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Location: 200 block of Northeast San Rafael Street
Submitted by: Colin Keating and Joseph Landoni
How they found it: Colin Keating and his partner were circling the Rose Quarter in search of parking, on their way to a Winterhawks game at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. That’s when they noticed a folding metal traffic barricade listing into the ground.
“The sign sinking into the hole looked like an instant meme,” Keating tells WW. He took a photo, and the sight didn’t cross his mind again until we asked for readers to nominate Portland’s most impressive potholes.
The hole is eerily cylindrical, in a way that puts this reporter in mind of Mel’s Hole, the bottomless pit of AM radio legend that supposedly sits outside Ellensburg, Wash. (A less mystical explanation is that the perfectly round hole signals a burst water main under the street.) Joseph Landoni, who separately submitted photos of the hole, dubbed it the “pothole portal to Middle Earth.”
“You cannot see the bottom of this hole,” he tells WW. “It does not end, I swear.”
Landoni says he called the city earlier this month to report the pothole; soon after, the traffic barrier appeared.
Current status: It’s still there, but the traffic barricade is now upright.
This pothole now advances into the Hole Patrol Winner’s Bracket. Each week in March and perhaps April, WW will select another reader-submitted pothole to move into the Winner’s Bracket, where it will be evaluated by our crack team of asphalt researchers using a proprietary methodology (we’ll probably measure it). The person who submits the city’s biggest pothole will receive a splendid prize. Send your entries to newstips@wweek.com.