The Reason I Like This Hawthorne Address

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This is charming, no?

It's the transom of The Meadow, a shop next to Powell's and The Fresh Pot that sells chocolate, gourmet salts, bitters, and other trendy comestible impedimenta, and even though the font and the treatment wears its designedness with a smug pride, I love it.

I live the way the abbreviation "No." is in front of the address. That elevates it for me at the same time I kind of resent the way it knows it will charm me. 

You might say it has my number. 

The Eternal Bagdad Theater

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First run, second run, brewpub, back to first run ... it doesn't matter.

The Bagdad will always, always, be the Bagdad: Dated Orientalist decor and all.

I remember, a looong time ago, when me and The Brown-Eyed Girl was concluding an evening at Powell's, back when there was the cook's bookstore there, and someone was playing music and projecting an iTunes visualization from somewhere over our heads to the big wall of the theater opposite.

The reason this memory is dear is ineffable, I guarantee you. 

Hawthorne Blvd, Sept 2022

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There's been so much change (and so much money rushing in) but somehow it still looks and feels the same.

Mostly, anyway. 

A Slice Of SE Portland Gingerbread

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While we were near the Hawthorne Powell's Books on Labor Day, we saw this little confection:

The architectural style, says my wife, is 'gingerbread'. It's painted up like a delightful bit of candy. And that easel on the front? Stanning for Ukraine, of course.

We found this on SE 37th just north of Hawthorne Blvd, just beyond the Three Doors Down Cafe. 

The Mighty Clouds Over Hawthorne This Day

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The atmosphere over Portland and northwestern Oregon was rather unsettled today; the adage If you don't like Oregon's weather, just wait 5 minutes and it'll change applied.

It did make for gorgeous cloud displays, however.

There was a majesty there.

There's A Double-Decker Egyptian Coffee Bus On Hawthorne

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We don't get round to the Hawthorne District nearly as much as we used to, at least since the money arrived. And then the pandemic.

But we were there yesterday (reason to follow) and here, at the cart pod at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, I noticed there was a English double-decker bus amongst the other (at the time, closed for the day) purveyors.

 

It's the Tōv Coffee Bar, and they specialize in Egyptian-style coffee, according to their website, and are fairly well-reviewed, also according to their website. Well, USA Today reviewed them, so that's certainly a feather in the cap.

It, too was closed, at 5 PM on a pandemic Wednesday, so we weren't able to partake. Perhaps another time.

A Long View Down Hawthorne Blvd

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So late this afternoon we were westbound coming out of downtown via the Hawthorne Bridge and the light and the angle were just right, and I pointed my camera out front of the car and made it pretend it was a telephoto by zooming in real tight.

The stretch of road that got lensed here was approximately from SE 7th Avenue to SE 20th. At 20th, which is the northeast corner of Ladd's Addition, the street itself jogs to the south approximately the width of the street itself, which puts it out of full view from this POV; however, the telephone poles along the north side of the street still can be seen, until they top the crest at SE 28th Avenue and the landscape drops again to the retail district along upper Hawthorn. From this vantage the only thing that can be seen is the humpback form of Mount Tabor.

Mount Tabor itself is about three miles east of the spot I snapped the picture from.

The View From Zach's Shack, June, 2010

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If I throwback any harder I may just wind up back in 2010, who knows. A similar artifice worked for Christopher Reeve in Somewhere In Time. So, there's that.

Zach's Shack is a place on the north side of SE Hawthorne Blvd just east of SE 46th Avenue. It specializes in hot dogs and sausage dogs of many varieties, and is a funky space with retro concert posters and funky dogs named after Bob Dylan and New York and Chicago and such. The french fries are incomparable. And it was a nifty dark place to sit and watch Hawthorne Blvd go by.

This was the view out to the street in June, 2010.

Stumbling on this picture excites me because it makes me think of photo-realistic painting and I am planning on doing a painting based on this photo.

It's the way this looks like those snapshot photo-realism paintings I've seen so much of coming from that school. I like the way the SUV across Hawthorne rests on a spot roughly 1/3rd of a way up from the bottom, creating an asymmetrical composition in the classic style.

It's resolved. I'll be painting this soon. 

Downtown Portland From Mt. Tabor With Bonus Hawthorne Blvd 2010 Throwback Picture

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Last of the throwback treats for the day, this goes back to 2010, and is another composition taken off the brow of Mount Tabor, which is another way Portland's dear to me; I don't get the sort of emotion I get looking at this when I think of any other town I've been in.

In reviewing the photos I'm realizing that that evening, in July 2010, I was really pushing the Kodak EasyShare C813 to its limits. There's only so much low-light goodness you can get out of an 8.3 Mpx sensor designed into a camera meant to appeal to the people who thought, when I was a kid, that Kodak Instamatics were serious picture-taking (this is not the slag it may seem, after all ... I was that sort of person, growing up. Aggravated me that you couldn't take night shots with those cameras. Seemed rather unfair). 

So, sure the view of SE Hawthorne Blvd there in the lower left is a bit fuzzy and downtown set against the backdrop of hills and a bright sunset may be a bit grainy, but it's clear enough to call back that time, just a decade ago, and to those who know Portland's skyline, to remarkably show off that changed skyline. 

So many new buildings there now.

The haze of the physical picture artifacts come off as a kind of an artistic interpretation of memory, now. Warm and hazy, filled with emotion and meaning. Same planet, different world.

And so it goes.

Township And Range Restaurant:2013 Throwback

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This is a building that has held a number of restaurants and/or trend bars over the years; it's on the south side of SE Hawthorne Blvd at SE 24th Ave. At the time it was a bistro and bar called Township and Range, and I insisted we pull over and lens it because I adored the bold, angular fat script o the sign. It looked good, impressively good.

It was a bar which promoted itself as a 'friendly neighborhood tavern' sort of vibe which even in 2013 in Portland meant hyper-stylized American bar food with painfully local ingredients and prices to match the attitude ... and even then Hawthorne was the kind of place where the patina of gentrification had soaked in to become the organizing principle of the place ... so we never went. 

We did look in through the entry glass when it was closed once though. Had this big beautiful wood outline map of the state of Oregon, with the surrounding states picked out in different colors, and inlays representing the Willamette Baseline and Meridian and the Willamette Stone. So at least they knew what townships and ranges were about.

Suffice it currently to say that it met the same fate as most ambitious bars and restaurants and self-styled 'friendly neighborhood spots' in Portland did. It's closed - as in gone out of business - and that was well before any pandemic stared hanging around, so put it all down to Portland's legendary shark-tank of a restaurant culture, where you kill or be killed. 

Something else is undoubtedly there, maybe. I guess. Whatevs. 

Movie Posters in a Hawthorne District Mexican Bistro

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The vintage Mexican movie posters, though, really cast a sort of a spell over the place.

... and they do love them some Cantinflas, don't they? I'm up for that SF feature Santo vs The Invasion of the Martians, myself.

#PDX_liff : Meditation On The Blanding-Out Of Old Portland

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The closing of The Third Eye Shoppe has catalyzed a lot of observations into a clear picture of evolution and how things pass along during the years. Change is constant, and change is also bittersweet; you roll with the changes but the changes, sometimes, have no intention of rolling with you, indeed they are indifferent. And there is a little world-pain that comes with that. I suppose that it's something one much just acknowledge as best as they can and be as foxy and clever and find ways to be tenable in the evolved landscape.

I remember when me and Wife were new-again to Portland after spending a few years in Corvallis. We exploited every opportunity we could get to go downtown. Downtown was funky back then. They even had an Arctic Circle with a great view of Pioneer Courthouse Square (prole burgers and fries with a perch for the best people watching in town? Damn skippy!) There was a 'Dollar Chinese Food' place, a steam-table restaurant, in the first floor of the Portland Medical Center building at SW 10th and Washington. Django Records. Art Media for art supplies. Metro on Broadway at SW Broadway and Taylor, sort of a food-court-without-a-mall-attached.

Downtown has been sanitized and de-funked. When they wanted it as a live-in neighborhood, apparently they only wanted people earning north of $75K a year down there. Me and Wife fancy a trip downtown to see if there's anything interesting down there, but I think we know in the back of our minds there's nothing really worth going to any more.

Now, it's Hawthorne. Time was there wasn't a week where we didn't find some excuse to go down Hawthorne. Jambo World Crafts, Dollar Scholar, Muse Art + Design, those were our three regular stops, there was the big raggle taggle used bookstore at SE 33rd that morphed into a vintage shop, Murder By the Book, The Daily Grind, so much that was funky and welcoming. The only thing that would attract us anymore would maybe be Powell's on Hawthorne (actually eager to see how that's building out), and Zach's Shack and Pepinos (they always had the most fabulous steak and potato burritos). But Hawthorne is going the way of downtown, losing all move, groove, and attitude, and if the social push-out of the lower middle- and lower class out to Outer East wasn't real to any one yet, why, it should be now.

Old Portland can still be found, multicolored and funky, out 122nd way, out in what the kids call 'The Numbers' … for a while, anyhow. 

[pdx] Hawthorne To Lose A Little More Funk: Goodbye to The Third Eye Shoppe

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It's gettin' tough out there, campers. This just in from Willamette Week: The Third Eye Shoppe, one of Portland's granddaddies of the funky culture that used to rule Hawthorne, is also going away:

Third Eye Shoppe, one of the city's oldest head shops, will close at the end of the month.This morning, shop owner Mark Herer, son of late cannabis legend Jack Herer, who co-founded Third Eye Shoppe in 1987, sent a text message to their glassblowers and vendors to announce that their last day in business will be March 31.

It was a head shop and sold a lot of custom, functional glass, but they had all sorts of psychedelia, posters, t-shirts, and incense. We stopped there a couple of times for the incense because The Wife™ is an incense nut.

They're going to have a big, funky, stupid party the last week of business, and if that's your sort of thing you might want to stop on by. Follow the link to the article in the pull-quote, or just visit

The blanding of Hawthorne Blvd continues, we fear.

Facebook 'em at https://www.facebook.com/ThirdEyeShoppe/.

[pdx] Day of the Wildfire Smoke, Part 2

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From Southwest Portland and the Terwilliger Blvd Parkway we proceeded east over the Hawthorne Bridge into the Hawthorne District (a/k/a Chicville, Lower Cascadia).

This was the view from about 28th and Hawthorne looking west …

… and this was closer in, about 18th Avenue or so.

It bears remembering, I think, that the points-of-view in the above two photos were in areas that were, because of the miasma, not visible from the viewpoints on Terwilliger in the last posting.

The above is looking down Hawthorne east from about SE 35th Avenue. That dark area above the horizon in the distance is Mount Tabor. For comparison, this, taken in 2014 at the Hawthorne Street Fair, which isn't in exactly the same spot … but it's close enough.

What a day, huh? This is your world … and this is your world on global warming.

Any more questions?

[Photos On Sunday] September Sunset, Hawthorne Blvd, Portland

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We have one of these once every day, I promise you … and I also promise you that, because this is Portland, Oregon, we do sunsets more beautifully than you.

Shh! This is Portland, now! Just accept it!

Seriously, though, the light had an amber quality as the sun cut into the West Hills today. It wasn't too hot, and as the rays got longer and took on a more red and orange quality than usual, it was hard not to feel adored, coddled … even seduced, yes, I said it … by the light.

See? I told you we did sunsets more beautifully than you. I guess I kinda meant it.

This is SE Hawthorne Blvd, along an area I think of as Lower Hawthorne … between SE 12th and SE 30th, going up the hill from the big five-pointed intersection at 20th at the NE corner of Ladd's Addition … almost but not quite to the fashionable part, which stretches east from SE 30th through 50th Avenues. The signboards on the street are outliers of Kruger's Farm Market, at 23rd and SE Hawthorne, a fine place to go if you like farmer's markets but can't always get to your neighborhood edition, which seems to always close a little too early for us night-owls. Good prices too; less than eight dollars got us a pretty hefty haul … corn, squashes, potatoes, onion … all grown locally.

Sure, it helps if you're all pretentious about it, but there's no requirement to be.

The sun threatens to immolate Oregon's tallest building, the Wells Fargo Tower, that vertically-striped, black and white monolith there in front of the West Hills. That smoky orangeness pervatded the air in a way that a mere photograph can't really picture, it was an atmospheric thing … but this one comes close (or, long sight lines means Sam's about to play with extreme zooms again …) :

This is letting the lens play games with the bright light and having something delightful happen. Another in-camera special effect.  I think I was whispered to by the memory of this:

Which is, of course, a screen grab of a Los Angeles freeway from the opening titles to The Rockford Files. I came pretty close, I thought.  Anyone thinking of scripting and getting illustrations or visuals for any upcoming hard-boiled Oregon style PI shows can contact me for the rights.

Another extreme closeup! featuring some downtown landmarks, being bathed in the late summer sunset …

The Wells Fargo Tower, I've told you about; the silvery, boxy one to the right there is still called the PacWest Center, though PacWest Bancorp hasn't existed for about 25 years now. Still, it's nice to see something still being called what it always has been. Here in Oregon we're more interested in that sort of history than some places I can name, but that's no guarantee that things will maintain.

Gosh … Isn't that in-lens reflection just the thing, though?

Now, up on Hawthorne at  43rd … which is, by the 20-block-to-the-mile rule, 1 mile east of where we just were, the sun was well into its setting task, and the light had taken on a different quality. Still warm and seductive, a bit more firey though.

Yeah, extreme closeup! again.  And it reminded me that, no matter how much I'm in love with the scenery around here, how easily it is to miss things. I hadn't really dwelt on the fact that you can still see the downtown towers from here – that rise that crests between SE 28th and 30th Avenues puts the city center at your back and then you go downhill into the heart of fashionable Hawthorne, and you kind of forget it's back there. But you look in the distance, and there it is … the Wells Fargo Tower and, to the left, under a just-visible pyramidal roofline, is the KOIN Tower,  that orange-red sun, a glowing kindness.

It's doing it's best … we'll be going into fall soon, and then comes the clouds and the rain … well, if the shaky weather the entire continent is dealing with hasn't shaken up too much yet.

The rosy color deepens, and this picture is mostly because Fat Straw, a favorite place … boba tea, Banh Mi sandwiches, we love the place and I'll move on before this veers off into a food-obsessed post, but nifty place and go.

And the lovely, lovely light.

Do you take pictures thinking this would be a lovely album cover? Because I do, and this last one is just about color and form, silhouette and shape, and any band that wants to purchase this for their album, you know how to reach me.

This is the sort of evening we'll all remember round about mid-October going into November, when we can't remember how we complained about how warm it was in the summer because we're too busy bitching about how cold and gloomy October is.

Well, you guys might be. In general terms, I won't; you don't grow up an Oregonian hating the gloomy winter. You accept it. It's home. 

[PDX] Faux Telephoto - Hawthorne And The Big Hill East of César E Chávez

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It was said, on the Hawthorne Street Fair Facebook page, that this was the first time the Boulevard between 30th and 38th had been closed in decades.

This gave the perfect opportunity, of course, for some angles that you couldn't otherwise get else the chance of grievous bodily injury. An always-inspiring view is the view east down Hawthorne, with the street rising to meet, and appear to be utterly defeated by, our legendary volcano-within-a-city, Mount Tabor.

It will be remembered, though, that Hawthorne Blvd was named after Dr. Hawthorne, who once ran what they called then an "Home for the Insane" down near where the Hawthorne Bridge now, and the street started life as Asylum Avenue.

So, on Hawthorne, unless anything's possible and everything's a little crayzee, then it ain't right. Not really.

The above photo looks down Asylum Avenue east from just west of Chávez up tow where the street jogs south on the side of Mount Tabor. That edifice at the apparent termination of the street is the Portland campus of Western Seminary.

Notice the dude there in the lower left of frame. He's doing what I'm doing, except his only companion is a tripod. Tripods are nice, but wives are better to have around. Just my opinion, of course. Now, when  you widen the angle, here's what you see …

The loftily-named 'Mount' Tabor is merely a hill, though a most pulchritudinous one. It is an extinct volcano, and one of the western outposts of what is amusingly called the Boring Volcanic Field. A great number of small, knobbly hills spread out south and east into the Multnomah and Clackamas hinterlands; these all erupted over one period, with nary a peep since the last 300,000 years.

In short, it's dead, Jim.

The summit elevation is reported as 636 feet above sea level; the surrounds are about 200 feet above sea level, though, so that's a 400 foot hill there. Still, remarkable; of all the cities in the USA, only four are thought to have extinct volcanoes within the city boundary. Two of them are in Oregon.

When you zoom in, crop and frame, and go for a compressed perspective view, though, that's where I fall in love:

The parts of Hawthorne west of Tabor are kind of in two parts to me: the painfully cute and fashionable, which stretch from about SE 30th Avenue to Chåvez Blvd, and the more clubby section, which run from Chávez to 50th.

When reviewing the photos I was going to put there, I realized that I tend to prefer photos with few people in them. This one, with the two young dudes there, just ambling down the street enjoying life, spoke to me, saying that maybe I shouldn't be so aloof. But, just to satisfy the aesthete in me:

… here's one where you can ignore the peoples, if you want.

A few years back, when we Portlanders went through the spasmic renaming of what we then called NE and SE 39th Avenue to César E Chávez Boulevard, it was such a strange thing. Yet again, the careful rules that were agreed on to ensure that everyone … especially those along the route, who would have to spend money changing up stationery and signage … was on board with the change, were rather casually set aside because reasons. And more than a few people, of more than one ethnic POV, pointed out that it'd take more than a street name change to really address the problems that we all saw in a mere street name-change.

But the change did go through, as it did. And I don't think I'm off the beam in saying that it very much appears that the vast majority of us have not only made peace with the change, but have embraced it. I like the idea that my hometown has a street named for Chávez; it fits with the sort of place Portland's trying to collectively constantly reinvent itself as.

So when I take a picture like this:

… with the street blade settling in against the charming latticework of the windows in the façade of the Hawthorne Theater, there's something there that's never been more natural somehow. It's part of the fabric of Portland now, which has been many things, sometimes simultaneously, often contradictingly … corrupt and holy, fair and unjust, progressive and regressive, rich of heart and poor of spirit …  All of that. Depending on time you look and the angle of persistence.

Exegesis in a photo.

One more: as addicted as I'm becoming to the forced perspective, the Telepfauxto, in sizing and cropping for display, this angle and crop hit me as perfect. Just makes me happy. That's all it is here:

I love you, Portland.

[PDX] Scenes From A Street Fair: Hawthorne Blvd, 2014

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This last Sunday we sojourned over to the other side of the mountain (Mt. Tabor, that is), and went from our part of Hawthorne Blvd to the fashionable part of Hawthorne Blvd to see the people there.

Hawthorne Street Fair 2014 was happening this hot August day, and The Wife™ really wanted to go; me, I tend to stay away from human contact, having figured that, at this point, I've met all the people I need to. But, my love loves going out to these things … there are few things more quintessentially Portland than this … and I realize that she has the right of such things, as not being out in the world isn't really an option if one fancies themselves an artist.

And, besides, I haven't taken Photos on Sunday in a few weeks. That investment in time paid off, as follows in the scenes; one of the delights of curating one of these postings is I get to look at all the photos, re-experience the reality as the memory wells up. Coincidentally, it's one of the burdens as well – I end up sorting through so many pictures I get lost in selecting the ones that tell the story I want to tell.

The story is really the people and the surroundings. Now, mind, I'm not bagging on it, but the Hawthorne Street Fair is, at its nut, a bunch of people coming out to sell you things. I'm not criticizing it, here, but it is what it is.

That said, there's nothing wrong at all with it, it's got a bunch of great stuff and, in the Portland DIY tradition, all the best. We bought artisan soap from an entrepreneur who sold Scrumptious Suds (here's her website, and here's her Etsy shop). We stumbled upon a quite wonderful thing, a soap made with Ninkasi Oatis Oatmeal Stout, which smells a lot better than you'd think it did … warm, embracing, as The Wife™ said (I paraphrase) like a crisp autumn evening when the neighbors  have just stoked their fireplace, all that in the good way.

The old city-neighborhood feel of Hawthorne is endlessly enticing. Businesses have changed over the years … that Blue Star Doughnut shop, whose sign is just behind the telephone pole in the center of the picture there, used to be a Chinese food joint of some 30 years standing … but everything seems just as inviting as the first time, years ago, me and Wife got down Hawthorne and realized that These Were Our People-ish.

The merchants along Hawthorne in that area had stalls out in the street. The above display was apparently being marketed by the owner of the Potala import shop in the building directly opposite. I particularly loved that big glyph over the display of Tibetan impedimenta below.

As I've always said, you can always find your Om on Hawthorne.

The Peterson Building

The theme of the day is people and surroundings; this building has always delighted the eye. The Peterson Building, 3530 SE Hawthorne Blvd, just bursts with imaginative potential. That little niche balcony up there. The two bay-windows toward the building's corner (don't they just make you think of hard-boiled PI's offices?). The hand-painted sign over the main entry to the upper floor there. The individually-painted shop facades. Made my point here, I think.

Again, the people. If those two old lovers aren't as Portland as anything, then nothing is.

One of the merchants on the street. I found her quite beautiful in absolute terms.

Oh, the ubiquty … one of our legendary food carts. I have never met a fried egg I didn't enjoy, so I dug this name for a long time before I found out it was a pun on the title of one of the Cure's most popular songs. But then I never was big on the Cure. Just the way I roll there.

Whatever that old, rusted sign with the light-studded arrow (or it would be, if any power was going to it) ever held, I don't know. But it suggests so many stories.

Tall bikes are a thing here locally, and I saw a couple. This one …

… looked fairly adventurous, and I was duly impressed. But I was really blown away by this one…

… with a fellow Portlander alongside for scale. Seriously, look at that rig! It  has stairs on it. 

I'm not sure what this mute duo's act was, whether they were trying to sell something or just to perform. That costume must have been murder in the heat though … at least as it was beautiful to look at.

They were absolutely quiet. No words.

The beats were as heavy as the pavement was hot:

And it caused not a little bit of dancing.

This dancer, as you can see, she owned that beat.

The Bread and Ink Cafe,  SE 36th and Hawthorne, started out as the original location of the Hawthorne Fred Meyer store (as photos I've seen depict, but none I can find right now).

Diners can now enjoy meals as well as draw on the tablecloths.

Of course, being Hawthorne and being Portland, there's other drawin's and art …

And, again, the surroundings: the building the Bagdad Theater's in has always been pleasant to the eye. Massive and sculpted.

I have a few more photos that I may share in subsequent postings.

But what I'll remember? Tiring … but a good tired. Glad I went.