A Mural Befitting The David Douglas Community

3774

There's this building on SE 122nd, a little south of the Midland Branch Library, on the west side of the street between Main and Market, its address is 1245, and it tends to be a county home for services for various disadvantaged populations. Its held state offices and county offices and been home to correctional functions such as a work-release and more recently has housed the Wy'east Men's Shelter. 

It's a two-story brick edifice about the length of a city block. 

It's been doing a little evolution over the past year and that evolution is mostly finished. And, in a niche in the building's east front, formerly bare brick veneer, now exists this wondrous bit of art:

I'm happy to live in one of the most, if not the most, economically and ethnically diverse areas in all of Oregon. I don't mean this as a brag; it just makes me happier to see a whole lot of different people. You can get whitebread anywhere you want in Oregon, and Portland west of 82nd is blanding out at an amazing rate. Out here, in what the kids call the Numbers, you get a rainbow of skin colors. There are a great many African immigrants. There is the most amazing and delightful mercado next to the Plaid Pantry that's a 10-minute walk from my house. There are two halal groceries down at 122nd and Division. 

And the faces on that mural perfectly reflect that. The rest of the kaleidoscopically-wondrous picture invites you into a universe of wonders which asks you to engage and explore, and make sense of it all. 

Like life, really.

I'm not world-travelled, but I've lived in more than a few places in my life and I've never felt as joyously at home as I have in my years out near 122nd in the David Douglas neighborhoods. It may not be the perfect place, but it comes close.