To hear the love song Portland has always sang to me
Putting Portland's 20 year golden age in a scuzzy, weirdo context.
I was sixteen, in the big city of Portland for a school field trip when an imposing drag queen berated me on Broadway for not being a proper gentleman.
"If you don't walk on the curb side of a lady people will think she is a whore, honey," she said. I am pretty sure it was Darcelle XV, who ruled Portland until passing in 2023.
From across the mountains where I grew up, Portland always mattered to me and always terrified me. It was where music history was made. It was where my uncles went and got into trouble, discovering heroin and improvising ways to get it.
Ten years after Darcelle coached me about how to prevent carriage mud from getting on my lady's hem, I was living there. I had tamed the city. I was earning money with a white color on, I was meeting women. We went to shows. I tried to keep cool. Portland sang me to sleep.
I lived in Portland for 21 years, 2001-2022, Our Portland Golden Age. When I drove into town at 26 years old, the lower pedestrian path on the Steel Bridge just had its ribbon cutting. It connected to the also shiny new Eastbank Esplanade that unrolled a clean engineered urbanity floating and soaring between the river and the interstate. Reclaiming the corridor for running, biking, and fishing, the shiny new concrete wiped away some blight on the East side of the Willamette where folks probably did untoward things before.
New Seasons opened in 1999, a grocery chain of less-expensive-than-Whole-Foods conscientiousness created by workers who abandoned the local chain Nature’s when it was absorbed into Whole Foods (later absorbed in turn into Amazon). I can find food there for any paleo or gluten-free or vegan diet experiment .
Sadly, the Henry Weinhards tower came down as I was first finding my way around town. Local beer was no longer cheap beer from here on out. Still, plentiful and delicious. Manufacturing of all kinds was pushed out of the northwest Pearl district and Slabtown, along with working people, for the sake of new residents and the shops they liked.
As the era turned, the edgy Seattle weekly The Stranger sent William Stephen Humphrey to Portland in 2000 and started publishing The Portland Mercury, our own edgy weekly.
Rent was low, a room in a shared house would be $300. People were buying houses with mortgages approved on waitstaff earnings. We thought anything outside of 39th avenue was too far out to be connected to the city. The black neighborhoods were watching white families, some on waitstaff earnings, buy up houses.
Our Golden Age was safer than Portland’s past. The war between brutal Portland Police and black youths and the crack epidemic1 had receded. The white supremacists and skinheads such as those that killed Mulugeta Serah in 1988 were not collecting news stories. Crime had dropped noticeably in the previous four years2 and would continue to drop for around 15 years.3
As a young guy with no city instincts, I roamed the city end to end night and day without being robbed or molested. People like me were treading everywhere, going to shows, discovering that one can just walk into a strip club and watch naked ladies dance.
And rather than meeting any hostility, Portland was nice to me, nice to us. I grew here, from my twenties to near the end of my 40s. I loved Portland’s song and sang along.
In Portland history, there is a lot of blood and gore and suffering. Being able to live a brutality-free life for 20 years can allow you to forget that. As the (semi) historical tours will tell you, The idea of the shanghai (drugging a man then loading him aboard a long-haul vessel so that he wakes up in the ocean and has no choice but to work his way home) may have been invented in Portland in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Regardless how much truth there is in our shanghai legend, there were definitely exploitive business models that brutally manipulated the lives of sailors.
This is usually told as a quaint tale, but it probably did not feel quaint at the time. We always found a perverse joy in claiming that mantle, but now that I think of it should that have been within our lifetimes wouldn’t we have felt ashamed?
The town was dirty and smelly and dangerous, powered by the workers living in slums like Slabtown4 or the floating ghetto Scowtown.
In the first half (two thirds? 100 years?) of the 20th century, Portland was known for corruption and mafia activity.5 My grandmother told me that her own mother told her to run if a policeman tried to call her over. In the 30s, Portland police were to be run from by little girls.
The overt racist practices and inside dealing that did not stop in the time I was there — a local hospital received dispensation to take over a black community around 1970 and tear it down. A lot of that crushed community is still flat, undeveloped land.
Gus Van Sant's film Drugstore Cowboy tells a story of a more modern ugly Portland, where drugs were easier to get than jobs. It is set in 1971 and based on an autobiography. It is not pretty and that was not that long ago.
But none of that was at hand when I walked through Portland streets from coffee shop to bar to venue to strip club. There were homeless and fancy-clothes clubbers and slackers like me all mingling on the street. We all had enough representation to be safe with each other.
I soared through the Portland of criminally easy mortgages, lovely new floating walkways for bikes and pedestrians, rents cheap enough for musicians, perfectly tailored markets and restaurants, and even a tech scene to drive leisure economy. I rode it hard. From the Tuesday trail run to the Thursday night ride. From shot and a beer at closing to the mimosa brunch. From poetry night in a seedy West Burnside bar to Design Week. The free print weeklies helped my find my people (I met a lovely lady in the Mercurypersonals) and places.
We tried to hold on, we tried to pretend that it was forever. We shot ourselves in the foot trying. We couldn't stand the idea of new buildings in our old neighborhoods — and loved the ballooning values of the houses we owned there. It was no longer cheap to live there when we couldn’t build housing for all that came to town.6
We still have bands of course, but are they as scrappy as before? How many are tech bros letting off a little steam?
I love it, though. Portland’s song is still alluring to me and I come back to hear its refrains.
I was back visiting Portland just as the cherry blossoms popped this Spring, 2024. I set out on a run from our AirBnB in Northeast to see them, choosing a route through Old Town. In the early 2000s I had weaved through these streets around homeless sleepers to get to the historic strip club where dancers put money in the jukebox on the stage. For a time, I played bass in a band whose leader also stripped there, wearing a wig to keep her lives separate.
A few years later, had an office in Old Town. Walked to a fancy grocery store at lunch where all the fruit was ideal and the sandwiches were tied with cotton string.
The bike store had moved. It is a long time Old Town business whose staff had helped me out with unexpected flats and advice. It has moved around the corner from its cramped location into a larger space. I presume the fancier tenant they replaced had folded or abandoned downtown recently and the bike shop took the space, likely for a lower rent than it demanded in 2016.
On a premium corner up the street was some kind of second hand or upcycling storefront with very rustic anarcho-hippy signage. It reminded me of The Church of Elvis7that was once just a block from here. A strange street art installation both thoughtful and slapdash, the Church of Elvis was something from the gritty 90s punk Portland that endured for a few years of the Golden Age that I enjoyed.
The city is not shiny again. Maybe we can have a coin-op church yet.
My running route passed damaged, fentanyl-struck people. I had to choose whether to feel the pain of it or armor my heart. It is additional labor on top of the worries of the tenuous wealthy like myself that want to hang on to the luxury we have and possibly get a little more.
The cherry blossoms were in full throated visual song. My eyes teared up from allergies. A woman was lugging heavy camera gear along. A couple was dressed beautifully for engagement portraits. The trees run along the riverfront, the flowers are a long tunnel along the grass. You can pass below this pink roof in crowds of others, all of us here for the wonder of it.
I crossed over the Steel Bridge lower pedestrian path to the Eastbank Esplanade. It shows some signs of the 23 years since these paths had their grand opening. Not just graffiti; cruft subtle to the eye but taken as a whole tells the viewer that time has passed. The chip in a stair. Dent on a hand rail. Crumbled edge of a concrete pad.
At the top of the stairs, someone had affixed two stickers designed like industrial warnings:
Danger What if we held a protest and everybody came.
Notice It doesn’t have to be like this.
The design is spot on, you have to read them to notice that they are not some safety alerts but calls for collective action. The signs were clear and proud. Keeping them from peeling or wrinkling must have required some knowledge of what adhesive and what materials would work with the old concrete surface. A bang up job by a nerdy activist. Portland's love song still rings out.
After that run I got in the car and came back across the mountain. Spring was a little behind, but a week or so later I took my dog running on the river trail in the rich town nearby my home. It was warm and sunny, a day to celebrate. Bend is a town of imports who are attracted by the lifestyle and whose income does not need to be tied to location. It is a natural landing place for Portland Golden Age refugees, and they tend to get out to run, hike, and otherwise interact with the space around them. The trail was busy.
Two people were talking on the trail, their dogs perhaps having some other conversation, as I headed their direction. They kindly went to opposite sides of the trail for me to pass through.
I heard one say "I agree, it is a shit hole now" and I knew that they were talking about Portland.
That is the word used. Shit hole.
They had the tone of certainty. Their refugee status was tragic, they had been betrayed by some combination of bad policy and weak-minded drug addicts that forced them to leave.
If Portland is a shit hole now, it has always been a shit hole. It has functioned on crime, drugs, racism, corruption, inequality, bad city planning outcomes, and fundamentally depressing weather since before it was named in 1844. Hell, only forty years before that Lewis and Clark found empty villages along the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia where whole communities were destroyed by smallpox. The Chinook built huge houses and had complex relationships of trade from British Columbia to California.8 By the time the expedition passed through, smallpox had killed the bulk of them. Most of those houses were abandoned, unmaintained, sinking into the soil around where Portland Airport is now.
Imagine being the last of your kind, dying in a huge house, the rain falling down.
Imagine coming into the smelliest town in America, jobless, to find formalized exploitation waiting for you.
Imagine a Black family keeping a household in Vanport, and losing everything in one day to a flood that could have been prevented.9
These pieces of history are not (just) quaint old photos and mind blowing anecdotes about a foreign life. They have a throughline to who we are, and who we were in our Portland Golden Age.
There are other throughlines. In Portland, I wanted to be where the music was. Our music was made by emotional folks who probably had to make music to stay sane. They made songs so true that they cut through the clink of moldy bars where people are busy erasing their worries and trying to find some human contact.
Portland joins together for sports with a festive and aggressive collective action. I saw that in the Brandon Roy and Damian Lillard eras of Blazer Basketball, but if you think it was only hoops, I highly recommend the film The Battered Bastards of Baseball.10 Today, the women’s soccer team The Thorns get as much festive and aggressive love as the men’s team.
Back on the trail in Bend, I could not keep quiet about my beloved shit hole.
I was surprised by the volume I got midstride when I tilted my head their way and yelled to the crowd of active Bendites, "I still love Portland!"
It is not a popular thing to say, but I think they love it, too. For calling it a shit hole, I think you love Portland but are hurt. There are a lot of broken hearts that need to be heard about the passing of the great 20 years Portland gave us. Portland has broken a lot of hearts and crushed a lot of bodies with its vivid love song in the last 200 years, maybe longer. I can still hear its song and I look forward to the next verse.
Our ideas of the crack epidemic are a little questionable. https://daily.jstor.org/rereading-the-story-of-the-crack-epidemic/
Portland Police Statistical Report 2001 https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/2001.pdf
Portland Oregon Crime Rate 1998-2018 https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/or/portland/crime-rate-statistics
New book 'Portland's Slabtown' traces photographic history of one of the city's oldest neighborhoods https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/06/new_book_portlands_slabtown_tr.html
See Phil Stanford’s book Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/221
Acknowledged: The issue of the cost of housing is complex and not a single point problem.
24 Hour Church of Elvis (note that if you can, the Wikipedia article needs some work) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hour_Church_of_Elvis
Portland : East Portland historical overview and historic preservation study 2007 https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/6212
Vanport, a largely Black city of people segregated out of Portland, flooded in 1948. 15 died, the city was never rebuilt, and Black survivors were kept out of the city of Portland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanport,_Oregon#Flood
The Battered Bastards of Baseball https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3445270/