Donna Maxey's family lost its home in Portland, Ore., to the bulldozers of "urban renewal" back in 1961. She was only 12 years-old, but she still remembers every detail of that house – the pocket doors, the built-in china cupboards, the towering English walnut trees in the yard. "I would dream about that house until I was in my 50s," says Maxey.
Maxey, a retired educator and community activist, remembers it as a place where no one locked their doors and everybody knew each other. "I liken it to Ozzie and Harriet meets The Cosby Show," says Maxey, who is black. In an overwhelmingly white state with an ugly history of discrimination against blacks, Albina was a haven of sorts. And then it was all destroyed to make way for interstate highways and a hospital expansion. "The African American community never did recover," Loving says.
Today, after decades of neglect, the part of town once known as Albina is seeing a revival. Businesses are going in on North Williams Avenue, the area's main business street. But newcomers to the neighborhood are overwhelmingly white and well-to-do – "yuppies," Maxey calls them.
It's a familiar pattern of gentrification, and the bitterness many felt about the neighborhood's history might have remained unspoken except for another planning decision – this one seemingly the philosophical opposite of the destructive urban renewal policies of the '50s and '60s.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation wants to install a protected bikeway on North Williams Avenue, which sees as many as 3,000 cyclists daily, and in July a public meeting on the plan – part of a larger "traffic operations safety project" – turned into a contentious forum on the history of institutionalized racism in Portland.
In response to the outcry at the public meeting, the project has been put on hold until at least next spring. More African Americans have been appointed to the advisory committee, and a community forum will be held in October to have a full discussion of all the issues involved, including race.
Jonathan Maus, who runs the Bike Portland blog and has reported extensively on the North Williams controversy, thinks the city should have stood its ground and gone forward with the project, but wasn't willing to do so in part because of the political weakness of scandal-plagued Mayor Sam Adams, who has been a strong biking advocate and is closely identified with the biking community.
Special thanks to Jonathan Maus of BikePortland.org for use of the above image.