[ REMEMBERING ]
hey tiny.
i spend a lot of time looking down at this stretch of north portland, and most of what i see has something older underneath it. a platform built on a stockyard. a cultural center built in a firehouse. a road that used to be the only road. some of this ground is heavier than a walk through it lets on, so here are my notes, with directions to the people who know it better than a giant ever could.
if you want to stand on any of it yourself, the hunt walks most of these corners. but you do not need it to read this. the history belongs to the neighborhood, not to a game.
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/ / / before
before the cattle, before the hotel, before the road had any name at all, this was not empty land waiting to be used. the lower Willamette was home to the Multnomah and other Chinookan peoples, with Kalapuya, Clackamas, Cowlitz, and others moving through and trading across it. the wetlands that the company later drained were a source of wapato, a staple root, and the river was a highway long before interstate avenue pretended to be one. the people were not removed by accident. the 1850s treaties and the forced marches to reservations made the company town possible by first making the land seem available. it was never available. it was taken.
the descendants are still here and still telling it. the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and of Siletz carry much of this history, and they should be where you begin, not with me. if you want to see whose land you're standing on, native-land.ca maps it.
/ / / the hotel and the tunnels
in 1909 swift and company moved the stockyards to kenton and built a town to serve them, and the grandest thing in it was the kenton hotel: forty rooms, opened the same summer as the streetcar line. during prohibition its basement ran liquor, and tunnels are said to have connected it out under the streets. a boxer called "mysterious" Billy Smith trained down there. the building has been a hotel, a rooming house, and now apartments, saved and renamed across a century. it is on the national register, and it is the reason this whole newsletter is called what it is.
i live low. i know which streets have something underneath them. this is one. [ more ]
/ / / vanport
a wartime city of forty thousand stood just north of kenton, the largest housing project in the country and home to much of portland's Black community. on may 30, 1948, the dike failed and the city was gone in a day. the Vanport Mosaic keeps its memory through oral histories, theater, and an annual festival, told by survivors and descendants themselves.
start there. the people who lived it are still telling it. [ more ]
/ / / the flood, in photographs
the same water that took vanport stood in the kenton stockyards. the oregon historical society holds the negatives from june 1948, the yards and the exposition building reflected in still water. and the man who shot them, Al Monner, sat for a three-hour oral history in 1993, for the history freaks who want it straight from behind the camera.
look once. you will not forget where the water reached. [ more ]
/ / / the assembly center
in may 1942, Japanese Americans from portland and southwest washington were ordered to report to the livestock exposition grounds. families lived in animal stalls before being sent to camps. at the expo center max station, artist Valerie Otani's "voices of remembrance" marks the site with timber gates hung with metal tags, one for each person processed through.
it is one stop past kenton on the yellow line. worth standing under the gates and reading the tags, walk or no walk. [ more ]
/ / / albina and the freeway
the interstate you ride beside was built through a Black neighborhood, block by block, beginning years before the freeway itself. city observatory has documented how the demolition started in 1950 and what it took. the west side got a park where its highway used to be. albina got the arterial it still has.
read it angry. that is the correct way to read it. [ more ]
/ / / the ifcc
in 1982, Charles Jordan, portland's first Black city commissioner, turned a 1910 firehouse on interstate into a cultural center: a 99 seat theater, a gallery, a home for Black art in north portland. portland parks is now studying its future as a center for Black arts and culture.
if you ever read the gate up close, this is what it is holding. [ more ]
/ / / the line itself
every station on the yellow line carries commissioned art encoding its neighborhood's history. trimet publishes the full guide: the artists, the materials, what each piece remembers. the cattle at kenton, the kente glass at killingsworth, the basketweave at rosa parks. most people ride past all of it without looking.
the train is a museum that costs a day pass. [ more ]
/ / /
that is the deeper cut. the neighborhood is older and stranger and heavier than any afternoon can hold. if you ever want to put your feet on it, the hunt is one way to walk it slow. either way, the history is theirs, and now it is a little more yours too.
stay low.
janet
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