Street Of Dreams

[January 10th, 2007] (WW incorrectly reported when Mayor Tom Potter and Jo Ann Bowman had breakfast at Hannah Bea's. They dined the day after Potter won the mayoral election in 2004. WW regrets the error.) Last Sunday's regular all-you-can-eat brunch at Hannah Bea's restaurant on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard hardly seemed the setting for dire warnings about the street's redevelopment.

Jazz musicians softly crooned in the background as a diverse crowd of Portlanders—everyone from a burly white hipster in Carhartt overalls to restaurant owner Anita Smith's nonagenarian mother—sampled from a menu that included grits, bacon and dirty rice with poundcakes in sweet potato, lemon-glaze and triple-chocolate varieties for dessert.

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 15, WW checked in last weekend with the 52-year-old woman known almost universally as Miss Anita. She greeted new arrivals, cleared tables and periodically popped into the kitchen to whip up more scrambled eggs.

Yet Smith's good cheer and easy manner gave way to steely concern when asked about the future of the boulevard named for King.

When Smith took over one corner of the decaying boulevard at Northeast Shaver Street in 2002 for her dessert mecca and restaurant, "snobby skeptics" questioned the viability of her location, Smith says.

Just a few years later, the scene has changed for Hannah Bea's, made famous nationally by Al Roker's Food Network show and also known locally as the place where ex-state Rep. Jo Ann Bowman, a black community activist, first urged Mayor Tom Potter in 2003 to run for Portland's top office.

But now that restaurants such as Hannah Bea's have attracted business traffic to MLK, folks with deeper pockets than Smith, who rents her space, have expressed interest in the street.

What was once considered financially risky seems far less so today; for example, the gentrification-friendly Terroir wine bar is scheduled to open on MLK in May.

The worry, Smith says, is that gentrification will push out black-owned businesses like hers. She can point to a history in Portland in which decades of racist real-estate practices limited black families to Northeast Portland.

While Smith takes some credit for the continuing renaissance along MLK, her pride is laced with a tinge of resentment that she's not shy about sharing.

"It's not new, it's history," Smith says. "It's, 'You guys can babysit [the street] until we decide we want it.'"

The symbolism of the street's name, of course, makes its redevelopment that much more important to African-American business owners like Smith.

"How's it going to be MLK Boulevard without MLK businesses?" Smith asks. "If you have an MLK Boulevard, you have to have nice, respectable places that represent his culture."