Flip 14--Sellwood

8/9/2010  5:15 PM  Monday
Location: SE 17th and Umatilla

To me, the Sellwood neighborhood is like a forgotten small town within the larger city, like something one discovers by falling accidentally through a magic door.  It's like entering another dimension.  It's not that it's all that different a place, or unusual.  It's just that it's unknown. 

Walking south down 17th Avenue, one of the main drags, I pass a cake shop.  In the casual style that bespeaks its locale, it's got a ramshackle look, with weathered wood siding and vintage advertisements in the window.

The display case looks amazing.

I turn the corner at Sherrett and walk past what appears to be a self-watering raised vegetable garden with a homemade Rube Goldberg-esque irrigation contraption, looking like a miniature jungle gym.

After passing some Victorian houses that look like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting, I come to a park alongside Johnson Creek.

Johnson Creek runs from Mount Hood to the Willamette, and here it appears placid and harmless.

However, during the Fall and Winter rainy season, especially during periods of heavy snowmelt, this creek can top its banks and do major damage to the homes and businesses that line it.

Leaving the park I walk further south and find one of the entry points to the Springwater Corridor Trail.  It's a multi-use path mostly running east and west that skirts the southern edge of the city, through an old railroad cut.

Across nearby 17th Avenue is a semi-gated community of affluent homes that borders the 114-year-old Waverley Country Club.

Across the railroad tracks is a giant Goodwill Industries distribution and sorting center.

For nearly as long as Portland has been a city, this spot has been a nexus of goods and people: river, rail, road, poor, rich, housed, homeless, greenspace, grayspace.