the boroughs of portland

As a Portland resident, I enjoy Portlandia’s portrayal of Portland as a city overrun by hipsters and ageing hippies.  Many parts of Portland really are pockets of vintage-wearing, gourmet-eating, horn-rimmed-bespectacled people.  Many parts, however, are not.   I live in the Portsmouth neighborhood in North Portland, which is, well, interesting.  The Taco Bell next door has been robbed at least once since I moved in.  My roommate’s truck was stolen (but she later found it on her bus route).  It's had a history with gangs and violence, although the crime rates in Portsmouth are lower than in Downtown, according to the Portland Police.

One girl in my program at Portland State University lives in SW and earnestly expressed fear of “crossing the bridge.”  There are 11 car bridges crossing the Willamette River, which divides East and West Portland.  (Portsmouth is so far north that, while technically on the east side of the river, it gets its own designation as North Portland).  Most people on the west side talk about the east side as “another world.”  It really isn’t—it’s full of regular people and has its fair share of hipsters and hippies, but it’s a lot less shiny and a whole lot poorer than many parts of the west side.  There are, of course, pockets of gentrified, staid houses and edgy, boutique shops throughout all of the east side.  For the foodie, for example, Alberta can rival NW 23^rd for gastronomic diversity, and is usually cheaper.

Portland has upwards of 100 neighborhoods, and each is as unlike the others as Seattle is from St. Louis.  Some are up-and-coming, some are terribly poor, some have streets that go in circles the opposite direction from every other neighborhood’s streets, some are artsy, and some are shiny.  The City of Portland has made a great map of all of the different Portland neighborhoods and neighborhood coalitions here.  (If you open it in Adobe Reader, you can play with viewing different layers in the toolbar on the left in order to make the map slightly less overwhelming.)  My newfound home of Portsmouth is… well, I don’t think I’ve lived here long enough to give it an adjective.  It isn’t known for anything in particular, except for being wedged in between Kenton (cute), St. John’s (out there), and University Park (where University of Portland is, and where the Methodists named all the streets after eastern colleges and Methodists).

As I continue to settle in here, I'm learning more and more about North Portland and Portsmouth in particular.  For now, though, here is a fascinating article about East Portland—the far East Side.

Willamette Weekly is an alternative newspaper that discusses pressing issues and current events in the Portland area.  They ran a wonderful article a few months back that discussed how the “myth” of the “’Portlandy’ part of Portland” does not extend much beyond downtown and the Inner East Side.   For all you non-Portlanders, people normally think about East Portland extending to about East 82^nd Ave.  After that, the mental map of many Portlanders is painted white.  Portland goes far beyond that, however—the city limits expand out to East 190^th Ave.   108 blocks—or about 5 miles from east to west—are usually ignored by the rest of Portland.  To put that it perspective, the rest of Portland fits into an area of about 5 miles from east to west.  Virtually half, then, of Portland, isn’t “Portlandy” at all.

Go read the article on the Willamette Weekly’s website:

http://wweek.com/portland/article-18071-the_other_portland.html