I didn’t grow up in Portland (a section of Louisville) but I know plenty of people who did. One of the oldest sections of Louisville I find it very exciting to drive around and see buildings still standing from the 1800s or later. To see streets abnormally wide because they were built to accommodate wagons full of ship cargo rather than the average horse and buggy. I am, and always have been, the person who loves looking at old pictures of the city, comparing then and now.
Portland, though, after it was absorbed into Louisville (which very nearly had to suffer Portland as a twin city rather as a subservient one) became a dumping ground. First the Irish immigrants made Portland their home (in fact St. Xavier, one of our most attention-getting schools in Louisville started in Portland, a fact that they refuse to even admit in their own history.) then in the 30s two floods pushed the middle class out of Portland and the city largely declined any efforts to rebuild (a trend that sadly continues to this day.)
Portland has a very noble background, one that even looks inclusive, since we were home to the first female steam ship captain and we were the first neighborhood in Louisville to home blacks in the 60s.
Since then West Louisville has become the “black part of Louisville” and in a way has been gifted with some loud and persistent activists, downtown has undergone, and is undergoing a revitalization program and Portland…has been forgotten. The thing is, even our own representative on the city council has reportedly told people she doesn’t need Portland to get re-elected so she doesn’t care about us. Portland wrongly, might I add, has a tough reputation that crime statistics do not support. Essentially, today, we aren’t rich and white enough to be important to the city leaders and we aren’t minority enough to be important to their PR machine.
The support systems in my area leans against the further education or job training, or job procurement of people in this area. This is where the poor people of Louisville are sifted by the rest of the areas who will not tolerate them.
This is also the only place in my teen and adult life that I have ever felt like home.
I moved every year from 1989 to 1996, when my family finally settled into the house my father would eventually buy. I’ve lived in Indiana, Georgia and several sections of Louisville (Newburg, Hikes Point, Saint Matthews, Highlands). Sure I don’t have the full adult view of all these places, their politics and community, but I’ve been a part of a lot of places and Portland still feels like home. My writing career, and attempts to both find writing communities in Louisville, and venues for promotion have taken me to all the “typical” hang outs; coffee bars where clerks sneered at me in disgust when I asked to put up flyers for an event, bookstores who told people the event had been canceled while we were setting up, and east end writers groups who strongly discouraged me from joining. The real world home I’ve found has been a Taco Bell in a predominately black neighborhood on the edge of Portland where people smile at me instead of sneer, don’t charge eight bucks for a drink, or try to force their vegan and extreme green politics on me, and don’t complain if I sit and work for a few hours, taking up their precious dining room space.
And likewise the only place I’ve found where the neighbors will stop and talk with you, offer a hatchet or a hand, out of friendliness and helpfulness instead of Thanking-God-you’re-finally-doing-something-about-that-damn-eyesore has been Portland.
Recently I’ve gotten involved with the Portland Festival planning group. The festival itself is 36 years old and proceeds benefit community charities. All of them, not the proceeds after the people in charge get paid. The people behind the Festival are amazing, good people. They dedicate a lot of their free time into putting it together but more than that all of them are directly invested in the community. They know the business people here, they’re involved in other initiatives, like local anti-drug groups, and in interacting with the city on behalf of the community. They invest their time and money here, many of them being property owners, often owning multiple properties. They have a lot of loyalty to the area and I’ll be honest, I haven’t really encountered many people like that.
Two really upsetting things have happened lately that provoked this post. 1) Our house, which is a 4 bedroom 2 bath, 1600 square foot two floor, 100 year old home (completely renovated at some point in the 80s and mostly kept up with the exception of a few things that largely happened when the bank that owned it left it closed up and unmaintained for 9 months before we bought it, and normal things, like the siding and roof aging) on about a quarter of an acre with a private driveway and a detached two car garage, was valued at just over $6k when we went to our bank for a refinancing. The surveyor cited “the neighborhood” and “the age of the home” as the primary reason for this assessment, essentially saying that because we live in Portland and our house isn’t one of those brand new (lifeless) communities being built all the time, our house was useless. (Remember I mentioned those two floods in the 30 that devastated the neighborhood? Our house survived both of them with no major damage. Who knows what else it’s survived. I’m sure it’ll outlast us.) The bigger rub is we know for a fact what a farce this “assessment” is because two years ago our next door neighbors bought their house (which is almost half our size, a traditional Portland “shotgun”) for $56k, from a relative.
Second is a friendly sort of person (not a close friend, but a friendly acquaintance) who on Facebook has spent a lot of updates talking really bad about the neighborhood. You know, “Only pill poppers, drunks and hookers live there”, “I am so glad I got the hell out”, “The area isn’t like I remember it”, “It’s not safe to walk around there alone anymore”.
The thing that bugs me about that are threefold. 1) I can’t really talk about it because it involves my personal knowledge of the person saying these things, which include but aren’t limited to all the ways this person has not, themselves, contributed to the community in a positive, but sometimes in a very negative, way. 2) I have been spending a lot of my free time trying to help out the community, a community I’ve only lived in for about ten years, and it bugs me, and I feel cheapness my effort to have someone actually born and raised here belittling the time, effort and money I’ve put into the community. Portland Festival aside, I chose (even sought out) to buy a home here, because I liked the characters of the homes here and the sense of community. I’ve put a lot of money and time into my home, my yard, my kid’s schools, and yes, even community politics on behalf of people who don’t have my education, intellect, skill or just time, to give. Likewise others seem only willing to contribute complaints, even into insults. It’s frustrating, and I certainly have more ways to spend my time rather than let the community I’m trying to help spit on my face.
The last thing that bugs me is the idea that something as static as a cluster of buildings and streets have changed so much in such a short time. I was warned, when I started dating my husband that he came from Portland, which was the trash section of town. Dangerous, some said. What utter tripe. Most people here have never been involved in a violent, or non violent crime. I hear about more murders and violence in Bonnieville, a tiny town south of Elizabethtown, where my mother-in-law lives than I have in Portland. I’ve heard of more break ins and car thefts from people I know who live in the Highlands and Old Louisville sections of town, than I have from people who live in Portland. I’ve always felt safe enough in this neighborhood to walk to the store, or the bus stop, the doctor’s office or the vet (because hey, bonus, I can walk to all those places from my house, as well as to the hardware store, and some fast food places too.) I’ve walked through alleys and *gasp* past black people who do little more than nod as we pass each other.
The idea that this neighborhood has somehow changed, and become unsafe is ridiculous, because it is still as safe as any other area occupied by lots of people. The idea that in a person’s childhood it was somehow safer, well first of all there was a great episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit that I saw that addressed this issue. Nostalgia skews a person’s memories of the past. No era of the past was without its dangers, its crazies and its drama. There is no real Donna Reed, or Brady Bunch, not even in the 50s or 70s. The past most people are nostalgic for never, ever existed except in dreams, ideals and fantasies.
In fact dwelling too much in those times, wanting too much for those things to be a reality is utterly dangerous. And seeing as the situation everyone OTHER than the white male was in those times it’s outright disastrous. In fact a longing for the fantasy world where women wear pearls to bake and vacuum, men are always well paid and handsome, kids behave and minorities and gays and lesbians didn’t exist, save for maybe as comic relief, or proof of sin, is longing for something you have no right to have, the ability to force your will on everyone else in the world.
The world is a mess, chaotic place. It is microcosms, cracks in the facade and the snobbish look on the face of people who you’ll never be good enough for, and in fact, even the person they see in the mirror isn’t good enough for. The truth is that it’s very likely these people berating my neighborhood just don’t like the color it’s becoming. They don’t like how they felt living here, sifted to the bottom and forgotten. They need, for some reason to tell the world how much better off they are, not through hard work that very few people every see, the kind of work, that when done right blends in to a seamless, effortless appearance of things being as they should be, but by screaming that By God they are better off because they aren’t THAT person (anymore).
But in the end good riddance to those with no sense of community or tolerance. They can take their pride, and their attitude elsewhere, for other people to be bothered with. Me, I have a garden to work on, a hundred year old house, that thanks to someone who hasn’t forgotten about those of us struggling out here, has new windows and a new roof, and is looking awfully spiffy. I have a meeting Monday, where I’ll get to work with other people like me, who aren’t asking for praise or payment, but for people to just contribute something other than apathy to the things and the people around them. And despite all the naysayers, and the fear mongers and elites over on the other end of town, I have friends here, and a sense of community here. I have a house I love, and a place to call home, and it doesn’t get much better than that.
I love old houses, too. Yours sounds terrific.
There’s such a weird thing about the stories we tell about our own communities vs. other people’s communities and residents, told as cautionary tales designed to enforce a cultural/class status quo, and the end result is exactly what you describe. I noticed it as a kid, spending summers with my mom’s family in the deep south. Everybody magically “knows” some bit of nonsense about a neighborhood, town, or even a specific family, when in fact no such thing is actually true.
Thanks for taking the time to write and post your thoughts and experiences.
Thanks for commenting MacAllister.
Glad to know there are more people out there who value personality over “new”.
I love this entry Michele. It’s so true. I remember having my reservations about what I had heard about Portland when I moved here. I love visiting Josh’s family in Portland. We can sit on their stoop and wave and talk to neighbors who walk past. They all know each other and look out for each other. Meanwhile, back in my own neighborhood our neighbors barely speak to each other.
I know! I’ve never lived anywhere else where everyone knew each other like this. Yet all I hear is complaints about how it’s not how it used to be. But I love it down here.