Another Brick In The Wall

[December 21st, 2005] Bishops Barbershop on Northeast Alberta Street has an odd problem for a local business owned by a minority: It's been targeted by clueless protectors of the street's virginity.

On Monday, Bishops general manager Stella Farina arrived at the company's headquarters at 2132 NE Alberta St. to find shattered glass and a brick wrapped with an anti-corporate message, much of which was apparently cribbed from the Portland novelist Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

"You bring nothing to our table besides bills and foreclosure notices," read the unsigned note. "We bring you broken glass and a headache for you to hide behind your shitty haircuts."

For anybody who has followed Alberta's rapid gentrification (see "Alberta Rising," WW, June 6, 2000), backlash against newcomers—especially anybody remotely connected to globalization or corporatization—is hardly unexpected.

Roslyn Hill, who has developed several properties along Alberta, says her projects have been tagged by people upset about gentrification—even though she's an area old-timer and, unlike most developers on the street, is African-American.

"Most of the people are new to the neighborhood, and they don't know anything except that costs have gone up and they don't want big corporations on the street," Hill says.

The brick-throwing at Bishops, which has about 50 employees in five shops around Portland, follows a series of minor vandalism and taggings at the building, which was completed in September.

The property's developer, Mary Walker, says she suspects whoever is behind the damage to her property is operating under mistaken beliefs about her and her tenants.

"They've tagged the building with bleach, acid, glue and paint," says Walker, a single mom who lives in North Portland. "It's a lot like what happened to Starbucks on Division."

Last year, activists unhappy that Starbucks was moving into a stretch of Southeast Division Street dominated by local businesses targeted and even firebombed the building the coffee conglomerate occupied. And attacks also mimic those directed at a proposed McDonald's on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in 2001.

But Walker's building is home to knitting and fabric shops owned by two local women, as well as Bishops, a Portland company owned by local entrepreneur Leo Rivera, a Filipino-American.

Farina thinks the vandal or vandals may have mistaken the local Bishops chain, which was founded in 2001, with Rudy's, another "rock and roll" hair-cutter that has expanded rapidly in trendy Portland neighborhoods.

Complicating the mystery is a series of burglaries at Bishops. In the past two weeks, somebody has broken into Bishops locations on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, Northwest 21st Avenue and Alberta Street, stealing safes and cash registers. Two of the break-ins occurred in the early morning of Dec. 16.

Farina says the coincidence is remarkable but thinks the burglaries and the brick-tossers are unrelated.

"It's really frustrating," she says. "If people feel that passionately, they should check the facts—which are that we're a local, minority-owned company that provides lots of jobs—before they make themselves look like idiots."