24 October 2005

[pdx_life] Another Eastside Sign Code Victim

Facing east, SE Division Street just west of SE 164th Avenue, Approximately mid October 2003:


This was a noble old sign, back from the days when such places were where the housewife did the shopping. It just radiates Chevy Bel-air-tailfin-women in Capris-suburban '60s, don't it?

Sadly it, too, is gone. Seems the old Big Dollar Shopping Center is going through some renovations, and the sign is gone, replaced by a sign that is really not worth going out and taking a picture of.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

3 comments:

stan said...

Losing that sign is like losing a piece of my childhood. I'll never forget Mom taking us along when we went to the drug-store post office to get "C" rate stamps, or strolling along the aisles of Scott's 88-Cent Store, which was connected -- on the inside, which was the coolest thing ever for a nerdy kid -- to the Safeway store.

stan said...

Or I could be confusing that corner with 162nd and Stark, I'm not sure. Division had a Thriftway store which became a Videoland, which apparently became an Aaron's Crap-For-Rent store.

Samuel John Klein said...

I'm sympthetic. I've always had a thing for signs and I remember the way they'd give a street a certain sort of character and feeling. Some of them where kitschy, kinda-suburban-trashy but brilliant works of art.

The Zim's sign should go without saying.

The BigDollar sign just reminded me of when I saw suburbs on shows like Adam-12, the suburban feel of the TV landscape. I grew up in Silverton, where there's no such thing as a suburb–even to this day.

For a while it looked as though I'd lost the photo of the sign. You can imagine how we felt about that.

Yeh-neighboring stores connected so's you don't have to go outside to get to the other one...that was cool.