The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

I don’t know much about the year I was born. It was the year my parents moved from Chicago to Portland, Oregon (yes I am one of those rare natives that was born here).

I can tell you a little bit about Portland in the 80’s though. There were hardly any places to eat. The two we used to go to were Poor Richard’s on Sandy Blvd. and a restaurant we named Eat Food Now (I don’t know the real name of it, it was just called that because the waiter yelled at my mother to “eat food now!” when she was taking a really long time to finish her plate and he wanted to free up the table).

Burnside was a bunch of empty lots, car repair places, and run down buildings. There were some second hand shops here and there. My favorite haunt on Burnside was a comic book store I used to go to all the time on the way home from school or on weekends that had a comfy chair in their book room where I used to sit with my rat on my shoulder and read. The Laurelhurst theatre was always there (still is) but it played one dollar second run movies. My mother and I saw Cry Baby there four times when it came out.

Hawthorne was a bunch of hippie shops that wreaked of incense and were filled with tie dye clothes. There were some little independent book stores before Powell’s moved in. Paradise Books was an unorganized explosion of stacked second hand books and it smelled like old paperbacks. Murder by the Book specialized in murder mysteries and sold both used and new books. The only restaurants I remember on Hawthorne in the 80’s was Oasis Pizza and Bread and Ink. There was an Arctic Circle there too and a Kentucky Fried Chicken (it wasn’t called KFC yet) by the Safeway. Fred Meyer’s was always there but was much smaller than it is now. At the Hop came in the early 90’s and had amazing milk shakes (there’s now an apartment complex where that used to be).

Belmont was pretty quiet. It was mostly residential but there was a big open lot where the old dairy used to be, and a handful of second hand junk shops. Kitty Princess Boutique was a neat place to go on Belmont when I was in high school. But that was in the late 90’s and I can’t remember if it was there when I was younger.

The city center used to be a shopping hub. Meir and Frank was there and it was all decked out at Christmas time (all the windows were done up) and had a Santa Land on the top floor with a little monorail train that went around the top of the room. All the fancy expensive shops were downtown. And there was this awesome toy store called Finnigans that I never got to get toys from because it was too expensive for my parents but I loved going in there.

Lake Oswego used to be really sleepy. I spent a lot of time there as a kid because my grandmother lived there. It was mostly elderly retired people (it wasn’t wealthy like it is now) and had a Dairy Queen and the Tillamook Ice Creamery (which is still there and is the last vestige of old Lake Oswego). George Roger’s Park had this awesome playground that was super dangerous. One of those old wood and metal ones but the monkey bars were really high off the ground and there was this slippery old log with notches in it you had to scale to get to the top of the structure.

Lloyd Center was our local mall. It’s in its dying throws now but when I was really little it was open air and super popular. There was always an ice rink there and that’s where Tonya Harding would practice. We would go Christmas shopping at Lloyd Center every year. It had a Meir and Frank, a Nordstrom, a JC Penny, and a Sears.

I don’t miss old Portland because it used to be a really quiet place with not much to do. The gentrification has brought all the good food and coffee here and neat little pubs all over the place. Downtown is a mess and has really suffered since COVID took away all the business people who now work from home (with businesses moving out and now it’s full of derelict buildings), but the inner city neighborhoods in Portland are thriving and lively. It’s the neighborhoods that have all the good places to eat and drink. I love my old neighborhood now and wouldn’t want to move away from it.