Bend Emblem

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Behind the dais

City of Bend · Seen from August 21, 2019

In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.

A large wooden disc on a wall, the word BEND cut into its tan face inside a dark ring.
The disc on the chamber wall, cut from a January 2026 news photograph. KTVZ NewsChannel 21 · documentary reproduction Examine the original

The emblem hangs, three feet across and cut in wood, on the wall the city council sits in front of.

Every photograph of a Bend City Council meeting has it in the background: a large wooden disc on the wall above the dais, the word BEND cut into a tan face inside a dark ring. Nameplates along the bench beneath it read Mendez, Riley, Mayor Kebler, Perkins.

Nothing has been found that says when it was made, by whom, or when it was hung. What the record gives is a floor: the City's own post of 21 August 2019 shows it already on the wall, the Bulletin photographed it twice in January 2023, KTVZ in September and in October 2024, and the news photograph this record is cut from is January 2026. One object, several sightings, no date.

And the drawing is the City's own. The mark the City uses today has an arched third letter — the lowercase n the City itself calls the “Bend bug” — and so does the disc on this wall: enlarged from the news photograph and set beside the City's 2016 and 2026 files, the three carry the same arch between two stems and the same small spur above the left one. This archive read it the other way for part of a day, as a capital N, and said the room held two constructions of the same four letters. It does not.

Said plainly, because a record about a City object can be misread in both directions. What it is: a carving of the Bend emblem, about three feet across, cut in wood and hung in the council chambers, held by the City of Bend, drawn and made by somebody nobody has named. What it is not: a dated object. Nothing here says the City commissioned it, or when, or from whom — only that it carries the same construction the City's identity files carry, and that no document has been found explaining either.

Where it sits, and who put it there. The disc is filed with the bureau roundel, placed there by the curator on 16 September 2026 because it has the lower case n. The character matrix agrees, and it is the one of his five placements that does: read at 134 pixels of letter, four times the floor the n-form character asks for, the third letter is an arch carried between two stems with the same small spur above its left stem that the City’s own 2016 and 2026 files carry, and no diagonal in it at any enlargement. The placement and the reading are the same, so this record carries one answer rather than two, and what it replaces is a reading of this archive’s own that lasted part of a day.

Measured

The bureau roundel, the notched construction. Narrow letters, a notched E and a notched B at the same height, an arched third letter, and rounded corners.

Read at high confidence from 134 px of letter, which is an upper bound: this drawing's letters run into its ring, and no cut separates them.

Each drawing is reduced to the same thing — the letters BEND, cropped to their own ink, rasterised at a common size — so two of them can be compared by shape alone.

Device aspect
1.000 The roundel’s width divided by its height. 1.000 is a true circle; anything else is an oval, or a photograph taken at an angle. 0.977 – 1.048 across the collection
Word aspect
0.984 The same ratio for the block of BEND letters alone, once cropped to their own ink. 0.927 – 1.862; the high end is lettering set wide rather than stacked
Figure ink
0.569 How much of the drawing is ink rather than ground. A heavy ring and fat letters push it up. 0.169 – 0.728, median 0.493
Coverage
0.452 How much of the normalised square the letters fill once every drawing is reduced to the same size. 0.198 – 0.576, median 0.456

What it most resembles. Two digitisations of a single printing score 0.975, so that is what “the same artwork” looks like as a number.

Least like it: Bend Rubber Stamp & Printing, at 0.229.

Resemblance is not descent. A high score means two drawings have the same shape. It does not establish which came first, or that either was copied from the other.

Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured

Seen in use

5 dated sightings, 2019–2024. Each is a record of this object or this drawing somewhere else, and where a picture is hosted it is a documentary crop of the object, credited to whoever holds it.

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