Neighborhood Landmarks
1. House Full of Hippies
There’s a house on the street that dead-ends against the alley behind my building that is just chock-full of hippies. This is interesting to me, because it’s a relic of a time before this neighborhood started gentrifying, when its hundred-year-old bungalows could be profitably rented out to working class people; up on the hill, where my building is, the gentrification is complete, and four-bedroom houses go for three quarters of a million dollars — but down the hill, where some of the streets aren’t paved or don’t have sidewalks, that’s not true yet. And so there’s a tumbledown orange house that always has shirtless dudes and dreadlocked chicks hanging out on the porch, smoking cigarettes and spliffs, working on old vans, talking about nothing, smiling more than seems rational, and waving at anybody who walks by. If one were to taxonomize these hippies, they appear to be of the huge-jeans, neon-torch, all-night-rave variety, rather more than banjos-and-acid variety or the urban-organic-tomato variety.
The presence of hippies is Portland’s true valence; though the place is stereotyped these days as a haven for skinny jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, ironic sundresses, striped socks, and bad moustaches — and those are here in quantity — these can be found in almost any coastal city anymore. No, what makes Portland different to Seattle or Oakland or Brooklyn or Boston (aside from a distinct lack of tech douches) is that its counter-culture roots are showing, as the dropouts and weirdos who washed up here during the Nixon administration have long attracted fellow travelers to come here, hang out in backyards, sell junky trinkets at the Saturday Market, loudly play Barry McGuire on street corners, and generally not be hassled by anyone. Even when I was a kid, when Portland was a little city with a high proportion of rednecks, our ethos of not hassling people attracted hippies, and hippies remain at the foundation of a lot of Portland’s self-image: they’re why every food truck advertises its locavore friendliness, why bikes take prominence over cars on many urban streets, and why, to this day, young people move here figuring they’ll just make it work, find some like-minded people to flop with, apply to every job listing on Craigslist, and not worry too much about stuff.
There’s a lot of anxiety in Portland right now that the no-hassle ethos is going the way of the dodo, and that we’re going to go corporate and lose our souls — that Portland is going to turn into San Francisco. I get that, I do; I drove by my old house in Sellwood yesterday and one of the neat little bungalows across the street had been knocked over and replaced with one of the cookie-cutter monstrosities that are taking over a lot of the neighborhoods on the east side. It was horrible. But I also think that things change, or they die; I think that Portland’s instincts contradict (if we’re so green, why are we so against building denser, better-engineered housing?); I think the core conservatism of many people who fancy themselves extremely liberal is a symptom of a broken movement. Realism isn’t a notable quality of Portland.
Anyway, my neighborhood still has a house full of hippies, and around the corner there are a few more, the kinds of places that don’t get painted very often and always have people out on the porch. If there’s a way to keep that, I’m okay with it.
2. Pocket Park
A few blocks from the house full of hippies is a little tiny park in the middle of the block on a sleepy residential street, about as wide as two houses and stretching from 27th to 28th under the shade of some big elm trees. This park is key to understanding my neighborhood.
Back in mid-century America, there was a frenzy for building freeways, as white people moved to the suburbs in droves, leaving behind poorer and more ethnically diverse neighbors who often didn’t have the political clout to keep their houses from being bulldozed to service the fleeing middle class. In Portland, I-5 was driven right through the heart of the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods on the north end of town, and I-205 carved through the poorer outskirts of southeast. A planned downtown-to-Gresham freeway would have gone straight up Division Street, the main drag in my part of town. The city got as far as buying out certain older houses and bowling them over, with it in mind that these spots would one day be where the struts that supported the freeway would go. Most people assumed that this was a fait accompli, and for years the neighborhood decayed, as property values plummeted and many places became derelict. The spot where my own building sits was once four big houses; you can see on either side what they must have looked like, because the ones that remained were eventually renovated and restored, and hang there like architectural ghosts.
Then, in the early 70s, a bunch of idealistic young U of O grads teamed up with pissed-off neighbors and managed to put a match to the freeway plans. The story is long and interesting and I had once intended to do a radio piece about it but got distracted; anyway, the upshot is that within a few years, Portland had a bunch of money to fund buses and trains, and this neighborhood was no longer slated for destruction. The spots that were once intended to hold up a freeway were now little scars on the city, as though the neighborhood had caught the chicken pox and not been able to resist scratching. The apartment building I live in now was built here in 1975. The pocket park was turned into a pocket park. The city was saved, thank God. This is one way in which I think the no-progress types were right; why should we have paid to build a giant road that only serviced people in Gresham? Screw that.
The neighborhood remained dowdy and lower-middle-class for a long time after that; in anticipation that it would one day die, Division Street itself had become a string of dive bars and auto body shops; its most notable landmark — one that’s still there — was a porn theatre that served as a gathering spot for sexual adventurists and closeted gay men. It was the kind of place where a teenaged kid might be able to find a long-haired guy in an army jacket to sell him weed. But it was also the kind of place where a lesbian bar could flourish and nobody batted an eye. That’s the thing about cities, a thing that’s wondrous and disastrous all at once: dereliction provides a kind of home, a place for people to hide if they feel the need — but it can also feed on itself, and a city can die. You can (kind of) solve one problem by trying to create a society in which no one feels the need to hide. The other? Well, sometimes the patient just has cancer.
3. House of BBQ
There’s a house about two blocks east of me where they barbecue every night from late April till it starts raining again in September. I don’t know the people who live there, or why they are so committed to outdoor cooking, but I thank them for it. There are few things more pleasant than walking on a hot evening beneath rustling trees obese with leaves and smelling the twinned odors of charcoal and meat; it calls on something deep in our animal brains, and lets us know that all is well, there is food, it is safe, we are surrounded by our tribe. Many nights I walk by their house before dinner, just to get myself ready, even if I’m only eating rice and beans myself. It’s a warmup, like playing catch before the game, or stretching your achilles before a jog.
4. My Patio above the Alley
Upon which I sit and sing to my city.