Holst Architecture transformed two usable floors into four to maximize density for the Street Roots building by developing the roof and turning the basement into a wellness center with showers, laundry and Francine’s Beauty Parlour. Credit: Floor Plan by Holst Architecture
Your daily routine likely involves plumbing and hygiene. Perhaps you already showered today, shedding your sleep for a clean wakefulness. Maybe you will draw a bath in the evening, calming and cleaning yourself in the warm water.
All of this is a daily rejuvenation, allowing you to be clean enough to walk into work, a market or a case manager’s office without prompting a second glance.
It’s also part of your preventative health care. Bathing cleans scratches and wounds before they fester into infections.
If you then dry yourself, brush your hair, scrub your teeth and rub lotion into your cheeks before a mirror, you remind yourself of your face. You are not surprised by what you see.
These are rituals not to be taken for granted.
As we planned to expand our space and programs in 2021, Holst Architecture led discussions with Street Roots vendors about what they sought. Vendors’ number one request? Showers and laundry. This confirmed what Street Roots staff heard repeatedly throughout the years.
Many Street Roots vendors who advocated for these basic amenities now had access to showers. After experiencing homelessness, they’d achieved housing and wanted showers and laundry for the next vendors who were experiencing homelessness. They knew how difficult it was not only to lack those basics but also to maintain one’s self-esteem without them.
We were also committed to it because of the knowledge we accumulated from co-producing the Domicile Unknown report for the past decade with Multnomah County. This annual report tracks deaths on the streets, where people die decades before their time.
Both infections and despair can be life-threatening when left unattended on the streets.
To expand our services to include a Wellness Center, we’ve learned from community partners like Rose Haven, Hygiene for All, Sunnyside Shower Project and the Behavioral Health Resource Center. We also learn from vendors about their own experiences using showers.
Rose Haven, a day shelter and community center supporting women, children and people of marginalized genders experiencing homelessness and poverty, has long set up a space for people to fix themselves at vanities after they shower. When they renovated their space in 2022 on Northwest 18th Avenue and Glisan Street, executive director Katie O’Brien gave me a tour.
She explained to me that sometimes people need to have a solid cry in a shower where the water can rinse away the tears. It’s difficult, O’Brien said, for people to abruptly transition from that to the hard realities of homelessness, including a lack of privacy. That’s why Rose Haven prioritizes a beauty center, a place where people can more calmly transition.
I immediately thought of the late Francine Park, who would find the mirror in the tiny Street Roots kitchen to apply her glamorous layers of eye shadow and mascara. After she died, artist Helen Hill painted a sign that we hung in the kitchen: “Francine’s Beauty Parlour.”
Learning from Rose Haven, we knew we needed to create a small beauty parlor for the mental health of Street Roots vendors to transition after they shower. It would be “Francine’s Beauty Parlour.” Helen Hill’s sign would travel with us.
Holst Architecture embraced this. Architects Nici Stauffer and Hannah Rusnac designed two showers, one roomy enough for a person in a large wheelchair to navigate with ease. They also created a small beauty parlor with room for three vanities.
They added a moving detail: backlit mirrors. This light, they explained, was gentle. If a person had not seen their face for a while, or their face was worn with homelessness, it would be a little less shocking. It would be a little kinder for a person who might not feel their best, whose face is worn from nights of rough sleep.
Cole Reed, a designer leading a group of paid Street Roots vendors called the Flight Crew in this work, is finishing the design of Francine’s Beauty Parlour, including purchasing the three vanities to be stationed with these mirrors.
It’s a particularly thoughtful part of our building design, with knowledge gleaned from others doing this work.
As we place the finishing touches on our Burnside Building, we ask you to contribute to creating these spaces, including the stipends that pay vendors to support this work, and a fund we have for supporting the trauma-informed details throughout the project.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
