Vanishing Portland (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)) Review

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(More customer reviews)I love old photos, especially photos of locations where you can see how things used to look and compare them to the current landscape. I ran across the book Vanishing Portland by Ray and Jeanna Bottenberg on our library RSS feed, and jumped on it immediately. It was a delight to see both early Portland images, as well as images I remember fondly since we moved here in 1968. While I don't completely share their tendency towards progress being cultural destruction, it is a bit sad to see what we gave up for things like parking garages and supermarkets...
Contents:
Acknowledgments; Introduction; Stores; Restaurants, Bars, and Nightclubs; Buildings and Streetscapes; Transportation; Products and Companies; Sports, Arts, Entertainment, and Media; Oregon Centennial Exposition; Bibliography
The book starts off with a brief history of Portland spanning the years from the 1840's through around the year 2000. You learn that Portland was very well-known for "shanghai-ing" sailors as forced labor on ocean voyages. You pass out in a bar, and you wake up at sea, unable to escape until the voyage was completed. Companies started, grew, died, moved... Exposition grounds had a history of serving as assembly areas for Japanese internment camps. World War II Liberty ships were produced in large numbers in local shipyards, and an entire city, Vanport, was built around that industry. Unfortunately, Vanport was wiped out when a levy broke and flooded 18500 home in less than an hour. After the history lesson, it's on to the pictures and images of days gone by. Stores such as Meier and Frank with horse and carriages out front. It's now a Macy's. Corno's Food Market, complete with huge fruit cutouts adorning the building (I remember those). It's now been torn down. Restaurants such as Waddle's right before you cross the I-5 bridge, with the famous clock and duck sign. It closed in 2004 for a Krispy Kreme shop, but ended up as a Hooter's instead. sigh...
There are images from Portland Wrestling, back in the days before the WWE (yes, I watched it every Saturday night). Wrestlers like Jesse Ventura and Rowdy Roddy Piper got their start here. There are all the old theaters that lined Broadway Street, such as the Oriental, the Broadway, the Fox, and the Orpheum. All are gone under those names, and only the Orpheum survived with major renovations to become a performing arts center. There's even the landmark location about a quarter mile from my house... the Steigerwald Dairy Company building that was in the shape of a milk bottle. It was remodeled as a 7-Up facility, then the bottle was enclosed to put a large 7-Up sign on the top. That recently gave way to, of all things, a Budweiser logo. Double sigh...
There are also some glimpses into how culture forces change. There was a chain of restaurants based out of Utah called the Coon Chicken Inn. One opened about a mile away from my house in 1930, and the buildings all sported a blackface character's head as a huge part of the entrance. Obviously as time progressed, that stereotype became far less acceptable, and the restaurant closed in 1959. I'm sure the same could be said for the Sambo's restaurant chain. The "Little Black Sambo" character became unacceptable, and even altering the basic advertising didn't keep it from closing down to the point of only the original restaurant still remaining.
I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and there were only a few places where the information attached to the picture was incorrect. I also could have done with fewer matchbook cover pictures in the restaurant section, but I guess it's hard to find pictures of some restaurants that were part of larger buildings. The book also screamed for a follow-up that would attempt to place the photographer at the same place today, taking the same picture at the same angle. Perhaps that'll be a photo project in all my spare time... :)

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Portland at the end of World War II was an international port and a powerhouse of the timber and shipbuilding industries. Oregon's largest city grew and changed in the decades that followed, adding new industries and population. It also endured reductions in shipbuilding capacity, a devastating flood, a declining timber industry, urban renewal, freeway construction, and social change. By the 1990s, a wave of globalization and big-box retail marketing swelled shipping at the city's port and swept away a surprising number of Portland's businesses, which remain in the fond memories of Portlanders. A few of these memorable icons include the stores Meier and Frank, J. K. Gill, Payless Drug, and Sprouse-Reitz; the restaurants Henry Theile, Jolly Joan, Tik Tok, Yaw's Top Notch, and Waddle's; the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park; the Portland Hotel; the Broadway, Fox, and Orpheum theaters; Henry Weinhard's brewery; the Ramblin Rod television show; and Portland Wrestling.

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