Last week was my first time in Portland, Oregon — all 48 hours of it. There were only a handful of meetings and I had several uninterrupted hours for a leisurely stroll, so I shouldn’t complain. No notes about the city itself except that the coffee was A+ everywhere I went, including at the hotel lobby coffee shop: a good sign of an excellent coffee culture.
It has been a while since I flaneured through an unfamiliar American city, but I am still able to sniff out the key neighborhoods without a map: the 5th Avenue knockoff with its Tiffany and Channel storefronts, the generic skyscraper district, the stately historic home quarter. The comic I linked to, by Malachi Ray Rempen, is for a generic all-American city so does not include things found only in more upscale towns such as the expensive shopping area, while having dollar stores and mega churches. It was also made pre-covid so there was no spot with encampments of people who are in-between places. Similarly, the generic European city map is missing its immigrant/refugee district. The family favorite has always been what I think of as the “hipster district”: in the midst of gentrification but for whatever reason (close to industry, high crime, etc.) still cheap and affordable enough for independent shops run by artsy types with no business sense to either flourish or (more likely) churn frequently enough to keep every building occupied. Like Carytown in Richmond, or Baltimore’s Hampden.
So, what television told me was that the entire city of Portland would be one big happy hipster hood. To my dismay, not only was this not true, but what I thought would have been that part of town instead turned out to be skid row. We don’t need to go into details, but I thought what happened at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Harvey Milk St was a good symbol for the general state of affairs:
Sign of the times, right across a run-down Voodoo Donuts that needs a security guard to keep watch.
That used to be Cameron’s Books and Magazines, founded in 1938 and in operation until April 2021 when the building owners decided not to renew the lease. It was the gateway to a stretch of 3rd Avenue that I imagine in some better days was tourist central but was now lined with rubbish-filled shopping carts and neon-colored tents.
Walking towards the more expensive part of town I realized that the independent shop owners who were more savvy moved closer to the Tiffany district, with eye-popping prices to match the cleaner interior design; those without business sense moved to Etsy. So goes the K-shaped “recovery”: But let’s call the phenomenon by its real name: worsening inequality. either you can afford the $20 recycled cotton tote bag brandished with a subtly progressive slogan, or you risk tripping over a passed out drug user on your way to a bargain.