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This story first ran in the Nov. 24, 1981, edition of WW.
Maybe, like Beverly Green, you’re just a small-town girl at heart. When you came to Portland 18 years ago, Overlook neighborhood seemed just your style, with its wide, fat streets, broad-leafed trees, boxy houses and cropped lawns. Overlook was quiet and crime-free — a triangle of 500 solid homes, a Polish church and a library, reined in by North Interstate Avenue on one side and the edge of the bluff on the other two. You were only a stone’s throw from the swirl and turmoil on Union Avenue, but Overlook was different.
Then one night, a pimp begins beating up his prostitute in a car parked in the motel lot behind your house. She breaks every window in his car and runs naked and hysterical through your yard, over the sleeping bags of your two young sons, who are camping outside for the night. Sometime later, you, a small-town girl at heart, look more closely at the alley behind your house. For the first time, you see hypodermic needles strewn in the gravel. Next day. when you’re out on your Avon route, you carry around a petition for your neighbors to sign, demanding that the city set things straight.
Or you’re a sensible kid from a good home, working part time as a hotel maid for pin money, and your manager tells you to use different sheets for the last two rooms because they are for hookers. And when you try to clean their rooms, they’re always sleeping and the whole thing just doesn’t fit with the uneventful place where you grew up.
That was years ago. Terry Schrunk. who was mayor at the time, didn’t answer Green’s petition, and no one investigated who was using the last two rooms in the motel because prostitution on Interstate was pretty well veiled at the time. But this summer, shooed from their usual haunts on Union and Williams, scores of prostitutes headed over to Interstate, making blatant the secret life of the strip that most of its neighbors had never known.
The onset of winter means you won’t see most of the prostitutes on the street again till spring. But, warn the police, they’re sure to return. This time, though, the people of Overlook will have shed their illusions about their corner of the city. The same women who six months ago thought the hookers were scantily clad girls waiting for buses that never arrived are now savvy grassroots organizers setting up block watches and preparing task forces. The neighborhood, once so quiet and self-contained that it didn’t even have a neighborhood association, now holds meetings that draw hundreds.
Equally important are the motels on Interstate. Small and glamourless, the 13 motels that line the street were left stranded when I-5 outstripped Interstate’s original purpose as Portland’s main link to Seattle. All but one have been sold in the last five years to emigrants from India, many of whom discovered belatedly that some of their tenants were prostitutes.
Caught between an acute need for business and fear that they couldn’t legally deny anyone a room, the motel owners have unwittingly fostered a kind of trade they say they don’t want. But no matter how fervently the neighbors and the motel owners wish it away, the fact is that arrests for prostitution in this city have increased each year for the last three years by nearly 90 per cent. Yet most people agree that slapping hookers with jail sentences is no solution. Until the seemingly endless flow of prostitution customers (“johns”) can be staved, it looks as though nothing will change.
This is the story of how one neighborhood and one group of businesspeople are trying to cope with prostitution. What they want are things you’d expect to find in America’s most livable city. They want women in shorts to be able to walk outside their houses without being harassed by johns; they want their children to be able to walk alone around the motels they own; they want to look outside without seeing strange cars with two huddled strangers parked in their driveways. No one in Overlook thinks it’s too much to ask, and no one there believes it’s their own special distress. “It’s the neighborhood’s problem now,” warns one Overlook resident, “but it’ll be the city’s problem soon.”
Our town
If you didn’t look too hard, you could easily miss Overlook neighborhood entirely.
It sits on the crest of the bluff above the Willamette River, and runs north to Ainsworth. A section, known as “The Triangle,” is split off by the Going Street ramp — that wide slash of street that tips over the bluff and runs down to Swan Island. Interstate Avenue cuts it off at the eastern edge, making the triangle south of Going a white enclave in an otherwise predominantly black part of town.
“It’s a special little spot.” says Stephanie Masson, a six-year Overlook resident. “People who’ve been raised here are buying back into the neighborhood.” Besides the furor over the Going Street ramp, which rattles day and night with truck traffic, and the embarrassing revelation a few years ago that realtors were firmly steering black families to properties outside the triangle, the neighborhood
has been a peaceful spot, home to many elderly Polish couples, staff from Kaiser-Permanente down the street, and young families snapping up the pleasant, moderately priced houses in the area.
Interstate was never part of the neighborhood’s draw. Built originally as Portland’s main highway to Seattle, it lost its lure when the freeway opened and became just another avenue — but still home to a few small businesses, an odd shop or two. a couple of rough taverns, and the motels that would soon be catering to a different crowd from the interstate truckers who had been their lot before the freeway was finished. For all its woes. Interstate had never been too grimy or tacky or visibly lawless — certainly not enough to make the adjacent neighborhoods less appealing. “I never really noticed Interstate when I bought my house,” says Judy Murase, who moved to Overlook two years ago. “I just thought it looked kind of seedy.”
According to the Portland Police Bureau’s Drug and Vice Division, and North Precinct (which patrols the area), there has been prostitution on Interstate Avenue for at least the last decade. Usually, hookers would stand on Union or Williams, find a customer, and head with him to an Interstate motel. The first trick of the day would get stuck paying for the room. The woman would keep the room key, and return with customers all day. It was a stealthy business, little noticed by most of the nearby residents. But it was an active one, too — six years ago, police staked out one of the motels on another sort of case and noted that business was brisk.
Few women actually solicited business on Interstate itself, mainly because, with its high-speed traffic, median strip, left-turn restrictions, and open sidewalks. Interstate isn’t a good place to walk the streets. Better was Union, where cars dawdled and cruised, and nearly every block had some nook or doorway where women could hide when the heat was on.
This summer, everything changed. The city rolled a median strip down the length of Union, neighborhoods and local businesses put the heat on nonstop, and the police began a series of decoy missions that sent the prostitutes packing. Not to Williams Avenue, where Emanuel Hospital’s sprawl had gobbled up much of the land and throttled the street’s spirited night life and left it empty. This time the action moved to Interstate, and the fight was on.
Locals began noticing it in the spring — a few hard-faced girls roaming the street in hot pants and high heels, a few cars driving a little too aimlessly through side streets. A few neighborhood women waiting for buses along Interstate were told to move on by unfamiliar women in skimpy sundresses.
The principal of Beach School, which borders Interstate, was propositioned by prostitutes on his way to school. Men pulling up for a shave and a haircut at Edee’s Barber Shop would find an eager girl climbing into their car while they were parking. An Overlook woman walking down Interstate with her baby in a stroller, glanced up to find herself ogled by a masturbating man in a parking lot.
“There have been girls walking up and down this street for a long time,” remembers Myrtle Morris, who has run the Komb-n-Kurl Beauty Salon on Interstate for 13 years, “but this summer they were thicker than hops. One afternoon a couple of them stopped in — I could tell they were prostitutes, there was no mistaking it — and asked me for some hair spray. I plain said no. I wasn’t lying, either. I didn’t have any good spray left. I told them I had some off-brand spray, but I didn’t think they’d like it. They said no, and then they left. You do get a little more uneasy when you start seeing all these different-looking characters on the street.”
Wild in the streets
Uneasy was only the beginning. By the middle of summer — by the time hookers
were flagging down cars as they zoomed by on the street and johns were circling the side streets in their searches — there were people in Overlook who were steaming mad. When call after call to the police and Mayor Frank Ivancie produced little more than hand wringing, they decided to try something else.
“We wanted to do it for ourselves — we didn’t want slick organizers and we didn’t want to have to trade it for some favor at City Hall.” says Murase, who, with Masson and Sigrid Huston, organized the Overlook response. “But actually, we though there would only be about 12 people at the meeting and we could kick it over and let it die.” Far from it. The three circulated petitions and in two weeks had gathered 800 signatures. Farly in September, they held the first meeting. It was scheduled for the Overlook House basement, with a capacity of 75. The crowd packed in 85. 100, then 200 people. They moved outside, comparing notes on the crime that had transformed the neighborhood they’d known.
They figured two things were at the root of the trouble — Portland’s poky, lenient judicial system, and the motels. For the second meeting, they invited every judge and district attorney staff person they could. Many came (with the notable exception of Judge Aaron Brown, a resident of the area, who sent his wife and a letter that read, in part, “Unfortunately, I believe that my judicial responsibilities and obligations prevent me from attending the meeting. However, I did want you to know that the courts are doing their part in imposing the law”).
At the meeting, residents heard the true, discouraging, hoary old chestnuts about lack of jail space, victimless crime, soaring recidivism, shortage of police. All the while, they were thinking about depreciating house values, children in danger, neighborhood streets with lurking pimps, a bid on a Navy boat-repair job that could bring 600 sailors to live on Swan Island for nearly two years. And resenting, says Masson, the feeling that everyone else in the city figured they could just let it slide because it was only North Portland anyway.
Forty people signed up for task forces. One group set out to woo business owners — particularly the motel owners — to a meeting with the neighborhood. Nearly every business person approached by the task force admitted to having been robbed or harassed by the new rough trade on the avenue. But some were too cowed to come to a meeting. “You never know when someone will come around and bust out a window,” sighs one shopkeeper, “just because they saw you going to one of those meetings.” Who did turn out, in force, were the Patels, who own the bulk of Intcrstate’s motels. It turned out to be a surprise summit between the two groups, mutually suspicious and exclusive and unwilling to believe the other was any less than an out-and-out culprit.
The stranger
In 1976, Bhikhabhai Patel bought the Westerner Motel on Interstate Avenue for $232,000. It was the first motel in Oregon purchased by a member of the Patel group, which by 1978 owned 1,000 of California’s 6,000 motels.
The Patels come from Gujarat in western India, where the name Patel is as common as Smith is here, but the bond between them is more akin to that of a clan. Some clan members in Portland used the name Patel even when it isn’t their legal name. In India they are known as shrewd merchants and ambitious business people, stubbornly loyal to one another. “Patels are like Jews,” says Ramesh Patel, who bought the Westerner from his wife’s uncle in 1979. “We help each other out. We make loans to each other with no paper and no signatures. It’s just a matter of one saying. ‘I’m short $5,000,’ and if the other one has it. they loan it. It works out fine — as long as it stays among Patels.”
It has worked that way here. With a hand from family members and a determined willingness to work as maids, managers, and maintenance men all at once, Patels and their associates have bought 20 motels in the Portland area and several others scattered throughout the state, worth more than $6 million. That includes every motel on Interstate except the Knickerbocker. Most Patel properties like those on Interstate — small, squat ‘50s buildings, worth around $200,000 with a small apartment where the owner or manager lives.
“It’s a good business to be in,” says Ramesh Patel, noting that most of the group chose to live in, and manage, their own motels. “It’s a guaranteed roof over your head.” It’s also a good business for those who have only a slight grasp of English, and who shyly hew, as have a million other immigrants before them, to their familiar group of friends in this unfamiliar territory. The Portland Patels have a social club, the Gujarati Samaj, where they speak their own language and share their literature. Once a year, they hold a religious New Year celebration in Mel’s Top Deck banquet room, and invite the neighborhood to come. Most of them are now citizens, and. just like other Overlook kids, their kids truck down Interstate to school in their jeans, running shoes and T-shirts, past the hookers and heroin dealers. “It’s not that we’re isolated people,” says Patel. “It’s our community too, and our kids out there on the street just like everyone else’s.”
Why, then, has prostitution continued to flourish on Interstate? Some of the motel owners say they walked into an already fouled situation. “The first few nights after I got here, I was awakened by lights flashing from police cars raiding the motel next door,” recalls one owner. “It wasn’t until the maids told me who was who and what was what that I knew what was going on.” Another owner recalls discovering the nature of the clientele shortly after buying the place from a relative, but he isn’t surprised that he wasn’t warned. “Really.” he smiles, “that’s not the kind of thing you tell someone when you’re trying to sell something.”
But if the motel owners were at first unaware, it wasn’t for long. One recalls dining with several other motel owners three years ago and discussing the hookers’ presence. Many other people, including the police, are skeptical of the owners’ plea of ignorance.
“You can claim ignorance,” says Capt. Robert Tobin, head of the Drug and Vice Division, “but it doesn’t take a lot of reasoning power to figure out what’s going on.” With a little prodding, most of the motel owners acknowledge that it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, it’s a simple case of economics: Patel says one-fourth of the Westerner’s customers are tourists, one fourth are commercial travelers. The other half, he says, is local business. To turn away any customer when you’re talking about bread and butter isn’t an easy thing to do.
Nor, argue the owners, can they be sure that it’s a legal one. “How am I supposed to judge someone?” asks one owner angrily. “How? You tell me. Then I’ll do it.” Certainly there are statutes that give a lot of muscle to individuals who feel they’ve been unfairly denied accommodations. But District Attorney Michael Schrunk argues that the motel owners have more latitude than they think.
“They don’t need to rent rooms to a prostitute with her pimp hanging outside the door,” he says. “Granted, it’s a fine line, but it’s our feeling that by turning someone away, they wouldn’t necessarily be violating a criminal statute.”
The first meeting of the Patels and the Overlook neighbors was an awkward affair that left the Patels smarting from what they felt was untempered blame by the group. Nevertheless, shortly afterward, they drafted a letter insisting that they wanted to cooperate, and hired a lawyer — an Overlook resident who had served as moderator at the neighborhood meetings — to help figure out ways to stymie the prostitution trade.
The tender trap
That, of course, is the uphill battle. Prostitution is absolutely booming in Portland: In 1979, there were 350 arrests. In 1980. the number leaped 83 per cent to 740. This year, through October, there have been 860 arrests. Last year at this time, the number was 535.
On Interstate itself, it’s equally daunting. Last summer, there were no arrests at all in July, August, or September. This summer, there were 35, and in October, the arrests on Interstate topped those on Union Avenue, representing nearly 20 per cent of all prostitution arrests in the city. Cite any of the oft-cited reasons and it still seems that a reason is missing: the lousy economy has sent more women onto the streets; the crumbling nuclear family has left more of us without morals; Portland’s reputation as a soft touch for low life has attracted more trouble; overloaded dockets and overworked police hamstrung by fussy laws have made serious enforcement impossible. More important, jailing hookers does no good if you don’t get rid of the johns. Cynicism meets the news of one neighborhood’s reduction in prostitution when it’s realized that the hookers have probably just been booted to another hapless part of town. And in Portland, for whatever reason, the girls keep getting younger and come in pistol-whipped and welted by wire hangers. No one will try to argue that the ugliness stops at one neighborhood’s borders.
What’s being done? In Overlook, the initial excitement has simmered down, and the cold fall rain has provided a lucky break from last summer. A few battles have been won, a few lost. The neighborhood’s new awareness is the biggest accomplishment: the tentative truce between them and the Patels the hardest-fought and most promising.
The three schools on Interstate — Beach, Ockley Green, and Pope John XXIII — are also bracing for the next bout of warm weather. Beach Principal Charles Anthony plans to bring in a school nurse to counsel girls at the school, and parent advisory committees (one of which is headed by Ramesh Patel) are hashing out a plan for the spring. In a few weeks, ludge Kimbcrly Frankel is leading a talk on “street sense” for area parents and girls.
There are other cheering signs: Kaiser Permanente, which anchors the southern end of Interstate, recently leveled one of the grimier motels and began construction on a $7.5 million regional headquarters building. The Navy contract, which would have brought hundreds of sailors to live on Swan Island for 16 months, was given to a firm in Seattle. A few motel owners have discovered
that raising room rates above $20 and requiring photo identification is nearly always enough to scare off unsavory traffic. And the North Portland police promise that next year on Interstate would not be a summer of love. “We’re working on long-range plans,” says Lt. Robert Peschka. “If the girls think they can get away with it here, they’re wrong, because Lt. Peschka’s going to have his troops and have at ‘em.”
It’s not all encouraging, though. One battle neighborhood activists have nearly conceded is with The Oregonian, whom they tried to convince to publish the names of people arrested in connection with prostitution. Police, sociologists, and even Oregonian City Editor Judd Randall believe that helps dissuade customers who’d rather remain anonymous, and Eugene police and the Eugene Register-Guard found it helpful in quashing Eugene’s spread of prostitution
a few years back. “In some cases, like if some prominent person knew their name would be published, they might be discouraged,” says Randall, “but at the same time, there’s a hell of a lot of people who wouldn’t care. We’re not going to do it. The amount of space required and the nature of the crime is not sufficient. We’ve discussed it quite a bit, and thought about it good and hard.”
More worrisome, say neighborhood people, is that a few motels haven’t made clear that they’re willing to help battle the problem. Among them arc a few that, willing or not, were the center of much of last summer’s action. Still, Overlook residents say, they will keep faith with themselves and their own way of wrestling with trouble — for that matter, no one in the neighborhood, it seems, puts much stock in County Commissioner Gordon Shadburne’s much-ballyhooed task force on prostitution.
“Everyone in Overlook is just as determined as I am,” says one resident firmly. “No one’s leaving. This is our neighborhood. We won’t get driven out.”