Street Roots reflects on some of the characters that made Old Town what it was – and is today
From the rooftop patio of The Society Hotel, guests can relax and enjoy a fine cocktail high above the complex intersection of Northeast Third Avenue and Davis Street.
To the south is a Japanese tea shop, an echo of Japantown, one of the neighborhood’s many historic identities. To the east is C.C. Slaughters and Darcelle XV, institutions of LGBTQ+ night life, and kitty corner is the requisite Starbucks.
Below is also a stream of patrons to the methadone clinic, which serves people in recovery from heroin addiction, and milling about are the clients and residents of numerous social service agencies that are located in and adjacent to the neighborhood: Union Gospel Mission, Sisters of the Road, Portland Rescue Mission, St. Andre Bessette, The Maybelle Center for Community, Musolf Manor, Central City Concern, Transitions Projects, Street Roots, etc.
Old Town today is a 24-hour community, and the confluence of two historic districts cradling the city’s earliest heritage. It’s home to a concentrated population of people struggling with homelessness, poverty, addiction and mental illness. It has gone in and out of fashion over the past century, and it’s poised for big changes to come.
The Society Hotel is located in a “fine, substantial brick” building, as the Seaman’s Friend Society described it – one built to be a “boarding house of good character,” according to history documented by Barney Blaylock in his book “Portland’s Lost Waterfront.”
The year was 1883, and for $13,000, the Society had created a safe boarding house for sailors looking for rest, removed from the “crimps” and ship captains who traded in hustled seaman. Built on a moral code of temperance and Christianity, the Seaman’s Friend Society also saw it as a way to “improve the social and moral conditions of seamen, by uniting the efforts of the wise and good on their behalf,” Blaylock writes.
Despite Old Town’s often unsavory reputation, caring for people in need seems to be one of this neighborhood’s oldest vocations.
In this series, Street Roots reflects on some of the characters that made Old Town what it was – and is today – before it changes forever, again.
READ MORE: To read additional coverage in our Old Town/Chinatown issue, buy the newspaper from a Street Roots vendor.
THIS CLEARING along the shores of the Willamette River, in Chinook territory, was platted in the 1840s by Captain John Couch, a China trader from New England. He built the original neighborhood for his family and settlers.
“They were the keepers of this neighborhood for 40 years,” said Jackie Peterson-Loomis, executive director of the Portland Chinatown History Foundation. “It was the first downtown.”
By the time The Society was being built, in the early 1880s, Capt. Couch had died and the remaining Couch families moved westward, building new mansions near what we now call Nob Hill.
“That’s when things suddenly start to fall apart,” Peterson-Loomis said. “It coincides with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and all kinds of things are happening in the country. This is post Civil War, and the collapse of the deal with the Southern states, so it’s the beginning of Jim Crow. And it’s a period of real antagonism against Native Americans, African-Americans, Chinese – toward everybody.”
The neighborhood we now know as Old Town/Chinatown had become a bustling confluence of sailors, longshoremen and laborers – single men – needing a place to flop between jobs and shipments. It wasn’t long before Old Town had become the vice district, the Las Vegas before Las Vegas.
Soon after the turn of the century, the Chinese community left its once booming Chinatown along Second Avenue south of Burnside, and resettled several blocks north, pushed out by the growing white population that discriminated heavily against Chinese society.
Marie Rose Wong, the author of the 2004 book “Sweet Cakes, Long Journey” about Portland’s Chinatown, wrote that in 1869, “The Oregonian predicted that within 30 years, the population of the state and the country would double and that anyone who wanted to purchase land as an investment or for farming should do so before the opportunity disappeared. … A guarantee of ‘personal independence’ was to be found in property ownership, either rural or urban.”
In fact, between 1870 and 1900, she writes, the population of Portland swelled more than nine times from 9,565 to 90,000. Immigrants teemed the shores of Old Town, migrant workers filled the cheap rooms in the neighborhood during the winter, prostitution and gambling thrived, and Old Town’s reputation became cemented in poverty and vice.
In 1905, Portland hosted the Lewis and Clark Exposition, and the city continued to grow rapidly.
“Property values went up, rents went up, lots of Eastern capital flowed in,” Peterson-Loomis said.
As the city thrived, the upwardly mobile left Old Town behind. Still, the neighborhood continued to accept generations of poor and marginalized people – through the Depression and later with the onset of urban homelessness – while the rest of the city grew fashionable and affluent.
“Skid Row is, however, more than simply a poor neighborhood,” writes Chris Sawyer, in his eloquent 1985 doctoral thesis for Urban Studies from Portland State University. “It is a world of ironies, contradictions and paradoxes. The Skid Row district is a world where poverty and inhumanity are just as often juxtaposed by mutual aid and compassion: a world where unemployment and dereliction lie, literally, in the shadows of steady employment and glittering high-rise office buildings; an island of urban homeless destitution in a sea of suburban, middle class and family-oriented affluence.”
In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, former Portland mayor Bud Clark arrived in Portland at the age of 7. He arrived by steam train and rode through Old Town into the city. He remembers the scene, early evening with men standing around talking along the streets.
“It was my first impression of Portland,” he said.
It was a den of vice and prostitution, recalled Clark. He later delivered Meals on Wheels to the men in the SROs, the low-rent, single-room occupancy hotels that the women were afraid to enter. It was the part of town where “if you want to do something illegal, you go down there,” Clark said. As mayor in the 1980s, Clark championed the city’s 12-Point Plan on Homelessness.
FROM ITS vantage at the corner of Northeast Third Avenue and Davis Street, The Society Hotel straddles past, present and future. Two blocks away, the once dilapidated Grove Hotel that sheltered low-income residents has become the sleek and trendy Hoxton, a beacon on Burnside, catering to tourists. On Fourth Avenue, what was once a strip club, now beckons creatives to open boutiques.
Toward the waterfront, the parking lot at First Avenue and Davis Street is now the 38 Davis building with luxury apartments cashing in on Old Town’s river views. And a 16-story apartment building is in the works for the parking lot between Fourth and Fifth avenues. At 160 feet, the design had to receive an exception from the Portland City Council to exceed the height limits for the Chinatown/Japantown Historic District.
These changes are expected to increase as development incentives go up and design barriers go down.
Jessie Burke, a partner in the ownership of The Society, has been involved with the Old Town Chinatown Community Association for five years, only recently stepping down from its board of directors. But she remains invested in the neighborhood personally and professionally.
“I think that Old Towns everywhere are the heart of what always was in that city,” she said. “It’s the original downtown.”
The Society serves about 20,000 guests a year, Burke said, and each one receives an emailed note stating in essence, “This is an urban environment, and we we expect people to prepare for it.”
Burke defends the neighborhood in the face of criticism, and she bristles when people dismiss Old Town’s potential and its residents. She wants to see Old Town develop more market-rate housing and a viable mix of businesses, and she wants it always to be a place where everyone is welcome.
She likens its success to nurturing a child.
“Neighborhoods are like children. If you want a child to succeed, you love them even when they don’t deserve it, you give them resources, and you speak highly of them even when they’re not around,” she said.
“This is like your oldest child,” she continued. “It’s been here the longest, it’s been through a lot, but it’s also the one that always catches everybody,” she said. “Everyone’s allowed to be here.”
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org.
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