A Brief History of Albina, Part One.
Never mind the flooding, highways and racism are the real disasters.
Why is Portland Like That? is a weekly Q&A column that answers your questions about the Rose City. If you want to ask a question, send me an email.
Julia asks: Can you give me a solid actual history lesson on Albina along with the states history of racist bullshit and the floods?
I’m writing this in what used to be Albina. I’ve lived in North Portland for several years, and it’s one of my favorite of this city’s six quadrants. However, the Albina that I and many other middle-class white Portlanders now live in is very different than the Albina that existed for much of the 20th century. For a long time, this was area of town was Portland’s major Black neighborhood. Because of that, it’s been subjected to destruction via neglect, major construction projects, and financial discrimination, all powered by racism.
Oregon banned slavery in 1843 as a territory, and that law continued on when it became a state in 1859. But, plenty of anti-slavery whites in the middle 1800s still had no desire to live near free Black citizens. Free Blacks would be allowed to settle in Oregon for any lengthy period of time, on penalty of public lashing.
To the best of my knowledge the lash law was rarely enforced. The only person we know of who was actively expelled from Oregon was a sailor in 1850. But, the law did seem to disincentivize Black settlers from putting down roots in Oregon. We do know of one, George Washington Bush, who settled north of the Columbia instead of in Oregon proper.
In 1868 the 14th amendment rendered the exclusion law moot, which brings us back to Albina. Albina was very much a company town for the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, and for the Union Pacific Railroad. By the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s Blacks in Oregon and in Portland came here more often as employees of large corporations like railroads, rather than as settlers and homesteaders.
Because of this, Albina was understood by everyone in Portland, Black and otherwise, as the “official” Black neighborhood in the metro area. I’ll talk more about redlining in the next column, which actively excluded Black Portlanders from other parts of the city.
Julia’s question asks in particular about floods, which is a reference to Vanport. I’ve written about Vanport before for the Portland Mercury, so permit me to quote myself extensively here:
WWII had an immense effect on the demographics and economics of the United States, including Portland. The Kaiser company wanted to turn the Rose City into a shipbuilding center, churning out a constant supply of support vessels for the Pacific fleet.
"The reason why the Portland region was getting the demand for the 24/7 workforce was that we had the cheapest electricity in the country," says Tanya March, a researcher with a Ph.D. in urban studies who's focused on wartime housing projects. "That's why we could outcompete the East Coast. We could run these factories off the Bonneville Dam. We had cheaper power than everybody."
Assembling ships for the war effort meant a huge influx of new laborers to Oregon from around the country—and Kaiser's old advertisements sound almost desperate to the modern reader. "Previous experience is not necessary," says one ad from 1942. "Training will be given on the job. Willingness to work and a desire to do that work are what will do the maximum good." Kaiser's solicitations appealed to workers' "patriotic viewpoint," and advertised a base pay of $0.88 an hour, just over $12.76 in 2014 dollars.
Workers from around the country answered Kaiser's call. According to the late Manly Maben, author of Vanport, the only states not eventually represented in Vanport were Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware. Portland, a muddy Western river town, suddenly became host to Americans from across the continent. That large migratory population included a fair number of African Americans—a group heretofore underrepresented in Stumptown. The African Americans who followed up on Kaiser's offer of employment were going into unknown territory. The 1940 census recorded that less than one percent of Oregon's population was black.
The new workers had to live somewhere, so the Kaiser company and the federal government teamed up to build Vanport, a city on unincorporated county land just north of Portland, where Delta Park is today. In 1943 Vanport was Oregon’s second-largest city almost overnight, with cheaply-built housing and infrastructure for workers who churned out ships for the U.S.’s war effort.
It’s worth noting that the city of Portland had nothing to do with the construction of Vanport. City officials were shocked when the city started going up.
Quoting myself again:
In May of 1948 the Columbia River swelled with runoff from the Cascades. The wooden, hastily built city rested behind a dike that had, so far, shielded it from the river—but 1948's seasonal flooding was proving to be more dramatic and more damaging than any other year in the city's short life. As the waters rose, the authorities urged Vanport's citizens not to panic. Bulletins distributed read: "Dikes are safe at present. You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don't get excited."
The dikes, to their credit, did hold.
On May 30, 1948, the Columbia River burst through a railroad berm and into Vanport.
"It was a railroad embankment that actually failed," says Abbott. "It had not been built as a flood-control dike, it hadn't been engineered for flood-control expectations."
A wall of water ripped the city off its shallow foundations, and the "cracker-box houses" never stood a chance. Every single one of Vanport's 447 buildings was destroyed. Remains of the rapidly built structures, along with splintered timbers, littered the soaked city. Denver Avenue, the main road from Portland to Vanport, was almost immediately choked with a traffic jam of residents attempting to flee.
Fifteen people died as a direct result of the flood. The rest of Vanport's survivors were destitute. They had lost their homes, jobs, possessions, everything. The migrant workers who'd moved to Portland for a new life suddenly had that life ripped from them.
After the flood, Portland had to cope with what can best be described as a refugee crisis. The newly homeless and jobless were set up in trailers on Swan Island. March describes the trailers as cramped and inadequate. The makeshift housing did not do well with heat or cold, and thousands of people suddenly lived without direct plumbing facilities.
"It was horrendous. A lot of people didn't even want to talk about living in those trailers," March says. "There were protests at city hall calling them kennels on wheels.... What I think is insulting is that they had to pay $35 a month to live there."
In time, most of Vanport's population moved into Portland proper. The vast majority of the project's African Americans moved to the Albina neighborhood—still the only area where blacks could obtain reliable housing.
Read the rest of my Mercury feature on Vanport here.
After the Vanport flood, Albina became known as Portland’s “Black Belt,” with the vast majority of the regions African-American citizens living there. That put it in a precarious position when it came to resisting large building projects. The city and other authorities didn’t seem to mind destroying the housing of Black citizens for major building projects.
For instance, construction on the Memorial Coliseum project destroyed hundreds of units at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. Ironically, one of the sites city official considered for the Coliseum was the former Vanport area. However, building a major landmark on an area known for natural disasters didn’t exactly fill people with confidence. They opted to build the venue closer in.
Later in the 1960s the Minnesota Freeway, aka Interstate 5. Highway construction destroyed several hundred housing units in the neighborhood and also sapped traffic away from businesses on Interstate and Union Avenue (today’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard). So, not only did the highway destroy houses, it also depressed economic activity for businesses that had set themselves up on what had formerly been main roads on the way to Vancouver. That, and Albina then had to deal with the noise, inconvenience, and health issues that come with having a highway slicing through a neighborhood.
But that’s not all. In the late sixties an Emmanuel hospital expansion destroyed over 1,000 housing units, and didn’t even expand the hospital like initially planned. Albina got a whole lot of destruction from that project, and didn’t even reap the benefits of jobs or development.
And I haven’t even talked about redlining yet. This is going to be a two-parter. We’ll get to all that next week.
Do you have a question about Portland? Send me an email and I’ll try to get to it in a future column.