Portland waterfront, late 19th century (image courtesy Portland Waterfront History)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In the last year or two, The New York Times has certainly showered Portland with plenty of travel and food coverage. But while reading a Times story about, of all things, a hotel comprised of multiple houseboats in Jamaica Bay, Queens, I came across an unexpected bit of Portland history: Nancy Boggs and the west's first floating brothel.
The hotel in Jamaica Bay, called Boggsville Boatel, just opened this year. But its inspiration came in the 1870s, when Portland was really three cities: Portland, East Portland and Albina. Separated by the Willamette River at a time when there was no bridge across, the cities each had their own governments and police forces. For criminals, evading the law sometimes meant simply getting across or even into the water.
Nancy Boggs was a local madame who 40-by-80-foot vessel moved up and down the river to respond to local demand. Her employees could accomodate customers in both cities. Boggs hired boatmen in small rowboats to ferry people on and off her 3,200-square-foot island craft. Not only did this give her mobility and the ability to evade police, but by staying in the river Boggs paid no taxes to either city.
Funnily enough, it's tax evasion and not prostitution that made the law come down on Nancy Boggs. Repeatedly during the 1870s, police from Portland and East Portland attempted to raid her boat. The rival cities did not co-operate so, like a scene from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, she would simply divide and conquer. When officers from one city headed toward her boat, Boggs would merely hoist her anchor and move to the shore of the city not conducting the raid.
Finally, in 1882, the two cities agreed to conduct a joint raid on the floating brothel from both sides of the river simultaneously. But remember I said Portland was then not just two but three cities? Boggs floated downriver a little further to Albina, where she enlisted a sternwheeler captain all too happy to help anchor her wayward boat full of whiskey and women. But she must have known the jig was nearly up. Boggs soon moved ashore in East Portland, near the present-day intersection of Pine Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and began paying liquor taxes.
Portland waterfront, early 20th Century (image courtesy Portland Waterfront History)
Reading the article, particularly given it had nothing to do with Portland other than the Boggs inspiration, made me wonder about the city's reputation over the generations and centuries. We so often tend to think that the current era is the one in which Portland entered the national consciousness with our food carts, indie rock bands and gourmet coffee.
Yet as it happens, the city had a reputation in the late 19th century that, even when there was no mas media except for a few city newspapers, extended across the western world. Despite suffering a devastating fire in 1873 that destroyed much of the central city, by the end of the decade Portland was the largest American city north of San Francisco and the Northwest's major trading center. Yet for all its growth, this was a very rowdy frontier town.
"A proliferation of saloons and bawdy houses mixed with a steady and transient clientele of seafarers gave Portland the opportunity to rise in the annals of vice along with other such metropolises, such as Gomorrah, San Francisco, and Sodom," writes Barney Blalock in his Pictorial History of the Portland Waterfront. "During the latter part of the 19th century up into the early 1920s, just the names of the cities of Portland or Astoria carried with them a worldwide infamy. Much like Chicago in the gangster era of prohibition was known for its machine gun murders, bombings, and bribery, Portland or Astoria was synonymous with shanghaiing."
Today, even though Portland is seen as an attractive destination to move because of its livability and progressiveness, there has always remained a touch of seediness. More than a century after Madame Boggs was locating her riverboat brothel on whichever side of the river had fewer cops pursuing her, for example, Portland filmmaker Gus Van Sant made in the late 1980s and early 1990s a trilogy of films paying homage to the city's downtrodden drug addicts and hustlers: Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Decaying Chinese restaurants in Old Town and the now-demolished Saint Francis residence hotel formed a collective ambiance of gritty transcience. It's not that one seeks decay over newness or safety over crime, yet in an increasingly sanitized world, this dingier urban fabric has a compelling authenticity.
To the rest of the world, Portland has carved an identity as a city of outsiders: far from the cultural capitols of the East Coast or Southern California, and moving to its own beat as a result. Nancy Boggs and her floating brothel weren't an ideal symbol for Portland then or now, but like Bonnie and Clyde, her crimes evoked a degree of sympathy because they embodied some larger sense of the outsider who which many of us, even amidst our glassy condos and earnest citizen initiatives, can easily identify.
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