SE 6th & Stark street mural

Next up, here are a few photos of the other Green Loop street mural on the eastside, after the one at SE 2nd & Caruthers that we just visited. This one's at SE 6th & Stark St. and has sort of a Hispanic / Central American theme to it. The theme comes from being right outside the Milagro Theatre, the Northwest's only Hispanic live theater company. Which staged La Bici -- an original play with a bike safety theme -- in fall 2021, I guess in conjunction with the mural and the whole Green Loop PR effort.

I didn't really have a lot of material for this post, or any other super-genius startup ideas to share with you, so I put the intersection into the library's Oregonian database to see if anything interesting had ever happened here. It turns out that way back in 1924 there was actually a bike shop here, or (strictly speaking) a motorcycle dealer that also sold bikes. The classified ads read "BICYCLES, $10 DOWN, $1 PER WK., Tricycles, coasters, scooters, etc., EAST SIDE MOTORCYCLE CO., Cor. E 6th-Stark. EA 1000". More ads of theirs appeared starting in 1933, now advertising that they sold new Harleys as well as used motorcycles of all types. An assortment of other industrial-type businesses followed, which I won't bore you with since it's just not very interesting.

I also tried searching on the theater's street address, which also wasn't very interesting until around 1948 when the current building went in. The new building was originally home to the shiny, new House of Fong Chinese restaurant & nightclub. Which in that era would have naturally had space for a live band and dancing after a dinner of inauthentic Chinese food. I'm imagining something along the lines of Club Obi-Wan in the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, though perhaps without the huge Hollywood song-and-dance production numbers. This space also doubled as banquet space so your large business or fraternal group could have a big party here, and the papers listed lots of these events over the next couple of years. These notices stopped abruptly in October 1950, so the place may have gone out of business right around then. One of the last mentions of the club came in May when a safecracker (who was arrested elsewhere in town) was found with plans to the House of Fong building, and a receipt for buying a gun.

The empty building was advertised for sale occasionally for a few years, eventually becoming the Backstage Coffee House sometime before 1961. This was obviously long before my time, but the name and the date make me think beatniks, free jazz, and improv poetry, maybe some avant-garde theater or interpretive dance, that sort of thing. And sure enough, the first mention of the place in the paper was when it became the venue for a new local repertory theater company. It seems the coffee house stayed open rather late and segued into the Backstage Club (featuring live music again) at some point in the evening, and later that year it saw a police raid for violating the city's new after-hours dancing ordinance, with several arrests including the club's 71 year old co-owner. The news story explained that Portlanders of 1961 were not permitted to dance in public after 1:30am, unless the club had a liquor license in which case patrons could keep dancing until 2:30am. I'm not sure of the subsequent details of that particular legal drama, but by December of that year the club was advertising that it opened at 2:30am, 7 nights a week, featuring a gentleman named Wally Dee at the piano bar. The aforementioned co-owner passed away in 1962, and her obit mentioned that she had once had her own jazz orchestra that performed regularly at the Crystal Ballroom (yes, that Crystal Ballroom). In 1963 the club or some part of it was known as the Downstage nightclub, which saw another police raid, this time for various liquor law violations, with six arrests for various severe offenses such as drinking liquor from a plastic container.

That may have been curtains for the club, as the next time the street address appeared in the paper was in 1967 when it became home to Eagles Lodge No. 3256, and various fraternal activities ensued for the next decade or so. 1975 saw yet another police raid, this time for operating an illegal bingo game. Five people were arrested, one on felony charges, although all charges were dropped soon afterward when it turned out the police had not gotten a warrant first before barging in.

The Eagles migrated elswhere around 1977, and after that the building was briefly home to a craft mall in 1978, and an Asian-style furniture store in the 1980s, before becoming the present-day theater in the early 90s.

So that's what I've got for this particular location, but if you're still interested in history and are up for a longer bike ride, might I suggest continuing east on Stark to see the old Stark St. Milestones, a series of stone distance markers that continue east along Stark all the way to Mt. Hood Community College, with one marker per mile minus a few that have been misplaced since the mid-19th century. Milestone P2 is the first you'll encounter, embedded in the north wall of Lone Fir Cemetery. If you get to MHCC and you're still up for a longer ride, the same milestone numbering continues east as part of the Columbia River Highway, with mile 31 putting you west of Multnomah Falls, and mile 35 is around the Ainsworth freeway exit. The HCRH bike trail will (largely) get you as far as The Dalles, and fragments of the old road continue east as far as Pendleton. At which point it becomes the Old Oregon Trail Highway and continues eastward to Idaho and points unknown. If you're feeling ambitious, I mean.

Madison Street Plaza mural

Ok, here are some photos of yet another painted intersection, once again in downtown Portland. If you aren't familiar with this mildly weird local thing, the previous one of these that I covered back in January tries to explain a bit. The current one we've visiting is another twist on the usual theme in that it's an official city government project by the Bureau of Transportation and painted by hired artists, not at all a community volunteer thing. Madison St. Plaza here (which is just across from the Portland Art Museum) is one of at least four new 'plazas', all painted as part of a wider effort the city calls "The Green Loop", which is a bit hard to explain. It's sort of an official bike loop around the central city -- that's downtown plus the central eastside -- enhanced with things that are either trendy here right now, or were trendy before Covid, or at least were cool sometime in the last 15 years or so. So, occasional "everybody ride the Green Loop today" events, complete with obscure local bands you probably haven't heard of playing along the route; food cart pods; street paintings like the one here; that sort of thing. I was all ready to snark about this; I figured the city was trying to create a Disney-fied version of the real things, aimed at tourists and rich developers and conveniently close to upscale hotels downtown and around the Convention Center, and routed past the front doors of sponsoring businesses.

Eventually I realized what the city was really up to. Despite our heavily cultivated reputation around being the perfect bike & pedestrian city, we still have a really high rate of traffic fatalities and serious injuries here, and the numbers keep increasing, which leads to people asking the city how they're going to fix it. The city seems to think that one quick and easy, if partial, mitigation would be if people would stick to side streets more and avoid riding in heavy traffic and darting around 18-wheelers and gigantic SUVs from the 'burbs. You can even put together a network of these safer routes around town and give out maps. The city's done that for years now, and some people pay attention to that sort of thing religiously and others... don't. A lot of other people respond badly to safety-based appeals; they see it as victim blaming, or at least being told to eat their vegetables instead of just gobbling glucose gel packs all the time. So the plan, as I understand it, is to take the existing safer routes and make them look cool and trendy, so people will sort of gravitate to them of their own accord without any safety lectures. At least I think that's what the plan is, unless I'm giving them too much credit.

Whether the execution on the street murals and the curation of food carts and so forth is good enough to pull this off is a whole other question, obviously. And of course there will be cynics out there who see right through what the city's trying to do and reject it out of hand, and if too many people start thinking that way the city will have to come up with an alternative (but still safe) route that isn't 'corporate', but without anyone clueing in that it's another safety campaign. But hey, that's why city bureaucrats make the big bucks. Or at least why they have a good pension plan. I mean, I assume they still have a good pension plan, I dunno.