Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jeanne Bear's avatar

Fran, I have more pieces to add to your history of Portland street numbering.

First, I want you to know that I met you around 2011-12 at Laurelhurst Park, I think, when Debilyn Molineaux had an organizing meeting for Coffee Party newsgathering. So when I saw you on Facebook, and now on Substack, I followed your writings. I appreciate reading your work, but for the first time I have a response.

I moved to Portland around 2005, bought a 1888 house near downtown a year or two later (I’ve since left it), and started to investigate the history of our houses and streets. I got a tour of some of the old streetcar lines (maybe from Dill Pickle Club AKA Know Your City or Architectural Heritage Center).

We heard that what are now Portland city neighborhoods used to be a collection of separate small towns, accessed by streetcars rather than by travel on streets, all with their own internal streets and a few arterials such as Asylum street/boulevard. I understood that the great renumbering in the thirties was part of bringing all the towns into the one city of Portland. They had to connect the neighborhood streets (often with offsets that survive to mystify us), decide on common names/numbers within the quadrants, as well as renumber the buildings’ addresses. It was so good to hear from you about the extra thought that went into choosing numbers. I’ve heard that other standards were 10 blocks east/west to each half mile, and odd-numbered building addresses on the north and west sides of streets.

I heard about the address renumbering, that those “plain” white number tiles were supplied by the city to everyone. (That’s lots of tiles!) AHC people often say that home buyers in the 2000s who remodel old PDX bungalows and Victorian houses often assume they will discard and replace their address tiles with some fancier design that they think looks more “traditional”; they don’t realize their original tiles’ authentic history.

A couple of years later I was back in the foothills of California to work on preparing my old house for sale. I attended a terra cotta arts festival in Lincoln (a town northeast of Sacramento) at the sprawling Gladding McBean clay factory. At the accompanying “open house” of their sprawling warehouse (it looks like: www.gladdingmcbean.com/?pgid=jvpj6cbx-936679ae-77e0-46df-a851-939e2b518f76), I saw samples and heard more about their projects in the 1930s. Their main challenge at the time was to produce all the clay roof tiles for the buildout of Stanford University in Palo Alto CA (where I grew up), which is a lot of red clay. A staff member said that equally challenging was another contract they were pressed to complete at the same time — thousands of white clay tiles for the city of Portland OR. Seeing those samples in Lincoln CA certainly closed the loop for me, to appreciate those plain little white rectangles on my very old house in Portland.

--Jeanne Bear jeanne.bear@gmail.com

Expand full comment
Amy Wang's avatar

Thank you for the fascinating lesson on Portland streets. Now I have to go see if my front door really is 190 feet from the previous intersection (that sounds about right).

Expand full comment
24 more comments...

No posts