Near SE 12th Avenue and Market Street (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
This Wednesday brings a milestone I never would have expected. It will be ten weeks since I exited a grocery store at Southeast 11th and Belmont. That was the last time I was inside a building other than my own home.
Yesterday also happened to be the 40th anniversary of the first major Mt. Saint Helens eruption, which somehow seems fitting. No matter what we build, nature always has the last word.
On May 18, 1980, as a massive ash cloud rose over the mountain, it could easily be seen 108 miles away from my home in McMinnville. I remember climbing onto the roof of a neighbor friend’s house to gaze at the eruption, which resembled photos I’d seen of a nuclear bomb’s mushroom cloud. The next morning, my parents and I awakened to a loud crashing sound, as the gutters fell off the roof of our ranch house, weighted down by volcanic ash.
Covid-19 is in some ways the opposite. Instead of driving people out of doors to watch the eruption together, the pandemic and its ensuing quarantine have driven us into isolation, indoors. Yet instead of being destroyed, our homes have become our sanctuaries—even if they have to double as offices and schools.
It’s not exactly that I refused to go inside a building. But when the quarantine arrived, I simply stepped up something I’d already been doing often: having groceries delivered. Because I hate standing in lines, I was already a fan. You can’t get beer and wine delivered with your groceries, but several very good local microbreweries deliver separately. And all the to-go food I’ve picked up has been handed over through a window or doorway, so I never step inside.
At some point I did start to become aware of the no-buildings streak and began wanting to see it continue. I suspect it’s not just a desire to stay safe that inspired me, but a kind of personal protest…against the protesters.
Certainly the quarantine has hit many people hard, not simply the medical threat but how the economy has been devastated. We’re basically already in a second Great Depression, and for millions it has upended their livelihoods. Yet to strap a gun into your holster and menacingly storm a state capitol—against the recommendations of the entire medical community and in a way that not only threatens people with violence but risks starting new chains of Covid-19 infections—is not a good look.
Right now judges in more than one state have struck down governors’ stay-at-home orders. It’s perhaps legally correct given the constitutional right to free assembly, but it essentially re-affirms peoples' right to behave irresponsibly. Luckily this is a tiny minority of the population, and there are next to none of these people in my neighborhood, except for the regularly-visiting son of an elderly shut-in down the street, who has a series of hand-scrawled angry messages affixed to his dusty white van.
Meanwhile, despite the title I gave this post, it hasn’t really been ten weeks without architecture. For starters, there’s my own building.
I’ve lived in the same Southeast Portland apartment for 22 years. It’s the only residential unit in what’s otherwise a single-story commercial building constructed in 1927, originally as a gas station and automobile repair shop. The other two current tenants, a dance studio and a brunch restaurant, were both here when I arrived in 1998. Even after 22 years, I’m the most recent arrival.
Yet because of Covid-19, both these businesses face a very uncertain future. I think the restaurant is already closed for good, and the studio has hung on through the generosity of a GoFundMe campaign that bought it two months’ rent worth of time. Even so, how many parents will sign up their kids for classes this summer, this fall?
This building makes me laugh in one architectural way. On its 12th Avenue side, it has little Tudor details: a bit of half-timbering along its roofline. But it also has a pitched parapet hiding its flat roof, which is embellished with clay roof tiles that make the building look Spanish. Who ever heard of a Tudor-Spanish work of architecture? It’s like Henry VIII went on holiday in Ibiza.
Near SE 12th and Market (Brian Libby)
Inside, although this two-bedroom apartment has enough windows to be full of natural light, the best part may actually be the basement, which replicates the entire 900 square feet downstairs – only not at the low ceiling heights of a single-family home’s basement. An old sofa and my turntable, along with the radiant cool that basements provide in summertime, have made this subterranean space my fortress of solitude.
That solitude is a lot easier these days thanks to the building’s two other tenants being out of commission, but it reminds me of the old Chinese curse: may you get what you wish for.
This circa-1927 building has very thin walls. For years, the clanging of the restaurant’s dishwashing and the march of 20 dance students hopping up and down at once has been a constant soundtrack. Yet now that I have my precious silence, it doesn’t feel so good. I just worry about Tim and Sherie, the dance studio owners who work 80 hours a week at their business and don’t have a Plan B.
The location of my apartment is a nice launching point for explorations. The building sits on a kind of seam, where the industrial Central Eastside gives way to leafy neighborhoods like Ladd’s Addition, Richmond, Buckman and Sunnyside. That means on walks and bike rides I have two distinct environments to choose from.
Scenes from residential Southeast Portland (Brian Libby)
On weekends, I like moving through the empty Central Eastside streets, but many of these businesses are still open, so on weekdays I instead dodge hundreds of other pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders in Ladd’s. Yet the unusual layout of Ladd’s Addition, with its central traffic circle and X-shaped layout of streets, discourages through traffic and, in effect, naturally acts like the shared-streets configuration we’ve ascribed with barricades to 100 miles of mostly residential streets.
Without the experience of being inside buildings, I think I’ve become more attuned to the experience of moving through my neighborhood, and to the varying landscape.
It starts with nature and the blossoms of spring: a saving grace with its bounty of color and beauty. Then there’s the houses of my extended neighborhood I walk past regularly: the Craftsmans and Victorians, the American Foursquares and Dutch Colonials. The old houses and the massive tree canopy make it look idyllic, especially this time of year. Yet in the other direction, in the industrial Central Eastside, there are more homeless encampments and more graffiti than ever. It’s rough out there for a lot of people.
Scenes from the Central Eastside (Brian Libby)
How I move through these streets has also changed. Because I’m an avid runner, and the etiquette of quarantine is that runners without masks should stay off the sidewalk, I’ve taken to going running down the middle of the street. Of course I still have to retreat to the sidewalk now and then for a delivery truck or the occasional other motorist. Yet I can’t help but feel a bit gleeful doing something that would have felt deviant a few months ago and doesn’t today.
This is just one of the silver linings that has come with quarantine life, like the world’s massively reduced emissions and pollution. I mean, there are dolphins in Venice’s harbor again.
It’s hard not to wonder if to some degree these gains by reduction can be retained.
I’m also hopeful that as a runner I’ll never have to go back to the sidewalk, for example: that in residential areas, drivers will accept that they have to share the road with many other modes of transit, be it scooters or bicycles or even pedestrians.
Oh, and the idea of a massive freeway-widening project at the Rose Quarter? It seems more absurd than ever now.
While it’s hard for many to work from home, particularly those with younger children, I think it’s also dawning on millions of office workers that they don’t need to be commuting to the office every business day. Even if most go back to the office following the pandemic’s eradication, just taking a portion of that activity on the roadways can have a transformative effect. We already should have favored congestion pricing to widening anyway, but now it really makes no sense to lay down all that additional asphalt.
In going ten weeks without entering a work of architecture, what stands out as the places I want to visit when I can?
As an introvert who already worked from home, I’ve adapted to quarantine life more easily than most. Yet I do find myself looking forward to shopping for records and books again.
Obviously you can buy stuff online. I just got some Thelonious Monk records and Portland history books in the mail the other day. Yet it’s the sense of discovery that I miss: entering Powell’s or Jackpot Records, Mother Foucault’s Bookshop or Tomorrow Records, Music Millennium or Broadway Books, without any particular title in mind but rather a desire to wander through the collections and see what I find.
When I’ve cheered along with 60,000 others at a winning Oregon Ducks touchdown in Autzen Stadium or gasped with an audience at the plot twist in a Portland Center Stage theatrical production at the Armory or a movie at the Hollywood, it’s not just the action on the field or the stage or screen. It’s the act of us together, falling into the same rhythms and intently following the same narrative.
The other architecture I miss the most will take the longest to come back: our large gathering spots — stadiums, arenas, concert halls, theaters.
Not only do arts and sports give us entertainment and food for thought, but seeing them makes one part of the crowd, which can have a power all its own. To be swept up with hundreds or thousands of other people gathered together in one place is to feel both extraordinarily small and powerfully large: small in the humbling sense of being just one out of many, but large in the sense of being a part of a collective emotion.
Jackpot Records, Hollywood Theatre, Autzen Stadium, Eugene (Brian Libby)
Yet it’s hard to imagine these larger venues being filled to capacity anytime soon. Even after there’s a vaccine, there will be a psychological hangover.
That said, of course we will get through this. “We” does not mean everyone, for there has already been a staggering number of human casualties, in America more than anywhere else in the world: approaching six figures. And our utterly clueless, corrupt national leadership has made it all so much worse. Yet just as it did in 1918, the pandemic will subside.
These days I’m sometimes reminded of an article I was commissioned in late 2001, not long after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The assignment was to ask whether the era of tall buildings was effectively over given this terrorism threat. Of course in hindsight the idea is absurd. But now I’m thankful to think of that overreactive absurdity in light of the gloomiest projections about the future.
Which brings me back to Mt. Saint Helens with yesterday’s anniversary still on the mind.
The mountain erupted not just on May 18 but several times over the ensuing weeks and months. It changed the landscape forever, but while the peak itself and Spirit Lake never came back, nature has restored the ecosystem.
So too will it be in our communities. It’s going to take a long time, and the human landscape will be permanently altered. Yet hopefully we can emerge not just scarred but determined as well: to capitalize on once-in-generation opportunities that have accompanied the tragedy.
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