Plague Year Diary: Deserted Stark Street, Montavilla, PDX

3627

Montavilla, for those who don't know, is an old-school eastern Portland neighborhood with a good deal of history. Like a number of them, it has what amounts to a business district; a stretch of SE Stark St going east from where SE Thorburn Street splits into the Stark-Washington couplet, at about SE 74th Avenue, to SE 82nd Avenue; about a half mile's of street. It's one of those Portland neighborhoods with a little downtown, so to say; a rather darling place that would serve as the cute undiscovered downtown of a small town anywhere in the Willamette Valley hinterland. And it's fairly bustling; cars parked all up and down the street, people going to and from the taverns at 80th and Stark and the lumber yard across the street; the cute bistro at 78th, the Lebanese restaurant there.

Here's what it looked like today, though, in this second (third) week of Covid-19:

The brow of Mount Tabor overlooks a very quiet place today.

And here below I go to the gore point of where Thorburn devolves into Stark and Washington, stand in the middle of the street with plenty of time to get out the way, and hit that zoom, hard.

The TriMet bus there in the mid-distance is stopping to pick up passengers at 82nd and Stark. The street loses clarity at about the I-205 overpass, which means I'm taking in about a mile's worth of Stark here.

But there is still a tourist attraction of a sort. I'll post about that in about two missives from now.