In June I moved to Portland, Oregon. Since leaving New York City in 1965 I have longed for city living and the change of seasons. I usually have a yearning, a lusting, a strong desire for the feel that comes with a season change. It is one of nature’s sensual pleasures and I have missed it for far too many years.
I moved into a building that was built the year my mother was born: 1911. There is a shiny brass plaque marking that on the brick wall that leads to a small courtyard with benches and a water fountain that lends its voice to the backdrop of the city sounds. Spiral staircases on each side gently curve up and meet at the second floor where there is a substantial looking weathered wooden door. When I first entered the building I could feel my mother’s presence in that I kept thinking this building and my mother were born at the same time.
I live on the third floor. The building has an elevator that is also 100 years old and brings back memories of days in New York. There is a black wrought iron gate inside the door to the elevator that must be pulled back and forth for entrance and exit. Department stores had these gates in their elevators when I was growing up and there was a store employee wearing white cotton gloves who pulled it back and forth letting folks on and off. At each floor they would announce what could be found such as, “third floor: ladies dresses, lingerie, undergarments”.
My apartment is 650 square feet. When I first started looking for a place to live I scoffed at apartments under 1000 square feet. I could not imagine where anyone could put any furniture and still move around in a place that small. I went back to watching HGTV shows about apartment and house hunting only to realize that in some highfalutin cities people were paying well over a million dollars for condos well under 1000 square feet.
I had hoped for a washer and dryer in my apartment but had to settle for one in the building. There is a shelf downstairs where we all store our detergent and dryer pads so you don’t have to schlep them up and down; there is a line where you can hang your rugs or bedspread to dry, an ironing board with an iron for community use and a lovely long table for folding that makes tackling sheets ever so much easier. There is also a table where you can leave things you no longer want; you know it might be someone else’s treasure. In fact, I found enough sweaters (that I love) for my first winter here. The other day I went down to get my quilts out of the dryer. Someone else needed the dryer and mine was done so they folded all my quilts (four of them) very lovingly and they were waiting in my basket for me when I went to get them. So, maybe I like the washer and dryer in the basement.
I have imagined this building to be reminiscent of a tenement house filled with budding, struggling, aspiring performers of one kind or another. In my head I feel it is the nineteen twenties and I am thrilled to be here, part of this group of individual people. I think about Rear Window (one of my favorite Grace Kelly movies) where Jimmy Stewart could see what was going on in all the apartments in the building across the way (forget the murder part). That’s how I imagine us. For example, right now while I’m writing this blog the woman upstairs is giving piano and voice lessons. Up and down the scales they go, working on making that a smooth transition from note to note. I can hear the progress since last week and the week before that. The young man who lives next door to me has an easel up in his sunroom with paints, brushes and pencils scattered about his table, as if they have just been in use. There are folks who live on the first floor in studio apartments that share a common bathroom out in the hall. I am guessing they are actors who wait on tables while working at getting their first break.
We all live across the street from Trader Joe’s. In the fifties Trader Joe’s started out as a convenient store called Pronto Markets but changed it’s name in the mid sixties and expanded to include “innovative, hard-to-find, great tasting food”. I love that it carries Charles Shaw wine, known affectionately as Two Buck Chuck, because that’s how much a bottle of Merlot costs!! That’s as connoisseur as I get.
Portland is divided into fourths. The dividing lines are the Willamette River and Burnside Avenue. I live in the Northwest, which is how many people refer to my neighborhood. If I tell a Portlandian that I live in the Northwest across the street from Trader Joe’s I might as well be giving them the coordinates on a map. It is also referred to as the Alphabet Historic District. Around the turn of the century (the 20th that is) the task of naming the alphabet streets trickled down to Douglas Taylor, who was the Superintendent of Streets (sounds like a precursor to a Monty Python sketch) and he gave them the names of prominent folks of the time, himself included (he is the T street). The word on the alphabet streets is that Matt Groening, who grew up in Portland, named several characters in the Simpsons after them: Flanders, Kearney, Lovejoy and Quimby. He however, is not the G name, which is Glisan (pronounced Glee-son), but that’s where I live.
We are also known as Nob Hill. Back in the 1840’s Captain John H. Couch (pronounced Coo-ch), believed Portland would be a better water navigational city than Oregon City, so he bought the land that became this neighborhood, and staked his claim. He wound up making a fortune sailing ships with supplies back and forth from Portland to San Francisco during the gold rush so the name Nob Hill seems an offshoot, tribute, namesake of the exclusive enclave of the rich and famous in San Francisco’s northwest. Over the years Portland prospered and at the turn of the century (when my building was a twinkle in some architect’s eye) the city had an enormous growth spurt attributed to folks flocking here in 1905 to see the Lewis and Clark Centennial Expedition.
In the Portland guidebooks there are walking tours through my neighborhood to give folks a slice of the architectural life during the 1900’s with its Queen Annes, Craftmans and apartment buildings that offered new city dwellers luxury, spacious living. Of course, the next population increase and re-interest in city living saw those buildings, my building, do some reconfiguring to increase the amount of residents it could accommodate. If they did an apartment walking tour you would see the beauty of the past expressed in apartments like mine with their high 10 foot ceilings, layered molding, creaky, worn but rich wooden floors, and doorknobs you see advertised in Restoration Hardware.
I refer to my neighborhood as the epicenter of the city because it takes me 3 minutes to walk to Cinema 21 that shows independent films, 3 ½ to get my hair cut, 5 to my doctor, 11 to my dance class (although it used to take me 14), 6 to Ace Hardware (7 back because of the “incline”), 1 ½ minutes to the thrift store, 13 to the post office. In 11 minutes I can catch the city rail that takes me to the door of Portland International Airport. No parking, no daily rate, and no traffic: just door-to-door service. It’s a 14 minute walk to Union Station to take the Amtrak, which provides a scenic, comfy ride to Seattle. In 15 minutes I can be at the Apple Store rubbing elbows with the rest of the crowd inhaling and exhaling technology. In 13 minutes I can go from my apartment door to a seat at Portland’s Center Stage to wait for the curtain to open or in 11 ½ be listening to live Jazz at the renowned Jimmy Macs. It takes about 25 minutes to walk to the famed Saturday Market and follow my nose from food cart to food cart while listening to the music from a harp or upside down plastic containers and empty hanging bottles. I mean if you get right down to it I can (and did) walk 52 minutes from my apartment to my daughter’s house and she lives on the east side of the Willamette River which means I can (and did) walk across one of the ten bridges that join the east (where she lives) and west (where I live). Damn, I’m an urban trekker.
My building is the delicious filling between two parallel streets that are lined with independently owned shops, bakeries, restaurants and services that, although they may be selling similar goods, are delightfully different. Restaurants span ethnicities and their aromas waft from their kitchens filling your senses and stimulating your taste buds as you breath in and out walking up and down the streets. Sometimes I can convince myself I am full after walking from one end of 23rd Street to the other or I can stop and have lox and bagels at Kornblatt’s Jewish Deli for breakfast, Mio sushi for lunch, Swagat’s Indian cuisine for dinner and a dessert that should be an entrée at Papa Haydn’s in front of a roaring fire. There is ping pong, darts, pool and live music, gelato spots, chocolatiers, coffee shops and cafes. There is yoga, massage, hypnosis, meditation and Pilates. There are nightclubs, movie theaters and art galleries; bars, pubs, and taverns are brimming with folks watching the big screen together. It is the community living room for us folks in the neighborhood who live in reconfigured square footage.
In the evening the neighborhood transforms itself; the trees that line the streets spring to life when the sun goes down and burst into light’s that hug the trunk and branches, offering a runway of glitter to dazzle the nighttime diners and shoppers. For me, it’s the yellow brick road that leads me back to my building, of struggling artists, that was built in 1911, the year my mother was born.
