Having grown up in Portland as the progeny of people who had grown up in Portland, I long have been subjected to stories about the city’s history.
While this undoubtedly resulted in countless not-this-story-again eye rolls on my part — a trait that my own children have inherited and developed into an art form — I actually always have enjoyed tales about mid-20th century Portland. In fact, I find the history of any city to be fascinating in its own way, providing a snapshot of how a particular region arrived at its present state.
How, for example, would Portland be different if the coin toss had gone the other way and the city was named Boston? And how would Vancouver be different if the Columbia River waterfront had been open to development two decades ago instead of now? And how would the world have been altered if the boroughs of New York City had not consolidated in 1898? These things I find interesting, which probably explains why I don’t get invited to many parties.
Because of this admittedly odd predilection, it was with much interest that I received a book in the mail the other day. It is titled “Vanport,” and it is part of the “Images of America” series that tells the story of cities throughout the country.
You’ve probably seen the series in local bookstores — or at least you would if people still visited bookstores. The books are relatively small paperbacks filled primarily with historic photographs, accompanied with minimalist text from local authors describing local history (Pat Jollota wrote Vancouver’s entry in the series).
Triumph and tragedy
Anyway, the story of Vanport is one of a bygone America that is at once both triumphant and tragic.
The city, located at what is now the Delta Park area just across the Interstate 5 Bridge from Vancouver, was named for the two cities is was nestled between. It was the creation of Henry J. Kaiser, who had developed shipyards at Vancouver and Swan Island during World War II and then discovered that the thousands of employees moving to the area needed someplace to live. This was problematic, in part because Portland and Vancouver did not have enough housing, and in part because Portland had strict redline policies that limited where black people could live.
This institutional racism was not some wartime creation. As Natasha Geiling wrote last year for Smithsonian.com: “When Oregon was admitted to the United States in 1859, it was the only state whose state constitution explicitly forbade black people from living, working or owning property within its borders. Until 1926, it was illegal for black people to even move into the state.”
But Kaiser’s shipyards drew workers of all colors from all over the country, so he set about building a community. The result was an old-fashioned company town, with schools, stores, day care centers, apartments, and homes for the workers on reclaimed swampland protected from the Columbia River by a series of dikes.
The city was built in less than a year with housing designed to be temporary, and the population of 40,000 at the peak of the war made it the second-largest city in Oregon. It all seemed like a great idea, except that when World War II ended, most of the white people moved on and most of the black people had no place to go.
A few years later, they had no choice, as the dikes gave way and the river wiped out the town. The Vanport Flood of Memorial Day 1948 remains one of the seminal moments in Portland’s history, resulting in an official death toll of 15.
Being an eye-rolling history buff, I was familiar with this story. And yet a fresh telling brings to life some of the hidden details. One is how Kaiser bypassed the local housing authority and worked with federal officials to get the city built. Good luck doing that in the modern Bureaucratic Age.
Another is how Portland utterly failed the people who remained in Vanport following the war.
But all of it, good and bad, helps paint a portrait of how the metro area became what it is today.
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