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"Gentrification" is Portland's word of the year. But while viral apartment-complex marketing videos and crime-scene selfies are 21st-century innovations, socioeconomic displacement is nothing new.
For example, long before the arrival of the New Seasons and the oyster bar and the deli bar, the area around North Williams Street was a nationally known hotbed for jazz. Major players, from Duke Ellington to Cab Calloway, stopped in at the Cotton Club, a West Coast counterpart of the legendary Harlem venue of the same name. By the '70s, the club, along with many other black-owned businesses in the area, would be uprooted by a series of "urban renewal" projects. Back then, the symbols of gentrification weren't condos and yoga studios but the I-5 freeway and Legacy Emanuel Hospital.
In the short documentary Losing Albina, drummer Ron Steen and Paul Knauls, the former owner of the Cotton Club, recall the neighborhood's early '60s glory days and its decline. It's a reminder that the shifts in the Portland's landscape didn't just start happening after Portlandia premiered—and a look at a piece of the city's history that has, not coincidentally, been largely forgotten.
Watch the video below, and read Reuben Unrau's corresponding story for the University of Oregon's web zine Flux here.
Losing Albina from Christina Belasco on Vimeo.
WWeek 2015