No microbrewery has ever done for Portland what the Blitz-Weinhard brewery did. There's no substitute for the smell of hops and barley cooking in 20,000-gallon batches. That warm grainy smell used to spread for tens of blocks, a reminder that the history of civilization is the history of beer. That smell connected our city to the earth, to the farm fields where the grain was grown, to a world of things grown by human hands. That transient smell, spilling out into the city only at certain stages of the brewing process, let the city know that something alive and yeasty was happening inside those buildings.

With the redevelopment of the brewery blocks we're left with only the original brick buildings. In place of the smell of beer being brewed we have the transience of demolition. Nothing is permanent. But the careful dissection of the brewery buildings has left us the utilitarian beauty of the smokestack. Before the wrecking balls came, only the very top of the smokestack was visible. The smokestack was lost, surrounded, and screened off by the jumble of the brewery buildings. Now it stands seven stories tall on an octagonal pedestal, a monolithic monument to the bricklayer's craft. Seen from NW 11th Ave, it is tall, red, phallic, severed from its original purpose. Its only reason for existence now is to delight the eye.

In a city, beauty is in the unexpected, the transient, the ephemeral. For years, every time I drove west across the Steel Bridge, I ignored the grain elevator next to the river. But one day, after I saw an exhibition of the barn-sized abstract paintings of Clifford Still, this huge, corrugated wall of gray cement transformed itself into a piece of unintentional art. Between the regularly spaced curves of this wall are flat sections where rain darkens the concrete in slowly deepening V shapes. They start at the top and work their way down with gravity, growing longer the more it rains. The wall becomes a slowly changing painting that also functions as a kind of enormous rain gauge.

This particular bit of ephemera is now defaced with legally sanctioned graffiti big enough and crass enough to stand as a symbol for the corruption of art by commerce. Progress, in the form of amazon.com, has co-opted this space and scrawled its ugly signature across it in letters 20 feet high.

But the city, busy as it is tearing itself down and building itself back up, continually yields new ephemera to the observant. Recently I drove west across the Burnside Bridge at about 10 in the morning. The rain had stopped, and the sky to the east was starting to clear. As I crested the top of the bridge I saw that West Burnside, wet and shiny with the recent rain, was bathed, for blocks, in a coppery light. The source of this--dare I say--yes, rosy light, was the pink surface of the US Bank tower. West Burnside appeared otherworldly, almost heavenly. And, unlike a rainbow, which recedes in front of us as we approach, this was light I could enter.

At the west end of the bridge, I pulled over to the side. I rolled down my car window and let the noise of the city in. I stuck my head out, wishing, nostalgically, for a whiff of hops and barley cooking in a 20,000-gallon batch, but all I got was a trace of diesel exhaust from a Tri Met bus a block ahead of me.