Southeast Portland Research Articles

Door-to-Door Mobility: Evaluating a Bus Rapid Transit Community Transport Concept

Portland, Oregon’s regional government, Metro, has designated specific communities in outer Southeast Portland as areas that should be planned to accommodate future population growth. Both Metro and the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (Tri-Met) have expressed a desire for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service to this area from downtown Portland, within a corridor approximately following Southeast Powell Boulevard and Foster Road.A preliminary analysis of BRT alignment alternatives was completed for this study. After six possible alignment options linking downtown Portland with Pleasant Valley and Damascus Town Centers were identified, a multivariate corridor analysis was applied to each option. Criteria used to select the best alignment alternative included regional connectivity, local ridership, operational costs, trip duration, distance, right-of-way and political feasibility, environmental costs, and capital costs. In addition, recommendations have been made for possible station locations along the preferred alternative corridor.This analysis is intended to assist Tri-Met in its efforts to begin planning, designing, and implementing a BRT system in this area. The results of the analysis suggest that a BRT system is feasible for the Powell/Interstate 205/Foster alignment. The outcome also suggests that BRT has the capacity to influence land use and could generate high transit ridership. Overall, it is recommended that Tri-Met and Metro continue to evaluate opportunities for BRT in this alignment.

Oregonscape

THE GAY LIBERATION FRONT (GLF) was formed in 1969 following the Stonewall Riots in New York City. The organization helped to bring together smaller groups around the country interested in advocating for LGBT rights. The GLF also saw themselves as part of larger protest movements at that time, including the fight to end the war in Vietnam, support of the Black Panthers, civil rights, and the feminist movements. Based primarily in New York City and San Francisco, local chapters of the GLF soon sprouted up in cities across America and around the world. In 1970, the Willamette Bridge, a small, progressive Portland newspaper, turned down a classified ad for being sexual in nature, which read: “Gay, longhair, young, lonely, seeks meaningful relationship with same. Answer with ad in the Bridge.” This inspired one of their staff members, John Wilkinson, to publicly decry the situation, and on March 24, 1970, the Portland chapter of the Gay Liberation Front had its first meeting. By that summer the group was meeting two nights a week at the Ninth Street coffeehouse located in Portland’s Centenary-Wilbur Methodist Church. Wilkinson, along with fellow Bridge staff member Holly Hart, continued to write articles in support of the movement — advocating for and providing resources and support for the Portland area LGBT community. As was common at the time, writings on the topic of gay rights were widely shared and reproduced as inspiration for local chapters. The Portland GLF reprinted “A Gay Manifesto” by Carl Wittman in one of their first newsletters. Whittman saw the main goal of Gay Liberation as being to “free ourselves; that means clearing our heads of the garbage that’s been poured into them.” In conclusion he ends with four “imperatives”: 1. Free ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self-defense and political activity; initiate counter community institutions. 2. Turn other gay people on: talk all the time; understand, forgive, accept. 3. Free the homosexual in everyone: we’ll be getting a good bit of shit from threatened latents: be gentle, and keep talking & acting free. 4. We’ve been playing an act for a long time, so we’re consummate actors. Now we can begin to be, and it’ll be a good show! OREGONSCAPE IN THIS EXCERPT from the Willamette Bridge titled “A Place to Go,” John Wilkinson, one of the newspaper staff members, issues a call to gay youth to meet at the Ninth Street Exit coffeehouse in Southeast Portland. — Matthew Cowan, OHS Moving Images and Photography Archivist OHS Research Library, GLAPN, Roger Troen Gay Liberation Collection, Mss 2988-2, Box 3, f6 ...

White Supremacy and Hatred in the Streets of Portland: The Murder of Mulugeta Seraw

In November 1988, in Southeast Portland, Oregon, three neo-Nazi skinheads murdered Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, with a baseball bat. The murderers had been recruited to commit violence against people of color by members of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), a White supremacist group founded in southern California. A few months after the murder, Elden Rosenthal, a Portland attorney, was asked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to serve as local counsel on a civil suit they were bringing against WAR founder Tom Metzger for inciting violence that led to Seraw's death. In this Oregon Voices essay, Rosenthal relays a personal account of the trial and makes connections between White supremacist rhetoric during the 1980s and 1990s in Portland and the resurgence of that rhetoric and hate crimes in recent years.

Source apportionment of trace elements and black carbon in an urban industrial area (Portland, Oregon)

This paper reports a current source apportionment study of trace elements and black carbon in particulate matter in industrial Southeast Portland, Oregon. The study aimed to determine whether metal pollution hotspots identified in the area in 2016 had been successfully mitigated by baghouse installation, or whether industrial sources continued to dominate local particulate matter. Particulate matter was filter-collected nearly continuously in 24-hour intervals between October 2017 and March 2018 (101 total filters). Filters were analyzed for 30 elements by x-ray fluorescence; black carbon was measured continuously during filter sampling using an aethalometer. EPA's Positive Matrix Factorization 5.0 was used for source apportionment modeling, yielding a 5-factor optimal solution. The source identities were resolved to be diesel and fuel emissions, sea salt, soil dust, secondary sulfates, and metals industry. The metals industry source was much less significant than expected, suggesting effective emissions reductions from the local factory. The source profiles' correlation with wind direction and speed using bivariate polar plots was examined to give further insight into the source identities and their locations. The NOAA HYSPLIT model was also used for air flow back-trajectory analysis. The results of the HYSPLIT and bivariate polar plots suggest that the coal power plant in eastern Oregon is a significant source of sulfates and mercury emissions. Using PMF on particulate matter data from a second industrial location in Southeast Portland (98 filters) revealed the same major sources except for the metals industry source, supporting the conclusion that regional sources dominate particulate matter metals composition, despite measurements made in an industrial urban location.

Building an Alternative: People's Food Cooperative in Southeast Portland

People's Food Store, now known as People's Food Cooperative, opened in 1970 in a small southeast Portland building that had housed feed and grocery stores since 1911. Its business model — a collectively managed, cooperatively owned, natural-food store — reflected the anti-corporate attitude of its founding era. When People's began, Portland hosted many cooperatively owned businesses, and some visionaries imagined a landscape filled with cooperatively owned businesses of all types. Although that vision has thus far failed to emerge, People's continues working under the same business model, in the same neighborhood, forty-one years later. Marc D. Brown explores the history of People's to provide a better understanding of the vision of those who advocated for community based businesses and of how People's managed to survive where many other cooperatives founded at the same time did not.

Building an Alternative: People's Food Cooperative in Southeast Portland

Building an Alternative: People's Food Cooperative in Southeast Portland

Measurements of carbon dioxide in an Oregon metropolitan region

Ambient concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are reported for the Portland, Oregon (USA) metropolitan region for the late July through December, 2009 period. Three stationary locations were established: a downtown location on the campus of Portland State University; a residential site in southeast Portland; and a rural station on Sauvie Island, located ∼30 km northwest of Portland in the Columbia River Gorge. Continuous measurements of CO2 at each site average 403–408 ppm and show considerable variability at each site (360–610 ppm) due to CO2 sources, sinks and meteorological variability. Within this variability, a marked 20–30 ppm diurnal cycle is observed due to photosynthetic activity and variations in the planetary boundary layer. In-city CO2 concentrations are on average enhanced by 5–6 ppm over the Sauvie Island site during upgorge wind conditions, a difference which is greatest in the afternoon. Measurements of the 13C/12C ratio of CO2 in downtown Portland are significantly depleted in 13C relative to 12C compared with background air and suggest that regional CO2 is dominated by petroleum sources (75–80%). High degrees of relationship between CO2 variability and primary air pollutants CO and NO (r2 = 0.80 and 0.77), measured by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality at the Southeast Portland location, corroborate this finding and illustrate the importance of traffic emissions on elevated ambient CO2 concentrations.

Monitoring the channel process of a stream restoration project in an urbanizing watershed: a case study of Kelley Creek, Oregon, USA

AbstractPacific Northwest (PNW) streams in the United States were impacted by the 20th century development, when removal of instream structure and channelization degraded an aquatic habitat. The lower Kelley Creek in southeast Portland, USA was channelized during the 1930's Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. Stream restoration reintroduced pool‐riffle sequences and heterogeneous substrates to protect salmonids while mitigating impacts from flooding. We investigated whether the restored pool‐riffle morphology changed substantially following effective discharge events. We examined channel forms for four reaches representing three time periods—pre‐development (two reference reaches), development and restoration. We conducted thalweg profiles, cross‐sections and pebble counts along the reaches to examine how channel geometry, residual pool dimensions and particle size distribution changed following effective discharge events. The effective discharge flows altered the restoration reach more substantially than the reference reaches. The restoration reach decreased in median particle size, and its cross‐sectional geometry aggraded near its margins. However, the residual pool morphology remained in equilibrium. Richardson Creek's reference reach degraded at the substrate level, while Kelley Creek's reference reach remained in equilibrium. The restoration reach's aggradation may have resulted from sedimentation along the nearby Johnson Creek. In contrast, Richardson Creek's degradation occurred as upstream land use may have augmented flows. Stream channels with low gradient pool‐riffle morphologies are ideal for salmonid spawning and rearing and should be protected and restored within urban corridors. The findings of our study suggest that the connectivity of streams and the dynamic fluvial geomorphology of stream channels should be considered for stream restoration projects in humid temperate climates. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America by Elinor Langer

AHundredLittle Hitlers:TheDeath ofa BlackMan, theTrial ofaWhite Racist, and theRise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America By Elinor Langer Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003; paperback ed., Picador USA, New York, 2004. Notes, index. 413 pages. $26.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Reviewed by Lauren Kessler University ofOregon, Eugene Elinor Langer's A Hundred LittleHitlers begins with amurder. InNovember 1988, on a dark street corner in southeast Port land, three skinheads? members of a local neo-Nazi group called East SideWhite Pride ? bludgeoned and beat to death an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw. Langer, a Portlander and theauthor of a biography of the left-wing writer and journalist Josephine Herbst, was, shocked by this brutal incident, as were most Oregonians at the time. For her the con nection was not only geographic and personal ? the lives of the three skinheads intersected with hers inodd ways ? but also visceral.As she writes, "theword Nazi tolls fora Jewdifferently than itdoes forothers" (p. 3). Tomake sense of thissenseless actbut,more importantly,to tryto learn something about the movement that it seemed to exemplify,Langer focused her prodigious researchand journalistic skillson this local story.Firstwriting a lengthy investigativepiece forThe Nation (July16-23, 1990), Langer then continued her research for more than a decade toproduce A Hundred Little Hitlers. Based on thousands of pages of official documents, from Portland Police Bureau files to civil and criminal case files,videotapes, press coverage, and scores of interviews and corre spondence, thebook isboth a grippingnarrative of the crime and the events leading up to itand a deeply disturbing account of thehistoryof the skinhead movement. The book succeeds on three levels.First, it is a highly readable, compelling work of narrative history. For non-scholars ? and for scholars weary of trudgingthroughdense academic tomes ? itisan easy read on a tough subject, a serious book that wears itsresearch lightly. Second, it is amodel of how local history can and should be used: a small storytold in the serviceof amuch largerissue. It isthroughthisone eventon a street inPortland thatLanger reachesout toencompass and make sense of the entire neo-Nazi movement in America. As a research technique and as a storytellingstrategy, this works well. Finally,as a work of sociocultural history,thebook illustrates how history isnot a two-dimensional, linearpro gressionbut rathera complex, three-dimensional tapestry. Langer effectively identifies, details, and then interweavesthevarious elementsofpopular culture thatcame togethertocreate the skinhead movement. Just as amix of politics, music, drugs, fashion, and lifestyle forged the anti-racist,pas sivist, countercultural movement of the 1960s, so too those same basic elements coalesced to form an almost diametrically opposite movement in the 1980s. Where A Hundred LittleHitlers falls short is in itsexploration of the legal maneuverings that follow the murder. Part of thiscomes fromprob lems constructing a strong narrative. The cast of characters is just too vast tobe comprehensible, and Langer spends toomuch timedetailing the personal histories of twowildly idiosyncratic men ? Morris Dees, thehead of the Southern PovertyLaw Center, andAryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, who were locked in an odd and convoluted civil lawsuit that stemmed from the murder. The bigger problem isthattheevidence does not solidly support Langer 'scritique of the Reviews 155 police and criminal justice system thatunder lies the second half of thebook. Still, this is an important and compelling work of narrative history that, as Adam Hochschild writes in a blurb on the back cover, "illuminates a whole moral universe." The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography By Elizabeth Jacobs, edited by William R. Seaburg Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004. Illustrations, notes, references, index. 272 pages. $21.95 paper. Reviewed by Rick Minor Heritage Research Associates, Inc., Eugene, Oregon ONE OF THE MOST COMPLETE and mOSt accessible accounts ofNative American mythology and folklore fromwestern Oregon was recorded fromNehalem Tillamook infor mant Clara Pearson by Elizabeth Derr Jacobs inSeptember 1934.Pearson's storieswere edited by Elizabeth Jacobs'shusband, Melville Jacobs, an anthropological linguistat theUniversity of Washington, and published by theUniversity ofOregon Press in 1959 asNehalem Tillamook Tales (reprinted in 1990 by Oregon StateUni versity Press). Elizabeth Jacobs also collected ethnographic information on theNehalem Til lamooks? thenorthernmost subgroup of the Tillamook people of thenorth-central Oregon coast ? from Clara Pearson during interviews conducted inNovember and December 1933at Garibaldi, Oregon...

Diurnal variations in residential woodburning pollution in Portland, Oregon

We demonstrate how air pollution from residential woodburning may vary over the day in suburban environments. The concentration of a unique gaseous tracer of low temperature combustion, methyl chloride (CH 3Cl), is related to the mass of fine particles in the ambient air from woodburning stoves and fireplaces. Four ambient air samples per day were collected every 3 days during the winter of 1983–1984 at a residential site in southeast Portland, Oregon. An integrated sampling system was also used over the winter of 1984 in nearby Hillsboro, Oregon, to collect 4–8 hour samples over the day and determine the longer period averaged pollutant concentrations. The maximum averaged wintertime concentrations were found in the evenings as expected, with a few surprisingly high levels in the morning during the 6–10 a.m. period, usually associated with stagnant meteorological conditions.

Trace organic compounds in rain. 1. Sampler design and analysis by adsorption/thermal desorption (ATD)

The design and sue of a rain sampler with a 0.89-m/sup 2/ collection surface area are described. The sampler is controlled electronically, provides for the in situ filtration of the sample, and carries out the preconcentration of nonpolar organic compounds by means of cartridges of the sorbent Tenax-GC. Analytical results were obtained for 27 compounds by fused silica capillary column gas chromatography with detection by mass spectrometry for four rain events sampled 12 km southwest of Portland, Or, at the Oregon Graduate Center (OGC), and for five rain events sampled in southeast Portland. Mean dissolved rain concentrations for ..cap alpha..-hexachlorocyclohexane (..cap alpha..-HCH), naphthalene, acenaphthylene, fluorene, and phenanthrene were 5.9, 11, 4.7, 3.2, and 24 ng/L, respectively, at OGC. The mean values for the Portland events were 47, 72, 55, 43, and 140 ng/L, respectively. Since dissolved concentrations were measured, the data were also used in conjunction with available Henry's law constants to estimate the concurrent, local atmospheric levels of these compounds at these sites. Many of the H values of interest are available only near T = 298 K. Therefore, the further understanding of the wet deposition of toxic organic compounds will be facilitated by the direct study of wetmore » deposition as well as by the determination of the temperature dependence of the H values of environmentally interesting compounds. 36 references.« less