3498.
On the SW corner of SE 82nd and Division is a building that's been there a long, long time. For a great many hears it was the SE Portland home of Banner Furniture (which is now merely a single location out in Hillsboro), and before that, it was SE Portland's Piggly Wiggly outlet (according to the indispensable Michael Long) - I would have guessed a Safeway, since Piggly Wigglys never got down to Silverton or Salem (as far as I knew) when I was a kid and the old Safeway on East Main had a similar design and footprint).
Currently it serves as a community event venue and center called JAMS (Jade/APANO Multicultural Space), which is currently being leased by APANO, and is one of the current and evolving features of the core of area along SE 82nd between E Burnside and SE Powell which has been dubbed the Jade District. A great number of east Asian-owned businesses and culture have come out this way to join those that were already there (the Canton Grill, the late Legin (once the Lung Fung East - the pagoda-styled building razed to allow PCC-Southeast to expand) and the FuBonn shopping complex, amongst others) to form a burgeoning outer-east Portland cultural community that is evolving by the day, it seems.
JAMS bills itself as a temporary step between here and there; the building while in good repair, is clearly venerable and ripe for up-development. Until then, it's the community center that this area needs, and while it's there, it's using the old front windows, facing SE 82nd, to good effect.
There are large posters there, and one series that has caught my eye in the past few months, in the top tier of the windows facing 82nd, is a series of posters that appear to show the territorial growth of Portland since 1845.
Here's the one for 1845:
... and Portland in 1875 ...
... and Portland in 1915 ...
... by now you're noticing three things. First, the information is minimal; the visual profile of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers are clearly recognizable, the city's apparent extent limned by a thick red line, the interior of the shape filled with a vigorous, energetic, rough cross-hatching that looks like it was made on scratchboard. Secondly, the presentation is not complex, it's simple as it is direct. And, thirdly, it's rather inaccurate. The city area seems outsized and shifted to the north and west of where it should be.
So, it's a map ... but it's as much art as map. It's beginning to give me a gut-level, subjective idea of how Portland grew and despite - or perhaps because - of the informational subjectivity, it's incredibly engaging.
Now, 1945:
... 1975 ...
... and, appropriately instead of any particular year in that decade, we have the 1980s. Not only was this a 'fuzzy' time when old Portland began to change into new Portland, I can't really think of one exemplar year that would do justice to the whole decade. It was so chaotic it so many ways politically, economically, socially, and artistically.
The map does have a particularly valuable insight, in that the uniform red boundary line elsewhere in the map expands to a region on the east, and the caption 'unincorporated East-County' seems to appear as an explanation. That's an excellent way of noting that culturally and economically, even though the area between 82nd/I-205 and Gresham was part of Portland in every way but governmentally; that area was still Multnomah County. During the 1980s, of course, that era swiftly closed out, as the unincorporated land between Gresham and Portland was divvied up between the two in a rapid series of annexations which left the only unincorporated areas of Multnomah County those northwest of Linnton and that east of Troutdale and Gresham by the turn of the 2000s.
The sequence ends in 2016.
This is Portland as we have it today, with six major freeways slicing it into six easy pieces. The freeway meanders reduced to pixel-like steps, the area of "Portland" spilling over into what's actually Vancouver, the informational inaccuracy is at once aggressive on the left brain but informative to the right. Portland always has been a state of mind, now more than ever, and whysoever the art was designed this way, it's very engaging on a mind and soul level.
Currently it serves as a community event venue and center called JAMS (Jade/APANO Multicultural Space), which is currently being leased by APANO, and is one of the current and evolving features of the core of area along SE 82nd between E Burnside and SE Powell which has been dubbed the Jade District. A great number of east Asian-owned businesses and culture have come out this way to join those that were already there (the Canton Grill, the late Legin (once the Lung Fung East - the pagoda-styled building razed to allow PCC-Southeast to expand) and the FuBonn shopping complex, amongst others) to form a burgeoning outer-east Portland cultural community that is evolving by the day, it seems.JAMS bills itself as a temporary step between here and there; the building while in good repair, is clearly venerable and ripe for up-development. Until then, it's the community center that this area needs, and while it's there, it's using the old front windows, facing SE 82nd, to good effect.
There are large posters there, and one series that has caught my eye in the past few months, in the top tier of the windows facing 82nd, is a series of posters that appear to show the territorial growth of Portland since 1845.
Here's the one for 1845:
... and Portland in 1875 ...
... and Portland in 1915 ...
... by now you're noticing three things. First, the information is minimal; the visual profile of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers are clearly recognizable, the city's apparent extent limned by a thick red line, the interior of the shape filled with a vigorous, energetic, rough cross-hatching that looks like it was made on scratchboard. Secondly, the presentation is not complex, it's simple as it is direct. And, thirdly, it's rather inaccurate. The city area seems outsized and shifted to the north and west of where it should be.
So, it's a map ... but it's as much art as map. It's beginning to give me a gut-level, subjective idea of how Portland grew and despite - or perhaps because - of the informational subjectivity, it's incredibly engaging.
Now, 1945:
... 1975 ...
... and, appropriately instead of any particular year in that decade, we have the 1980s. Not only was this a 'fuzzy' time when old Portland began to change into new Portland, I can't really think of one exemplar year that would do justice to the whole decade. It was so chaotic it so many ways politically, economically, socially, and artistically.
The map does have a particularly valuable insight, in that the uniform red boundary line elsewhere in the map expands to a region on the east, and the caption 'unincorporated East-County' seems to appear as an explanation. That's an excellent way of noting that culturally and economically, even though the area between 82nd/I-205 and Gresham was part of Portland in every way but governmentally; that area was still Multnomah County. During the 1980s, of course, that era swiftly closed out, as the unincorporated land between Gresham and Portland was divvied up between the two in a rapid series of annexations which left the only unincorporated areas of Multnomah County those northwest of Linnton and that east of Troutdale and Gresham by the turn of the 2000s.
The sequence ends in 2016.
This is Portland as we have it today, with six major freeways slicing it into six easy pieces. The freeway meanders reduced to pixel-like steps, the area of "Portland" spilling over into what's actually Vancouver, the informational inaccuracy is at once aggressive on the left brain but informative to the right. Portland always has been a state of mind, now more than ever, and whysoever the art was designed this way, it's very engaging on a mind and soul level.
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