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When Portlanders talk about neighborhoods, we don’t usually talk about the city’s 95 legally designated neighborhoods. We talk about the streets we walk down when we’re on our daily errands or the spaces we visit when we want to clear our heads, meet a friend, or pick up an iced latté on the way to work.
Stomping Grounds
For the past several years, WW’s recurring feature Rose City Rituals follows a notable Portlander on their daily routine. It’s a way of getting to know them a little more intimately and a way to see the city through their eyes. For this year’s Neighborhoods issue, we reached out to six well-known Portlanders and asked them to show us around six of Portland’s better-known neighborhoods. These could be the spaces they live in or spaces they work in. We started out with specific neighborhoods in mind, but sometimes our subjects took us on, well, some side quests.
We learned that when Daniel Shoemaker came to Portland 20 years ago to scout locations for a new cocktail-forward bar, he chose the Pearl simply because it seemed like a place that would get a lot of foot traffic, and ended up becoming one of the best-known faces in the neighborhood. If you spend any time in Laurelhurst Park or at the Laurelthirst Pub, odds are you’ve seen Johnny Franco, one of the hardest-working musicians in town, playing shows and hosting open-mic nights. But Franco wasn’t content with sticking to Laurelhurst when he showed us around his favorite Portland haunts; it turns out he loves Hawthorne and Hollywood, too.
Hollywood is also a special place for Portland philanthropist Jeme Brelin, who is rapidly helping to shape the Hollywood Film District—a fitting development for a neighborhood named in honor of its classic theater. Althea Grey Potter, who technically lives in Portsmouth, found herself walking in Cathedral Park during the pandemic to recharge, which led her to bring high-end destination dining to St. Johns. After a journey that took him to Yale and Oxford universities and Oak Ridge, Oregon, JT Flowers is living in the ZIP code he grew up in and focused on remaking Northeast Portland a flourishing Black community. And former Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani is dedicated to making Sunnyside the brightest spot it can be.
Every one of these Portlanders is working to make our city a better place, and they all taught us something about the spaces they move through that we didn’t know before. Come along for a stroll and let them show you around. —Christen McCurdy, Interim Arts & Culture Editor
