Hail to the FleetTwo Short Features and a Sequel
A few projects are taking longer to come around than I had hoped. In the mean time, some odds & ends, and a few more movies…
The Big Guy Stays
As the 1950s [...]
The Wizard of Oz Moment
1939 was a good year for movies;
“Gone With the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach” and “Ninotchka” all premiered that year.
It was also the year when Dorothy and Toto departed sepia-toned Kansas for the Techicolored Land of Oz in her [...]
At the Pig and Whistle
Portland in wartime, 1943.
The city was energized with round the clock activity as it strained to meet the war effort. In less than one year’s time, Portland had been transformed into one of the country’s primary shipbuilding centers. Above the shipyards [...]
Farewell Nick’sNick’s Famous Coney Island doesn’t need an introduction and it probably doesn't need another goodbye, but I can’t let that most Portland of institutions pass without a tribute.
Nick’s will close in February after 73 years on Hawthorne.
It will be' [...]
The City in Flames
London, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle-
Great cities have Great Fires. Portland’s was on August Second, 1873.
Portland in the early 1870s. Note the original line of Park Blocks, from one end of [...]
In Search of Lost Time…
Two years ago I began Café Unknown, a series of articles on Portland, it place, its history and its past in the present.
Actually, I had no idea what it would be about. Advances in spell-check technology encouraged [...]
Interstate
This blog, Café Unknown, is not so much about history as it is about place.
Perhaps the difference is merely semantic, as for me the two are closely intertwined.
Without continuity of place, a city loses its identity, it becomes a merely a collection of buildings, pipes [...]
A Spinster on the Trail
In the 1890s it was said that the trio of great cities on the west coast; San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, were as three sisters, a debutante, a tart and a spinster.
San Francisco, wealthy with decades of mining, shipping and railroad fortunes was the [...]
Council Crest…Glass Hill…Talbot’s Mountain…Fairmont… Dreamland.
All names that described the high point above Portland atop the West Hills.
Of them, Council Crest is the best known, Talbot’s Mountain the most legitimate. But Dreamland, the most appropriate.
The site of today’s Council Crest Park [...]
For You A Rose In Portland Grows
The Centennial year of the Portland Rose Festival has been a chance to look back at how the celebration and the city have changed over time. Billboards, magazines, films and newspapers have featured views of the festival [...]
Worth Saving
It’s an old story, perhaps best illustrated by “The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton, a classic children’s book written in 1942.
Slowly, at first, the outside world approaches…
Portland Romanesque
The Dekum Building.As Portland’s downtown moved inland in the eighteen eighties and nineties, the size, the shape and the look of its buildings changed as well. Out of fashion were the elegant cast iron fronted commercial buildings with their Italianate facades [...]
The Portland of Robert Moses
Robert Moses's name is writ large on New York in freeways, parks, parkways, dams and miles of squalid landscapes of failed urban renewal.
On a national scope, his methods and teachings also inspired the generation of highway planners that built the Interstate Highway System.
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The Bridge Diner
They were talking about old days and old ways and all the changes that have come on London in the last weary years; a little party of three of them, gathered for a rare meeting in Perrotts rooms.
One man, the [...]
Lost and Found
A survey of Portlands venerable and storied parking lots could start here, at the corner of First and Stark Streets.
The lot covers nearly two thirds of Block #38 (Lots #1 through #6 specifically). In land use parlance it [...]
House of Inman, House of Poulsen
Vanished Symmetry.
Like sentries they stood at the east approach of the Ross Island Bridge, two identical Queen Anne mansions on either side of Powell Boulevard.
The Poulsen House exists today, one of the finest examples [...]
Before Sky 8...
Before News Chopper 6...
Before Air 12...
There was the Newsroom Dragonfly.
It was purchased by the Oregon Journal in 1947, the first helicopter in the country used by a newspaper for news coverage.
A state wide news sensation, its career [...]
Forgotten Portland
One of my favorite web-sites is Forgotten New York, where obscure or hidden pieces of old infrastructure are placed into the context of New York Citys vast historic narrative.
It is harder to do in Portland. After all, there is so much more in New York [...]
In the 1940s photographers in Portland, such as Minor White, began to document the heartbreaking piecemeal destruction of Old Portlands cast-iron fronted city beside the river. Thirty years later when the process was complete, only twenty of [...] 
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