Well it is a nice thing about Portland that even the 2023 new arrivals replacing a more grizzled (but ultimately resolved to things) crowd at least know how to sing along to Friends in Low Places
That’s Garth Brooks, the guy who oversaw the ‘90s mainstreaming of country Billy Ray Cyrus merely heralded! But still.
The 14 bus line I’m along – coming across the water from downtown, down Hawthorne, and then down 50th to Foster out to Lents – has some real potential to be the new hip axis of the city – Belmont/Stark’s tapped out, Lloyd Center’s all new-build at best a Pearl District for younger people, North is in fucking North.
As is it has 15 minute bus service during the day becoming 20 at 7, 30 at 10, and then a final two at 12:30 and 1:30. Saturdays the difference is they go to 20s at 6.
I think if you’re developing a hip part of town around transit you really need better night service – at least 20 minute headways until 12 or 1 and 30 until 3 – to tie it together so any part of it is a functional local nightlife zone for residents of any other part of it
(And then maybe some clubs around the midpoint at the light industrial buildings near me on 50th in the 20 years until they’re ready to be torn down for condos)
Alright, it’s gonna be a hundred and fucking five degrees tomorrow, so that’s not gonna be a topsoil day either.
High ratio of gentrification frontier newcomers celebrating World Naked Bike Ride Day to ones doing it by riding their bikes naked.
There is a really weird orphan commercial space near me where I think decades-ago developers were like “this space carved out of like a warehouse plot is right on people’s daily commutes!” but it’s not big enough for like, a Darden restaurant and it’s somewhere that would honestly be kind of weird to just pull over and stop without much foot traffic…
It could only really practically be used for a cafe or something that really faces the park next to it (it had been incredibly shitty cheap pizza squares really serving the youth leagues playing at the nearby fields, but they moved), maybe there’s an opening as the neighborhood develops, and it’s frustrating me because that’s not my project at all but unless I like, find and support whoever’s it is I’m gonna have to keep looking at this boarded-up shell all the time.
They’re building an N+1 (currently framed up to 3rd) a whole square block big for the Reed students in Woodstock.
My sense of Portland has changed so much since the personality change just ‘cause I go out in the daytime now.
If you know exactly what you’re looking for you can date the Portland residential blocks established contemporary with the early-20th century boom of Los Angeles from the influence on what trees to plant out front.
Meanwhile the fact that developers named one contemporary neighborhood “Hollywood” to build heat (which is literally how Hollywood was named “Hollywood”!) is a gimme
If you know exactly what you’re looking for you can date the Portland residential blocks established contemporary with the early-20th century boom of Los Angeles from the influence on what trees to plant out front.
Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons and Ramona Quimby from the Beverly Cleary books are both named for an honestly pretty unremarkable 20-block street in Northwest Portland.
It’s in the Alphabet District and it’s not bad for fitting between Pettygrove and Raleigh, but still.
There’s a U-Haul rental places a bit down on the artery parallel to my street such that it’s pretty natural if you’re going there but not familiar with the neighborhood to turn and assess things in front of my house, and I wish I could say talking with the drivers has given me some insight into in- and outmigration trends from Portland, but it mostly just leaves me with a good mental map of storage places and other U-Hauls in the area.
Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons and Ramona Quimby from the Beverly Cleary books are both named for an honestly pretty unremarkable 20-block street in Northwest Portland.
Aaay, met another reader coming through town who got the first real exhibition of Karafuto, and then had enough local context to unlimber all my years of thoughts on neighborhood development, Portland urban politics and Cascadian cultural quirks on.
There might come a point where accessibility to random readers becomes less of a positive but for now I’ve really been appreciating talking with strangers preselected for finding the shit I say worth hearing.
No topsoil today but I think I’ll do a full 3 yards tomorrow, and time permitting get a third bedload for when the yard’s closed on Sunday.
Oregon attempt to regulate massage to keep grey market storefront prostitution to the “underwear modeling” sector somehow yielding the result that the only massage places in Portland I’m sure aren’t jack shacks are expensive stuff you have to schedule a week ahead from some generation of borderline tedious hippie woo woman.
I just want some Thai grandmother bending me in knots and driving her elbow under my shoulderblade again.
“We have a regular high tea. Each month, Lacy Knightly [stages] high-quality burlesque. Sword & Veil produces these immersive dark art experiences.”
The key to the “Dream of the ‘90s” Portlandia '10s was that Portland is just perpetually 17 years behind the curve, culturally, but that’s about the length of one retro cycle so it more or less works.
Jesus, I kept hearing snatches of this ethereal music on the wind and I wondered what the hell my memory jukebox thing was up to…
someone on my block is DJing an ambient set in his backyard
I remember books from when I was a kid where the characters’ schools just turned them loose for an hour at lunch to eat at home or a local place or something and that sounded totally foreign to me but when I came to Portland I found they still do that, but now that I think of it a lot of those books might have been Beverly Cleary’s Portland-set stuff so I don’t know if that’s always just been a here thing or what.
Okay, went to meet @utilitymonstermash for drinks, got to an area that had been at the edge of my circuit living on Killingsworth to see what it’s like these days, great time all around. The muscle weariness from the last 4.5 yards of topsoil is making itself felt lightly enough I trust I can do 3 more tomorrow and then only take a day or -and-a-half off after.
Been bumbling around the neighborhood lately, appreciating how it’s reinventing itself as the kind of “Portland” I knew closer in in the early 2010s but had started to write off, like “are we… in the sun-dappled clearing now?”
And had that in mind as I went into a dispensary and “Out of the Woods” came on because of course it did, and I had to keep from looking a fool and crying while the clerk rang up my Pink Lemonade Full Spectrum Blast gummies
