Tag Archives: Alberta Streetcar

Home History School | Find your streetcar

April 13, 2020 By in Beaumont-Wilshire, Broadway Streetcar, History Walks, Home History School Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Northeast Portland streets were once alive with streetcars taking neighbors to work, school and play. They were an institution that connected us with the city and with our neighbors. Noisy, drafty, cold in winters but alive with neighbors going places, these electric-powered vehicles were loved by Portlanders, and our system was the envy of the country.

The Beaumont streetcar at the end of the line between Klickitat and Siskiyou on NE 41st Avenue, about 1914. Courtesy City of Portland Archives.

The rise of cars and buses in the 1940s brought an end to streetcars, but if you know where to look, you can still find clues, and there’s lots of photos, memories, maps and even old film to teach us about these times. This week’s activities get you looking for clues, finding your nearest streetcar route and learning about the electric trains that criss-crossed Northeast Portland neighborhoods.

Click below for this week’s installment.

Find Your Streetcar

The Finest Corner in Concordia

October 20, 2019 By in Concordia, Historic News Clippings, Memories, Observed Tags: , , 4 Comments

We’ve just finished researching a home in the Irvington Park addition, one of the many underlying plats that make up today’s Concordia Neighborhood. It’s been a fascinating look back at what was once the far edge of Portland. Not Irvington, mind you, but Irvington Park: the 175-acre parcel bounded by NE 25th, NE 33rd, Rosa Parks and Killingsworth, first platted back in 1890.

We’ve written about this neck of the woods before, and it keeps drawing us back. Partly because we like to take the dog out on walks in the alleys that criss-cross the neighborhood, but also because we can imagine these lands as the forests they once were, sloping down to the Columbia Slough.

Addison Bennett, a long-time reporter for The Oregonian, visited Irvington Park in July 1915, when things began to finally gel for the young neighborhood. He had been one of the first newspaper reporters to write about the area 25 years earlier, so he knew the wild landscape in its pre-development days.

The narrative of Bennett’s 1915 trip to Irvington Park is worth a read: He called the corner of NE 30th and Ainsworth the finest corner in the entire addition, and for good reason. In part, it was the end of the Alberta Streetcar line. But apparently it was also the heart of community spirit.

NE 30th and Ainsworth, looking north. October 2019.

If you have time, read the whole article (at the bottom of this post), but here’s the part that jumps out at us, and something we like to imagine every time we walk through that intersection:

“One Tuesday night I went out to find just at the end of the streetcar track on the northeast corner of East Thirtieth and Ainsworth Avenue, in a lovely grove of pines, cedars and dogwoods, a great dancing floor, with rows of seats within and surrounding it, the trees a-sparkle with electric lights, a piano and trap-drum playing a twostep and about 40 couples upon the floor while seated around were perhaps 200 happy people of all ages from the wee infant to the aged men and women.

“A dozen or more automobiles waited on the adjacent streets; in some of them passengers were reclining and listening to the music and the glad voices of the dancers and the audience. It was a lovely summer night with just breath enough in the air to soften the heat—and in the heavens, overlooking and apparently guarding all, a full moon looked down upon the happy scene, which was really a picture taken from some story of a fairy land.”

The old frame structure standing on the northeast corner today dates to 1923, a few years after the days of the big dance platform and the dogwoods. That time traveler of a building started out as Hinrich’s Grocery—one of the neighborhood’s many mom and pop stores—and once had large windows facing Ainsworth, which you can see in this photo from 1944 looking north of the Alberta Streetcar parked at that intersection.

Looking north at NE 30th and Ainsworth, 1944. Courtesy City of Portland Archives, image a2009-009-4152.

Here’s Bennett’s full story from 1915 about Irvington Park (click to enlarge). Enjoy.

From The Oregonian, July 25, 1915

Before Concordia there was Irvington Park, and an even deeper history

February 18, 2018 By in Concordia, Maps, Neighborhood History, Research, The Plats Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

We’ve had the opportunity recently to look into the origins of what is known today as the Concordia neighborhood, and even though it had different names way back when, no big surprise that today’s neighborhood draws its name from nearby Concordia University.

Opened in 1907 on six acres of land that was then at the edge of Portland city limits, Concordia College was a simple two-story wood frame building home to the Oregon and Washington District of the Evangelical Norwegian Synod. Operating primarily as a high school program for young men until the 1950s, Concordia gradually evolved into a junior college, added a co-ed mission and additional facilities in the 1950s, and became a full-fledged four-year college in 1977.

Here’s an article from The Oregonian on December 15, 1907 that provides some context and mentions a few early references that AH readers will recognize. Have a look (click to enlarge).

 

We’ve written about that stop at the end of the Alberta carline mentioned above, which was the corner of NE 30th and Ainsworth. Check out our post and a 1944 photo of the streetcar parked there.

So ok, no big surprise about the Concordia name we know today. But peel back a layer of history to reveal earlier names, and it gets interesting.

Back then, if you lived in the area north of Killingsworth and south of Dekum between 20th and 33rd, you would have told someone you lived in Irvington Park (not to be confused with Irvington), or maybe the Town of Creighton, or the Heidelberg Addition, or even Foxchase, all place names making up today’s Concordia neighborhood that stem from the title of survey plats filed by the real estate operators who gridded out the fields and forests on these gentle south slopes above the Columbia River.

The Town of Creighton (like the Town of Wayne adjacent to Alameda) wasn’t actually a town, more like the idea of a town, hatched by property speculators in 1883, drawn out as a kind of map and filed with the Multnomah County surveyor. Remember back then this neck of the woods was well outside the city limits. The Town of Creighton plat is unrecognizable today: its tentatively drawn tree-related street names didn’t carry through time: Maple, Walnut, Beech, Locust, Birch. Creighton’s only legacy is the location of boundary lines on today’s map: north of Killingsworth, east of 25th, south of Rosa Parks and west of 33rd.

Take a look below at the Irvington Park plat, filed in 1890 and trading on the name of Irvington, a subdivision south of Fremont (the same one we know today). Note that in this view of the Irvington Park plat, west is up. You’ll see some familiar names, and some that didn’t make it through the years, Click to enlarge, it’s a big file:

Maybe you’ve figured out that “Riggen Street” is today’s Holman, and that “North Street” is Rosa Parks Way. 33rd on this plat is actually today’s 32nd place and 34th is 33rd. Details, details.

One of the interesting aspects of Irvington Park was how aggressively real estate man F. B. Holbrook marketed it during its early years, and how he coat-tailed on Irvington, located more than a mile south as a crow flies, which he had no actual business relationship with. Have a look at this ad, which ran in The Oregonian on July 10, 1907:

And here’s another gem, from September 16, 1907.

Yes, there were lots of trees: a nice way of saying this subdivision was way the heck out there.

Trading on the name of someone else’s success wasn’t a new idea. Alameda Park developers did the same with their own outrageous 1910 brochure, plus when Alameda was plumbed for sewers back in 1910, they even attempted to freeload (so to speak) on Irvington’s existing sewer system.

Even The Oregonian got into the act of promoting Irvington Park. Here’s a piece from July 23, 1913.

There’s a fascinating history to the Irvington Park lands that runs deeper, to 1866 when 49 acres were transferred from the United States government to Henry McIntire as part of a bounty land claim deed that was a reward for McIntire’s military service. The lands changed hands quickly after that, owned briefly by a private individual, then by Willamette University, and then by the Salem Flouring Mills. During the early 1880s the lands were even owned by William H. and Jennie Creighton (of “Town of Creighton” fame) before they defaulted on a mortgage payment to the Salem Flouring Mills. Mr. Creighton started out as a produce and shipping broker and proceeded into real estate speculation, as it seemed every Portland businessman did in those days.

By the early 1890s, the lands were in the hands of an unimaginatively named group called the Investment Company, owned by big-time Portland developers including William M. Ladd (who incidentally was a principal in the Salem Flouring Mills) and Edward Quackenbush. Selling lots in Irvington Park was just one of their many enterprises.

And deeper yet: elderly residents of Irvington Park we have interviewed report that when the ground was first disturbed to make streets and lots almost 100 years ago, Native American objects and artifacts were frequently found, which makes sense given the proximity to the Columbia Slough and Columbia River. These lands, like every inch we live on today, are part of the ceded lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. Unfavorable treaty agreements in the 1850s removed indigenous people from these original homelands and then systematically broke the lands up to development through actions like the Donation Land Claim Act and related bounty land claim provisions. Any stone tools or arrowheads found today should rightly be returned to the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.

Over time, as Concordia College’s physical presence began to expand, the underlying plat names in the adjacent neighborhood fell out of usage in favor of what was becoming a local landmark, as in “we live over near Concordia,” and the previous deep history was forgotten. The mid-1970s marks the first official reference to the Concordia neighborhood that we could find either in daily news reporting or in city reference documents.

Read more about the “finest corner in Concordia,” a summer’s evening trip from 1915 to NE 30th and Ainsworth.

Fernhill Park: From wild thicket to popular neighborhood park

April 22, 2017 By in Concordia, Memories, Neighborhood History, Old Photos Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

It’s often the small and even random things in the past—stuff we don’t pay much attention to or think about now—that make a big difference in outcomes that shape the future.

How Northeast Portland’s Fernhill Park has turned out today is kind of like that: Peel back the layers of history and you can see why things are the way they are today. That’s kind of our broken-record message here at AH, but it’s true.

The hills and gullies that make Fernhill Park distinctive today made it less desirable for crops in the early 1900s.

One of the most prominent features of the park today, located across rolling hills near NE 41st and Holman in Northeast Portland, is responsible for it being a park at all, and probably not for the reason you think. The hills and gullies on the park’s north side, a great place to run the dog in the spring and summer or to sled in the winter, distinguish this place from other nearby city parks.

But back in the day, when much of this area was farmland, this up-and-down topography was a thicket of trees and brush and not very good for growing crops. A close examination of aerial photos from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s show agricultural fields on all sides right up to the edges where the ground falls off into the ravines of today’s park area. So—the reasoning went—if the city really wants to buy that property from us farmers, go right ahead, we can’t grow anything there anyway.

And that’s just what happened.

After voters approved a property tax levy in 1938 to create more parks and playgrounds for a growing Portland, the city set out on a 10-year process of buying those hills and gullies, starting out in 1940 with a 10-acre parcel owned by the Jackson family right in the middle of it all.

During those years, several dirt roads criss-crossed the north side of the park, one even ran right up the bottom of the gully at the heart of today’s off-leash area in the northeast side of the park, pausing at a wide spot that served as a dump and debris field where car bodies and all manner of junk were strewn.

This detail of an aerial photo from 1940 shows the area of today’s Fernhill Park in the middle surrounded by farm fields on all sides. NE 42nd Avenue is the north-south street on the far right and doesn’t yet go through to Columbia Boulevard (it bends around the corner to the right where Holman is today). The north-south street on the left (that also doesn’t go through) is NE 37th Avenue. The east-west dirt road at the top of the park became today’s Holman Street. Paths, a road and a dump area are visible in the top center of the brush patch. Mike Brink’s grandparents’ home is in the upper right corner with the rows of trees and barn to the south. Photo courtesy of the University of Oregon Map and Aerial Photography Library.

It wasn’t an official dump, but more like a secluded out-of-the-way place where folks from the surrounding area knew they could get away with off-loading a truckful of junk if they needed to. So they did. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the NE 42nd Avenue connection to Columbia Boulevard was built, some of the dirt fill needed to make the grade change for the overpass was dug out from and supplied by the gully on the east side of the park along today’s NE 41st Avenue.

Prior to 1940, when NE 42nd didn’t go through to Columbia Boulevard, you could stand near the northeast corner of what is today’s park and see the Kennedy School across the fields and orchards stretching west to NE 33rd Avenue, with more open fields south to Killingsworth and north to the banks of the Columbia Slough. Then during the building boom of the 1940s and 50s, subdivisions marched east transforming the fields into neighborhoods.

Just 10 years later in 1950 the neighborhood was filling in. NE 42nd now goes through to Columbia Boulevard (look for the Tourist Cabins and the Spur Tavern…they’re there). NE 41st has been built and house construction is underway.  And Mike Brink’s grandparents have planted an orchard with orderly rows of filberts south of the house and bing cherries north of the house. Photo courtesy City of Portland Archives.

Often referred to as “truck farms” because the produce was trucked to market (and some of it was sold out of the back of trucks at busy intersections and small markets around town), these surrounding fields produced fruit and vegetables for Portland households. One farm near the corner of what is today’s NE 41st and Holman was owned and run by a Japanese immigrant family, as were others in the area. During WWII, Japanese farming families across the Pacific Northwest were removed from their land and placed in internment camps in southeast Oregon and central California.

We know from our recent visits with Mike Brink—who grew up in the 1940s and 50s in the tourist cabins at NE 42nd and Holman now about to be demolished—that the fields and orchards stretching out in all directions were filled with filberts, apricots, bing cherries, raspberries, strawberries and other crops. Mike remembers walking through them and through the heavily wooded thicket that is today’s Fernhill Park on his way to and from St. Andrew’s School at NE 9th and Alberta. He’d leave the cabins in the morning, pass by his grandparents farmhouse that stood near today’s intersection of NE 41st and Highland, then take the path through the woods and fields over to Ainsworth Street where he’d walk to the corner of NE 30th and Ainsworth, which was the end of the line for the Alberta Streetcar (you should check out this link because it shows the streetcar waiting where Mike used to catch it at NE 30th and Ainsworth). Hopping on a mostly empty streetcar, he’d ride south on 30th and then west on Alberta to school, reversing the process in the afternoon, maybe stopping at a neighbor’s house for hot chocolate on the way home. Quite a solo daily adventure for an elementary school kid, but times were different.

Mike doesn’t remember it being talked about in his house during those years, but gradually, the city was buying up parcels of the woods when bond money was available and when the locals were willing to sell. A couple more parcels in 1942 and 1943. Six in 1949.

As the park took shape through the late 1940s and early 1950s, some locals referred to it as Ainsworth Park, a name that appears frequently in real estate advertising of that era. By the early 1950s, most of the open land Mike remembers to the north of the park had been converted to subdivision (the Vanlaeken and Leitritz additions for readers keeping track of plat names). NE Highland Street was put through the middle of his family’s farm and his grandparents moved to a new house in the neighborhood as the working farm landscape they once knew was transformed into suburbia. By June of 1951 when most of the park buying was done, the city had invested $60,479 and had acquired 25.95 acres.

In this detail of a 1956 aerial photo, the family farm is gone replaced by the cul de sac that is today’s Highland Street and homes are under construction; all of the lots are built up between NE 41st and 42nd in the middle of the photo; a baseball diamond has arrived in the middle of it all; the paths, road and dump are gone. Once again, the Tourist Cabins and the Spur Tavern stand out clearly just right of center toward the top. Photo courtesy of the University of Oregon Map and Aerial Photography Library.

 

Contemporary view from a hill on the north side of the park, looking off into the Vanlaeken and Leitritz additions. Mike’s grandparents’ farm was off to the right.

On July 14, 1954, City Council passed an ordinance officially naming the area Fernhill Park, a name that was not in local usage prior, but that probably takes its meaning from the hills on the north side of the park.

Construction of Adams High School just southeast of Fernhill Park in the mid-1960s caused quite a stir and protest from the neighborhood. More than 150 angry neighbors turned out at a Portland School Board meeting on September 4, 1964 to share their disbelief that the School Board would demolish 26 homes, three duplexes, a local greenhouse/nursery known as Knapps and a PGE substation to make room for the school. The emotion and sense of loss in the letters and petitions submitted to the school board make for tough reading. Despite this strenuous protest, demolition of the homes and businesses went ahead, construction followed, and John Adams High School opened in September 1969.

From The Oregon Journal, September 3, 1964. The homes and businesses inside the dotted line were demolished to make room for Adams High School.

A dozen years later, when high school enrollment dropped in the early 1980s, the building was repurposed as a middle school and operated for another 18 years before being closed in 2000 due to health concerns about mold. The building sat empty and was frequently vandalized until being torn down in 2006 leaving the large open space south of the track. Newcomers to the area today might not even know that vacant piece of ground south of the track was once a school, and before that a neighborhood, and before that farm fields, and before that an Oregon Trail-era homestead.

No history of the area would be complete without taking it back to the earliest record, when this property was homesteaded under the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, which Congress passed to encourage settlement of the Oregon country. Isaac and Mary Rennison came across the Oregon Trail in 1852 and settled on and farmed the property, filing their Donation Land Claim in 1855 that encompasses the area bounded today by NE 33rd and NE 60th, Holman and Killingsworth.

Before all this recorded history, let’s not forget that these lands on the south shore of the Columbia River and the Columbia Slough were frequented by the Native Americans who called this area home for more than 500 generations.

Interesting, isn’t it, how the places we know and care about today as our local parks came to us partly because of unpredictable events or circumstances: Alberta Park was a brush patch owned by a Chinese immigrant who didn’t want to sell, or to control the brush and trees while the neighborhood developed around it, so the city condemned the property out from underneath him and turned it into a park. Wilshire Park was tied up in a complex probate process inadvertently delaying development until the city took out a bank loan to buy the property on the eve of its being turned into a subdivision. And much of Fernhill Park was property no one really wanted anyway because it wasn’t good cropland. Today, we take these places for granted as fixtures of neighborhood life.

With these lessons of history in mind, what should we be thinking about and taking action on today that would change some future outcome about how our neighborhood feels and operates in the future? Demolition and densification? Traffic? Hmm. More on that next week.

Alberta Streetcar: Catalyst for Change

February 28, 2017 By in Alberta-Vernon, Neighborhood History, Old Photos Tags: , , 2 Comments

It takes lots of imagination to conjure up a picture of what our neighborhood might have looked like 100 years ago. The fields and forests of today’s Alberta district, Vernon, Concordia, and Alameda were way out in the country, beyond the far edge of Portland. But one key development changed all that: the Alberta Streetcar.

a2009-009-4152-streetcar-along-alberta-line-1944

A photo of the Alberta Streetcar from 1944 looking north on NE 30th Avenue at the line’s far northern end, NE 30th and Ainsworth. Only the building on the northeast corner remains. Development of the streetcar line changed everything about the landscape that eventually became our neighborhood. Photo courtesy of City of Portland Archives.

First constructed in 1903, the line left downtown at SW 2nd nd Alder, crossed the old Steel Bridge and ran north up Union (today’s Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.), where it turned east on Alberta to NE 25th. A few years later it was extended five blocks east on Alberta to NE 30th, and then a few years later north on NE 30th to Ainsworth, which became the end of the line. For a time, there was talk of connecting the Alberta line with the Broadway line, which terminated in Alameda at NE 29th and Mason, but by the time that seemed possible, automobiles had begun to eclipse streetcar use.

Wherever the streetcar went, so did development. Initially just two rails in the mud through brush and open fields, by the heyday of Portland’s streetcars in the teens and 1920s, the Alberta streetcar had attracted scores of business owners and thousands of residents to this new developing part of the city. Its impact on the shape and feel of the neighborhood can’t be overstated.

The December 28, 1913 edition of The Oregonian reported:

“The streetcars are now operated to East Thirtieth street and Ainsworth avenue. The line runs double cars in order to take care of the traffic and even then the cars morning and evening are overcrowded.”

The fact that autos were not the primary mode of transport in those early days meant streetcars—and lots of foot traffic—fueled growth of the business district along Alberta. It was a thriving place of activity and commerce, not unlike today. But by the 1940s, with automobiles dominating the transportation picture and Union Avenue no longer the main north-south travel corridor (travel had shifted to Interstate Avenue), the Alberta streetcar became disused and was eventually replaced by a bus. By then, Portland had turned its back on its once robust streetcar system. The last day for the Alberta line was August 1, 1948.

As if to silence the era of the Alberta streetcar once and for all, in September 1949 The Oregonian reported that the City of Portland authorized a $75,000 paving contract that took 11 days to erase all evidence of the tracks:

“A total of 110,748 yards of materials went into the project to bury the old Alberta streetcar tracks. Paving tonnage amounted to 8,407 tons of blacktop.”

Today, there aren’t many specific clues other than the hundreds of streetcar-era buildings that would not have developed without the line. When you’re out for a walk along our neighborhood’s path of the old streetcar line (1.8 miles along Alberta between MLK and 30th; then 30th Avenue between Alberta and Ainsworth), see what evidence you can find.

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