Morning Shoot

I spent the morning gathering some video of the old neighborhood.  I think I captured a few images that will fit nicely into the movie as I attempt to show what the area looked like when I moved into the neighborhood in 1977.

A few of the old warehouses that once dominated what is now called the Pearl District are still intact, but you have to hunt them down.  I found a couple of shots of those that will suit my needs. As a way of contrasting the old warehouse district with the Pearl, I also grabbed a few images of the new condos that clutter the area.

Along N.W. 21st Avenue I grabbed a couple of shots of the old Barker Apartments where my sister lived in the late fifties and early sixties during my first visits to Portland as a kid.  The building is now pretentiously called the Irving Street Tower Condominiums.

First, it ain't a tower.  Second, its exterior looks just as it did fifty years ago.  No doubt the units have been remodeled, but that doesn't make it a tower in the slightest.  It's a four-story apartment complex built in 1910 that the new owners have slapped a new name on.  The Barker was once a relatively affordable place to live.  No more.

The old neighborhood grew gentrified when I lived there.  I was disgruntled by the trend, knowing I'd shortly be priced out.  It's all flash and weak substance now.  There wasn't much there to shoot for the purpose of the film.

A tourist might have found it attractive, but I'm no tourist.

Across the street from the old Barker, however, I shot the marquee of the retro film house, Cinema 21.  Grand Illusion, the great anti-war film by Jean Renoir is playing this week.

To me the people who live in Northwest Portland are the ones with the grand illusions these days.  Money and asininity go so well together.

I did take a nice sequence of the dilapidated boarding house I moved into when I came to Portland permanently in the summer of 1977.  It's been painted recently; otherwise it looks the same.  I looked for a sign announcing that it too is now being called a condo, but didn't see one, thankfully.

I nabbed some shots of the old houses that dot the neighborhood, trekked up to Burnside and grabbed a few shots and then had some lunch.

A good day's work for five or six minutes of usable video.


TS