|
Made in Oregon — Page 2
RThey’ve even seized the reins of power, if Rex
Burkholder is any example. The wiry 52-year-old Metro
councillor joined me for a pint at a microbrew-and-pizza
joint on Mississippi Avenue, one of Portland’s
up-and-coming high streets. (And the first place I’ve
seen a stormwater planter, a kind of sidewalk swamp
designed to absorb drain water and ease pressure on
the city’s sewers. Such hallmarks of conspicuous
green urbanism are everywhere in Portland.) Burkholder
peeled off his drenched biking togs, settled into his
pint of oat stout, and outlined the trajectory that
brought him to Portland. It began in a landscape of
teen angst, amid the suburbs of Pittsburgh: “We
had nowhere to go but the 7-Eleven, and nothing happened
there but drinking, fighting, and sex—and I never
got that lucky.”
He settled in Portland in 1980, just as a new network
of freeways threatened to turn the city into a familiar
patchwork of parking lots and strip malls. Burkholder
fought the freeways, championed a new light-rail network,
and eventually joined the establishment as a councillor
of Portland’s new and powerful regional government.
He’s convinced that changing the way people get
around is what changed the soul of Portland.
Just look at downtown, he said, where never-to-be finished
stubs protrude from the aging downtown freeway loop
like so many severed limbs, and inner-city neighbourhoods
like Mississippi are filling up with ex-suburbanites.
The light-rail eases along downtown streets at a convivial
speed, then whips out to select suburbs, making Vancouver’s
SkyTrain seem brutal and alienating in comparison. While
our own city hall dithered over widening the Burrard
Bridge, Portland renovated four of its main river crossings
to make room for bikes. Meanwhile its city centre is
sprouting Yaletown-like development, with new condos
clustered around the route of a new streetcar line.
“People come here because they want something
different. They don’t always know what they want,
just that it’s about walking, about knowing people.
That’s the kind of city we’re building.”
The downside? Well, says Burkholder, the bike lanes
are getting pretty darn crowded. Indeed, more people
commute by bicycle in Portland than any other major
city in North America—one in every five trips
across the Hawthorne Bridge to downtown is by bike.
This is one reason why the city’s per capita carbon
footprint—the amount of greenhouse gas each citizen
spews—has fallen since 1993. “A well-designed
city can save the world,” Burkholder offered,
then gulped the last of his stout and wheeled off into
the greasy night.
It just so happens that the world-saving city can also
be an engine of easy pleasures. Portland celebrates
the local, the recycled, and the joys some people mistakenly
call simple. Its most famous retailer happens to be
Powell’s, a city-block maze of used books. Its
most sacred traditions are extended chatty breakfasts
featuring such wonders as orange-anise toast, and the
sipping of fair-trade drip coffee.
If Seattle’s gift to the world is Starbucks, Portland’s
is McMenamins, a group of brew pubs that eschew chain-style
conformity for antique warehouse bric-a-brac. The group
fixes up old buildings, then lets these venues shape
the brew experience. How’s this for civilized:
at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne, you can enjoy your
“hand-crafted” ale and a burger beneath
the big screen.
Only in Portland would pub chain proprietors declare
that their businesses should function as community centres.
My first McMenamins visit illustrated the point. I wandered
into the Crystal Ballroom complex, 94-year-old cousin
to Vancouver’s Commodore, on a Sunday afternoon
to find a tavern packed with kids—not club kids,
but actual children—rocking out to a live band
while their BabyBjörn-strapped parents toe-tapped
on the edge of the dance floor.
Upstairs, around carnival-painted vats, furry young
men offered samples of the McMenamins brews. The ales
were good, and the people were warm. The roof shook
as an all-ages crowd shuffled on the sprung floor of
the ballroom proper upstairs. After a dozen or so samples,
I couldn’t help feeling like I was witnessing
the good life and the green life converging in a kind
of Hobbiton-meets-Main-Street dream.
Cultural institutions like the Crystal Ballroom are
indeed thriving, especially now that Portland’s
downtown is drawing thousands of new residents. The
Pearl District, once a grid of warehouses, has grown
into a human-scaled version of Yaletown, dominated by
low-rises, cafés, and, yes, more brew pubs.
The empty-nesters have arrived. Land prices have shot
up. Burkholder insists this is good news. (“If
rental rates are a measure of happiness, then we have
been very successful,” he says. “We’re
creating a more valuable place.”) But Portland’s
younger citizens and cultural creatives have no illusions
about their future. “Developers love the work
we’re doing. Though we know that by making this
town more sustainable, more livable, we just may be
working ourselves out of a place to live.”
There’s hope, and it’s coming in the unlikely
form of the real-estate meltdown triggered by the U.S.
sub-prime crisis, which is beginning to trickle through
the Pearl District. Developers of at least one of the
district’s mid-rise apartment blocks have given
up trying to sell units in the softening market and
will instead lease out the building. The fugitives and
refugees may be able to stick it out a few more years
before the rest of the world lays claim to their city’s
unique appeal.
|
SUBSCRIBE 
