Chapman Square

This is a nice downtown park, across the street from Lownsdale Square. It features trees, an ok sculpture of pioneers and lots of seating.
The seating is important, the block is across the street from the Portland Building and fills up for lunch on nice weather days. Other that there isn’t a lot going on. That is ok though, It does what it needs to do and is an A-​OK place to hang out on a sunny day.

Chapman Square brings particularly welcome nature to the increasingly urbanized downtown. It is bigger than Lownsdale Square, which brings it to have more benches. The traffic is usually not too loud, though there can be obvious exceptions due to the square being close to the Hawthorne Bridge. Wonderful statues exist there and so does a neat Skidmore Fountain in the middle of the park.
In continuation of my experiment to gauge the true nature of both squares, I continued reading at Chapman Square. The fountain is not merely crumbs thrown to me while reading, reading on the other hand requires some serious hydration. The traffic was a little louder than at Lownsdale Square, but not too loud in either instance, even for reading. The angle is flatter. Chapman positions you towards walking towards Portland State University.
Portland could use more squares the likes of Chapman as well as other shapes.

Did you know that Chapman and Lownsdale Square used to be for men and women back in the day? Now it’s filled with passersby and mostly crackheads. Otherwise it’s pretty clean. It’s a park. Need I say more?

I really like these two blocks (located between all of the federal buildings downtown). Having the bus stops here is really refreshing. These two adjacent parks (the other is Lownsdale Square) used to be designated by sex; this one was for women only and the other for men. Plus, I really love the elk statue that separates the two parks. Even as a kid, I loved that it took over the road and cars were forced to swerve around this giant fountain/​statue.
Interesting: This square has all female ginkgo trees.