Lovejoy Columns

The Lovejoy Columns are painted concrete columns in Portland, Oregon, that originally supported the Lovejoy Ramp viaduct carrying the western approach to the Broadway Bridge, built in 1927 to 1928. Between 1948 and 1952, Athanasios Efthimiou Tom Stefopoulos, a Greek immigrant working as a railway night watchman and a calligrapher, painted the columns with murals of Greek mythology and American imagery, including owls, landscapes with aphorisms, and the philosopher Diogenes searching Athens with a lantern. The viaduct was demolished in 1999, but advocacy by the architectural group Rigga preserved the painted columns, and two were reinstalled in 2005 at Northwest 10th Avenue between Everett and Flanders Streets, with the artwork reconstructed in 2006. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/