Good evening from a tiny airbnb in Portland, Oregon, where I am taking many walks through the spring-has-sprung streets. If you’re thinking of convincing someone to move to Portland, bring them in April, when the place is a veritable planet of the plants.
I am here to try to gauge how a city I lived in for fifteen years has weathered the past three. What I can tell you is, well and badly. Most of the city is as pretty as ever, and the areas that have been historically ratty do not look much worse to me. Ever Pollyanna, I was prepared to declare Portland on the brink of 3.0. Then I started asking residents whether they saw green shoots. Like what? one asked. Another said she and her family were probably going to move. "For five years now, I've been like, 'We've hit rock bottom; it's going to come back. And then we go lower, and lower, to depths I didn't ever predict." One friend made a circling the drain finger when I asked him how he thought the city was faring, and another asked, rhetorically, “You do know all civilizations end, right?”
Until then, I recommend the raw honey and sea salt donuts at Pip’s Original, and a Paloma and some shuffleboard at Vendetta. Trash fam version after the break
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