THE OTHER PORTLAND, NOT THAT ONE

The other Portland is not an event, a gathering, or a cause.

It could have been anywhere, but Portland just so happens to be where I started my career, met my wife, had kids.

It is where my kids got married.

I’ve had the city on my mind all my life, from driving past as grade school-aged kids with the parents on the way to Grandma’s, sometimes stopping for Lloyd Center Christmas shopping and riding the moving stairs.

It’s my city, for better or worse.

The part I like about living here has been luck, good luck.

I’d already lived in cities run by red-asses, like Philadelphia with Mayor Frank Rizzo.

The Portland Rizzo was Mayor Frank Ivancie.

He had plenty to be red at.

The word in 1980 Portland was, “You missed the good times by a couple of years,” but it was still rundown enough with cheap rents to make me feel right at home.

After stretches of living in bigger cities, Portland felt like a small village when I moved here.

That was the other Portland.

 

Today’s Big Town

 

Cross the Willamette on the Marquam Bridge, a double decker heading to I-5 North and I-84 East.

It’s a fast, busy, road, but just off any exit it’s back to normal Oregon stop and go traffic in the rain.

Red means stop, green to go, and on.

 

 

You get off the freeway, stop at few lights, and find what you’re looking for.

 

 

What you don’t find is a convenient parking space in Big Town.

Why?

Because it’s big and people like coming downtown on a chilly Sunday morning.

 

 

Somehow you manage to do what you came to get done, and leave.

Get through a few stop lights, and hit the fast track out.

 

 

Take a look around if you’re not the driver and you’ll notice this standing all alone across the river.

If you wonder how anyone gave the green light for a singular tower, there are two possibilities.

Someone may have been a little high?

Or the planned in-fill with the towers to the south is a long, long, range plan.

This morning it looked like an urban planning fuck-up behind the glowing fall foliage.

It happens in the best of  cities.

 

 

Portland Lockdown? Noooo

This is a safety fence on the run-up to the Marquam Bridge heading south.

 

 

This is a snapshot of future Portland in the area once considered such a blight that it needed to be plowed under, scattering the people living there.

 

 

Other cities would have preserved the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods as a treasure, a foundation of their shared history.

With a vibrant Old Town, Portland would have had a different identity than whatever this is.

 

PS: This isn’t a picture of East Germany from the seventies.

 

PSS: I’ve heard the views are good, at the top.