loading . . . Lovejoy Columns Tom Stefopoulos created art on the pillars of the old Lovejoy Viaduct in the 1940s and '50s. (The Oregonian)LC- THE OREGONIANBy Douglas Perry | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The drawings were an underground secret of sorts, hidden away for years in a grimy, abandoned part of town, appreciated chiefly by local railroad men and lost souls who’d skidded past skid row.
But, slowly, the secret got out.
“Stunning,” said one witness who stumbled on the scene in 1948 after taking a wrong turn on his way out of downtown. “Charming and amazing,” said another, who came to see for himself two decades later.
Newspaper reporters and art critics and finally the simply curious visited the Northwest Portland rail yard to take in the murals – and then sought out the man who’d created what were now being called, straightforwardly, the Lovejoy Columns.
This should have made the artist happy. It’s what he’d always wanted. Recognition. Respect. A place in the world.
But it wasn’t enough. And, besides, it was too late.
***
The Lovejoy Viaduct opened in 1928, an uninspired solution for a small, working-class city just getting used to modern conveniences.
The utilitarian viaduct allowed automobile drivers to bypass the sprawling rail yards between 14th Avenue and the Broadway Bridge in Northwest Portland. Unless you worked in the rail yards – or had fallen on hard times and were tired of being rousted from downtown – there was no reason for you to ever head under the viaduct and into the polluted, noisy industrial district.
Tom Stefopoulos Tom E. Stefopoulas, SP&S watchman at the NW 12th Avenue and Lovejoy Street crossing under the Broadway Bridge ramp, embellished the drab concrete supports with his drawings. (The Oregonian)LC- The Orgonian
Athanasios Efthimiou Stefopoulos worked there. Starting in the 1940s, he was a switchman – or crossing watchman – for the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway Company.
Stefopoulos, who went by Tom, was easy to overlook: a short, stocky man in late middle age, with a mashed-potato face and fractured English. An everyman in a city packed with everymen.
And yet, he still had dreams.
He started making chalk drawings on the concrete columns that held up the viaduct, also known as the Lovejoy Ramp.
Soon, images of birds swirled near the top of the pillars. An old man in flowing robes carried a lantern in the night. An owl stared knowingly.
Then Stefopoulos added messages, chalked in an extravagant, flowing script:
“No man is free who is not master of himself.” “God is love.” “A true friend is the gift of God.”
Lovejoy Ramp The Lovejoy Ramp in 1997. (The Oregonian)January Scans 1997
These were not mere doodles.
Stefopoulos had studied art in Greece, where he was born, before deciding ambitions were for America. He landed in the U.S. in 1910 and began paying his dues as a new American. He worked in a factory in Wisconsin and for a railroad company in Minnesota.
His father, a small-town lawyer in Greece, didn’t understand what his son was trying to accomplish in the New World. Tom wasn’t always sure himself, but he felt compelled to keep striving for it.
“Three times after I get to America, my father sent me ticket to go back, but I not go,” he told a reporter late in his life. “I want to become artist. America I like; everyone have chance. I can do what I want.”
For a while his dreams heaved into view.
Tom Stefopoulos Tom Stefopoulos. (Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum)Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum
He moved to Seattle in 1920 and eventually launched his own commercial-art shop, using the name Tom E. Brown and specializing in a beautiful, art nouveau-like script. He made invitations pop, decorated bank vaults with golden glyphs, painted signs for bars and restaurants.
But running a small business was hard – and that was before the Great Depression hit.
After a lost decade, he was saved by World War II, with work available in the Portland and Vancouver shipyards for almost anyone. He found he liked the Rose City, its live-and-let-live attitude, and took a cold-water flat in Old Town.
Near the end of the war, SP&S hired him, putting him in charge of keeping an eye out as trains swung around each other and switched cars by the Lovejoy Viaduct.
Immediately, the ramp’s gray concrete columns called to him.
Lovejoy Columns The Lovejoy Columns. (City of Portland Archives)City of Portland Archives
Stefopoulos drew on the pillars “just to kill time,” he said, creating works that uniquely combined Greek iconography and American patriotism.
There was Diogenes walking the streets of Athens carrying a lantern, looking vainly for an honest man. Over there was a portrait of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
To draw birds high up on the pillars, he’d climb on top of boxcars when trains were waiting in a queue and “reach out like this,” he once explained, leaning forward and balancing on one foot. When he had time, he went back and traced them over with white paint, adding red or blue flourishes here and there.
Transients frequently would end up in the area, and they came upon the drawings, in winter’s cold and wet, in summer’s heat, in the dark. Many found the images and their accompanying messages (“Light - Hope - Truth,” one said) moving. The experience made them take stock. They spread the word.
Lovejoy Columns Diogenes carrying a lantern.City of Portland Archives
But in 1952 the railroad transferred Stefopoulos to the Northwest 14th and Thurman crossing. His new post didn’t have any transportation columns nearby, and it was busier, not just with train traffic but also cars.
“Nothing to paint,” Stefopoulos said one evening while sitting in his favorite tavern. “And also many cars – thousands, thousands – must watch all the time.”
His days of creating public art were over.
***
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.”
Tom Stefopoulos Artwork by Tom Stefopoulos. (Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum)Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum
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.
Tom Stefopoulos Artwork by Tom Stefopoulos. (Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum)Courtesy of the Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum
“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.
He had never married.
His family was in Greece, increasingly known only through letters.
He was alone.
Joan Liapes, whose late uncle and aunt owned the Tacoma Café, said her aunt told her that at some point Stefopoulos had been hurt in an accident, and so he drank heavily to blot out the chronic pain from the injury.
“It was a sad story,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive recently. “He was just a nice guy who fell on hard times.”
Liapes’ sister, Georgia Liapes, said their aunt “was a sharp one – her facts would have been straight.”
Tom Stefopoulos The Lovejoy Columns. (City of Portland Archives)City of Portland Archives
Despite his difficulties, or perhaps because of them, Stefopoulos was known at the Tacoma Café as “one of the area’s soft touches,” wrote an Oregonian reporter who had discovered the viaduct murals and tracked down the artist at the café in 1967. “One old fellow wandered up and, after a whispered conversation, Tom without hesitation handed him money from his wallet.”
By this time, Stefopoulos had retired from the railroad, just in time for SP&S to merge into Burlington Northern Railroad and start to shut down some of its local operations. The rail yard where he had worked for 20 years would be derelict for most of the next 20.
Now the viaduct drawings were reaching a wider audience, but Stefopoulos didn’t know how to respond when fans of the art found him at the café. He wasn’t entirely sure they were serious in their praise.
He died in 1971, long before the industrial area where he had created art would transform into the fashionable Pearl District, with restaurants and Starbucks outlets and exclusive shops.
Portland’s two daily newspapers published brief news obituaries of the unassuming railroad man and artist. They both gave his age as 89, but this is probably wrong. Available documentation is sketchy and sometimes contradictory. (The Oregonian’s 1967 interview with Stefopoulos said his age at that time was 74.)
Lovejoy Columns The Lovejoy Columns (The Oregonian)LC- Oregonian
Interest in the Lovejoy Columns faded after Stefopoulos’ death, despite the artwork making an appearance in the Gus Van Sant movie “Drugstore Cowboy.” But in the mid-1990s, when the city decided to knock down the viaduct to open more land for housing development, a preservation movement took hold.
“Saving, restoring and relocating the murals will cost roughly $120,000, which is perhaps more than Tom Stefopoulos made in his entire life,” The Oregonian wrote in 1995.
The preservationists lobbied for money and official support, insisting the murals had “a visionary quality to them.” Chicago-based anthropologist Steve Frangos called Stefopoulos a “singular artist.”
The effort achieved an early success: Right before the viaduct came down in 1999, 10 columns with Stefopoulos’ art were carefully cut out and stored at an outdoor site owned by developer Homer Williams.
But Stefopoulos’ fans couldn’t maintain the momentum. The estimated cost to protect the drawings and build a permanent outdoor display space for the columns kept going up and up. Funding commitments proved hard to come by.
Lovejoy Ramp The Lovejoy Viaduct was knocked down in 1999. (The Oregonian)LC- THE OREGONIAN
The huge pillars moldered in storage for years. Finally, the Lovejoy Columns’ adherents gave up.
Without anyone taking notice, most of the pillars were destroyed.
But Stefopoulos’ artistic legacy isn’t completely gone.
The Hellenic American Cultural Center and Museum, on the second floor of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Northeast Portland, holds a small collection of Stefopoulos’ possessions. There are envelopes with cartoons drawn in faded pencil, a piece of paper with a poignant list written in his beautiful handwriting (“Are you worried about Money Troubles?” it begins), striking ink portraits.
(The small museum created an exhibit from these materials – “Master Penworks of Tom Stefopoulos: The Hellenic Artist of the Lovejoy Columns” – that will be revived at the Oregon State Capitol next spring.)
And you can still view Tom Stefopoulos’ Lovejoy Columns – sort of.
In 2005, two of the 30-foot-tall, 29,000-pound pillars – with the drawings on them protectively hidden behind covers showing photographs of the art – found a home, in the courtyard of an upscale condominium tower on Northwest 10th Avenue, between Everett and Flanders streets.
You might not have noticed them. Most people walking past don’t.
That isn’t because Stefopoulos’ art has lost its power. It’s the location, the district’s progress.
For years, people only laid eyes on the artwork while pushing through the smoke of a working rail yard or, later, the unnatural quiet of an abandoned industrial wasteland. In those environments, they saw on the soot-stained columns not only singing birds and a lantern-wielding sage. They saw the artist’s life, a hard life, for so many of the people who came upon the murals, their own life.
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Douglas Perry is an editor and reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive. He has written for a range of publications over the years and has won various regional and national feature-writing awards. He is the author... more
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