Sure, we’ve been insulted before. We’ve been called “Vantucky” and we’ve been called “Clarkistan.” But for some reason, referring to Vancouver as Portland’s Hoboken touches a nerve. At least that is the impression created from a recent email thread that included a link to an article in a Portland newspaper (no, not the one that delivers four days a week; the other one) that carried the headline “Our Hoboken.”
To which former Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard responded: “THIS SUCKS. VANCOUVER HAS A HISTORY THAT MOST CITIES, INCLUDING PORTLAND, WOULD KILL FOR!!!!!!!! LOTS OF REASONS THIS IS INCORRECT. BUT I DON’T HAVE TIME TO HELP THEM SELL NEWSPAPERS!!!!!”
Yes, the caps and the exclamation points are Pollard’s. Nobody screams in email more effectively than Royce, who routinely proves that it is, indeed, possible to use a keyboard your entire life without undoing the caps-lock key. But that’s beside the point; what is important is that nobody defends Vancouver more effectively than our former mayor.
Before we go any further, it should be pointed out that the article in question was originally published in August before making the email rounds last week. Which, I suppose, only gives credence to those Portland snobs and only provides fodder for jokes about the Pony Express taking 10 months to make its way across the Columbia River.
But, again, I digress. The point of the article was to insist that Vancouver is a suburb of Portland. “It remains … inextricably drawn into our comparatively vast cultural and economic orbit. It’s our Hoboken, you might say,” wrote Lizzy Acker.
A sense of place
Now, being compared to a New Jersey city that gave the world Frank Sinatra and might or might not have been the site of the first baseball game is not necessarily a bad thing. But there is no doubt that people on this side of the river are a little sensitive about the word “suburb.” A little protective of their 159-year history as an incorporated city. A little proud of their role in the settlement of the Northwest.
As well they should be. When white settlers arrived in Vancouver about 1825, Portland hadn’t even evolved into the “Stumptown” it would soon become. And when Esther Short bequeathed land in what is now downtown Vancouver to the city in 1862, Portland was being called by its own newspaper “the most filthy city in the Northern States.”
Yet none of that mitigates the issue at hand — Vancouver’s role in the metropolitan area. As Ethan Seltzer, a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, says in the article, “It would be incorrect to assume that the definition of suburb here represents some sort of subservient role to Portland, because that’s just not how they developed.” But, he added, “It would probably be harmful to Vancouver’s prospects to not embrace its relationship to (Portland), because frankly its fate is directly tied to Portland.”
Therein lies the conundrum. Vancouver is not subservient to the weirdness across the river, but it is linked to it. The almost 300,000 cars that cross the Columbia River each day stand as a testament to that fact. And while Vancouver should embrace this synergism (anybody in favor of a new bridge?), it should not be content with it. Vancouver is a city with its own culture and its own zeitgeist and its own sense of place.
That culture has blossomed in recent years. Why, a story just the other day in a Portland newspaper (the one that delivers four days a week) ran under the headline, “The hot new thing in the Portland beer scene? Vancouver.” Throw in the coming waterfront development, and Vancouver is moving ever closer to the ’Couv and ever farther away from being Vantucky.
So, yes, while we can never escape Portland’s shadow and while we really shouldn’t aspire to, we have a lot of things happening in Vancouver. Or, as Royce Pollard might put it, “WE HAVE A LOT OF THINGS HAPPENING IN VANCOUVER!!!!!”
