The Advent of SW Harvey Milk Street

3571

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.

 

[Address Nerd] Where Is A Quadrant Not A Quadrant? West Des Moines, Iowa

3494.

This is a bit of brain-bending niftyness I stumbled on while finding the why of the street grid of greater Des Moines, Iowa (an interesting subject in and of itself, and one whose origins are ever more obscure than those of our beloved PDX).

There is a large town subordinate to Des Moines called (not surprisingly) West Des Moines. Now, Des Moines and most of its suburbs are located in Polk County, Iowa, which has an address grid and street naming/numbering and directional rationale based on the center of the metropolitan city, like here in Portland; specifically, the point where Vine Street crosses the Des Moines River. Addresses radiate out in all directions from that point as do street directionals (mostly).

West Des Moines, when the greater DM area was ordered, decided to take a pass. It has its own grid. Starting with 1st Street on the east edge of the city (which happens to be the city limits and abuts the city of Des Moines, sharing DM's 63rd St/SW 63rd St) numbered streets progress to the west. A line approximating Railroad Street and E.P. True Parkway (and certain streets west of where E.P True begins to meander) spits the city into north and south halves and is the baseline for north-south addressing; addresses on east-west named streets run 100 to the block and are synch'd with the numbered streets, same as you may be familiar with here.

The basic plan resembles this:

The only directional prefix in the basic plan is South, and that only applies to numbered streets that extend south of the Railroad Street baseline (35th Street north of Railroad becomes S. 35th Street where it's found south of Railroad).

Now, direct your attention to that meadering blue line separating the upper 2/3rds of the city from the lower 1/3rd (more or less). That's the Raccoon River, and for a number of years, WDM pretty much ended there. But cities grow, as they do, and eventually WDM started annexing land south of the Raccoon. There are only two ways from the main part of WDM into this section: A bridge on S 1st Street, and the bridge that carries Interstate-35 into the area. This makes that area comparatively remote and relatively inaccessable to the rest of WDM, and did emergency responders in the area a concern, as detailed by the city council proceedings that are linked to in the article I stumbled on in a blog called Iowa Highway Ends:

Lynne Twedt, Addressing Administrator, reported on the background of this proposal to add locational prefixes for roadways south of the Raccoon River. She stated as the City develops south of the Raccoon River, it will pose a greater challenge to public safety personnel responding to those areas, because there are currently two river crossings in the City. It is critical that the public safety responders know immediately based on the street name whether or not they need to go south of the river.

So ... addressing administrator? Has that got to be the best job ever or what?

Anyway, that was their concern. Whether or not it was too much of a concern is a exercise I leave to the reader, but that was their feeling. Here is how they solved it:

• All the streets in the area east of I-35 and south of the Raccoon River get the prefix SE
• All the streets in the area west of I-35 and south of the Raccoon River get the prefix SW

The observant reader will note that the area deemed SW is actually terribly tiny, and is dwarfed by the SE area, but the logic is consistent in and of itself. Here's the map with the 'demi-quadrants' added:

But here's the crucial point here, and one which may leave some conventionally minded address nerds scratching our heads: only the street names have any respect to these boundaries. That is to say, the street names have been modified, but the addresses have not. As soon as South 1st Street crosses the Raccoon River, the street name changes to SE 1st Street, but the addresses continue to progress as they were. The address grid remains as before, relative to the origin point of Railroad Street and 1st Street. The demi-quadrants are really just region names, cluing in the first responder (or address seeker) that if you have an address beginning in SW or SE, you merely know to look south of the Raccoon River to find it. This is an innovative, if awkward-to-the-layman way of at least letting you know where not to look for your address, and if sufficiently familiar with the streets, making the most efficient guess at which of the limited number of accesses is your most efficient route.

And if anyone in the City 'o' Portland comes up with the idea of an Address Administrator (or, anyone in any Oregon city), well, I'm available.