Portland's Lost Waterfront

In looking at my Portland Waterfront History website for the first time in ages I am filled with remorse for not updating it as I discovered new things. I sat down this morning and quickly dashed off a new version of the chapter on the period from 1870 to 1900. I have discovered so much about this period that each subject that I mention is a subject that I would gladly write pages, chapters, even whole books on if I had the time. I am going to publish that new material here as well. I plan to turn it into an entirely new site using some of the images I have collected in the six or eight years since I first put the site online. Here is the chapter, a brief overview of Portland's shanghai masters, and their environment:  The Years of the Sailor's Boarding House Masters The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution had outlawed slavery in 1865, but in a nation whose beginnings had been staffed by indentured servants from the home countries and captured slaves from Afri

Municipal Terminal No. 4, Portland, Oregon This is an scan of one of the post cards in my collection. A friend tells me that there is a real copy at the OHS, so that is nice. I will have to take a look at it soon. It is a very interesting image, I think. I worked at this place for about 25 years, until it closed. We all hoped it would re-open, but it never did. I will go into detail about this place in some later post. Getting back to "why" by which I mean, "why I bother to blog, etc. about Portland waterfront history, this picture is worth the proverbial 1000 words. I spent 33 plus years on this waterfront, always interested in where things came from, and why they were done the way they were. This place is gone, bulldozed, up for lease. There was a time it was Portland's pride and joy, the most modern grain facility in the world. I have about 3000 stories I could tell about the place, and maybe 50 to 100 of them are actually interesting. I just had an article