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East Portland more than just “East Portland”

TIM CURRAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
East of 82nd Avenue, there has been a movement in the last few years to lump every neighborhood together and call it “East Portland,” using the grammatically incorrect capital E.

While the underlying reasoning might be to draw city bureaucrats' and their bosses' attention to this often neglected, most populous area of our city, I find this campaign to be counterproductive.

Since annexation to Portland in the mid-80s, activists in neighborhoods of what was then unincorporated Mid-Multnomah County or Mid-county for short, have worked diligently to create separate identities for their neighborhoods. By identifying attractions and singular benefits of their Mid-county neighborhoods and instilling pride and sense of community in the folks who live in them, they have made progress differentiating their specific neighborhoods and making them as distinctive as older neighborhoods of Portland.

Why then the concentrated effort to dilute these efforts by lumping all of them together as “East Portland”?

It took individual neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland de-coupling from the stigma and label created by the image that all of Northeast Portland was a ghetto and all of St. Johns was where the drug-addled white trash lived before they received their due. The image is rarely the reality.

Because local community activists must highlight and stress the lousy aspects of some east Portland neighborhoods to get help from elected officials and receive resources and bureaucratic movement, the new bad area of Portland is becoming “East Portland,” as in “Oh, you're from east Portland.” You're welcome, folks in North Portland; you, too, in Northeast Portland. The residue created by stressing the negative term sticks to every east Portland neighborhood, good or bad.

For the first time last month, the City brought its Sunday Parkways event to neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue in Southeast Portland, calling it “East Portland Sunday Parkways.” Sunday Parkways strives to connect neighborhoods and people by closing streets to vehicle traffic and encouraging bicycle and pedestrian activities and entertainment along the prescribed 4.5-mile loop.

Due to the location of this event, East Portland Expo-a two-day community event held in the outer Southeast in its second year-took advantage of the traffic generated by the bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly event by getting the Department of Transportation to link its event with their site at Ed Benedict Park.

Other community events were not so lucky. The Ramona Street Fair, also in its second year, was originally scheduled to be on the East Portland Sunday Parkway route, but construction along the Springwater Trail cut this small, community-focused event and the Lents International Farmer's Market out. So while the Parkway drew thousands, the Ramona Street Fair was reportedly host to but a few hundred neighbors.

Farther north, an annual celebration in the Gateway area (held for the first time in Parkrose) with a long history was overshadowed by these upstart events on the same day. While Fun-O-Rama, as it is known, is being redefined from the days when it included a parade and carnival, it seems to me a shame that this historic neighborhood event appears to be getting lost under the umbrella of the movement to redefine individual neighborhoods as part of this large, amorphous geographic area known as “East Portland.”

I applaud area leaders' efforts to attract the attention of City Hall and to bring money and services out our way. However, I do not support the idea of aggregating the unique neighborhoods of Portland east of 82nd Avenue in one group, under one name.

Represented officially by the East Portland Neighborhood Office-the city-staffed umbrella organization for these participatory groups-the neighborhoods of Argay, Centennial, Glenfair, Hazelwood, Lents, Mill Park, Parkrose, Parkrose Heights, Pleasant Valley, Powellhurst-Gilbert, Russell, Wilkes and Woodland Park have their own persona, style and history and each makes a contribution to our overall community.
Let's not lose them and their individual identities in the effort to bring notice to the entire area of Portland east of 82nd Ave.
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