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On Friday morning, all five members of the Portland City Council stood in front of the Ira Keller Fountain in downtown Portland, celebrating its reopening after a major repair project that left it dry for more than a year.
City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who was the most recent commissioner in charge of Portland Parks & Recreation and the final commissioner to speak at the reopening ceremony, recalled with fondness jumping into the Ira Keller Fountain while a teenager in the late 1970s. To illustrate his fondness, Ryan announced, he would again be jumping into the fountain.
Commissioners Mingus Mapps, Carmen Rubio and Rene Gonzalez decided to follow suit.
The dip was unkind to Mapps, who, according to one person in attendance, emerged from the water with a bloody foot. He’d stepped on what onlookers suspect was a piece of glass.
Mapps’ office says he’s OK. “Commissioner Mapps got first aid from staff on-site and is totally fine,” his chief of staff, Michelle Rodriguez, tells WW.
The reopening included a DJ, a bagpipe player, pop-up beverage vendors, a traditional Filipino dance performance, a parade, and speeches by all five of the city commissioners, who were introduced by Portland philanthropist and developer Bob Naito.
The Halprin Land Conservancy, a nonprofit led by some of the city’s prominent developers, including Naito and John Russell, funded the Friday morning event. (That nonprofit is currently lobbying the city to approve a redevelopment of the aging Keller Auditorium, rather than approving a competing plan by Portland State University to rebuild a new performing arts center elsewhere. Read about that issue here.) In a picture taken at the event of Gonzalez, Mapps and Ryan in the fountain, arm-in-arm, another fountain dipper is holding up a small whiteboard for the camera with the words “Keller Fountain + Keller Renovation = Extraordinary!”
A press release from the parks bureau announcing the reopening of the Ira Keller Fountain on Tuesday strongly suggests that the fountain is for admiration only—not for dips.
“Reminder, the Keller fountain is decorative and not for wading or swimming,” the press release states.
That directive did not appear to deter four of the five commissioners from jumping in the fountain. Mayor Ted Wheeler did not partake in the frolicking—after all, half of the city’s internal software programs are down due to the worldwide Microsoft CrowdStrike outage.
