Murals Over Harvey Milk Street, Part Two

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To view this, you have to go one block east of the last one (3952) on West Burnside and look south on SW 12th Avenue.

 

I'm not sure what the message is supposed to be, but to me it's "Grandma's fallen and she can't get up and also she can't really dress herself and her lower jaw has fallen clean out of her head, so we should probably help her.

I don't clearly know why I identify the figure as a female one. It could be either. 

I adore public art. I just don't pretend to always understand it. With art, I find it's more fun, sometimes, not to 'get it'.

Murals Over Harvey Milk Street, Part One

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The sight line down SW Harvey Milk Street as viewed from West Burnside west of SW 13th Avenue encourage you to fixate upon a surrealism.

I have a feeling Magritte would approve. Also would Luigi Serafini, I think. The pattern that the fellow's shirt is 'decorated' with is a favorite of mine, and I only say that because back when everyone was doing that weird rock'n'roll 'S' on their Pee-Chee's, I was filling the blanks spaces on mine with this.

Portland's Own Flatiron Block

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There's a triangluar block in downtown Portland. It has lived many lives.

This block is bounded on the north by West Burnside Street, on the east by the 300 block of SW 12th Avenue, and on the south by SW Harvey Milk Street, formerly SW Stark Street. There are two buildings on this small block; at the gore point, an impossibly small, unnervingly-narrow two-story building, and taking up the remainder, a four-story hotel.

The tiny building at the point was a radio station studio, KKEY. Those who've been here long enough will remember the big call sign in stacked type adorning that point. Few, if anyone, will remember its programming, which was unremarkable and made little history; back in the day, two people of my acquaint had a show there, but only as long as they could drum up the sponsors. 

What sort of penny-ante operation made its on-air talent (and for KKEY you could use the word rather loosely) do its own sales? Well - I believe I just answered that.

The hotel itself used to be home to a gay swinger's place called Club Portland. In the 1990s, the McMenamins bought the place and got rid of the sordid stuff and graced the whole with a more historic name ... Crystal Hotel ... and that trademark McMenamins bland class. So it goes.

My memories must suffice to describe what once was. This picture is what it is:

 

West Burnside is in front of us. Harvey Milk Street slants off to the right. There's been a tectonic change to the traffic pattern as well, as one has not been able to veer off Burnside onto Stark for quite a few years, and the Portland compulsion to let people dine in the middle of the street combined with times of Covid has populated that block Harvey Milk Street into a seat of al-fresco umbrellas.

The Old Joyce Hotel Sign

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The Wife™ has declared this photo to be Portland AF:

Well, it certainly is old Portland AF.

What this is is the sign for the old Joyce Hotel, over the corner of SW 11th Avenue and Harvey Milk Street (formerly Stark). And there is something evocative to the thing, the old flophouse sign, still there and still intact but for the stress of the years on the paint job, up against one of those classic downtown Portland street lamps, which I adore beyond sane reason.

It profoundly emotionally moved her, which is a thing that I'll be even amateur photographers like myself as well as pros are surprised; you never know which one of your compositions will grab someone by the heart.

And so that goes.

The Advent of SW Harvey Milk Street

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Southwest Stark Street is no more, kinda sorta, for a five-year transition period.

But the street blades honoring the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk are up now. And for the next five years, the street will wear both names on the signposts. This is how we transition street names here in Portland.

The proposal by the businesses along the street supporting it and detailed at The Harvey Milk Street Project  was to have the thirteen blocks of SW Stark Street renamed only, in honor of Harvey Milk who, in his highly visible position as a legislator in one of America's pre-eminent large cities was amongst the first openly gay people ever elected to such prominence, was assassinated in 1978. Also, for a period stretching roughly from the mid 1980s to the mid-2000's, that area stretching along Stark from approximately 11th Avenue to 13th Avenue was the hypocenter of Portland's gay culture.

The list of nightclub names still doubtlessly rings legendarily in the hearts and minds of Portlanders gay community: Club Portland, the Fish Grotto, Boxxes, the Red Cap Garage, Scandals, The Roxy. Of those, only The Roxy and Scandals remain, however tenaciously, against the advance of gentrification and the McMenaminization of everything between SW 12th and 14th along West Burnside.

This was where gay Portland came to hang out and play, a place that was thiers.

The building in the picture above is the Joyce Hotel. Its first floor, there on the corner, was home to the Fish Grotto.

The Fish Grotto is no more, having closed in 2014. The space next to it, which now holds a totes adorbs little alley-mall style boutique collection called Union Way, once held Boxxes and Red Cap Garage. Boxxes moved to the upper floor of the building on the SE corner of Burnside and SW 11th before it winked out.

The old sign for the Fish Grotto still remains, as does the board that once supported the sign for a latter-day subdivision of the Fish Grotto called the Sand Bar. Now it, as well as the Joyce Hotel itself, one of Portland's last great flophouses, stands in stasis on the corner of SW 11th and then-Stark, now-Harvey Milk Street, a ghost of Old Portland in solid, tangible form.

The corner of Harvey Milk and 12th still has remnants of the Portland what was. Note in the picture following the Peterson's Grocery on the corner. That's been a corner shop there for a very long time; up until the Peterson's near the library on Yamhill was evicted, it was Georgia's Grocery. 

The other two survivors, Scandals and The Roxy, are the market's neighbors. In the picture above, if you look for the al fresco parasols; that's Scandals.

Over Scandals, there's a true antique. I'm glad they left the sign up that declared that this was once Georgia's Laundromat.
 

And ... The Roxy. What a splendid pageant that place is. We adore it. Funky as well, pictures all over the walls, you go in there and all of a sudden you feel like you're in 1987. And the food? All bad for you, and when I say bad for you, I mean if you don't eat once here before you die, that would be bad for you.

Burgers, nachos, bad for your arteries but oh, so good for your soul.

We will always love The Roxy. How it hangs on in this area of ascending property values I don't know, but I hope it stays just this way for a very long time.