Church of Elvis

It's baaack! Portland's legendary 24 Hour Church of Elvis returned recently, after a long absence I'd assumed was permanent. It has a new Old Town location on NW Couch near 4th, but other than that it looks the same as the original, mumble-mumble years ago, right down to the psychic Commodore 64 computers. I fed one of them a quarter for old times sake, and took a couple of photos, which attracted the attention of a few passers-by in the process. As I always say, I like to believe I'm performing a valuable public service when this happens.

That's why the 3rd photo is so crappy actually: A woman wanted to show it to her young daughters, passing the bemusement on to the next generation. So I snapped the last photo quickly and got out of the way. Most real photographers would have told them to go right ahead and would've been delighted to have some live people in the photo. But that's not really how I roll here, for good or ill. This humble blog is basically about places and things. People, not so much.

Updated 8/5/2025: Sadly the 2009 revival was all too brief, and the NW Couch location was gone again by 2013. The website stayed up until sometime in late 2016, and I updated the link above to point at one of the last Wayback Machine copies of the site, before it became a content-less parked domain. Unfortunately a lot of the archived web content was created in Flash and is no longer playable due to the Flashpocalypse. I vaguely recall that at one point the Archive.org folks were working on some kind of process sandbox for running old Flash content, but I haven't heard a word about that in years, so maybe that didn't work out in the end.

I also don't know what Stephanie Pierce, the Church's longtime proprietor, is up to these days; no further incarnations of the Church have appeared in the last 12 years, so maybe she has completely moved on from Elvis-adjacent kitsch at this point. And it just might be that, although it captured the spirit of the times in the late 80s and early 90s, those times are long gone now, and GenZ kids might just be bewildered by the whole thing. And as a practical matter, vintage, working C64s are now a bit too valuable to just leave running in an unattended Old Town storefront, and they'd probably be stolen within hours. Still, it would be fun if it could be experienced again somehow, just for the sake of old times. Maybe as a recreated storefront inside the Portland Art Museum someday, or maybe the Oregon Historical Society, I dunno. Maybe if you work up the nerve to go 'inside' you end up in the real museum gift shop, or something like that. That would certainly be one way to appeal to aging GenX-ers as we stumble unwillingly toward the core art museum member/donor age bracket. It would be sort of like adding a wing full of celebrity guitars to lure aging boomers back in the 90s.