A Rather Unusual Street Blade-Woodward and SE 6th

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This is a set of street blades that've been here for a while, as evidence by the obvious weathering.

 

This is, for sake of reference, one street north of the east end of the Ross Island Bridge and one block east of SE McLoughlin Blvd.

The oddities are manifest. The flat sheet metal of the signs; the rounded rectangle serving as a border, and the ordinal suffix on the number 6 being as large as the number. 

What really gets the attention is the specific; this is not SE 6th St, but SE 6th Av. But the CoP put it up, god knows how many years ago, and since it's in a forgettable corner of town, it pretty much remains. But then, we've seen evidence that whoever posts street blades for the CoP does kind of a sloppy job of it betimes. 

As Though I Were Behind The Dairy Curtain

3907

The main plant for Darigold, a dairy co-ooperative that sells dairy products all over the western USA, is located just north of the east end of the Ross Island Bridge here in Portland. It's a factory and office complex located generally between SE 6th and 8th Avenues and north of Woodward Street, constructed during the 50s or maybe 60s with details that look mid-20th Century.

There's a sign on the top that, when the support was lit, with red neon, made it like a landmark beacon coming home in the middle of the night when we lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

A Street Name That Didn't Exist 15 Years Ago

3852

This is a brief bit of Address Nerdery that momentarily obsesses on the way street names change and get extended over time. Dig, if you will, this picture:

This is a corner you come to if you come out of inner NW Portland going east over the Steel Bridge, or if you come west from Grand/MLK and NE Lloyd Blvd. It wasn't a part of Interstate Avenue until only about a decade ago; the only thing I can't determine for sure is what it was called before this. It was either an extension of NE Victoria Avenue, or NE Occident Avenue.

The area around what we now call the Moda Center must be one of the most re-thought urban areas anywhere in Oregon. Before the coming of the Memorial Coliseum, it was Albina's business district, a place also called "Jumptown", the heart of a vibrant jazz scene, and Oregon's black downtown. Then it was decided that Oregon needed a major sports venue; out went the black people, in came the Memorial Coliseum. Then it was decided (by Paul Allen, I think) we needed a bigger and better arena, then came the Rose Garden Arena, though we succumbed to the need to sell naming rights and it became the Moda Center. 

In the process of all that evolution, many streets were renamed, rerouted, and some obliterated and forgotten. In the case of Interstate Avenue, which had other names before it became the main route (pre-Interstate 5) to the Interstate Bridge, hence its modern rubric, before the current revision it turned onto the Steel Bridge just before it crossed the line established by North Williams Avenue, and was fully North Interstate Avenue; after the area was re-thought, Interstate Avenue was extended to the intersection with NE Oregon Street, which is only one block east of where Williams Avenue would be if it extended that far.

So the very southern end of the road is properly NE Interstate Avenue, which, to a long-time Address Nerd, sounds a dissonant note, but it is indeed valid. Strange sounding, but valid.

The Northside Street Names, They Are a-Changin'

3792

Springtime, and the City of Portland's fancy turns to renaming streets.

Well, maybe not every springtime. But I remember May, about a year ago, where the CoP created a short-ton of new street names by the simple expedient of re-christening streets in the leading-zero segment of SW as S. Goodbye, SW Macadam Avenue; Hello, S Macadam Ave. Well, they're at it again.

Perhaps with an eye toward some sort of increased development in the city's far north margin, the CoP has deemed it possibly confusing the way street names change on that rim of town. Lombard Street and Columbia Boulevard, together, define a rather hard edge to the north side of town; south of these two streets, north and northeast neighborhoods march in stately array, and are abruptly ended at these arterials and the railroad line they dance around. North of this, the Columbia floodplain, meadows, a major international raceway which is also the site of Vanport City, industrial tracts, auto salvage yards, a branch of the Oregon State Dept of Corrections, and Portland International Airport. And I suppose it can be a bit disorienting:

Starting at Kelley Point, where North Marine Dr bends south to become the outermost end of N Lombard Street, said street descends inward, goes through a bit of a chicane, and becomes N. Columbia Blvd. If you fail to turn right on N Burgard Rd, it's Columbia Blvd upon which you'll remain. Turn on Burgard, however, go through another turn, and the name changes once again to Lombard. Now, in the business district of Saint Johns, Lombard pics up the US 30 BYP shield, which debouches onto N Philadelphia Ave from the Saint Johns Bridge, then for the next seven (give or take) miles, maintains the name Lombard Street from N going into NE, then, and this is unheralded, once you pass the NE 47th Ave overpass, you are no longer on NE Lombard Street but NE Portland Highway (the name is borrowed from the official ODOT name for the road). 

The road remains NE Portland Highway until the wide curve passes you by NE 72nd Avenue; it' s NE Killingsworth Street after that, until its terminus at NE Sandy Blvd in central Parkrose. 

There are other anomalies; the most irritating (a mild irritation to be sure) being the small snakey part of Columbia that starts at NE 89th and (for now, anyway) Killingsworth and ducks under the railroad trestle there by the Airport Holiday Inn to join old Columbia Blvd. This minuscule road is called NE Columbia Parkway. Just that. No other part of the road.

To fix and rationalize all this, the City o'Portland has devised a thing called the Columbia-Lombard Wayfinding Project and this simple thing aims to fix this by doing, majorly, the following:

• Renaming the part of Lombard Street at the city's extreme northwestern corner, alongside Port of Portland Terminal 5 and Kelley Point, as N Columbia Blvd.
• Eliminating the names of N Burgard Rd, NE Portland Hwy and NE Killingsworth St. east of NE 72nd Avenue in favor of a unified N/NE Lombard St along this entire length.
• Small street renames and adjustments to tributary streets.

The result is a Columbia Blvd that runs unbroken from Kelley Point all the way to NE 89th Avenue and a Lombard Street that runs unbroken from just west of Saint Johns all the way into Parkrose. This CoP illustration will make it a bit more graphically clear:

As someone who has lived in the city for almost forty years and has been addicted to the Portland street grid for longer than that, I can see the practicality of it, but I'll miss the quirkiness of having a road neither originating from outside or nor necessarily travelling toward or away from this town being called Portland Highway (there's a "N Portland Road" that exists similarly, so not all is lost). Also, seeing a level segment of Lombard defining the 5500 block north of Burnside will take a little getting used to.

But, just a little more than one year out, this will be the new reality. 

Update your maps, kids. 

The city's page on this foo-fraraw lives at https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/construction/columbia-lombard-wayfinding-project.

Block Numbers: There's Something About NE Fremont and Sandy

3737

Let's go back into street blade and Address Nerd territory with gun and camera.

Well, with camera anyway.

Allow me to introduce you to the intersection of NE Fremont St, NE Sandy Blvd, and NE 72nd Avenue,  in the Roseway neighborhood. This is pretty much downtown Roseway, really: there's Fairley's Pharmacy, the Safeway store, a handful of small shops, a liquor store, a theater, a handful of Vietamese-owned businesses. The late Yen Ha restaurant and lounge is here.

Now, keep your eyes on the road, and don't tell the officer you didn't see the sign.

NE Sandy/72nd/Fremont, looking east on Fremont
from the west side of the intersection

In NE Portland, at the point where diagonal Sandy Boulevard crosses straight east-west NE Fremont St, NE 72nd Avenue also happens to cross. In the big photo above, you can see it entering the plenum from the right, which is south, just behind the mansard roof of Annie's Donuts and just before the US Bank. Off to the left, well out of shot, the street continues northward from this intersection as a sort of parkway  with a very wide boulevard median, similar to the segment of SE 72nd running from Holgate Boulevard to Foster Road. This parkway goes from approximately Fremont/Sandy to NE Prescott Street, about half a mile.

Now, I've prattled at length somehwere at least once or twice in the past three-thousand, seven-hundred plus visits to this blog about how to read a Portland street blade. And when you put a block number on a street blade as an aide in motorist navigation, there are essentially two ways to do it:

1. The block number on the blade indicates the block of the street named on that blade, based on where the intersecting street cuts across. In other words, if I'm in Salem, and I'm on 12th St SE, and I look at a sign saying 12th ST SE and the block number says 3000, then what that street sign is telling me that it's directly labeling that block of the street that I'm on. This seems to be the most common way of going about it. Or:
   
2. The block number on the blade indicates the block of the street you're on as defined by the intersecting street, which in Portland will be whatever block you're either entering or leaving as you go. Say I'm on SE 52nd Avenue and I come to a stop at SE Woodstock Blvd. The block number on the Woodstock blade will read 6000. This does not mean that's the 6000 block of Woodstock; it means Woodstock defines the beginning of the 6000 block of whatever street's crossing it. I'm either entering the 6000 block if I'm heading south  or leaving it for the 5900 block if I'm heading north.

Number 2 is Portland's way of going about it. From what I've been able to see, though Portland is hardly the only city that does it this way (Salt Lake City has perhaps the most extreme idea of this sort of thing). It also lets you know how many streets away from, and quickly estimate your distance from said baseline (Woodstock at 6000 is the sixtieth block south of Burnside, and is therefore three miles from it). 

It also influences geographic parlance: in Portland it's common to hear it put as "Woodstock is the 6000 block" or "Hawthorne is the 1500 block". It's particularly useful in a town like Portland where the grid is so strong through most of town. It's also why you don't see block numbers on the numbered avenue signs; since the hundred block of numbered avenues in town is keyed to the avenue number, it follows directly from the street name (NE 15th Avenue is the 1500 block of named streets that cross it).

There's more I could say but all that I've laid down so far should have set the table for what I'm about to lay on you. Pay attention:

At this intersection, you have two major traffic streets, NE Sandy Boulevard and NE Fremont Street, and a local side street, NE 72nd Avenue. Sandy runs at a diagonal, so it has no standard block number; it depends on the rise/run at the point of intersection. Now that does happen to be Fremont. What's Fremont's block? It's the 35th block north of Burnside; Fremont Street is the 3500 block, at least of NE 72nd Avenue (Sandy Blvd is numbered as an east-west street, so it's building numbers at that point would be the same as Fremont's which would be 7100 7200.

Okay, knowing all this, what would you assume would be the block numbers on the named blades for NE Sandy Blvd and NE Fremont St? Since Fremont is the 3500 block north, and Sandy cuts 72nd at the 3500 block, you may have guessed that the block number on those street blades would read 3500.

That's an entirely reasonable assumption. It's also incorrect: Here is what they do say:

That's right. Not 3500, but 7200. That's the block that 72nd intersects both those streets at.

It's like that on all points of the intersection. I've walked the entire thing more than once and I did on that day. The following picture is the extreme northeastern corner of the intersection, where the northbound side of NE 72nd north of Sandy leaves Sandy Blvd:

The block number on the Sandy Blvd blade?:

Yep. 7200. As is the one on the blade of Fremont Street pointing east from NE 72nd Avenue.

I've done a lot of reasoning about this because it is rather bewlidering. The Portland system of street sign information is actually fairly simple but just like every system it will run into cases where the demands of reality test it to a limit and this would appear to be one of those situations. It fails in a way at delivering the information one expects. But my going over my multi-decade store of impressions and expectations as to the information this system can deliver, I can at least, I think, provide an insight, that will cause it to at least make sense.

Bear in mind that I can't read PDOT's collective mind and that I do not function as any sort of consultant on these matters to them (I mean, I should, that would be just and righteous, but I don't. C'est la guerre, mon frere).

In referring to Portland street blades over my adult life one decoding principle I've used in interpreting this information is that the intersecting street blade tells you all you need to know about where you are on the street you're travelling on. You, presumably, don't need to be reminded of the name of the that street you're travelling on; you intentionally put yourself there. Here am I, say, going northbound on NE 60th Avenue crossing Glisan. I look at the sign and I see NE GLISAN ST 500, and I say to myself Well, I know I'm going into the 500 block on NE 60th and I just crossed Glisan St. 

That street blade told me information relating to the street I was most likely to be on. Since 60th and Glisan only is composed of two intersecting streets, that further possibility is like an algebra term that multiplies by zero and falls out. I'm only going to be on one street or the other.

But what if the intersection I was at had three streets intersecting and only two of them were major through traffic routes? With the limited amount of room on the sign, what would I do?

What if, proceeding from the example of 60th and Glisan, I prioritized the needs of travellers coming into or through the area rather than those who wanted a reassurance that Fremont is the 3500 block north of a relatively-much-lesser travelled intra-neighborhood street? If that were true, then maybe I'd want to put 7200 on all those named street blades:

• If you're on Sandy Blvd, the intersection of NE Fremont Street defines the 7200 block of NE Sandy.
• If you're on NE Fremont Street, the intersection of NE Sandy Blvd defines the 7200 block of Fremont
• NE 72nd Avenue, being a comparatively little-used street, and less likely to be travelled on by people who are through-bound on Sandy and Fremont, can be left off the signs and cause minimal confusion and inconvenience because most locals already know that the 3500 block starts there and those through-bound people are more likely to be concerned with what block of Sandy or Fremont they're at.

So, there it is. I'm not saying I approve or disapprove, what I am saying here is that this is what I think the method behind this madness is. And there are other places in Portland where block number blade mistakes exist, and even some intersection signs which appear to contradict this logic within blocks of this very sign too ... Sometimes I don't know where PBOTs mind is on some of this.

And ... I still like the Portland system better than any others. But it does have its weaknesses where confusion can occur. This'd be one. But then, why even be in a city if you aren't going to take your time when you can, and look carefully around at your world.

The Smallest Triangular Restaurant We Know, and the Street Sign at Mason and Sandy

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Sandy Boulevard is one of Portland's signature arterials. Starting from the corner of SE 7th and Washington, it does a curl up that hill then shifts from SE to NE at Burnside (and is now made discontinuous by the Burnside-Couch couplet). It then strikes out diagonally across east-side Portland, creating complex intersections and small flatiron-shaped blocks in its relentless drive to Parkrose, many of those blocks containing almost absurdly-small flatiron-shaped buildings.

One of those is on the block bounded by Sandy, NE 81st Avenue, and NE Mason Street. This is directly to the west of the major intersection of NE 82nd and Sandy. This block is scarcely 100 feet long on the hypotenuse, and it is absolutely full of a very charming little breakfast and lunch place: the Cameo. It's directly across Mason Street from the Cameo Motel to which, we surmise, it was once organizationally-attached to as the motel's cafe. There seems no such affiliation now, but it's retained its old sign and name as it's become rather a landmark.

This is it, looking west from where Mason splits from Sandy:

We were there a few times before the Covid hammer came down, and found it most delightful. It's the kind of place, you know the kind, where the breakfasts and omelettes come at a price but you get what you pay for, satisfying and filling or, at least, you'll be taking some home to eat later.

The Korean ownership inflected the menu as one might expect. Kimchi is available in a few dishes, and there was even an omelette having that as its principal ingredient. One of the the times we were there they had a live guitar player in for the brunch crowd. Everything was very nice there.

The practice of Portland's street blades identifying the address block of the street one's travelling on by telling one how the intersecting street defines it has created, over time, spots on Sandy Blvd that tend to be bewildering, hampered by an inconsistent approach on the part of PBOT's signing. I have a few examples that will follow this. But here is a good introduction to this issue.

Please direct your attention to the street blade set there.

NE Mason Street is the 4100 block north of Burnside, so you see the 4100 there on the corner of its blade. The 4100 doesn't apply to Sandy, though: it's a diagonal road which addresses as an east-west street. The 4100 does, however, apply to NE 82nd Avenue, which runs perpendicularly to Mason and is about thirty feet behind me as I was standing to take that picture.

The 8200 on the Sandy blade might just be straight-up weird to anyone who comes from a town where the block number refers to the block face rather than the intersecting street. Look at it this way, though: You're on Mason Street, coming east out of that neighborhood. You come to the stop sign. This street opens into the intersection of 82nd and Sandy but this corner is just short of a solid intersection with 82nd. Sandy isn't the 8200 block east of the river and Williams, but it does cut across Mason at the 8200 block, or at least close enough that it would apply. 

Now, you could argue that the block number on the Mason blade should also read 8200 by this logic, since Sandy cuts Mason at the same place, but as potentially confusing as that might be for the out-of-towner, it does provide the North-South block for those passing by on 82nd (for which the position of this sign might make it a little hard to see, but the logic does work out).

Actually, I love this system despite its pitfalls. Once I got tuned into it, I find it makes a solid bit of sense: it tells me what I need to know about the cross street. I already know the name of the street I'm already on. 

But explaining it makes for some prolix profundity, that's for sure.

SW 4th And Harrison

3679

The street blade set caught my eye because there is something so pleasantly urban about the way it contrasts against the new-as-new-can-be building behind it. I also like that the block is 1850, not an even number; an address quirk about Portland I'm happy to say that they can't get rid of.

This is in the part of the city center that's south of SW Market St, which is the 1600 block south of West Burnside. SW Harrison St is three blocks south of that, but instead of a full block it only gets a half block; 1850 instead of 1900.

There's a reason for this, and it has to do with the end of canted downtown blocks, which align to the river, and the part beginning at SW Lincoln St, which is the 2100 block, which runs more cardinally east-west and begins the more cardinally-oriented grid south from there. Lincoln was designated 2000; SW Mill St, one south of Market, was designated 1700; SW Montgomery, 1800, SW Harrison, 1850; SW Hall, 1900; SW College, 1950; SW Jackson, 2000; SW Clifton, 2050. These all occupy a wedge of land which starts narrow on the east and widens as you go west at the point there the grid straightens out, and while the streets continued to march southward at the rate of one every 220 feet, the north-south address blocks on the numbered avenues were stretched to fill by 2 every hundred numbers, to even out at 2100 by the time they, either notionally or physically, crossed Lincoln Street.

Not all of these streets exist on the ground, of course; a great many were erased by urban renewal in the 1960s, construction of the Stadium Freeway and, in some places, ground too steep to build a street on. But it's a fun pattern to suss out.

South Portland, And Google Maps Can't Cope

3675

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

3664

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.

North Portland Roads and Highways

3610

Herewith, a little trivial crumb that you can use to win bets and amuse people at parties, if they were the parties that existed and the sorts that I would attend. They involve Portland street names, because that's the way I roll.

1. NE Portland Highway. There is a road near the margins of North and Northeast Portland called Lombard Street. This totally like the Lombard in San Francisco, except ours is very long and doesn't go up hills and is in fact made of long, straight segments. Except for that, it's just like SF's Lombard Street. In as much as it's a street. It's also badged in the US Hwy System as US 30 Bypass and is one of the principal arterials across the north side of the Rose City.

First, a necessary digression: ODOT, as I may have said elsewhere but maybe is worth repeating now, has a way of numbering state highways that does not coincide with the posted highway numbers. Also, in the vulgate parlance, when someone says 'Highway' or 'State Hwy', what we mean is the route number, that is the one you'll see on the signs. What locals call Highway 213, which runs from the east side of Portland through Oregon City, the farmlands of Clackamas, past Molalla, through Silverton and into Salem is known, from Portland through about Silverton as State Hwy No.68 - Cascade Hwy North, and from there through Salem as State Hwy No. 160 - Cascade Hwy South.

Think of it like a catalog number. You'll order a Deluxe Whizzit with extra froom-froom rom Whizzit World but they also know it as Catalog No 67-325. But you wouldn't call it by Catalog number.

So! Since the posted route number is technically a State Route, and in this case an Oregon Route, when, in times future, I talk of a state highway by its route number, the nomenclature will be, in this case, for Oregon Route 213, OR 213. We don't say State Route or SR here, that's Washington, folks. Get it straight. We used to escort people back to the border for that.

Anyhow, and to get us back on course, the reason I told you that is because, even though Lombard Street isn't a Oregon highway route, it's maintained by the state and is classified as an Oregon highway, No. 123, as it would occur. And those viewing maps or travelling down this road east of NE 42nd Avenue but west of where it merges with NE Killingsworth will notice it goes by a particularly generic name: NE Portland Hwy. 

While I don't have any way to run down why those who decided decided to change it where it is, I can tell you that the state's name for this highway is the Northeast Portland Highway. As State Hwy No. 123, it runs from Saint Johns, starting just across the river at Hwy 30 via the St Johns Bridge, all along Lombard Street and along Killingsworth and Sandy out to Troutdale.

But for that part between 42nd and approximately 72nd, where the city apparently decided adopting ODOT's name for the road was enough, and convenient too; it already contained the directional.

2. N Portland Road. Going north out of the Saint John's neighborhood, there is a road that runs along the railroad embankment from approximately where N Columbia Blvd goes over N Columbia Way to the south shore of the Columbia River at N Marine Drive. It's called North Portland Road. As Eugene E Snyder tells us, that was so named because there is a station along the railroad (the railroad equivalent of a wide spot in the road, trains never actually stopped there) which was itself called North Portland. When the street namers went out that way it must have seemed natural to call it North Portland Road, as it went out to that place, but when the Great Renaming came round in the 1930s, as the road itself would fall in the North quadrant, calling it North North Portland Road must have seemed a bit goofy. Once again, the historic name handily provided the necessary directional.

It too is a state highway: Hwy No. 120, Swift Highway ... not because it was a direct route into the area from the nearby stockyards, but because that used to be Portland's meat packing district, and Swift was the largest company. We also have a N Swift Street in the St Johns area dedicated to that memory.

State Hwy 120 is also one of the many unsigned state highways that adopted those numbers as state routes back in 2002. The majority of these are still unsigned; one not otherwise informed would never know a priori that N Portland Rd was also OR 120. Presumably ODOT's priorities lay elsewhere and, the way things are going in government these days, I wouldn't be the least surprised.

Portland: Like It Or Not, A City Of Sextants

3535A.

As of yesterday, they finally went and did it, they did, did they.

As a charter member of the Address Nerd club (or, as I like to call myself, a cartesiaphile), I hold my adoration of Portland's neat, well-ordered and pleasing address system as second to nobody's ... well, maybe Michael Long's of Portland and Ben Lukoff's of Seattle.

I will fight you on this.

A short while ago I reported on an approaching revision to the city's address grid; that of the conversion of the area between the river and Naito Parkway, including the South Waterfront area, Johns Landing, and areas including Dunthorpe and Riverdale, on whose east-west streets addresses increase as you approach the river and include a zero on the front, were going to become a new address district.

I traveled the district in prose in this missive, committed to the aether back in the salad days of 2005 on this blog (http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2005/07/geography-address-nerd-on-zero-hundred.html) I called them 'zero-hundreds'; it's developed that the official city nomenclature on those are 'leading-zero' streets. The most common example is the address of the Old Spaghetti Factory, a favorite place of many hardcore Portlanders (including Your Humble Interlocutor and wife, whose birthday dinner tends to happen there), which is, in the common rubric, 0715 SW Bancroft St; seven blocks east of the Naito Meridian yet located west of the Willamette.

Yesterday was the city council's vote to change the face of Portland just a bit, but remarkably so, and the city council approved. So, as of May 2020 (I'm born in that month, so what a coincidence!) the leading zeroes disappear from this area, and the SW is dropped in favor of simply ... S, giving us the most consequential Portland geography revision since the Great Renaming itself, nearly 90 years ago.

This was the layout of Portland before:

The east-west baseline being Burnside, of course, and the straight line going north is N. Williams Avenue. This is then, now; as of May 2020, this will be now, then:

Welcome, South Portland, to the family of Northeast, Northwest, North, Southwest, and Southeast Portland. The city, who keeps liking to call it a sextant, holds that the change was needed to facilitate wayfinding for emergency dispatch services. Those I know who aren't all that thrilled about it find it specious, pointing out that modern wayfinding technology is plenty sophisticated enough to make sense of leading-zero addresses and it's just plain lazy not to bother to learn it, not to mention the cost of manufacturing hundreds of street signs to replace the old.

6 of these = 1 PDX

I agree with those amongst us who say it's a problem that wasn't really demanding a solution that hard. I'm also sad to see a most unique Portlandism, and perhaps the most satsifying local geography quirk that exists pretty much anywhere, evaporate so. And it's such an absurdly small sliver of land to go on about!

The timeline as thus: in May, 2020, the new street blades go up in the South area. They remain up until 2025, after which leading-zero address will officially become a a Thing Of The Past, going into the hazy demesne of nostalgia that holds Ramblin' Rod, Barney Keep, Tri Met Service Sectors, and my ability to hear Lars Larson's voice without gagging.

Although, as the article at https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-south-new-address-area/ explains, the USPS will still deliver to leading-zero addresses after the year 2025. That article, done by OPB's Amelia Templeton, also links my 2005 Address Nerd entry on zero-hundreds as explanation, and you'd better believe I'm flattered by that!

The Return of South Portland: Welcoming the Proposed Sixth Sextant

3524A.

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