Portland's Lost Waterfront

From the 1878 Portland City Directory Some time back I promised to update my old Portland waterfront history website, and I have been plugging away at it for some time now. The most difficult part, for someone like me, is images. Were I unscrupulous I could easily load the site up with images stolen from university websites, navy history sites, and the like, but I actually believe that digital media has as much right to ownership as any other media. So, although the process has been slow, there will be a completely new www.portlandwaterfront.org very soon--and it will be bulging at the seams with pictures. The grain docks of Albina from the West Hills Since my book, Portland's Lost Waterfront, is now finished (and bulging with pictures), and will be out in November, I have decided that the residue of the images, the ones I ddn't use, and belong to me personally, will be made available on the www.portlandwaterfront.org website in fairly large format (1020 pixel wi...

The Shanghai Dock by Ross Island from a 1924 map showing the location of the Columbia Shipbuilding Co. shipyard. Every now and then, over the last several decades, I have happened upon the mention of a mysterious "Shanghai Dock" reported to be somewhere down by the Ross Island Bridge. A "whole lot of shanghaiing went on there," it is told. So, it couldn't actually have been by the Ross Island Bridge, since that bridge wasn't finished until December of 1926, and the period of shanghaiing of sailors in Portland ended well before World War I.   Being something of a map lover I tended to ignore references to the mysterious "Shanghai Dock," knowing that no such dock had ever appeared on any of the detailed maps of the waterfront that I have poured over hours on end.    One such reference that I ignored was a report on Shanghaiing in a 1976 Oregonian that said, "…shanghaiing was not confined to the Burnside area, but occurred all alo...