Plague Year Diary 7: Broadway and Burnside - or - It Turns Out This Town Is More Than Big Enough For The Two Of Us

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After the apocalyptic feel of the previous photos I found I could top even that. And, as one will recall, I mentioned that no cars challenged me to get the hell out of the middle of the street in the middle of the afternoon on one of the busiest streets in the state of Oregon.

Let me prove this to you. After taking those two photos, I did a one-eighty and looked north, toward the intersection of West Burnside and Broadway. This is a big, wide intersection, not only because two very arterial streets cross, but also because of the vicissitudes of the way the plats north of and south of Burnside collide, the two streets don't precisely line up, creating a big, distended open square where Broadway, Burnside and Ankeny all come together. And it is nearly impossible, therefore, to render a scene like this:

All those cars are parked. There is not one car moving. In the middle of Oregon's largest city, where some 650,000 people live, at the intersection of two of its most important streets.

Yeah. The earth has shifted underneath us all.

Plague Year Diary 6: The Quietest Broadway I've Ever Seen

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Moving on with selected scenes from today, I give you what may be one of the busiest streets in Oregon: Southwest Broadway, downtown Portland, the largest city in Oregon and the 25th-largest in the United States of America.

This, remember, was the middle of the afternoon, on a Tuesday in March, 2020, and in on a planet without a COVID-19 world tour in progress, this street would be very busy indeed. I can easily count the number of moving cars in this shot on less than two hands.

Out on the heavy east side of town, I can debate with myself whether or not this is an abnormally-light traffic load. I can't have this discussion with myself downtown, though. This is not natural. And it's kind of starting to settle in on the mind just how shut-down my hometown is now.

Also, if I suggested that I stand in the middle of Southwest Broadway to take a picture of the street, in the middle of the day, one might consider me a daredevil on the order and intelligence of Super Dave Osborne.

Yet, that's what I did just here:

As a matter of fact, I was standing, mid-block, in the middle of Southwest Broadway, between Oak and Harvey Milk Streets (that's the legendary Benson Hotel there on the immediate right, with the Federal Protective Service cruiser parked in front) for well over two or three minutes. No cars challenged me to GTF out of the way. I was in no physical danger at all.

No cars challenged me. Not one.

Busking With Strings, SW Broadway And Main, Portland

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Yesterday night, before the Ekumenical meeting, on the way into The Schnitz, we saw this fellow.

As appropriate for the dignity of the surrounding venues, he played adept classical violin.

He was quite adept and pleasant to listen to. Sadly, we didn't have any cash to tip. Hopefully sharing him on a blog will suffice.

He really was delightful, and in just the right place: SW Broadway and Main, in front of Oregon's finest performance space.

He is Tomoki the Violinist, in case the photo isn't of sufficient rez to peep his business card in his case there. There's a Twitter and and Instagram feed there too, I see.

[PDX] Calendar-Worthy Portland

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The following shots are candidates for any good Portland calendar.

The Chinatown Gate guards the entry to NW 4th Avenue at Burnside Street. North of this is what amounts to Portland's Chinatown; about a six-square-block area where there seems, these days, to be more gentrification and drunk nightclub life than there is any legacy of Chinese culture any more. but it is, historically, the Chinese quarter of the Rose City.

Down there, in the lower right hand corner of the shot, is the controversial homeless enclave known as Right To Dream Too, or R2D2 as we've taken to calling it. It's not so controversial because of the fact it's a homeless camp, but more because the fight over finding somewhere else to be, which has changed character; sometimes it's a real conversation of the issue of homelessness, other times, more of a fight over who gets to develop the property.

For many years it was a grotty porn shop called Cindy's, which became the just about the last bastion of the way lower West Burnside used to be commonly referred to as Skid Row, Portland's own Bowery. This is actually not as hard on the eyes as Cindy's was.

Three blocks west and one north, at the corner of NW Broadway and Couch Street, I got this handsome shot of Big Pink. that tan building in front of it is the Helen Swindells Building, an SRO lower-income property at West Burnside and NW Broadway. The Brody Theater is an improv house that also hosts local groups and comedy classes; down on the corner there is a shabby quick-shop that holds the barest echo of the way the whole quarter used to be.

… and our own mecca of high culture, the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (I can tell that it's a center for high culture, as I can afford nothing that ever goes through there). The sign is memorable
as it is iconic.

Rumors that I may be planning an annual calendar of my kind of scenic Portland may indeed have some truth to them. Be watching.