Posted Jul 8, 2008, 5:27 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Portland/Cascadia
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South Waterfront forges an identity
Neighborhood’s residents are warming to life near the river amid construction
POSTED: 04:00 AM PDT Tuesday, July 8, 2008
BY SAM BENNETT (DJC)
On the Fourth of July, Norm Whitlatch helped throw a party for a couple hundred friends and neighbors.
Dubbed the South Waterfront Neighborhood BBQ and Potluck, it was the second annual Independence Day get-together for South Waterfront residents only, including soon-to-be residents of the Mirabella apartments.
For Whitlatch and his wife, Judy, the party was a way to meet neighbors and celebrate their new environs.
To the occasional visitor, the South Waterfront area can be a confusing grid of one-way arterials, construction equipment spilling onto narrow side streets and tall, uninviting condo towers. As Gertrude Stein would say, there is no there there.
But for residents who have just settled in or who have been there for more than a year, South Waterfront, though young, is a neighborhood with distinct character.
“This isn’t the Pearl District and that’s why we moved here,” said Whitlatch, who has lived with his wife in South Waterfront for a year and a half. “We like the proximity to the arts, and we rarely take the car out.” They said the Pearl has more pedestrian and car traffic on the streets than the retired couple cares for.
In the heart of the South Waterfront neighborhood, some of the action on the streets these days revolves around positioning and moving construction equipment, as workers build a continuing care retirement tower called Mirabella and an apartment tower called the Ardea. (<<Prometheus?)
Linda Wysong, June’s artist-in-residence at South Waterfront, said visitors have a much different perspective on the neighborhood than its residents. Wysong last month created a 15-minute video focused on the South Waterfront, its residents, construction workers and office workers at the OHSU Center for Health & Healing.
“What’s true today will not be true in six months,” she said, referring to the burgeoning neighborhood. “It’s different from the inside than from the outside. People from the outside tend to be more critical.”
Several people interviewed in the video, including a worker at the OHSU building, said South Waterfront does not have the feel of a real neighborhood. Others, however, said the area offers adventures for adults and children who want to explore the waterfront.
Stacey Bailey, who dropped by South Waterfront for lunch last week, said it won’t feel like a neighborhood “until construction is out of the way.”
But for others, such as the Whitlatches and Alberta Tapp, who lives in the Meriwether condo tower, South Waterfront is ideally situated to zip into downtown for arts events such as the symphony. Tapp moved from her home on nearly an acre of land in Wilsonville to a 1,250-square-foot condo, where she can watch wildlife and industrial life – as barges are constructed at an industrial site north of South Waterfront. She said community groups “make a great effort to make this a community.”
The Whitlatches, who live in the John Ross condo tower, left the Oregon coast to come to South Waterfront and live in what they called an “eco-friendly environment.” The couple said they are avid walkers and art-goers, and Norm Whitlatch joined a dragon boat team last spring.
Wysong said that although South Waterfront has a streetcar connecting it with downtown, it must make a greater connection with the rest of Portland.
“They have not found a way to integrate South Waterfront into the city,” she said. “How that connection is made is the open question.”
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