Portland's Lost Waterfront

There was an old man from Albina, Who went off in the hills as a miner, But he's since reappeared, With his stories, most weird, And a red Turkish fez like a Shriner. I have been away. And like any other prospector who has headed off into the hills with gold pans and victuals piled up on his mule, I have probably been forgotten. But this note is to forewarn you of my eventual return. And instead off coming back empty handed, I am returning with pure gold. My research into the skeleton-filled closets of this city have turned up far more interesting stories than I had anticipated. And I am going to have to jam as much as will fit into one book of which each chapter could have been a book in its own right. The Albina rail yard A few notes on Albina Albina was a city in its own right for years before becoming part of the great metropolis—a bustling city at that. The train yards were alive with the arrival and departure of passengers, and the great steam engi...

Today as I was getting the urge to do a little show and tell it occurred to me that I was in the process of doing the same thing that I had laughed at while surfing YouTube. Kids now days, mostly girls, will come home from shopping and make a video of the stuff they purchased, usually with a running commentary. These are called "haul videos" (for you grownups who don't keep up with the kiddies). The Wikipedia article on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haul_video says that by late 2010 there were a quarter of a million haul videos on YouTube alone. So this is a haul blog post. Today I got some really, uh, what's the latest way to say "cool?" stuff in the mail, stuff I had found on eBay. (Is that how it is capitalized?) So here it is: 1. Some dark read trade beads, supposedly made in Russia and used by the Hudson's Bay Company. They came from an antique dealer in Manitoba. 2. A token from Erickson's Saloon. The place with the "mi...