
The median net worth of American households (not individuals) today is $192,000. And many of those households are barely keeping it together.
How is it that we allow multi-billionaires to accumulate so much wealth, while contributing so little to maintaining the country that made their wealth possible? Imagine what a few billion dollars could do to improve life for so many, with no felt pain to those with such deep wealth cushions!
Do you have any idea how much $1 billion is? It is a thousand times one million dollars. $10 billion is 10,000 millions. And $100 billion is one hundred thousand millions (100,000 times 1 million). “President Musk” is currently worth $464 hundred thousand millions.
When a billionaire donates $1 million—or in Musk’s case $277 million—to Trump, it is chump change to them. In return, they expect favors: more tax breaks and reduced regulation on their businesses. The rest of us are the ones who are hurt when they avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Then they have the nerve to announce, “We must cut Social Security! Medicare is too expensive! Paying for kid’s school lunches is outrageous!….”
I call total bullshit.
Meanwhile we still have a month until the full load of you-know-what hits the fan, during which time I thank you for hanging out with me and wish everyone of you a warm and peaceful holiday week.
PUT YOURSELF IN THE WAY OF BEAUTY
Holiday lights version.
A young guy in my neighborhood decked out his car with a lotta lights and posed it in this empty parking lot to take pictures of it. I happened to pass by at the perfect moment to compliment him on it.
And my friend Dannelle and her neighbors on either side of her SE Portland home light a series of hoops to make a cheery sidewalk tunnel.
I welcome photos of beautiful things you’ve put yourself in the way of lately! A person can never have too much of beauty in these dark times.
The Timberline Lodge proves what regular American people can do given the opportunity. Another WPA type program would solve many of this countries issues and stimulate the economy to boot. Unfortunately, the upcoming administration would term it as a form as socialism so we cant expect much help from them except chaos.
This summer stayed in NPS lodges at Olympic and Mt Rainier. Fantastic. National treasures.