moreroom4happiness:

A colorized view of Portland’s waterfront, and the West Hills, 
Portland, Oregon, 1898.

“At least three of the buildings in this photo still stand: The United Congregational Church, which pokes up tall just left of center, the First Baptist Church at far right, and Pioneer Courthouse (which is the hardest to spot because you can see only the dome), it’s left of the Congregational Church. 
The taller building dead center is the old Oregonian building, where the newspaper was headquartered from the 1890s until the late 1940s. 
The cool building at right (almost behind First Baptist) with the interesting twin towers was Congregation Beth Israel, which burned in the 1920s. It then moved to its current location in NW Portland.”  John Killen, Former Journalist at The Oregonian

eightyonekilograms:

poipoipoi-2016:

argumate:

femmenietzsche:

There she is

hey is Seattle going to get wiped off the map by the tsunami that follows the big one or is that just Portland?

Just Seattle.

Portland’s 100 miles inland and in a way so is Seattle, but it’s on the Puget Sound.

This is not my understanding. Tsunamis can’t make hard right turns, so there might be some water level rise and the boardwalk might eat it, but most of Seattle is not a tsunami hazard. Our real concern is all the landslides and soil liquefaction from a major earthquake. A lot of Seattle is on top of what’s basically a mud flat and it will become very unstable when the shaking starts.

Red area = fucked

Yellow area = also fucked, but for other non-tsunami reasons

The narrowness of the Columbia’s path through the Coast Range means a tsunami might make the river surge all the way back to Portland but no, our main concern in an earthquake is all the structures built before we realized Cascadian mega-quakes were a thing – including the bridges across the river dividing the city – collapsing. The Oregon coast, though, is gonna get scoured.

I know a lot of broad trends I can link to broad trends in general but I’m actually quite thin on the details

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Guys, “what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren’t aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood” is the subtext of like everything in the real Portland for the last decade

Which involves things like “Portland identity involved elements of both working class AND petit bourgeois idealization; after new arrivals shifted the economy there was a reaction against them in the name of working-class Portland, in response to which bourgeois forces have been co-opting them with the understanding of defending Portlandishness.” That’s how these things go.

It also involves things like “the Oregon Democratic Party never went through the ‘70s-'80s realignment because the state was so white that race wasn’t relevant as a cleavage and Christianity/family traditionalism wasn’t enough to power a Republican relaunch, but the national party did, and new arrivals come from state political traditions that did and so replicated those practices by habit, while state Republicans out of power were drawn by national trends to a niche, but this election the whole thing is rupturing and it’s legitimately unclear what form state political coalitions will take for the next few decades”

kontextmaschine:

Guys, “what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren’t aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood” is the subtext of like everything in the real Portland for the last decade

Which involves things like “Portland identity involved elements of both working class AND petit bourgeois idealization; after new arrivals shifted the economy there was a reaction against them in the name of working-class Portland, in response to which bourgeois forces have been co-opting them with the understanding of defending Portlandishness.” That’s how these things go.

Guys, “what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren’t aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood” is the subtext of like everything in the real Portland for the last decade

When I walked out the door three teen boys who had been standing by the wall at the foot of my driveway over-casually sauntered away

And maybe they were being naughty and improper but there’s nothing there for them to really menace and the neighborhood has packs of teen boys now. Vitality!

I cannot emphasize enough that when I first moved in this neighborhood was for fuckups and people who couldn’t afford any closer in if it had to be good

y'know I knew “when people settle down it will be remotely further out from the hip districts they spent their young adulthood in” but I did not really fully consider the correlate “neighborhoods will get hip years after it makes sense to buy there”

Hey, I know I have some Reedie followers, what period do Reed students typically sign off-campus leases for? I’m trying to make sense of the Foster-Powell summer scene.

The 23 year olds showing up in Portland are wearing I Am Clearly Showing Off My Tits tops like I hadn’t seen since late-90s high school while otherwise vibing worthwhile and not like Jersey Shore, so that’s a positive sign

Zach’s Shack

SE Hawthorne Blvd.

Portland, OR

kontextmaschine:

So a new personality recurring gag is I am getting out in the daytime more and constantly being surprised by what things look like in daylight.

Like a thing is this part of Portland very much looks like eastside LA in the sun but without the Googie neon not at night

Plenty of daylight this time of year but getting hot enough that there’s a period that’s too hot to do yard work, I have to go before and after it

Because of the thing where Portland doesn’t switch to “daytime climate” until 2 PM, this “midday” heat actually comes at 5

So I should clarify that if my picturing how this neighborhood would develop had been merely generally correct I could expect to see a reasonable amount of restaurants and retail moving in as storefronts were rehabilitated, as the price level got high enough various auto repair or construction supply places would’ve flipped, it would be pleasant!

But no, I correctly gauged things, the hotter area down the street has more locations so that’ll expand at a pace that should mean buildings get repurposed and vacant lots become 4+1s in the next 10 years when it’ll hit (maybe 1 or 2 of the plumbing/kitchen supply places become nightclubs. One’s already practice space/art studios!) and for the next 20 years I’m a 4 minute walk to the bus stop at the midpoint of the hot part of town

TriMet (Portland transit) buses have fare collector machines that are miles better and more forgiving than I’ve experienced anywhere else

kontextmaschine:

There were several other properties across Portland I was considering

Including ones in locations that were hot then, or in the previous decade when I established my sense of the town and would have made sense to rent in but by now have fallen behind the “time to polish this for soulless yuppies” frontier

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Jesus fuck, I had never seen this street in summer daytime broad sunlight

In the light you see the similarity to the parts of LA built in the transition from streetcars to automobiles

This is, in fact, why the city has so feverishly been planting street trees

Having a really good few days, exploring the greater neighborhood and being reassured that this place where the windows had bars when I arrived is going to be the center of things for the next while, the crowds are good like I hadn’t seen since 2014 and the next two decades will be a regular stream of neat new stuff showing up

poipoipoi-2016:

kontextmaschine:

Having open windows is a lot more pragmatic with a cat around when any annoying flying insect to try and take up residence inside will get eaten in a day or two

Is Portland, like SF, Boston, DC, Zurich, and NYC, one of those cities that’s too poor for window screens?

Well, it’s one with a lot of double-hung windows