On the final Thursday of each month, Northeast Alberta
Street undergoes a cultural transformation in miniature. Here,
among the coffee shops, low-end restaurants and boarded-up
businesses, the Jaguars, BMWs, Range-Rovers and Ford Explorers
ferry people in Italian sports jackets and $150 Guatemalan
sandals to the two-dozen-plus galleries and art spaces that,
since 1997, have popped up between Northeast 14th and 30th
avenues.
The three-hour event, a coy play on the First Thursday
of the Pearl District with its loftier pretensions, is commonly
known as Last Thursday. Residents of the predominantly African-American
neighborhood, however, have a different name for it: White
Night.
They aren't the only ones to notice the monthly shift.
One member of the all-white crowd gazing at the four-figure
artwork at Onda Gallery last Thursday was amazed. "I haven't
been over here in a while," he said. "It's like white country."
All told, of the more than 500 people wearing cocktail-party
smiles inside the galleries on Aug. 31, it appeared that
fewer than 10 were African-American.
Out on the street, the demographics weren't much different.
A few young African-American men stood against buildings,
looking as though they were sentinels for something that
had been lost in a neighborhood that until recently was
left to its own demise.
Crossing Northeast 24th Avenue, an African-American woman
was almost decked by an oncoming car. She rolled her eyes
and said to no one in particular, "Time to start exploding."
Exploding is precisely what many fear the Alberta Street
neighborhood will do as Portland's latest wave of gentrification
and all the social upheaval that entails sweeps the neighborhood.
Measuring the exact magnitude of the demographic shift
along Alberta won't be possible until Census figures trickle
out next year, but it's clear that there's a new wealth
in a neighborhood where many homes haven't seen a fresh
coat of paint for decades.
In the last two years, property values have spiked by 80
percent in the neighborhood bracketing Alberta Street, an
area that just a few years ago had running crack battles.
Now, it's not unusual to see a white man in shorts and Birkenstocks
washing his BMW 323i on a street lined with cars whose finishes
are so faded that washing would leave them as dull as before.
This scenario is nothing new in Portland.
Thirty years ago, no one would have predicted that a house
in Irvington would ever sell for $500,000. In the late 1980s,
the badly lit streets of Northwest Portland, once littered
with broken pint bottles, gave way to strings of white-light-laced
trees in front of boutiques. Across the Willamette River,
in the 1990s both Hawthorne Boulevard and Belmont Street
were turned into shopping districts. Soon after, century-old
homes in Sunnyside were snapped up and restored from $30,000
knock-downs into the kind of $250,000-plus painted ladies
that compel couples visiting local shops to stop and stare
and sigh.
And, most recently, there was the Pearl District, which
was transliterated from blocks of dubious warehouses to
blocks of galleries, pricey nouveau-cuisine restaurants
and lofts for the city's social climbers.
In many cases, longtime residents were displaced. Yet none
of those upswellings of development was as potentially explosive
as what's playing out along Alberta Street. That's because
Alberta is one of the few neighborhoods in Portland where
the demographics actually dovetail with the civic religion
of ethnic diversity.
That distinction is cause for both celebration and conflict.
"This is a divided community," says Reggie Petry, an African-American
gallery owner.
Yet despite the gibes that can be overheard on a Last Thursday,
the division doesn't fall solely along racial lines. Many
black residents can see the payoff in the influx of newcomers.
And some of those new white residents are the most unblinkingly
worried about the changes that they're a part of.
Rather, the division over Alberta stems from the answer
to a question that's bedeviled each sizable American city
in the last 20 years: How much gentrification and revitalization
is too much?
In cities like San Francisco, where the 150-year-old Mission
District has been usurped by dot-commers, the question has
been answered with smashed windows, spray-painted luxury
automobiles and diners hectored by street-level activists
with greasy hair. That's what happens in a highly political
city when rents double to $1,000 for a small studio, parking
becomes a concept and the entire community is suddenly out
of scale with what it once was.
Portland isn't San Francisco. Yet some worry that, except
for good intentions, there are no safeguards to prevent
popcorned window glass from covering Alberta Street's sidewalks.
Well ahead of the Mission District and Alberta Street,
a pattern of gentrification has established itself on the
West Coast over the past 20 years in San Diego, Oakland,
Berkeley and Seattle.
Each case, in essence, has been a hundred-year-long calculus.
White immigrants working in the mills, factories and shipyards,
build small-frame houses and raising large families. Their
children move out.
World War II brings a rapid increase in industrialization
and a partial lifting of the barriers facing African Americans.
Defense contracts bring a flood of Texans and Mississippians
to the West Coast. Walking down Oakland's West 7th Street
or Portland's Union Avenue during the war, you hear a Southern
patois, smell barbecue smoke and feel the dancing pulse
coming out of small blues clubs.
At war's end, for the first time, thousands of black families
have real disposable income.
Although this isn't the South, the hallmarks of "knowing
your place" are around: You don't go into department stores
and expect the salesgirls to ring up your purchase. No matter
how steady a living you make from working at the Swan Island
shipyards, Oregon Steel or the Albina rail yard, you certainly
don't try to buy a home east of Williams Avenue.
It's only after the civil-rights movement of the 1960s
that thousands of Portland's African Americans move to Alberta
Street.
One of them was Maggie Gibson. With her husband, she moved
to Portland from the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s
after he landed a job at Oregon Steel. The small woman with
corn-rowed hair has lived in the Alberta neighborhood for
28 years.
She remembers when the Oregon economy tanked in the late
1970s and early 1980s. Scores of young black men were unemployed,
standing on grimy street corners like Northeast Alberta
and 17th Avenue, trying to figure how they were supposed
to put food on the table and gain status, at least in their
own community.
And then in the mid-1980s came King Crack, provider of
income, sleek cars and clothes and an unparalleled high.
It was a jobs program for Northeast Portland the same way
it was for South Central Los Angeles and East Oakland.
In those days, Woodlawn Park Crips and Kerby Street Bloods
set handguns barking against the night, city buildings crews
plastered plywood faces across vacant buildings and cops
kept cars out of side streets with jersey barricades.
Houses along Northeast 14th Place were in such bad shape
that absentee landlords gave up trying to keep crackheads
from squatting in them.
Gibson says the warning signs became frustratingly familiar:
windows covered with newspaper and high foot traffic at
4 am. "You knew something was going on," she says.
She remembers a December morning a decade ago, when a home
across the street was set afire by a crack-addicted father.
His wife and children broke their legs jumping from the
second story; an infant died in her crib.
Now, on this same block of 1920s-era craftsman homes, only
one is boarded over. The remainder sell for $80,000 to $130,000,
depending on size and condition. They are ideal for young
people to buy, improve and sell into a rising market.
Yet it wasn't so long ago that real-estate agents steered
white home buyers away from what they now tout as the Alberta
Arts District. Few whites lived in the area during the years
when the wrong color of bandana or T-shirt could draw gunfire.
In 1992, 60 percent of the buildings on the 1.5-mile stretch
between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Northeast 39th
Avenue were boarded up, according to the Bureau of Housing
and Community Development. Today, an informal survey puts
that figure at 20 percent. Drive-by shootings are essentially
a bad memory.
Within the last three years, 27 art galleries have opened.
Alberta Street now boasts at least 10 restaurants. By the
end of this month, two new African-American-owned barbecue
restaurants will open.
No one knows the precise moment when Alberta Street began
its ascent. It may have been as recently as 1998, when Adidas
opened a factory outlet at the corner of Martin Luther King
Jr. Boulevard, or as early as 1994, when the Portland Police
Bureau opened its Northeast precinct a few blocks north.
Many people, however, peg the Alberta renaissance to 1995,
the year Roslyn Hill opened a coffee house and small art
gallery at Northeast 14th Avenue.
Sitting at a black lacquered table, the 54-year-old stares
out at the street through bifocals. Small strands of gray
hair spiral into her dreadlocks.
When she moved her gallery north of Broadway, she bought
a knock-down $27,000 building. Her friends thought she'd
lost her senses. Hill thinks she had sense on her side.
"It was the last undeveloped business corridor on the east
side," she says.
The disappearance of crime and the upsurge in property
values has largely validated her capitalist outlook.
Not everyone on the street is so bottom-line.
It's not that anyone wants to trade today's burgeoning
prosperity, even if it means higher rents, for the shooting
war of the 1990s.
"Living free and safe again is worth it," says Maggie Gibson,
even though she will not remove the iron bars from her windows.
But others aren't so comfortable with the trade, because
they are convinced that African Americans have been displaced
or are on the verge.
Richard Brown, a Northeast Portland activist, echoes that
perception. Like everyone else caught up in the Alberta
debate, however, he can't name anyone who's actually loaded
up a Ryder truck and moved to Gresham.
Still, an anxiety permeates Alberta Street that amidst
all the redevelopment and upscale real-estate, residents
will be taxed out of their homes.
In some cases, home values in the neighborhood have almost
doubled. That has yet to boost property taxes in the area
because under Measure 50, property taxes increase only 3
percent a year and are pegged to assessed home values, which
are recalculated only when a major improvement is made to
the property.
Yet there's an overwhelming sense that it's not possible
for so much success to come to a neighborhood without knocking
someone aside.
And, although homeowners so far have been spared from skyrocketing
taxes, rental prices are rising. Commercial rents are at
$12 a square foot, more than double what they were three
years ago. One-bedroom apartments rent for over $500.
But the most intractable fear isn't about real estate.
It's that the character of Alberta Street will change so
dramatically that it will become Northeast Portland's version
of Northwest 23rd Avenue.
For now, Alberta Street is hip in the same ragged way that
residential Northwest Portland, dreadlocks-and-commerce
Hawthorne and the yuppie lofts of the Pearl District once
were: as low-priced enclaves for artists and musicians and
the people who come along for the party.
It's been more than a year since anyone was killed on Northeast
Alberta Street. Standing outside Joe's Place on Aug. 4,
1999, Jermaine Robertson took multiple gunshots to his chest
and later died at Legacy-Emanuel Hospital. He was 20 years
old, a Blood of the Woodlawn Park set, felled underneath
the tavern's peace sign by a Kerby Street Crip at the corner
of 18th and Alberta.
Today, across that same street, a young woman wearing black
knee socks and pigtails plays "Hound Dog" on a ukulele at
the Medicine Hat Gallery. An all-white audience laughs at
this and other attempts to translate teenage inadequacies
into art.
So wedded are the post-punkers to Alberta Street--their
hipster 'hood--that they're carping long and loud over any
symbol (except for themselves) of the white middle class
shouldering African Americans out of the neighborhood.
Medicine Hat, a former ballroom with an air of a post-graduate
social club, is a focal point for the twentysomething whites
who, along with the gays and lesbians who preceded them,
have moved into this neighborhood over the past year and
claimed it as their own.
Anyone with an ear to the street knows that these post-punkers
who live in the neighborhood after the Last Thursday crowd
departs, despite their appeals to dialectic materialism,
signify that the gallery-goers could someday return for
good.
Alberta Street's tension usually sits under the surface, but
occasionally it breaks through. At her three-month-old Groundswell
coffee house, Harriet Fasenfest recently found a note in her
guest book that read, "Thanks for gentrifying my neighborhood."
An unknown cartoonist has sketched a tirade against the
evils of gentrification and pasted it to newspaper boxes
and the bathroom wall at Chez What.
Last April 1, an unidentified artist made his views on
gentrification clear. On the faces of several buildings
along Northeast Alberta Street, he posted "Coming Soon"
signs for The Gap and Starbucks that were accurate down
to the logo and typeface.
For a time, some in the neighborhood thought the April
Fool's joke was in earnest--and their reactions varied significantly.
"There were people peeing in their pants thinking that
the neighborhood had arrived," says Fasenfest. "Or they
were thinking, 'There goes the neighborhood.'"
Part of what's at issue is the perception that many of
Alberta Street's businesses are out of scale with the African-American
community, the very people whom all the white business owners
say they are concerned about.
Jim DeFeo, owner of the nine-month-old Vita Cafe, insists
that he serves the entire community. But, among the veganistas
and deep environmentalists, few African Americans sit at
the straight-backed booths and eat Asian noodle medley or
vegan chocolate cake. Fewer still cross the street to buy
$200 lamps with tissue-paper shades at the Hi-iH Gallery
or wander further west to finger $2,500 quilts at Onda Gallery.
The dread that runs through business people like Fasenfest
and Petry is that everyone who made the area unique and
attractive in the first place will be pushed out as the
next phase of the Alberta renaissance begins and the neighborhood
turns into a safe-zone for corporate chain stores.
During the next year, the City of Portland will pour more
than $3 million into the district. It will go into "streetscape
improvements": Victorian-era gas lamp knock-offs, concrete
curb extensions, Pacific Sunset maples, Kouza dogwoods and
five other kinds of trees, as well as public art. It's the
capstone to five years of economic pump-priming by the city's
Portland Development Commission: more than $2 million to
local business people for storefront improvements and small
business development loans.
All of this plays into the dreams of developers and commercial
property owners like Roslyn Hill and Eric Wentland, who've
owned properties for several years and are itching to make
good on their bets.
"What's turning Alberta is art and the belief in art,"
says Wentland. Once a debt collector in South Central Los
Angeles who was thrown off a porch by former mayor Tom Bradley's
daughter, he now owns three properties on Alberta Street
and is president of the Alberta Street Business Association.
He says the street has changed so much in the last two
years that if all the crack dealers and gangbangers were
released from prison, they'd have little impact.
"There's no community to galvanize," he says. "It's our
street now. There's those gentrifiers that wear green."
There's nothing unnatural about Alberta Street's rise:
Low rents and an influx of artists in the last undeveloped
business district east of the Willamette River make an irresistible
magnet.
But what makes it all seem schismatic is the neighborhood's
hole card of racial diversity. In this whitest of major
American cities, people are hungry for what they cannot
buy on Northwest 23rd Avenue.
When pressed, even Hill, a cheerleader for development
who now owns several commercial properties, admits that
there are risks. She fears that the neighborhood won't stay
ethnically diverse. Hill stares out her cafe's windows onto
the street, where hail has begun to drum the pavement.
"People come here because it's a bohemian environment with
a little bit of everything," she says. "But it could turn
into Northwest 23rd."
With the streetscape improvements, Alberta Street may end
up having all the spontaneity of that most imperious of
shopping districts, which already closely resembles downtown
La Jolla, Calif.
As the Alberta community makes the transition to a district
where people will drive over in Range Rovers and write $4,000
checks for acrylic paintings, it's that shift in the color
spectrum from which some people can't disentangle themselves.
"I know there's an undercurrent of folks upset that they
can't take advantage of increased prosperity," says Richard
Brown. "Are they cussing at every white person? No. But
they are not happy."
For Reggie Petry, the promise and the threat of Alberta
Street bend back to one crucial point.
"Alberta's been sold largely on its diversity," says the
gallery owner. "How do we preserve it now? If you ignore
this, then you are just doing things for the sake of money."
Predictably, property owners have a different view.
"I've always been fascinated by people who want to dictate
to you how to use your money," says Hill.
Fasenfest, owner of Groundswell, grew up in a collectively
owned house in New York City. She sees gentrification through
different lenses.
"Either you just want to bitch about gentrification or
you want to get to what's really wrong," she says. "How
seriously are we talking about revitalizing all the
community? That's what always falls through the cracks.
Alberta has the chance to do it differently."
Six and a half hours after the gallery-goers had departed
Alberta Street last week, an odd and, perhaps, telling chapter
in the saga of Alberta's redevelopment played out.
At 3:30 am on Sept. 1, the Brothers Free Motorcycle Club
building--the scene of two murders, one rape and numerous
assaults with weapons over the last 11 years--was reduced
to a pile of smoking rubble after an explosion that fire
officials called an arson.
According to sources familiar with the club, the Brothers
Free were going through an internal struggle over what to
do with the 5,000-square-foot building: maintain it as a
clubhouse bar or sell it to developers.
One theory holds that with the pro-sale faction gaining
momentum, someone decided that if it couldn't remain a clubhouse,
then no one could have it.
Fueled by an accelerant, the blaze in the 71-year-old building
touched off the natural gas line. The resulting blast woke
residents several blocks away and blew the vinyl siding
off one of the barbecue restaurants set to open this month.
In the wisps of smoke the next day, the remarks of the
young woman who'd almost been run over the previous evening
verged on prophecy.
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