"Form Portland and East Portland! Form St. Johns and Sellwood! And I'll form the head!"
Portland, like other cities, is a Voltron of a few smaller towns.
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.
Jenn asks: Why does Portland seem less a city and more 3 small towns standing on each others' shoulders wearing a trench coat?
Portland looks like several small towns that glommed together because that’s exactly what it is. The Rose City did not emerge from the head of Zeus fully formed. Instead, it is an urban Voltron made up of several small towns that came together to form something greater. Maybe not a Defender of the Universe, but at least a somewhat pleasant mid-sized American city.
Portland was incorporated in 1851, but that initial townsite was much smaller than what we now think of as Portland. It was essentially just today’s downtown area, and for a good while after incorporation Portland was just a muddy pit-stop on the river where a bunch of drunken lumberjacks and sailors would hang out between seasonal employment. It didn’t sprawl south or north to any great extent, and the land across the river was comparatively rural.
By the 1860s and 70s, though, plenty of stuff started sprouting up on the other side of the Willamette. The creatively named town of East Portland was mainly home to Dr. James Hawthorne’s massive insane asylum, located near where 12th and Hawthorne is today. Yes, by that one food cart pod you’ve probably been to.
Albina, meanwhile, was a more industrial railroad town just North of East Portland. Both of these towns joined Portland as a whole in 1891. I’ve heard a lot of local history enthusiasts and tour guides repeat an anecdote about how the various towns did this specifically to be bigger than Seattle, but I’ve never read anything that confirms that.
Rather, East Portland and Albina joining Portland was more about making bridges and public utilities easier to manage and coordinate. That’s not nearly as fun as three towns teaming up for the express purpose of being larger than Seattle, but it does make a lot more sense.
A little later on Sellwood, a real estate development and short-lived freestanding town, got annexed by Portland in 1893. Later still, St. Johns, a small town at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, voted to join Portland in 1915. Both of these areas still feel like small towns in and of themselves in large part because that’s how they were initially laid out and planned.
Of the parts of Portland that used to be independent cities, St. Johns still has the most coherent current identity. It’s geographically isolated from the rest of Portland, and residents still call the main drag and central area “downtown St. Johns,” even though it’s a smaller commercial district than comparable areas like Hawthorne or N. Mississippi. Also, having one of the city’s most iconic landmarks looming over your area probably goes a long way to building neighborhood identity.
East Portland, Albina, Sellwood, and St. Johns weren’t the only non-Portland areas to get gobbled up by the city. Several other bits of unincorporated land that had been claimed and developed by various speculators also got gradually devoured by Stumptown, leading to a Portland that stretches far beyond its initial boundaries.
One of the big reasons why lots of neighborhoods can feel different is that they were all platted, or laid out, differently. In the late 1800s and early 1900s street and lot planning was largely left up to the private developers who were trying to make a buck with real estate development. These developers didn’t work to any kind of standard about what streets or blocks had to be like. It was largely left to their whims.
So, you have several areas in Portland where streets don’t quite match up, aren’t the usual width, or just feel somewhat different than streets in other areas. That’s usually where different land claims met and different developers didn’t bother to coordinate or regularize how streets would work. Decades later, we all have to live with their independent decisions.
So, Portland looks like it’s made of different small towns because it is. Along with several bits of unincorporated land that it eventually glommed onto. And I don’t think we’re done yet. Portland needs to keep expanding, ideally by absorbing Vancouver, Washington. At least a little.
Despite what some residents might think, Vancouver, Washington is absolutely a suburb of Portland. And yet, it refuses to do the efficient thing and act like it. Vancouver isn’t part of Metro and it doesn’t have MAX or other Tri-Met lines running its way, even though connecting Vancouver to the MAX system would help everyone.
The fact that Vancouver persists as an appendage on the Portland area is an affront to reason and efficiency. At the very least, Clark County, Washington ought to join Oregon, which would make regional governance much easier. I don’t think Vancouver itself needs to become part of Portland like Albina or St. Johns did. However, having it in the same state, a part of Metro, and connected to local mass transit would be a massive improvement for everyone living in this particular metro area.
Do you have a question about Portland? Send me an email and I’ll try to get to it in a future column.