The City in the Womb
Written: Apr 06 '02 (Updated May 05 '02)
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Pros: A spectacular success in urban planning in the 1970s.
Cons: All this livability can be very sedating ...
The Bottom Line: An unassuming but complacently livable city, studded with small gems. The opposite of spectacular.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Portland |
Portland and I go way back. I lived there from 1969 (age 7) to 1980 (off to college at 18). I've lived there again since 1994, a much more complacent time. Now I sit in a cafe in San Francisco, wondering how ready I am to live in Portland again. Perhaps, I think, a frank review for travelers might help clarify the mind.
The Womb?
Portland may be one of the most comforting cities on earth. Both the design and setting of the city offer to nurture, embrace, console.
Start with the ring of mountains, most of them volcanic, their flanks usually covered in thick, dense, wet forest where hiking is like sliding through a continuous flow of loving hands. Stand at a viewpoint in Portland, and the mountains are just the right size to form a civic embrace, an enclosure.
Mt. Hood, pictured above, is Oregon's tallest but still a short mountain by western standards. It's a gentle constant on our horizon, but doesn't approach the spectacle of giant Mt. Rainier pressing upon Seattle, or the sheer 10,000' walls that define the northern edges of Los Angeles.
The other major mountain on our skyline is Mt. St. Helens. When I was a child, we always called St. Helens "the ice cream cone", because its perfectly rounded top (8000' and change) suggested the perfect spheres of white that only a well-wielded ice-cream scoop could deliver. The eruption of May 18, 1980 blew the north side off of the mountain, but the south side, facing Portland, lost only about 1000' off the top. Now it looks like a scoop of ice cream that's been licked a couple of times. Low on our northern horizon, it looks safe and comforting -- especially if you weren't there during the three ominous days when it rained the equivalent of finely ground Plexiglas on the city.
Hood and St. Helens are the modest highlights of a continuous belt of brilliant green mountains that lie both east and west of the city, and also close in around the north. Our female land can shock us with the destructive powers of Pélé, as Mt. St Helens did, but most of the time they are just there, gentle rounded verdant mountains east and west, as though holding the city in place.
Then there's the river, the Willamette, which drains one of North America's most fertile valleys and then flows through the center of Portland. Portland is still a port, of course, but an unusual one: the only Pacific port that handles major international shipping on a river 100 miles upstream from the ocean, rather than in deep saltwater bays. Fortunately, all the loading and unloading happens downstream from downtown Portland, so that the river downtown is largely a resource for civic pleasure. Check out the new Eastside Esplanade, which combined with Waterfront Park on the west side provides a complete 3 mile hiking and cycling loop around both sides of the river, right next to downtown. Portland is still cursed with a freeway on the east bank, but the Esplanade has worked around it gracefully, and is now full of cyclists and pedestrians on even a vaguely nice day.
What is a Feminine City?
Most major port cities are grandly phallic, grandly masculine: Think not just of skyscrapers, but of the dramatic promontory-shapes of San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, Lower Manhattan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney ... Of course, the world is full of river cities too, but few have the surround of mountains that enclose and cradle Portland so gently. As for desert cities, they lack that other crucial feature of the womb: the moisture. The Northwest's distinctive rain is a soft, slow, prolonged watering that "falls like a benediction," in Tim Egan's words. Hence the confusing statistics: we get fewer inches a year than many cities, but the duration of rain -- the percentage of the time it is raining -- is higher than almost anywhere. The rain abates in summer but never ceases for more than a few weeks.
Something very maternal is at work in this geography ... we in Portland are being cradled, comforted, pacified, bathed, and well-fed from a bounteous valley that surrounds us. We have all of the best features of the womb, but we also have the very same challenge that defines the prenatal state: we are too comfortable, so we must push back against our sedating land in order to challenge ourselves. If I have a single complaint about Portland, it's the difficulty of meeting people who are really challenging themselves in some way -- creatively, intellectually, whatever. It's just so easy to relax here, even get a little sleepy ...
Fortunately, a few times, we've collectively sensed some danger in the womb, and managed to break out of our complacency. And I'm honored to have been there for one historic era when this city kicked hard in the womb, turned itself upside down, and decided to be something special on the urban scene.
Something Amazing Happened Here: the 1970s
For a teenager who was constantly aware of his environment, 1970s Portland was an incredible place to be. An alignment of political stars gave us a governor (Tom McCall, R) and a Portland mayor (Neil Goldschmidt, D) who saw the dangers of auto-centered suburbia decades before most of the country did, and who devoted their careers to imagining a better future.
The Portland that you'll see today would look completely different, and far uglier, without the galvanizing leadership of Goldschmidt and McCall. Fighting for ideas that would not be widely accepted until 30 years later, these two led the reinvention of Portland as a place where you don't need a car, and where the inner city is where everyone wants to be. Without them:
... our downtown Waterfront Park, where thousands adjourn from business to run, cycle, take lunch or a concert -- would still be a freeway, walling off the city from the river.
... inner city neighborhoods of Southeast Portland, where the grand victorians now sell for $300k and more, would now be the "Mount Hood Freeway." During the decade that this doomed project was planned, a huge swath of southeast Portland fell into disrepair as owners braced for condemnation. Today, some of the city's most interesting nooks and crannies lie in what would have been the freeway's path. Check out 26th & Clinton, a funky and beloved business district at the intersection of two secondary streets, not on a main street at all. It's evidence of our loyalty to neighborhood business and the prevalence of walking and cycling here. It's only a small taste of what we saved when the Mt. Hood Freeway was finally shot down.
... we would still be paving over some of the nation's best farmland to create more dysfunctional suburban sprawl. We have our share of suburban dysfunction, but in 1972 Gov. McCall built a remarkable consensus of urban and agricultural interests to create Oregon's unique land use planning system -- driven most of all by the fact that urban sprawl threatened some of the nation's best farmland. Oregon cities are now surrounded by Urban Growth Boundaries, "lines in the soil" that are very hard to move. Inside those lines, we fill in our empty spaces with new, denser development that encourages alternatives to driving. Outside them, even right next to the line, agriculture and open space are the only uses allowed. Our land use laws have some vaguely comical corrollaries: If youre a farmer, for example, it's illegal to park your car in your barn. (If you do, you're using the barn as a garage, and if you're on agricultural land, that's not what barns are for.) Still, as someone who's seen the ravages of sprawl and the reduction of local government to little more than municipal development corporations, I stand by Oregon's land use system as a remarkable achievement. Portland's regional government is the only one in the nation that has the teeth to override the self-interest of individual suburbs and insist that we build so that the whole region is livable.
... we would not have the MAX Light Rail system, one of the nation's first major experiments with this technology. Today, Portland is unimaginable without the rapidly-expanding light rail system, as well as its excellent bus system.
... downtown would still be a grid of one-way streets roaring with traffic. Instead, the two most central streets in downtown are for buses only, allowing transit to move quickly through downtown and providing pleasant amenities that suggest that even bus riders count as citizens here.
... and finally, we would not have Pioneer Courthouse Square, "Portland's Living Room," one of the nation's most successful central-city squares. At the middle of everything in our human-scale downtown, the Square is a place where you can sit and watch humanity without watching cars, and where you can feel the whole city in all its diversity in a single place.
Because this is what "urbanism" is. A belief that the crowning virtue of cities is that they force us to see, for better or worse, our entire society, and therefore to care about it. If the mountains form the outermost embrace of this feminine city, the Square is perhaps the seed -- -the center of the center of the center, its form equally embracing in its own way.
Of course, if you come in from the suburbs (we still have them), you may perceive Pioneer Courthouse Square as a place where young drug addicts hang out and panhandle. They do, but the success of the square (and MAX, and so many other public places in the city) is that the rest of the city is there, too.
Portland's "street people" are an unusual lot, very young on average compared to those of larger cities. The city has a reputation as a good place to go if you've run away from home and are struggling with drugs, sexuality, or simply figuring out who you are. The lively music scene is probably part of why we've gotten this reputation, but I suspect that our magnetism to the young and bewildered lies also in all the feminine qualities of the place.
The Opposite of Spectacular
Portland has one spectacular vista, the postcard-photo that appears above. I recommend the spot from which it was taken, in Washington Park's Rose Garden, but you'll quickly find that this is not a city of long views so much as of intimate details. Washington Park is a hilly labyrinth containing a Rose Garden, Japanese Garden, a vast Arboretum, several memorials, and the zoo, but you can't see it all from any one place. This is a city to delve into, not one to conquer from great heights.
City planners describe downtown Portland as one of the most successful city centers in the nation. The city's loving stewardship of downtown has helped to keep major businesses here, but there's also a subliminal virtue that is just our good fortune, and for which we must thank those who platted the city over 150 years ago.
Downtown Portland is platted with blocks that are only 200 feet long -- compared to 300 feet or more in most cities. Shorter blocks mean smaller, more human-scale buildings and frequent changes of scenery along the street. It really makes a difference. My firm's San Francisco office near Powell BART station is on a block that's nearly 1000 feet long, and despite all the activity, it is still a depressing place -- fine for cars, but just too big to be a comfortable pedestrian space.
What to See?
You'll quickly notice that Portland has a quirky sense of humor. But don't stop with the 24-Hour Church of Elvis. Public art deserves a look, especially the Electronic Poet on Morrison between 9th and 10th, the block of literary pavingstones on Yamhill between 4th and 5th, and the very mysterious tortoise-and-hare labyrinth embedded into Waterfront Park near the Burnside Bridge. (The memorial to the Japanese internment, just a block north, is also worth a look.)
If you're literate enough to have read this far, then you probably already know about Powell's City of Books, the largest bookstore in the west. The "City" itself is at 10th & West Burnside, three stories packed with new and used books intershelved. Since Portland lacks a world-class university (though there are good schools in urban planning and medicine) Powell's takes on many of the functions of sustaining literary culture.
Powell's is only the most prominent example of Portland's success at containing the "chaining of America." Though it now has a national website and five stores in the Portland area, Powell's is still a home-grown Portland business. So are many other beloved businesses from restaurants to record stores to the quirky Bagdad theatre, where the admission is cheap but you can then buy pizza and take it into the theatre with you -- the latter being the profit center. In fact, the neighborhood around the Bagdad (37th & Hawthorne) is a collection of almost entirely local businesses, with a slight new-age tilt. In the 70s, this neighborhood was in ruins. Today, everyone wants to live here, and Hawthorne's collection of funky diverse stores just keeps growing. And you can't help notice, among these businesses, a strong emphasis on purveyors of various kinds of healing and cradling -- from imported blankets to acupuncture.
Because you see, it's just very, very comfortable here. And if you pay attention, something about this city is offering to hug you.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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