Portland, Oregon: Profile of a City
Is it cool, bruh?
My first sight of Portland, Oregon was frightening. We sped along the freeway, parallel with row after row of concrete roads at arbitrary heights, which sliced through buildings. The buildings themselves were just as incoherent in the dark, with unreadable heights and depths. An enormous neon sign, cliché of clichés, reminded the viewer of where one was.
The sight was enough to make an urbanist weep. Indeed footage of this kind of cityscape probably has a military application, used as torture material for anyone who has tweeted about cycle lanes and the Netherlands. Then we stopped at our AirBnB, in a lone wooden house with blistering paint by the side of a very fast road. The roar of the cars followed us indoors. What mistake had I made?
The big car problem (and the problem of big cars) is inescapable in the United States of America. It’s a fact about the place’s history and policy that one simply has to tolerate to visit it. The next morning, with some rest, we managed to cut through the moats of traffic into the city.
Portland, Oregon, is a much more interesting place than the important but boring tale of the American car. First of all, the city tries its very best to be a pedestrian friendly, public-transportable one. In this, it succeeds superbly by US standards; inevitably it fails by continental European standards.
You will need some form of transport to understand Portland’s different pieces, which are separated by the aforementioned roads.
Most urbanists baulk at suburbs, but these are an essential part of Portland. Suburban, low density neighbourhoods can be found to all points of the compass, relatively close to the city centre. To the east, there is Ladd’s Addition, and the surrounding residential areas.
The buildings here are an all-American clapperboard affair. They have classical detailing, which is often very well-studied, with some random bits of wood turning. I suppose they are mostly early 20th century at the earliest, but many of them have clearly been glazed before the advent of float glass. For those of you who have lives, this means the windows shimmer and distort light, for the glass is imperfect.
A much more important imperfection in Portland’s houses, though, are their front gardens. As a progressive statement, these don’t consist of regimented lawns, but of wheatgrass, rockeries, succulents, artfully kempt weeds, and roses. There is even a scheme of “yard habitat certification” for the richer front yard biospheres. These gardens put colour, texture, and (literal) life into Portland’s streets. They convert an otherwise oppressive vision into something human.
I mentioned roses. Portland is “the rose city”, as is declared in the airport. I had no idea what this meant, but I felt confident that it referred to something inscrutable like a baseball team. No. Portland is full of ornamental members of the family Rosaceae. These fussy plants are apparently well suited to the peculiar climate around the city. So, they’re planted by the sidewalks and in parks throughout the place.
All is not roses and sunshine. The city is famous for being rainy, and it was indeed overcast. Though, that is a) only a problem if you are used to a very different climate; and b) not strictly true. Portland has extremely dry summers, which protects the roses from the diseases that damp brings.
What is a problem in Portland is homelessness. At every street there is one more person who has run out of options. Yes, these folk exist in Europe, but they are surrounded by other street inhabitants. Because of the motorcar, that social scourge, the streets are far emptier than they should be. So, in the vacuum of other people, these broken people dominate public spaces. And there are a lot of them. Portland is the second worst place in the whole USA for rough sleeping. The famously weak social security system of this nation is partly to blame, and it is amplified here as in the rest of the West Coast by an acute housing crisis (read: not nearly enough homes).
Some people we chatted to around the city described the public transport as ‘unsavoury’. Insofar as this refers to a disproportionately large number of homeless people on these services, the statement is true. No one likes being reminded of the callous randomness of life, the non-inevitability of success, and of failure. I know I don’t; the experience makes me feel sad and hypocritical.
Beautiful streets and a jarring social backdrop might be characteristic of Portland today, but it’s an incomplete picture. The city has a few more tricks up its sleeves. The first trick is an extraordinary array of international foods. An excellent writer I’m aware of has written more about this. In short, there is a superb example of almost everything you could possibly want to eat.
Trick number two is drink. Portland has an unreasonable number of craft breweries. The city was an important part of the IPA revolution which changed beer forever and for the better. I had sublime examples in Double Mountain Overlook (sounds like a Jeff Steitzer line), and a good few in other venues. DMO had one Flanders red ale which tasted like oloroso! For those that drink coffee, the city does that rather well too. Its famous outlet is called Stumptown, a reference to the lumber industry which was Portlands raison d’être in the early days.
Trick number three is Portland’s relentlessly chirpy, progressive politics. It’s an expression of local identity, just as you might expect to see lots of ‘lone stars’ in Texas or pizza slices in New York. The vigour of a MAGA rally is turned here to vigorous support for trans rights, inclusiveness, and so on. It’s a pleasing sight to see. It’s also slightly odd: the centre of American politics lies somewhere to the right of politics in western Europe, so one doesn’t necessarily expect such an unchallenged concentration of rainbows, and blue, pink and white banners.
Just as we were leaving Portland, the overcast cleared and revealed a Platonically perfect snow capped mountain in the distance. This is Mount Hood. This hints at one more characteristic of the city: it’s dying to take a hike. Various gorp-core outlets such as Patagonia and Icebreaker can be found here, and the footwear brands Nike and Adidas are headquartered here. The temperature in early summer is perfect for a long walk.
As you can tell from the above, there are a lot of different things one can say about Portland, Oregon. It’s a mixed place, but the mixture is altogether pleasant and rather interesting. For many Americans, Portland is a complete outlier, a weirdo in the west. Portland even has its own comedy show, Portlandia, which lampoons the city’s kookiness. Yet Portland couldn’t exist in any other nation: it’s distinctive within America, but it’s also distinctively American.
Really enjoyed this. Glad to have it confirmed from you (and your esteemed writer chum!) that Portland really does have a distinct feel to it, that it's not just one of those situations where parochial residents of one city decide that their home is unique and distinct based on [features found in half a dozen other towns within a fifty mile radius]. Makes me feel much warmer to the idea of the city having its own themed sitcom.
On that: Portlandia was co-created by and co-starred Carrie Brownstein, who for me is 'better known for other work' as guitarist and songwriter for the magisterial Sleater-Kinney. I never bothered watching the show, and in my mind it was just a bit of a fun fact: 'did you know that Carrie Brownstein made a sitcom?' But then I met some of Rachel's American friends, who were in exactly the opposite situation: they knew Carrie Brownstein as the woman from Portlandia, a show they were gigantic fans of, and for them the fun fact was 'did you know Carrie Brownstein was in a rock band?'; they had not bothered listening to Sleater-Kinney. It's always interesting to learn how what counts as trivia in your life is actually a core piece of information in someone else's, and vice-versa.
Really interesting read ,thouroughly enjoyable , alarming in places and very witty in others.