South Portland, And Google Maps Can't Cope

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While the new address district of South Portland is an official thing, but it's still not applied to any of the street blades we've seen there, it has apparently broken Google Maps's tiny mind.

The South 'sextant', as it will be recalled, encompasses that part of Portland east of a line formed by Naito Parkway and View Point Terrace, west of the Willamette River, and out to the Multnomah County/Clackamas County line, taking in part of Lair Hill, most all of Johns Landing, and the posh-above-posh estates of Dunthorpe and Riverdale.

Google Maps, though, thinks that the "South" directional extends farther west than it actually does. As in this area around Cap Hwy and SW 30th Avenue:

If Google Maps cruises this blog, we'd like to reassure them that, no, at this point the named streets are Southwest, along with the numbered Avenues. Seeing Carolina spelled out as South Carolina Street is just plain bewildering.

This bemusement extends into the area were everything is actually supposed to be South, which Google Maps can't work out successfully either:

Because we have S Idaho, S Nebraska, and S Florida Streets all crossing Southwest Corbett Avenue and Southwest Macadam Avenue.

Quite an ironic outcome for an evolution that happened because, as they said, geolocating software couldn't cope with the way the addresses were laid out in this area.

I mean, I know we didn't order this side of unintended consequences, yet, here we are.

At The Dawn Of South Portland On Asbury Barbur Day

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Well, we've had about two years now to get our psyches into the idea of a sixth address 'quadrant' (the CoP loves the word sextant but we do not) called South encompassing that long shim of land between a line made up of SW Naito Parkway and SW View Point Terrace on the west and the Willamette River on the east, and we must admit ... we're still not entirely there.

We loved the zero-hundreds, the city-termed leading zero addresses. Of all the quirks a city could come up with to deal with the reality that their west-east division south of the north-south baseline not behaving itself and dawdling off to the east, this was the most charming and the most local. We also, with all charity and no necessary malice, don't entirely buy the reasons the city had for making this change.

But all that's as may be. The decision was decided and the thing has taken its course. Personally, while I like it not, go along with it I will (I mean, it's not as though I have a choice), and have made my peace with it by watching the process and consoling myself with the knowledge that I'm watching the most consequential city address rationale change since the very Great Renaming itself. That was 1931. Almost 90 years is a long run.

In honor of this suspicious occasion, my online friend Michael Long, every bit as much of an Address Nerd as I am, has dubbed this "Asbury Barbur Day", in honor of the man who gave us an unbroken thing that the City o'Portland, in the way cities are time and oft wont to do, strove to fix.

Photo courtesy of Michael Long; used with permission

If the name sounds familiar, it should; that great southwestern gateway to Portland, SW Barbur Boulevard, is eponymous of him. Ironically, the easternmost curl of Barbur, that part east of View Point Terrace and generally between SW Hamilton St and the ramp that sends northbound traffic down Naito Parkway will be ... South Barbur Blvd.

Because if there's anything we Portlanders are, it's consistent as hell.

And so it goes.

• Michael Long is a smart fella of much ilk and geographical knowledge and Portland history, and his Facebook feed is hither and hence.
• My long-time PDX blogging colleague Isaac Laquedem has a nice thumbnail of Asbury Barbur and his life the original Portland address nerd here: https://www.isaaclaquedem.com/2016/12/asbury-barbur-1861-1941-who-told-you-where-you-are.html.

The Return of South Portland: Welcoming the Proposed Sixth Sextant

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Don't look now, but Portland may be about to grow a sixth address area.

Actually, it already exists. Anyone familiar with the map of Portland knows that the Willamette River and Burnside Street makes a basic division of the address grid into NW, NE, SW, and SE quadrants; the veering to the northwest of the river north of the Burnside crossing creates an ample area on the North Portland Peninsula which is named, simply, N, and these areas form the directional part of every street name in town.

South of the city center, though, starting at about SW Jefferson St, the river dawdles more south-southeast rather than straight south. This is a topic I wrote about here back in 2005; and while the addresses increase southward in accordance with the southward address trend, you reach a point at which the zero-line ... then, SW Front Avenue, now SW Naito Parkway ... is actually several blocks east of the river. Rather than dubbing a new address district, back during the Great Renaming in 1930-33, the address planners counter-intuitively called for addresses to increase 100 to the block again, as you traveled toward the river, but with a leading zero affixed. These addresses I termed the zero-hundreds, but the term of art in the City is leading-zero addresses. Why they decided to take this approach rather than a mirror-image of the North Portland scheme is not recorded and presumably forgotten.

As an example, the home base of Portland's legendary The Old Spaghetti Factory, at the end of SW Bancroft Street, on the river, is 0715 SW Bancroft St, effectively seven blocks east of Naito but on the west side of the river, so SW.

Image: PBOT

It seems incredibly likely that that's all about to change in a local geography edit that, while is not as major as the original Great Renumbering, is quite remarkable and unprecedented in Portland's post-renaming street rationale. If approved by the City (and judging by the amount of work already done it looks quite likely), in 2020, the slender wedge of land with leading-zero addresses beginning just south of the Hawthorne Bridge and expanding to about a mile's width by the time you cross the Clackamas County line will lose the W in the directional and the leading zero in the address number. The Old Spaghetti Factory's address will become 715 S. Bancroft; Johns Landing's main drag will be known thenceforth as S. Macadam Ave, and SW Terwilliger blvd south of Lewis and Clark College will be S. Terwilliger Blvd. The PBOT 'Sixth Sextant' logo schematically summarizes the change, which was apparently catalyzed by the growth of a major urban neighborhood in the South Waterfront area and the collateral issues of city service and emergency service provision in an area where a caller will say "300 SW Whitaker" when they meant "0300 SW Whitaker".

If and when (let's be frank, or at least Meier & Frank ... when, this looks like a done deal) the change is applied, the new South sextant will come into being affecting 258 of Portland's estimated 19,502 street intersections (interestingly, I found that my home 'sextant', SE, has more than 6,600 of those intersections, about double that of the second-largest, intersection-wise ... SW).

I expect I'll embrace it with some excitement, though I'll have to admit that "South Macadam Avenue" doesn't have quite the ring "SW Macadam Avenue" did. And, though blander in character (the originally-named area was something of a center of lower-income and poor European immigrant communities) there is the thing that there will be, at long last, a real South Portland in Portland, Oregon.

Now for the info! Follow this link to the Portland Bureau of Transportation's (PBOT) South Portland Addressing Project: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/75814. Maps, tables of street name changes and address changes, FAQ's, the works!

Also, a tip of the hat to my incomparable friend Friday, who knows what I like and how to get my attention about it: she pointed me to this The Oregonian article and the rest, as they say, is Address Nerd history: http://www.oregonlive.com/roadreport/index.ssf/2018/02/sixth_sextant_city_considering.html