Last time I talked about finding a few other folks online who were, for want of a better term, geography nerds like me. Reading about their exploits rekindled an interest in exploring the local unique geography of Portland and sharing it through rides and walks. It’s gotten me thinking about why I like this stuff in the first place. It’s not exactly a common interest or obsession in the way someone would be into video games or stamp collecting. But that does not make it any less viable.
I guess I was obsessed with history and geography since I was very young. I wondered why the urban landscapes look the way they do. I remember a project I did way back in (yeeps) 1983 where for a local “heritage” fest, I created (with the help of my dad) a map detailing Ansonia, Connecticut’s history. (In fact, this was one of the few times I used the library’s local history room, a room I revisited on my next-to-last trip there.) Moving to Portland increased this desire to learn about the local landscape, as I didn’t have the inherited history of a place, whether through my personal experience or via my family. If I wanted to get beyond the cliche bits of Portland history shared in the obvious places I would need to dig in on my own.
And Portland is just the kind of city I like exploring. It’s big but not too big, about 650,000 at last count. It’s not old by European or even East Coast standards, but old enough to have several layers of history to sort through. It got built out during the streetcar era, so much of the city was laid out during a time when automobiles were not the dominant mode of transportation. And it’s geographically diverse in the sense of having unique regions, various waterways, and plenty of hills (though most are polite enough to not be in the way of getting around.)
I mentioned in my Tucson report in September that I once tried to live there for a hot second in winter of 2005, hoping I could pull off some sort of regular punk rock dirtbag snowbird typed thing. One month was enough. There were some practical reasons why it didn’t work, like lack of funds, but I would have given it another chance if I liked the city itself more. On paper, Tucson and Portland are roughly the same size, but on the ground is a different story. Remember above how I mentioned cities built during the streetcar era? Tucson is very much a post-streetcar city. The population history tells the story: while today’s population is close to 550,000, in 1950 it was just 45,000. (Compare that to Portland’s 375,00 at the same time.) All that development was post-war, when car-centric sprawl was the norm. There is an older part to Tucson, but it’s small in comparison to the rest of the city, and when I lived there, there was a lack of amenities in that zone, often necessitating bike trips into strip mall hell for necessities like groceries. And downtown Tucson is pretty tiny, too. While it seemed livelier now than it was in 2005, coming back to downtown Portland (then or now) makes me feel like I was in Chicago or something by comparison. Tucson is primarily a strip mall and cul-de-sac type of place, and that does not interest me.
While I loved exploring both Tokyo and New York this year, I much prefer the more mid-sized cities like Portland or Vancouver or even San Francisco. They feel big enough but maybe not big enough to overwhelm. There’s also the feeling that if you spend enough time in them, you’ll get a good handle on the place. There will always be more to explore, yes, but you’ll still have a feel of each neighborhood or district.
One mid-sized American city that holds a lot of appeal to me is Minneapolis. I’ve visited many times over the years, the last time in August. Minneapolis has often been called the “Portland of the Midwest” and there are definitely plenty of similarities, enough so that for a hot second I thought about moving there. I mentioned in the rekindling past interest posts, I found a few people in Minneapolis with the same nerdy interest and devotion to local history and geography like me. There’s the pedestrian freeway bridge guy, and then there’s Andy Sturdevant who wrote “The Stroll” series for online paper MinnPost. The Stroll was a series of walks and explorations around the Twin Cities, highlighting the hidden and not well known. Basically, the type of thing I love. Unfortunately he stopped the series in 2017, but in reading several of the posts during a couple days of down time brought on by a cold, I learned about another person who writes about Twin Cities geography and also leads walks, Bill Lindeke. When alerted to his website, I had the fear that he hadn’t posted since 2016, as is the case with a lot of this stuff, but no, he’s still active.
To be clear, there’s also these kinds of blogs and the like here in Portland. But many of them post infrequently and often have several year gaps, like Dan Haneckow’s Cafe Unknown, or John Chilson’s Lost Oregon. Doug Decker has a good and juicy post about every month or two at Alameda Old House History. And Vintage Portland, administered by the City Archives, generally posts daily, but it’s simply a photo from the archives without any context. The closest thing I could find to those Minneapolis blogs is Andrew’s City Hikes. I feel like he’s doing the types of things here in Portland that I was doing twenty years ago, and it probably helps that he’s probably twenty years younger than me. It’s also refreshing to see his impatience with things the way they are, as I felt that way twenty years ago too. (Funny how seeing the slow crawl of progress makes ya cynical, eh?)
When I see a new local geography blog like Andrew’s, I get excited and hope they’ll stick around, because there are so many “dead” blogs out there. It’s always a bit melancholy to come across something interesting, like this one about Uptown Minneapolis that I found during those Twin Cities searches, and learn that the last post was from thirteen years ago. I always want to contact this person and see what they are up to now, but many of these blogs were done anonymously, and blogger didn’t require an email contact, and even if they did, the address may be dead (At least because it’s a blogspot url, it still exists, which is often not the case of those with unique urls.) So I add it to the blog dead letter office and move on.
What is it that I love about these blogs? It’s because they offer up alternative views of the standard narratives of cities. There’s more to a city than its downtown, its big buildings, its overly-touristy districts, and these sites prove it. It’s a rich vein that doesn’t go dry and they can breathe renewed interest in a place for those who thought they had seen everything.
In any case, if you know of interesting local geography blogs, whether for Portland, Minneapolis, or other cities, please let me know. And don’t be surprised if you see more of that kind of stuff here again, interspersed with my usual musings and posts about bicycles and film cameras. There are also zine projects I’m working on, and I’ll share them with you when I’m ready!
Urban Adventure League 
I’ve got a deeply nerdy Minneapolis blog for you, though it’s related to music and not geography or the history of urban planning. Are you familiar with the “Anthology of American Folk Music” curated by Harry Smith and put out by Folkways records in the 1950s? If not it’s kind of ground zero for the folk boom of the late 50s and 60s. It’s a collection of 78s that at the time were only 25-30 years old, but they might have come from a different planet to the middle class kids raised on Leave it to Beaver, etc. The music is almost entirely from the South, blues and folk. But there’s one song on there called “Moonshiner’s Dance,” that’s conspicuously Northern and was recorded by a Minneapolis musician named Frank Cloutier. Back in the oughts the author of “The Celestial Monochord” blog got interested and followed the leads to some interesting places. I guess to follow his trail you’d need to read the linked blog category in reverse order: https://www.celestialmonochord.org/category/victoria-cafe-frank-cloutier-moonshiners-dance/
Love this!
I think of you as my awesome Portland-things blog:) Both your blog and your bike rides, actually. Thanks! 🙂