.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Thursday, June 26, 2008

 

Food Carts, Sharp Knives and the Boulevard



A long-delayed piece on the food cart lot in Sellwood finally ran in today's Oregonian. The article (attempts) to address some of the regulations that food carts have to deal with, and complaints that the rules are unclear, unevenly applied, and unfairly enforced.

Essentially, enforcement happens as a response to a complaint. Meanwhile, vendors can get the go-ahead to open and run their carts, only to find out after the fact that their factory-wired trailers are not in compliance with Portland code (though they may well work elsewhere).

Interesting issue, and an excuse to eat at Sellwood Corner lot a few times. Article includes a round-up of current vendors. Online version of roundup demonstrates miserable Oregonlive formating...no paragraph breaks or indents at all. COME ON!

Last Thursday, my profile of mobile knife sharpener Mike Kraft ran. I saw an ad for his services at Garden Fever one day. He didn't really want to do the piece, and when I called him to tell him it was running he said that work had been so busy he figured it had already run. Sorry Mike.

Finally, the saga of life on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard continues, with this article by Oregonian real estate reporter Ryan Frank. The Portland Development Commission okayed a deal that will let developers get a new loan to pay off an old loan, with that being contingent on signing more leases for the Heritage Building property.

That's a tough sell, unless they plan on leasing themselves the property. Heritage is mid-block, with spaces large enough to make tenants want off-street parking (despite the ready availability of mass transit).

What the article doesn't mention is that the long period of time that it took to bring this project to market (compared with a privately financed arrangement), due to the public nature of the process, probably made matters worse. The longer it takes to get the deal done, the more likely the market is to shift in its preferences and needs. A similar situation has plagued Kings Crossing. And, both buildings got the go-ahead without anchor-tenant leases signed. This is public financing of private speculation, and it's a dicey game.

Labels: , , , ,


Wednesday, June 25, 2008

 

Let Them Eat Poundcake

Miss Anita Smith, proprietress of Hannah Bea's Poundcake and More, has earned a fair share of media coverage in the seven-plus years she ran her business on Northeast Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, here in Portland. It will close this weekend, in debt. But in the past several days, what might have been a swan-song round of coverage instead turned ugly.

S. Renee Mitchell, a Metro columnist with The Oregonian, briefly complimented Smith's most famous wares (the pound cake) before making a little poundcake herself. Ingredients: One Anita Smith, outstanding loans, and the ever-present race-card.

The June 16 (didn't realize it was so long ago...) column is available here, but a couple of choice cuts follow:
"[T]he deepest wounds that have led up to her closing the restaurant after about six years may be self-inflicted -- and more ordinary -- than the media accounts so far."

Mitchell also referred to Miss Anita as "unusually tall." That's an interesting choice of words, given Mitchell's own altitude. I figure her for six foot, anyway. Maybe Renee and I share an Almost Tall complex.

I spoke to a woman the other night who knows Renee (and Anita), and she said Mitchell got it right. And the Portland Development Commission? Someone over there is no doubt cracking open a tiny bottle of champagne... their relationship with Smith had soured pretty badly.

The other article was an interview with Beth Slovic at Willamette Week, which ran today. I like Slovic's reporting, but she manages to aggravate her subjects fairly often. Slovic gives her free rein to rant. It's not pretty.

Reader comments mostly ran along the lines of "Portland Development Commission should have never loaned her the money."

If you take a step back, past the unpaid debts and public financing, Smith has some valid points. They don't warrant a bail-out at this point, but worth considering:
Smith placed her trust in the Portland Development Commission, which returned the favor but then violated that trust with costly mistakes. If you look at the history of this community, it's easy to see how paranoia and resentment might (and did) set in.

Urban renewal has not been kind to the African American community in Portland. Maybe the 1950s and 1960s are ancient history, but if you grew up here, then your parents lived it. Urban renewal tore down neighborhoods, built hospitals and stadiums, and left many blacks--living in those neighborhoods courtesy of redline laws, nothing.

Lots of people have put lots of energy into improving MLK, with public and private dollars. It's a three-mile stretch, much of which has no existing building stock to work with. It's a state highway, heavily traveled, running through one of the poorer sections of town. But almost no one will argue that the boulevard is worse today than it used to be.

A guy at a restaurant opening just off MLK last night said that he and his buddies used to drive what was then Union Ave. "just to see the show," which included lots and lots of prostitutes.

Did I ever eat there? I've had the poundcake a few times. It's good, for poundcake, but I like an egg white cakes instead. Angel Food, for every day.

The signs Hannah Bea's was struggling were obvious. One major indicator: The Banner theory, which is that every banner placed in the windows indicates the degree to which business is bad. Anita Smith had lots to advertise. And then she opened a bar, which stretched the staff and focus even thinner.

I interviewed Smith for my story on N.E. MLK a few months back. She was a piece of the puzzle, but it was obvious that a lot more was going on there. I had 20" for a 200" story, so I didn't pursue some of her claims. But her emails came through in the wee hours (AND IN ALL CAPS). If half of it was true, she had cause to be aggrieved. She couldn't get her lease renewed. She said the business needed upgrades, but she wasn't willing to dump more money into it with no guarantee. And her customer base was moving further north and east. At $4 a gallon, it's a long drive for a piece of pound cake.

Smith was the poster child of the Successful Black Entrepreneur on NE MLK. Maybe she wasn't the best candidate. Then again, maybe if there were more black-owned businesses, the stakes wouldn't be quite so high. Seven years is a pretty good run, and seven years from now, Hannah Bea's will be a distant memory on a drastically changed strip, with more businesses, more housing, and maybe even a streetcar line.

But we lose something without that restaurant there (besides pounds). We lose an example of a local person who scratched out a dream and made it a reality, if only for a little while. We lose an example of public helping private. We lose character and flavor and another remnant of a community that has weathered the storm, that has as the expression goes, "survived the Boulevard."

Portland boasts of having (or wanting to have) the best Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard in the nation. That may be. Or maybe it'll just be the whitest.


some nice photos of our own MLK BLVD, over at MLK in Motion.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?