(no subject)
Portland is a dense in a way Birmingham - or any Southern city - will never be. The people I’ve talked to think the metro area is roughly half a million people, less than half of Birmingham. A city block is roughly one fourth or one third the length of a block in southside Birmingham. The particular neighborhood we are staying in, Hawthorne, that I am staying in has roughly 5 restaurants combined on both sides of any block, some as small as 5 tables. They are all full at noon on Friday. This is not a business district - there are shops and restaurants on this main strip and houses a block off of it. Every restaurant has some options for vegans, and most staples are vegan. Ordering fried rice at a Thai restaurant solicits the additional question “Eggs okay?” in a blatantly false broken English. A better example would be the place where I am eating my breakfast, the Cup & Saucer. The home fries are vegan, there is a vegan option for pancakes, and the eggs in any egg dish can be substituted with tofu. More exciting than tofu is the option to have your pancake topped with fruit and yogurt for an additional $3.25. I passed this time because I’ll likely never get to eat at this restaurant again and want to sample everything else on the menu also and had my apple granola pancake topped with maple syrup and served with eggs scrambled with cream cheese and chives, home fries, and an English muffin. If Jim’s restaurant does end up with a crepe stand, I sincerely hope that a fruit and yogurt mix ends up a filling option.
Four and a half hours later, with one 30 minute bus ride and three hours of walking occupying the interval, I am sitting at Stumptown Coffee Roasters having my first refill of Rwandan grown, French pressed coffee. Stumptown serves their regular French pressed, with cups stacked near the register so you can pour your own coffee, mix in the sugar and cream, then get in line to pay for it. It costs a dollar, with your first refill free, on an honor system that seems prevalent in this city. During my first cup I looked up the census number for Portland and Birmingham As of 2000, Portland has five hundred thousand people in the city limits, with two and a quarter million in the metro area. The preceding ten year growth rate was extremely high, and if extrapolated, Portland probably has roughly two and a half to two and two thirds million people in the metro area now. Birmingham, for comparison, has nine hundred eighty thousand as of 2000. Since then, the census has redefined the size and shape of the Birmingham metro area to include Hoover as a metropolitan center and to include three more counties, for an addition of a hundred thousand people, giving the one point one million people figure commonly seen. The graffiti in the Stumptown bathroom mostly is a flamewar regarding racial reparations, and while not particularly insightful it is a sight better than the graffiti one expects in a Birmingham bathroom.
Every local establishment has art on the walls, for sale. Most I’ve seen is well done and inexpensive(ish - it is art, after all). Otherwise, the prevailing goal of most architects in the city seems to be to make the place as comfortable as possible while remaining minimalist and not resembling Starbucks. To further this aim, beige and crème are more prevalent than sienna or mint, wood is stained pale blonde instead of brown or red, and chrome shows up with alarming regularity, brushed as often as polished. This is a blow to my sense that the next wave of award winning interiors will be more confrontational, but a general sense of unease in much of the art on the same walls bastions up my resolve in this regard. Prints that utilize a small shock of neon-inspired inks or that have an aesthetically motionless image being obscured by a violent or fervent pattern are common. If these same images were on the walls instead of on canvases hung on the walls, the ultimate effect would be to place the customer into a situation of encountering, as opposed to observing, whatever anxieties are driving the current mood.
Portland has a tendency of sublimating its confrontations, handling them as passively and effectively as possible and then considering the issue resolved. If the issue continues, then the response is to ignore it. The Portland community’s approach works very well in most regards, for example, on the light rail. The passenger buys a fare and steps on the train. No one checks the ticket, which is good for two hours and a certain area of the city. Train fares transfer to the buses and streetcars. This morning I bought my fare on a bus, and then ended up boarding a light rail an hour and forty five minutes later. I’d say from my limited experience that 95% of people pay their fare and don’t worry. The Portland way of catching that other 5% is random farechecks, where four cops stand on a platform, drink coffee, and one gets on each train that goes past and checks everyone’s fare. This morning, the officer allowed mine to pass, even though by the time I got to the checkpoint I was almost at two fifteen since I had bought the ticket. The young lady who was caught was asked to stand on the platform (with the three cops who got to continue drinking coffee and talking for this train), while the officer went about checking the rest of the passengers. She instead turned and walked down the steps, onto the sidewalk and was presumably not seen again. The cops never noticed because everyone in Portland who hadn’t witnessed the exchange in the train would automatically assume she had a legitimate reason for getting off the train and going to the street. Everyone in Birmingham would, in my opinion, assume she was running from the checkpoint.
The Portland mindset might not catch everybody, but neither does the Birmingham mindset, and the Portland mindset is not an affront to human dignity. Where the Portland method fails is in those areas where more is called for. Portland has a large network of social services, making it attractive for homeless and migrant citizens in spite of its tendency towards cold and wet. Unfortunately, all people require an amount of social contact, and when everything is provided, a homeless person has no excuse to speak to non-homeless. The only real topic which both a homeless person and a random passerby are both going to find an immediate interest in is likely to be the change in the passerby’s pocket, and I have found the Portland response to be that there are numerous government and charity social programs annulling the need to give that change. In Birmingham the panhandlers are more assertive, but more likely to carry a conversation than just to ask for money and walk off. This is not something I’ve studied in either city in any detail, but just a short impression that has left a lingering feeling that what the homeless need most is a social contact across the social spectrum to remind both sides that the other exists. It becomes very difficult in every scenario not to think of a beggar as ungrateful, but contact makes people, if not more tolerable, then at least more understandable.
Drivers in Portland stop at pedestrian crosswalks with people obviously planning to cross them sometime, regardless of their right of way. More than once I was waiting to cross the street only to have the car I’m waiting on stop to allow me to cross, even though it was sunny and I was not showing any signs of impatience - or at least, not what would be considered impatience in Birmingham. I’m not sure how much this Portland mindset is an just west coast mentality, how much is the cosmopolitan mindset, how much is uniquely Portland. I have a tendency to anthropomorphize cities in any case, often based on situations which are unrepeatable and don’t involve anyone from that city. I’ll probably always think of Portland as being short, white, from Mountain Brook, wearing dreadlocks under her bandana, and so involved in causes that she no longer makes any sense. And her eyes are a green almost as deep as her skies are blue.
Four and a half hours later, with one 30 minute bus ride and three hours of walking occupying the interval, I am sitting at Stumptown Coffee Roasters having my first refill of Rwandan grown, French pressed coffee. Stumptown serves their regular French pressed, with cups stacked near the register so you can pour your own coffee, mix in the sugar and cream, then get in line to pay for it. It costs a dollar, with your first refill free, on an honor system that seems prevalent in this city. During my first cup I looked up the census number for Portland and Birmingham As of 2000, Portland has five hundred thousand people in the city limits, with two and a quarter million in the metro area. The preceding ten year growth rate was extremely high, and if extrapolated, Portland probably has roughly two and a half to two and two thirds million people in the metro area now. Birmingham, for comparison, has nine hundred eighty thousand as of 2000. Since then, the census has redefined the size and shape of the Birmingham metro area to include Hoover as a metropolitan center and to include three more counties, for an addition of a hundred thousand people, giving the one point one million people figure commonly seen. The graffiti in the Stumptown bathroom mostly is a flamewar regarding racial reparations, and while not particularly insightful it is a sight better than the graffiti one expects in a Birmingham bathroom.
Every local establishment has art on the walls, for sale. Most I’ve seen is well done and inexpensive(ish - it is art, after all). Otherwise, the prevailing goal of most architects in the city seems to be to make the place as comfortable as possible while remaining minimalist and not resembling Starbucks. To further this aim, beige and crème are more prevalent than sienna or mint, wood is stained pale blonde instead of brown or red, and chrome shows up with alarming regularity, brushed as often as polished. This is a blow to my sense that the next wave of award winning interiors will be more confrontational, but a general sense of unease in much of the art on the same walls bastions up my resolve in this regard. Prints that utilize a small shock of neon-inspired inks or that have an aesthetically motionless image being obscured by a violent or fervent pattern are common. If these same images were on the walls instead of on canvases hung on the walls, the ultimate effect would be to place the customer into a situation of encountering, as opposed to observing, whatever anxieties are driving the current mood.
Portland has a tendency of sublimating its confrontations, handling them as passively and effectively as possible and then considering the issue resolved. If the issue continues, then the response is to ignore it. The Portland community’s approach works very well in most regards, for example, on the light rail. The passenger buys a fare and steps on the train. No one checks the ticket, which is good for two hours and a certain area of the city. Train fares transfer to the buses and streetcars. This morning I bought my fare on a bus, and then ended up boarding a light rail an hour and forty five minutes later. I’d say from my limited experience that 95% of people pay their fare and don’t worry. The Portland way of catching that other 5% is random farechecks, where four cops stand on a platform, drink coffee, and one gets on each train that goes past and checks everyone’s fare. This morning, the officer allowed mine to pass, even though by the time I got to the checkpoint I was almost at two fifteen since I had bought the ticket. The young lady who was caught was asked to stand on the platform (with the three cops who got to continue drinking coffee and talking for this train), while the officer went about checking the rest of the passengers. She instead turned and walked down the steps, onto the sidewalk and was presumably not seen again. The cops never noticed because everyone in Portland who hadn’t witnessed the exchange in the train would automatically assume she had a legitimate reason for getting off the train and going to the street. Everyone in Birmingham would, in my opinion, assume she was running from the checkpoint.
The Portland mindset might not catch everybody, but neither does the Birmingham mindset, and the Portland mindset is not an affront to human dignity. Where the Portland method fails is in those areas where more is called for. Portland has a large network of social services, making it attractive for homeless and migrant citizens in spite of its tendency towards cold and wet. Unfortunately, all people require an amount of social contact, and when everything is provided, a homeless person has no excuse to speak to non-homeless. The only real topic which both a homeless person and a random passerby are both going to find an immediate interest in is likely to be the change in the passerby’s pocket, and I have found the Portland response to be that there are numerous government and charity social programs annulling the need to give that change. In Birmingham the panhandlers are more assertive, but more likely to carry a conversation than just to ask for money and walk off. This is not something I’ve studied in either city in any detail, but just a short impression that has left a lingering feeling that what the homeless need most is a social contact across the social spectrum to remind both sides that the other exists. It becomes very difficult in every scenario not to think of a beggar as ungrateful, but contact makes people, if not more tolerable, then at least more understandable.
Drivers in Portland stop at pedestrian crosswalks with people obviously planning to cross them sometime, regardless of their right of way. More than once I was waiting to cross the street only to have the car I’m waiting on stop to allow me to cross, even though it was sunny and I was not showing any signs of impatience - or at least, not what would be considered impatience in Birmingham. I’m not sure how much this Portland mindset is an just west coast mentality, how much is the cosmopolitan mindset, how much is uniquely Portland. I have a tendency to anthropomorphize cities in any case, often based on situations which are unrepeatable and don’t involve anyone from that city. I’ll probably always think of Portland as being short, white, from Mountain Brook, wearing dreadlocks under her bandana, and so involved in causes that she no longer makes any sense. And her eyes are a green almost as deep as her skies are blue.