PORTLAND’S EASTSIDE ALIVE

An Outsider Guide To Portland’s Eastside ‘Neighbourhood.’

When Virgin Atlantic blogs about your city expect a few things to be off.

Not wrong exactly, just not quite the same as it looks.

Portland’s eastside has an Artisan Quarter. Artisan? Quarter?

I’ve heard Paris has a French Quarter but this is the first I’ve heard of an artisan quarter in Portland’s eastside.

Who needs to get out more often?

Visitors following directions based on the Virgin blog post might fall off a bridge or walk right into the Willamette River.

That’s not the memory you want to take home from Oregon.

Instead of nitpicking and one-upping the author who may or may not have seen the Portland eastside neighbOUrhood first hand, let’s do it this way:

Portland’s eastside is not the cheap rent life. It’s not where you find a dive to save money to move to the westside.

Double income families with kids buy upper $600K houses with plans to stick around. Need proof?

On any nice Saturday drop in on the Division food cart lot near 26th and see how many young couples with kids in strollers are there drinking a beer with friends.

How many? Lots.

Walk the neighborhoods and notice the great houses being built beside the great houses already there.

They’re making old houses new and new houses look old, minus that basement smell you can’t quite define or find.

Are these people the artisans Virgin’s talking about? Or the young super smart people drawn here by the amazing start up companies valued in millions and billions?

Sure Portland’s eastside is all the talk. Would you rather live there than the West Hills?

Here’s the baby boomer choice: live as an older person in a younger part of town, or live as an older person in an even older demographic?

The West Hills offers views. Sweeping downtown vistas for some, rooftops for others. And what passes for old money.

Portland’s eastside is pretty flat in the central area. Ride your bike to Mt. Tabor for a view.

The artisan life in the Virgin post includes booze straight from the barrel, beer made on site, and food locally sourced. It’s the artisan way, close to the makers.

If you live here long enough you’ll meet homebrewers and moonshiners making the sort of drinks no one has ever put before the public.

Locally sourced still juice has a nice ring to it.

After a couple of shots more than your ears will ring.

Of course Hawthorne has great sidewalk shops on both sides of the street. And Division is everything you’d want from Portland’s eastside.

In a strange way the West Hills has it’s own version of the inner eastside on NW 23rd and 21st. Some of the eastside shops used to be on those streets.

Is Portland’s eastside leading the way toward Portland’s future? Showing the westside what it has in store for the coming years?

There is a migration pattern.

Let’s say a woman paints a sequence of images and sells them at Saturday Market.

Someone from NE Portland walks by and says they know a gallery in their neighborhood where they’d be a perfect fit.

She sells a bunch and moves to a gallery on Portland’s eastside.

The paintings take off like a gas fire. She moves to a gallery off the NW Park Blocks and sells so many that her prices climb and climb.

Then she opens her own gallery on SW Broadway. Who doesn’t want a place on Boardwalk, er, Broadway?

That’s when you know you’ve arrived in this city. At least that’s the old plan.

Today Portland’s eastside is where it’s happening. Artists can work and live right there.

It’s called roots, people. Strong roots make the neighborhood no matter what you want to call it.

Portland’s eastside is an artisan quarter?

Yes it is. Any problems with that, tell Virgin Atlantic. We’ve already got it figured out.

Get ready for a long strange trip.