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To end 2025, we assigned each reporter in the WW newsroom to pick two stories by a colleague that stood out in 2025. We then had the recipient of the compliment pass it on—but not before penning an update to the tales. Here’s the first of these stories.
“Gateway to Nowhere”
Aug. 27
Why Andrew Schwartz loved it: The key to this story is that Sophie (and the able team of interns whose reporting she managed) takes what many journalists would have turned into a totally boring tax policy story and made it about people. People and the concrete places where they work and spend their time. It’s all so grounded and specific. Here we are at a 76 gas station—Taser-toting Muhammad Bhatti stands behind the counter near a shrine commemorating an employee who got shot and killed in the parking lot not long ago. And here we are on the BMX pump track by the highway, where riders hit tailwhips and hard rock blares.
These are stories of a largely failed tax and development policy, Sophie shows us. But more to the point, they amount to a vivid portrait of a Portland community that—one senses—city leaders, for all their good intentions, never fully did see.
Killer detail: So many options, but my choice is less a physical detail than a descriptive flourish that stood out when I first read this story: Though, as the article makes clear, we are in a neighborhood designed for the automobile, here a strip mall-type space is rendered at human scale: “A quarterback’s throw over the Winco from Bhatti’s gas station is a mom-and-pop hair salon called Colour Authority.”
Sophie Peel on what’s happened since: Gateway remains a place where it’s difficult to do business, where tents and RVs line side streets, and where the store that was supposed to be the anchor for the neighborhood—Fred Meyer—is a shell. The property remains on the market. The asking price dropped this winter from $50.8 million to $44 million, and city officials, while floating some ideas for what the property might be used for, haven’t made any official moves.
