In 1989 I was living in Lair Hill, a throwback neighborhood on the southern edge of downtown Portland, Oregon. In the early 20th century it was the landing spot for recent immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe. In the late 1960s it became the center of Portland's hippie and artist community. By the late 1980s it still retained its bohemian flavor and was home to many aging hippies, young college students and recent graduates and dropouts.

Artist Carl Schomberg moved into a small Victorian cottage around the corner from me in 1989. Next door to his house was a vacant lot where a similar cottage had burned down a few years later. Soon Carl had turned that vacant lot into a wild art garden, filled with his oil paintings and sculptures, intermingled amongst beds of vegetables and flower. Some days you could hear the tones of Carl's trombone wafting above the wildness.

In the late 1980s Lair Hill was a neighborhood dotted with empty lots and even a small old growth forest. You could look out over the tops of trees and see the downtown skyline less than a mile away. But the city planners were intent on infilling close-in neighborhoods like Lair Hill to prevent urban sprawl from spreading out across Portland's periphery. So the woods was bulldozed and replaced with a large apartment complex and the empty lots were filled with rowhouses. Carl's Garden was the last empty lot to get built on. The night before the bulldozers came, Carl and his friends carried several of his sculptures over to our yard. The ceramic bird creature in the photo still has a place of honor in our current yard, now across the river and upstream along the Willamette River five miles from Lair Hill. Sara, the flying kitten in the photo, is now 17 years old.

Carl disappeared off the Oregon Coast in 1998.