Flip 18--NE 28th and Alberta

  

8/1/2011   Monday    3:50 PM

Location: Concordia neighborhood

It's a warm, sluggish midsummer afternoon, the kind Portlanders long for during the endless stretches of slate-gray overcast we endure through much of the year. Though days like this are rare here, when they arrive they feel like they may never end, like it may never rain again. How could it, with the cloud-barren sky stretching out in all directions?

A dandelion puffball is surprisingly intricate when viewed up close.

A few years ago, an artist started tying up miniature horses to the iron hitching rings which can still be found on curbs around town. 

The Alberta Rose Theatre was originally the Alameda Theater. In its more than eighty years, it has served as a movie house, a church, and now as a concert venue. It is also believed to have been the first black-owned theater in the city (perhaps the only?).

But the changes this neighborhood has undergone in the last fifteen years are remarkable. This strip was formerly occupied by mostly black-owned or businesses that catered to the black community. I remember my mom taking me to this building when it was B&R Sports to buy a coveted Starter jacket when I was in middle school. Now it's a tapas restaurant.

In this neighborhood, blocks are split by alleys running north-to-south, dividing the backyards of homes just off the commercial strip. The rear seating areas of some of the bars and restaurants are connected, and a bearded guy on crutches crosses the alley from a pizza place to a Mexican place. I overhear him talking to a friend about not wanting to work for Weiden + Kennedy, but I don't catch who he does want to work for.

Some of the alleys feature walls painted with incredible murals.

Walking through the alleys, one gains intimate peeks into backyards.

A small black church sits quietly on a corner.

Bishop A.L. Wright passed away earlier this year. His stepson, Derrick Foxworth, is the former police chief.

On the opposite corner, a poetry box offers spirituality of a different kind.

I find this truck, which resembles ones I see many older black men driving through northeast Portland, hauling metal, appliances, furniture, wood scraps and other refuse. 

Near a school bus formerly belonging to the Southern Rhode Island Collaborative (a special education program in the Ocean State), a thin, impoverished black man sifts through a cardboard box of clothing and other items alongside a young white man who does the same.

The bus driver checks her rear view mirror.

A block away, I pause to admire a house I have always liked. It appears to have been a combined residence and store at one time. The structure was built in 1910, but I don't know anything else about it.

Across the street, an enormous Victorian sits on a double lot. The odd stone fence barely conceals an RV.

Away from the Alberta Street traffic, the neighborhood is as tranquil as an open meadow. A wind chime. A dog. The drone of a distant airplane climbing. Unexpectedly, a woman calls out to her children in French.

Inexplicably, two pair of Nikes sit on the hood of a Saturn. No one is near the car.

This is the home of a singer I like.

Each of these houses seems so different, an eclectic collection of ramshackle to showplace, quaint to modern, but there is still a unifying essence common to much of Portland east of the Willamette. It's hard to name or describe but, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. Maybe it's in the rambling yards filled with decaying planter boxes overgrown with tomatoes gone to seed, or in the voices of two women saying their goodbyes on a porch, or in a suite of solar panels on the southern slope of a gabled roof. Of course, it is all of these things and much more. I wonder about the lives that exist within these houses, about the hidden joys and disappointments that reside there.