Bryan Fletcher was walking past the St. Johns Library in early August when he found himself standing in front of a six-foot crow. He didn't need an explanation. "Definitely big fans of the Wildwood books. Love that they're based in St. Johns," he told a KGW reporter on the spot. That reaction is the whole story in miniature: a St. Johns resident looked at a giant painted bird outside his neighborhood branch library and understood, without checking a map, that this was his corner of Portland getting its due.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're only half paying attention to the flyers on Lombard: of the 30 crow sculptures scattered across Portland this fall as part of the citywide "Wildwood: Follow the Crows" art trail, 23 are clustered in the central city and only seven are placed anywhere else in Portland, according to Sydney Mead, Senior Director of Downtown Programs at Downtown Portland Clean & Safe. St. Johns got one of those seven. And organizers didn't just tuck it onto a side street and call it done. They held the entire trail's public grand opening, ribbon cutting included, at the St. Johns Library on August 7, with illustrator Carson Ellis in attendance to unveil the crow she painted herself.
That's not a satellite location. That's a headquarters.
The trail exists to celebrate LAIKA's stop-motion film "Wildwood," based on the novel by Portland musician Colin Meloy (frontman of The Decemberists) and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis, a Portland artist. The film opens in theaters nationwide on October 23, and its teaser trailer leans on landmarks Portlanders already recognize: St. Johns, Forest Park, Pittock Mansion, the St. Johns Bridge, the Steel Bridge, the BNSF Railroad Bridge, and the downtown waterfront. The fantasy version of Forest Park that gives the film its name and its title only works as a story because the real version sits a few blocks from where most St. Johns residents park their cars.
The St. Johns Bridge itself deserves a beat here, because it's not incidental scenery. Built in 1931 with 400-foot towers and a main span of 1,207 feet, it's the only steel suspension bridge in Portland. It has been the backdrop for the neighborhood's identity for nearly a century, long before a film crew decided it belonged in a teaser trailer.
Ellis, who has spent years drawing this landscape for the Wildwood book series, described the project in language that matches what any St. Johns resident who's walked to the bridge on a clear evening already feels. She called it, in her own words to KGW, "a celebration of that particular beautiful, massive wild forestland" across the river from downtown.
"a celebration of that particular beautiful, massive wild forestland" — Carson Ellis, "Wildwood" illustrator, speaking at the trail's St. Johns Library opening
The trail runs through the last week of October, with all 30 crows reconvening downtown at Darcelle XV Plaza for a Farewell Weekend before they're auctioned off in November, with proceeds going to OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital. That gives St. Johns roughly six weeks left with its bird still on the porch of the library. If you've been meaning to make an afternoon of it, here's a route that doesn't require driving downtown at all:
None of this requires a special occasion. It's just what a Saturday in St. Johns looks like right now, with one extra stop added to the usual rotation.
It's worth sitting with why organizers chose Cathedral Park's neighborhood for this instead of, say, another North Portland stop. The park has spent decades being exactly the kind of place a fantasy film would want to borrow. It got its name from a 1968 Oregon Journal photograph of the St. Johns Bridge, with a caption comparing the bridge's arches to a cathedral. The park itself was community-built: in the early 1970s, an unincorporated St. Johns resident named Howard Galbraith got tired of the junkyard sitting under the bridge and organized a drive that eventually raised $7.5 million to turn it into the park St. Johns has today, dedicated in a community celebration on May 3, 1980. A 2008 sculpture by Donald Fels, called "Drawing on the River," sits beneath the bridge as a nod to the mills and workers who once ran this stretch of the Willamette.
That's a neighborhood that has already been telling its own story in public art for over fifty years. LAIKA didn't invent the idea that this stretch of the river looks like something out of a book. It just pointed a camera, and a crow, at what was already here.
If you've been putting off the walk because it felt like a downtown thing, it isn't. The crow at the St. Johns Library is staying put until the trail wraps at the end of October, and once the whole flock reassembles downtown for its Farewell Weekend, this particular bird goes with it. After that, it and the other 29 sculptures head to auction, with the proceeds supporting Doernbecher Children's Hospital, the same fundraising structure that supported the previous Curious Cat Trail, which drew more than 147,000 visitors across the city two years ago.
Six weeks is enough time to do this properly, on a weekend morning before the rain sets in for real, with a stop at the library first and Cathedral Park second. It's also enough time to notice something that doesn't show up in a movie review: St. Johns didn't need a Hollywood studio to prove it was worth a story. It just got one anyway, and the studio picked this exact library, this exact park, this exact bridge, to open it.
That kind of attention tends to say something true about a place, whether or not you were looking for it.
If you're already a St. Johns homeowner and you've found yourself wondering, even briefly, what a moment like this does for your street or your block, Green Buck Real Estate tracks these shifts across Portland Metro neighborhoods as part of how we work. Request a free home valuation any time you're curious what your corner of the city looks like on paper.
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