Brad Pitt, His Smile, His Ass. — Touched with Fire Media

I’ve been distracted lately. I keep trying to concentrate long enough to write a blog post about anything on my list of backup ideas, but none of them appeal to me. (This may be because the list is a series of semi-sensical sentence segments. Including: “money is a social construct”; “brad pitt, his smile, his ass. and brotherhood” — I think that one is somehow about A River Runs Through It; “dogs on leashes”; and “a bunch of dithering about race and gender” — which is basically what this blog has turned out to be in the last two weeks already.) I wrote that thing about DFW yesterday mostly out of desperation, because I’ve been able endlessly to write about him in the past, much to my own consternation. It worked, even if my loyal reader was almost certainly alienated by the long passage in the first person collective and didn’t read the rest. I know I wouldn’t have, and I wrote that shit.

Yesterday I went down to talk with Val Bellestrem, who works at The Architectural Heritage Center in SE Portland, about a radio project I’m working on and trying to figure out how to pitch.* Val is a native Portlander, about ten years older than me, who wrote his master’s thesis on Portland’s freeway revolt of the early 70s, in which a bunch of liberal pols and a loud minority of Portland residents managed to put the kibosh on the Mt Hood Freeway,** which would have run from downtown out to I-205, and maybe all the way to Gresham. That story is sort of an urban legend around the city, especially among those few of us who grew up there, and it was pretty fascinating to talk to an expert about it.

*Pitching is by far the most difficult part of freelancing for me, and I hate it. It has nothing in common with making radio, and very little in common with written journalism. Of course, that’s not why I hate it — I hate it because I hate being rejected.

**Side-note: if the freeway had been built, I wouldn’t live where I do. It was meant to be four city blocks wide, plowing straight up Division Street. My building is under that right-of-way. In fact, I suspect — though I don’t know — that my building is where it is because the neighborhood was badly degraded because people assumed the houses would soon be condemned and allowed them to become delapidated. My building dates to the mid-70s, shortly after the death of the freeway. I’m willing to bet a developer bought some old crappy houses, knocked them down, and turned them into the crappy apartment building I live in now.

The urban legend goes like this: legendary urban boogeyman Robert Moses — the guy who wanted to knock down Greenwich Fucking Village, the most beautiful and historic part of the greatest city in the most important country in the world, so suburbanites could go from Long Island to Jersey in their cars — designed a freeway system for Portland back in the 40s, when freeways meant progress and freedom (and a convenient way to transport troops in case the Nazis / commies / Canadian Mounties decided to invade). One planned freeway was the Mt Hood Freeway, which would have decimated several of the oldest neighborhoods in Portland. Though many of the freeways were built, including ones that destoryed historic black and Jewish neighborhoods, in SE — in my neighborhood — people stood up and said STOP!

The truth is of course more complex, and more interesting. I’m not going to go into the entirety of the details here, but I do want to clear up a few things, in part in hopes of clarifying how I’m going to make the piece:

1. Val was very clear that the Robert Moses thing was almost entirely a myth. It’s true that in 1943 the city fathers of PDX invited Moses to cook up a plan, and he came and spent a few days doing some studies and then drew up some pretty basic stuff.

If you look at that map, and then a map of Portland’s actual freeway layout, you’ll notice a few things. Most salient is that Moses’ plan for Portland was extremely modest. There’s no outer ring, the eastside freeway that currently mars the view across the Willamette from downtown is several blocks off the waterfront. There are other advantages, too, which I’ll save for the radio, but here’s the important bit: there’s no freeway running up Division Street. On a fundamental level, the Mt Hood Freeway wasn’t Robert Moses’ fault.

2. In fact, there’s pretty strong evidence that a majority of the public — not only a majority, but a heavy majority — favored the construction of the Mt Hood Freeway. The Oregonian conducted a poll that showed a 60/40 split in favor. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt had polling showing a smaller, but stil clear, majority that would have voted in favor of such a freeway, had a vote been held.

3. The alleged people’s uprising, which fits nicely with Portland’s self-image, in fact was something other than that. There had been strenuous objection to previous freeway construction, and nothing happened. Some of this, I suspect, is because most of the residents of SE Portland were white, whereas those who objected to the shattering of NE Portland by I-5 were largely black. But the main thing is that there was a shift in the political culture in the corridors of power. Without several young, some female, local pols, who took up residence on city council and the Multnomah County Council, no doubt the Mt Hood Freeway, like the ones before it, would have gone through. My neighborhood wouldn’t exist. Hell, following the butterfly effect as far as it could go, I might not exist. (Or at least not live in SE Portland.)

Anyway. I fear I’ve ruined the radio story now. Maybe not. I’ve still got a coupla interviews to do before I throw in the towel. And maybe 99 PI actually will be interested, right?