An Irishwoman’s Diary: Discovering Portland

Like the hardened cowboys and prospectors who filled its saloons and opium dens during the gold rush of the 19th century, Portland, Oregon, gives up its secrets reluctantly. You’ll need inside information to trace the city’s story, from Chinook Indian homeland to pioneer outpost, from thriving jazz scene in the 1930s to stomping ground of the grunge movement 50 years later.

In between there was the 1963 local recording of Louie Louie that triggered an FBI obscenity investigation, and trumped-up trouble in 1993 at the X-Ray Café – haunt of the Dandy Warhols and Kurt Cobain – that became known as the Anarchist Riot.

Without local knowledge, though, you won’t find where it all happened. The city has been busy moving on and up, and it’s hard to see beyond the pleasing, shiny veneer of organic food shops, vegan cafes, retro fashion boutiques and “beervana” microbreweries. Gentle, gentrified Portland, parody of hipsterville, is at risk of developing amnesia.

Non-landmarks

Community group Know Your City has stepped in to jog the local memory. One of its free walking tours takes in what might be described as non-landmarks: locations once associated with the big music and social movements but where little or no trace remains. It’s a service that brings history to life while ensuring the city’s musical stature is not overhauled along with the neighbourhoods that facilitated its greatness.

On a recent Sing-a-Song-of-Portland walk, music historian and jazz trumpeter Stan Fonseca stands outside a three-storey building devoted to affordable housing on West Burnside Street in the Old Town Chinatown district. It was here, he explains, that August “Gus” Erickson, a Finnish immigrant, opened a saloon in the 1880s to cater for transient workers – sailors, loggers, gold miners and railroad workers. Portland was changing from wilderness outpost into urban centre.

Taking up most of a street block, Erickson’s boasted a 208m-bar where some 50 bartenders served five-cent beers and free smorgasbord lunches. So lucrative was the business, says Stan, that Erickson was unwilling to lose money for customer toilet breaks, and so had a urinal installed along the entire length of the bar. When the great flood of 1894 washed through the place, he rescued his beer barrels and served patrons from a barge.

A few steps up Burnside – one of the original skid rows, so-named because during Erickson’s time it was a wide mud route on which full lengths of trees were rolled down to the Willamette – stands a nondescript building. In the late 1980s this was a struggling pizza joint in a run-down neighbourhood, and its Greek owner encouraged local band the Kurtz Project to play there in the hope they might increase pizza sales. They didn’t, but the band members ended up taking over the lease and opening the X-Ray Café, an all-ages club frequented by punk rockers, belly dancers and metal bands dressed as clowns. The Dandy Warhols played and Cobain was a regular. Afternoon maths and Spanish classes were also offered.

Nirvana

It was here an apparent misunderstanding on the part of city authorities led to a stand-off between riot police and X-Ray revellers, who responded to the line-up of helmets and batons with a rendition of the

Hokey Pokey.

Some windows were smashed but charges against the alleged “anarchists” were later dropped. The incident heralded the end of the X-Ray, which is now a church.

Irony sometimes outdoes itself. The nearby Satyricon rock club, where Cobain met Courtney Love and where Nirvana played, is a home for the elderly.

Many of its residents no doubt remember the scandal surrounding the Richard Berry song Louie Louie, recorded by the Kingsmen in 1963 in what is now a high-end shoe shop on 13th Avenue under a sign that reads "Walk it out, bitch". The lyrics on the recording were so difficult to discern that some upstanding citizens wrote to then attorney general Robert Kennedy to complain of possible obscenity. An FBI investigation involved laboratory analysis of the record and a public call for suggestions as to what the lyrics might say, but was inconclusive. The submissions in the FBI file, says Stan, reveal more about the unspoken desires of the song's listeners than the song itself.

In a city blessed and cursed by gentrification, a walk around Portland with him helps set the record straight.

knowyourcity.org