Albina: Built, Stripped, and Branded

After Vanport drowned in nineteen forty-eight, the Black families who survived had one neighborhood where they could legally go. Albina, in Northeast Portland, sat on a corridor of North Williams and North Mississippi avenues where racial covenants were less airtight or less enforced than elsewhere in the city. The families that came to Albina from Vanport's rubble came with nothing. They built anyway.

Through the nineteen fifties and sixties, Albina was the center of Black Portland's civic life. Black-owned barbershops, restaurants, insurance companies, churches, social clubs. The Portland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People operated here. The Urban League. Musicians and ministers. It was not a neighborhood by default. It was a neighborhood by necessity, and then by choice.

Urban renewal found it in the nineteen sixties. The city expanded Emanuel Hospital and needed land. The Memorial Coliseum required additional blocks. Then Interstate Five came through, and its construction cut through more of the neighborhood's fabric. Each project was presented as progress. Each one left fewer buildings and fewer families than it found.

By the nineteen eighties, Albina had been structurally reduced and economically isolated. Disinvestment followed displacement. The families who had survived each previous wave watched property values collapse in the years that followed the freeway.

Then the tech-era gentrification of the two thousands and twenty-tens arrived. Housing prices rose faster than any community could absorb. Many of the families who had rebuilt after Vanport, who had stayed through urban renewal, who had held on through the eighties, could no longer afford to stay.

North Mississippi Avenue today is one of Portland's most prominent restaurant-and-arts corridors. Its cultural identity is marketed in part through the neighborhood's Black history. The architecture of that history is real. The people who made it are largely gone.