Portland. Everyone’s idea of the perfectly-planned city. And by and large, it is. A dense, thriving downtown surrounded by a compact, thoroughly pleasant city. Good transit, water and bridges, hills, and more. And there are an infinite number of not terribly expensive short-term parking spaces downtown. It works well, and it hasn’t been overplanned to the point of looking like a theme park.

 

We hit downtown relatively early so as to allow plenty of time for exploring the central city and Powell’s City of Books, which is an absolute essential and may be the single most compelling reason to visit Portland. It provided several hours of entertainment and caused Mark to paart with quite a bit of money. I spent less, but was still quite entertained.

 

We roamed around downtown for quite a while, ate lunch, and made the rush hour drive back to Tigard via old US99W. This was about the point we started noticing that Portland’s suburbs have an unusually high number of adult bookstore chains. And that 99W (aka Barbur Boulevard) was going to be an interesting drive at night, what with all the neon to be seen.

 

And we were right. We spent a good chunk of the evening driving around Portland at night, looking for views in the hills, looking for beer at the QFC, and taking pictures of neon signs. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves on the next page.

 

The Burlingame Fred Meyer is a wonderful thing. Fred Meyer is an interesting Portland institution to begin with: as one of the first large suburban retailers in the area, they demonstrated an uncanny knack for knowing where development would occur and being there to meet it. They were innovative stores as well, combining general merchandise and groceries, and introducing such things as rooftop parking, etc.

 

Hollywood, where I bedded down last time I visited, is always worth a look.

 

As is Sandy Boulevard (US 30) in general. The area around Lloyd Center, Portland’s first shopping center outside downtown, and the convention center would be more interesting if anything looked much like it did when first constructed.

 

After the tour of Portland by night, we took the long way home via old US 99E (aka McLaughlin Boulevard), through scenic Milwaukie, and found the place where we’d be having our morning meal.

Rest well, Dr. Scholl…

In response to a request for elaboration about yesterday’s list of cities I might like (or hate) to live in, I’ll offer the following bits of info on what I do or don’t like in a city. And if some of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is, but I don’t think the original essay is posted anymore…

I like cities with a distinct urban “feel’, but this is a subjective thing. Some people think “urban” means Times Square in New York or Union Square in SF, but I’m more inclined to give that designation to ares like the Outer Mission or Brooklyn. I like a little grit and a certain reality. I don’t do tourist traps nor malls…

I also like cities to have texture. By texture, I’m not referring to successive waves of gentrification which have turned interesting working class neighborhoods into cutesy little boutique zones. Texture refers to a mix of building ages and types. It means things like diners and hardware stores rather than shops selling nothing but ironic greeting cards…

I don’t like places which, like so much of the sunbelt, appear to be nothing but stucco and plastic, all of it seemingly erected last week. I’m not fond of “upscale” places, nor of large and visible “gay neighborhoods”. These places tend to be exceedingly boring and bland and superficial, and full of similarly boring and bland and superficial people I don’t want to share the sidewalk with…

I like places with enough of a literate and collegiate presence to support good bookstores and good, cheap restaurants, but without that annoying and overpowering “college town” syndrome. That’s also why I tend to like bigger cities; they can absorb a large university presence without being overwhelmed by it…

I like places where transit is a viable option, but not the only one. I’d like not to have to drive, but I’d also like to be able to do so when I feel like it. I like some density, but not so much that it makes completing the simplest task a nightmarish challenge…

I am completely unconcerned with being around a large “gay community”, nor do I care much about “cultural opportunities” like the opera, the ballet, etc. I judge a city based on its good and cheap restaurants rather than its four-star “fine dining” experiences. I want a five dollar meal, not a five dollar cup of coffee. And I’m more worried about having an easily-accessible Target or Wal-Mart than a Macy’s or a Bloomie’s…

And when I get bored with the city I’m in, I’d like there to be lots more within easy driving distance…

Hope that begins to clear it all up…

Some days I have a morning like I had today, and I get to thinking that for half a dollar, I’d move out of San Francisco tomorrow. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but being a resident of a large, urban area seems less and less worth the effort with each passing year…

it’s more pronounced since I’ve been spending so much time in the relative sanity of the Central Valley the last few months, but it’s been building for quite a while. There’s just not much here which excites me enough to compensate for the fact that living in a crowded, compact place like San Francisco is a bit of a pain in the ass…

I crave the ability to park within a block of my house. And to actually HAVE a house, rather than to pay rent which would cover a nice mortgage anyplace else. I fantasize about not having to stand in long lines everyplace and not ending up in a homicidal rage if I decide to go to the Safeway earlier than 10PM…

I no longer want to wait 45 minutes for buses which are supposed to run at 10-minute intervals, nor to be packed into these buses like sardines with people who never learned the basics of personal hygeine and etiquette. I’m tired of being panhandled twice in every block and of never being able to light a cigarette without some complete stranger walking up and assuming I owe him one too…

I am not impressed with the ability to walk to a corner store and pay nine dollars for a box of stale corn flakes and four dollars for a quart of curdled milk. I am also unimpressed with the array of pretentious and overpriced restaurants at my disposal. The fact that I can walk a block and have sex with a speed freak in a dark bar also holds very little charm anymore…

The cable sucks. The newspaper sucks. Getting from point A to point B is difficult enough, and dealing with point B once you arrive is even worse. There WILL be a line, no matter what the establishment, and it WILL be full of people in big, ugly square-toed shoes who have “issues” with everything from the service to the chemical content of their braised tofu to their parents, and will spend ten minutes discussing these issues in the most annoying and long-winded terms possible, everyone else in line be damned…

I want to pay reasonable amounts for groceries and gas (and housing). I want to go to Target on a whim without it seeming like an expedition to Mars, and with the assumption that I’ll be able to splash down somewhere near where I live when I get back. And I want never to get on a bus again unless it’s by my choice and at my leisure.

I imagine I’ll get arguments from the “urban sophisticates” who believe all civilization ends at the SF city limits (or even worse, at Twin Peaks and Bernal Heights). Tough. I don’t go to art museums nor to the symphony. I don’t shop at any of the trendy boutiques in Union Square. I frankly don’t care how much of a “gay community” I’m surrounded by. I don’t go to nightclubs with $15 covers and $20 cocktails. My lifestyle does not require a large selection of headshops, leather shops, and gourmet cookware stores. I do not crave constant interaction with “colorful” (read “crazy”) people, and I do not believe that stepping in human excrement or syringes on the street adds anything particularly beneficial to my life…

There’s basically almost nothing I do here which I couldn’t do just about as efficiently in any mid-sized city in the country. So why I am I here? Inertia and the weather. That’s about it, and they’re both losing their grip on me…

Just think: if I’d actually pursued a career in planning, I could have spent all my time coming up with grandiose schemes like this one, which will probably never come to pass (and probably never should)…

What is this fascination so many small and medium-size sunbelt cities have with downtown stadiums and “grand pedestrian plazas” with cutesy little concrete doodads? They’re just like those stupid “downtown mall” schemes which blocked off main steets by the hundreds in the 1970s and are now being ripped up all over the country after succeeding at little but turning Main Street into a giant shooting gallery…

And why is it that municipal governments, when faced with lots of colorful sketches of ideas which have failed miserably everywhere else they’ve been tried, always manage to convince themselves that their city is the one place in the whole country where the scheme will definitely work and will “save downtown”, as long as enough money is poured into it?

If people decide to return en masse to downtown Greensboro (or Charlotte or Fresno or wherever), it will be beacuse an interesting culture has developed there over time which provides something not available elsewhere. It will not be because of some grand city-financed “master plan” which redesigns everything and assigns it a cute little name. And spending a fortune to induce white suburbanites to use mass transit is just plain ridiculous in most cities of the south and the west; it’s never going to happen…

They’ve already rebuilt downtown Greensboro about three times since 1970. Strangely enough, its most prosperous times have been the years before and in between, when they just left everything the hell alone…

If this sounds like a rather conservative viewpoint, it’s not really. I don’t mind cities spending money. What I mind is cities spending money on complete idiocy…