Beverly Cleary's Real Klickitat Street

Klickitat Street is real. It runs through Northeast Portland, a tree-lined residential street in the Grant Park neighborhood, and if you grew up reading Ramona Quimby or Henry Huggins, you already know the name.

Beverly Cleary was born in McMinnville, Oregon, on April twelfth, nineteen sixteen, and moved as a young child to Portland, where she grew up on the Northeast side. The neighborhood she described in her books, the street, the library, the park, the geography of a child's world, was drawn directly from her actual childhood. Grant Park is real. The local library was the real library where young Beverly Cleary was introduced to books by a librarian who made a particular effort with her. The Multnomah County Central Library holds her papers.

Cleary published her first book in nineteen fifty. Over the next seven decades she produced forty-one books, sold more than ninety million copies, and received the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award. She kept writing into her nineties. She died in twenty twenty-one at the age of one hundred four.

In Grant Park, at Northeast Thirty-Third and Brazee, there is a sculpture garden with bronze figures of her characters: Ramona in her pajamas, Henry Huggins, Ribsy the dog. Children who have grown up reading the books run to them. Adults who grew up reading the books stand a little ways back and feel something that doesn't have a clean name.

The neighborhood Cleary described still exists. She would recognize the streets. She would not recognize the property values.