- A Public Safety Activist with over 20 years experience in NoPo gives her views on Rosie “The Down” Sizer

- Is the PPB Chief’s office cursed?

- What are folks in NoPo more concerned about: police misconduct or lack of cops? 

- Is Adams up for running the Police Bureau?

Chris Duffy is a native Portlander who’s lived in NoPo for over 20 years. She’s been Chair of the Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association since 2006. She is currently involved with North Portland’s ‘go to’ gathering for all things community policing, the Peninsula’s Public Safety Action Committee or (PSAC). I called her to find out what she thought of the Mayor’s swift toppling of the Police Bureau Leadership this morning.

Do you think it was a good idea to fire Rosie Sizer?

Yes, I do.

Why?

She’s had four years. She’s had a tough time with threats of precinct closures from the very beginning, then budget crisis in recent years, along with continued problems between citizens and police. Now she’s been dealing with rising crime rates along with complaints with how police handled situations...Perhaps it’s time for someone with a different perspective to pick up the challenge.

Sentinel's fancy new website welcomes you (REFRESH YOUR BROWSER AH-LOT!)

What's been going on since the March Street Edition said, "I'm hitting the road!"

The quest for sustainable service model

Welcome to the Sentinel’s new website.
Over the last 6 months we’ve been working hard on launching this new design and platform. All those involved are delighted with how well it’s turned out. Forage around. I hope you find it easier to use and more pleasing to the eye than ever. News and information should flow better, and as always you can post your own news and events by hitting the big blue speech bubble. The user login, though, is now discretely tucked up in the upper right hand corner of the site. Community users, should know that their post will still publish instantly. But it might take a few hours or a day for editors to review the content before a posting them the home page. Go to the RECENT POST page (button on the main navigation bar) for an unfiltered view of all public access and news service postings. Last but not least, if you have problems with site features, remember to refresh your web browser. Refreshing your browser will help your computer to 'learn' how to see the new website design and functions.  It sounds strange, but...yes..it's technical, trust me.

Have you heard a coyote’s call in your neighborhood? [today's O article]

Folks in St Johns say they have.

Lecture on Urban ‘cay-yotes’ coming next Tuesday, April 27th

Where’s the Roadrunner when you need him?
Many of know about or have seen “urban” coyotes in or around Portland International Airport. At about 6am, I once saw one scampering through the high grass in the vacant lots off Airport Way. The little fellar pictured here, hoped on the Airport MAX back in 2009. It was almost like he did it in obedience to the song Light-Rail Coyote by Portland’s own Sleater-Kinney, released the year before. (see video below).?“They’ve been seen on occasion along Baltimore Woods and heard! There is also coyote scat in Pier Park on the trail on the east side of the Park all the time. Apparently they come over from Chimney Park to hunt at night,” wrote Barbara Quin, of the Friends of Cathedral Park Neighborhood Association in an email today. “One of our FOBW members saw one trotting down Decatur in daylight and the neighbors at the deadend of Edison have lots of stories.”

The big picture of what a new North/Northeast urban renewal area will look like will be revealed tonight at Billy Webb's Elk Lodge. Whether or not the Rose Quarter will be a part of that picture won't come into view until this summer.

Tonight, the Portland Development Commission hopes to start wrapping up its plans to consolidate the neighborhood's two urban renewal districts. But an earlier request from the mayor to plug the Rose Quarter into the new SUPER renewal district is being taken off the table.

This will decouple both large scale renewal projects in the pipe for the area: the URA merger, and the redevelopment of Memorial Coliseum and Blazer's Live District.

The announcement will be made at this evening's meeting of the PDC's North/Northeast Economic Study Area.

I am excited that the Oregon News Incubator and the Sentinel are continuing on with their office and content collaboration.

Through this arrangement, experienced writers and media producers can get 24-hour access to the Sentinel’s newsroom, either through direct rent payment — starting at $40 a month — or through taking assignments for the Sentinel’s online news service. The office share provides writers and media producers the resources of a newsroom with the camaraderie, casual peer review and free flow exchange of ideas that can only occur in a real space. For the Sentinel this is an opportunity to continue to deliver news service to one of Portland’s most under-served communities. While this publication continues to look for sustainable models, this partnership is vitally important to the publication’s mission to deliver quality news to a part of town that usually gets ignored.

The hatchet finally seems to be buried after months of protracted hissy fitting between the St Johns Boosters and the organizers of the St Johns Farmer’s Market.

“The boosters, never intended the shut the farmer’s market down,” said St Johns Boosters Sarah Anderson. “I could not be more happy that its all worked out.”

Representatives of the Farmer’s Market could not be reached by phone at the time of this posting.

Last year’s launch of the St Johns Farmer’s Market was a huge success. But downtown businesses had some concerns about scheduling, and the vendor mix.

Last night the Farmer’s Market, St Johns Boosters issued a joint press release:

The Board of Directors from the St. Johns Business Boosters and the Friends of the St. Johns Farmers Market met on Tuesday, March 31st to discuss solutions on a handful of issues and to determine how to best work together in their common missions of further building and supporting the St. Johns community. The groups agreed to meet to mediate issues around communications, scheduling of the St. Johns Plaza, and products and services offered by market vendors.

The Plaza, which was for decades more eye sore and hang out for street drinks appears to be getting ‘over booked’ with family oriented events. It’s not a bad problem to have.

Managing Editor Rebecca Robinson officially left her position here at the Sentinel on April 1. She will now be covering North Portland as a freelancer for the Oregonian. 

Robinson came to the Sentinel through its internship program in 2007. She continued on as a freelancer and became news and online editor in 2008. This year, she was promoted to managing editor and had final edit on all Sentinel print and online coverage. 

Robinson was one of four editors at the Sentinel that reviewed assigned and edited content. Those include myself, Will Crow and Roger Anthony. 

UPDATED 1:44pm

Heard about two more.. second one, is Willamette Blvd, at Rosa Parks Way

From this morning..

..saw this this morning at Interstate and N. Watts on my way to the office.  The City of Portland has finally gone too far...

UPDATE: 11:56 am - A REAL hoax

Despite what folks at Poises Cafe on North Denver, orginally thought, this is a REAL hoax. No photoshop tricks by yours truly (other than a tweak to brightness and contrast). Someone actually took the trouble to change the sign.

In today's Oregonian, columnist Steve Duin offered a thoughtful view on Portland Public Schools imminent high school redesign.  I recommend reading it.  Most of his comments align with our recent editorial. But we do differ in one area. The Sentinel recommends that Jefferson become a vocational special focus school.

Duin seems to believe that the redesign is on the right track, but doesn't go far enough. He makes the case that PPS is not looking into the future with it's vision. His case, perhaps, being that the redesign is, at it's least, triage rather than transformation.  Duin does not argue against PPS logic that a reapportionment of students to fewer and larger high schools would level some of the playing field. But he does say that's not good enough for a forward looking school system.

FROM THE OREGONIAN: BELOW THE CUT

Oh, boo hoo, the Sentinel Street Edition has perished. Who cares. That bloody newspaper never printed even one of our video selections. What did the Street Edition ever for do us at SMV? Nothing, that's what! So, crocodile tears is all you get from us. But since everyone is getting all nostalgic and clogging up SMV's precious bandwidth with all their blubbering, we might as well join in. 

We can be nostalgic too.  Remember 'the aughts'? Remember when bands in 2002 and 2003 made us nostalgic for the bands who did identical music in 1982 and 1983?  That's what we miss. We miss a time when we could really feel nostalgic from a really nice clean piece of nostalgia.

Take Swedeish electo-poppers The Knife's 2002 song "Heartbeats," for example. That song makes us miss when new music sounded really old. The song was re-released in 2004 after Jose Gonzales did a seemingly more popular cover of the song on 10-string guitar. The lovely irony is, the cover sounds less nostalgic than the orginal.  The Knife's official video brings it all together, combining Super 8 footage with really old analog video affects. The whole things just makes us wish we could go back in time 7 years when the new stuff made the past look so much cooler than it ever was.

[PS- in SMV's humble opinion, March 4th, 2010 Daily Show- tightest, investigative, self-satirizing, infotainment media artifact in years...is it just a funny show with a unsettling ending or a vast left wing media conspiracy to get the Quants?]

In my five years with The Sentinel, my favorite story was “Crack in Kenton” (November 2006 article not available online).  An ex-pimp and drug addict named Lionel Scott walked into The Sentinel offices in St. Johns one evening in September. He said that he was seeing a lot of drug dealing in Kenton, but he felt that police and neighborhood activists weren’t taking him seriously. 

The newly installed community policing office on North Denver Avenue was not in regular use, and at the time, there were few businesses on the street that could keep an eye on things. Scott street mannerisms might have lead some to be dismissive or suspicious of him.

Scott appeared sincere to me.  He worked as a case manager for True Dialogue, a nonprofit that worked to keep kids off the street.  Scott’s references checked out, and distinguished people in the community such as the Reverend John Tolbert vouched for him.

Over the next two months, I followed Scott and his wife, Stephanie, as they told me of the remarkable turnaround Scott had achieved in his own life, and of criminal activity they saw in the neighborhood around them. 

[Photo of 2005 St Johns Bridge Rededication ~ from offline archives]
In one of my editorials for The Sentinel, I wrote, “St. Johns is always on the verge of nothing happening.”
This area has seen decades of revitalization schemes and big plans floated by developers. The brochures and a trail of defunct newspapers were once laid out for me in the offices of the St. Johns Boosters.  “The only thing that changes is the date,” said then-Booster President Gary Boehm.  But I think history has proved us both wrong.

St. Johns has historically been the commercial and communal center of the North Portland peninsula. While given to insularity at times and dismissed as remote at others, the businesses there rely almost exclusively on customers from North Portland and far Northwest Portland. North Portland and St. Johns residents have a stronger connection to the merchants and the daily life of the town center than any other part of our coverage area.

Where is the Grant Warehouse you ask? Nowhere. The building formerly known as the Grant Warehouse was demolished over 5 years ago, but once sat on NE MLK just south of NE Freemont. The site is now tentatively slated for development as mixed income housing (see below). The warehouse went through a number of uses in it's day. Before it was condemed it was said to have housed a illegal gold extraction operation. The EPA and City spent considerable time and money cleaning up the site.  But the property has sat vacant and un-redeveloped for years.

Some crackerjack reporting here from your esteemed Publisher:  Kenton Library finally slated to open this coming Monday, March 8th! The Grand Opening ceremony's set for next Saturday.  Don't take my word for it; just look at this picture I took of a flyer in a window.  That makes it REAL. The Kenton Branch Library has been in the making for almost 10 years by my reckoning [but here's 100 years of history for you if you want it]. 

When I ran the Portsmouth Press in 2001, activists advocated for a branch along North Lombard Street.  Then-County Commissioner Serena Cruz chose to locate the planned branch in what is now the New Columbia development. Needless to say, that branch never materialized - perhaps to Kenton's benefit. Now, the little downtown strip that keeps getting better will finally have a daily regional attraction (other than the surly butcher shop and "7 Bucks a Whack" barber shop).

Kenton has had other new businesses crop up in the area, but unlike Mississippi or Alberta, the library will add a little more family friendliness to the mix.  This is more of the St. Johns model of neighborhood revitalization: a diverse mix of public services, small businesses and major corporations all in one confined area. (You don't hear St. Johns held up as model very often.) Good for the library, good for Kenton and North Portland and the city. ~ Cornelius Swart

At SMV we often cultivate what we call "emotional texture" meaning things that intentionally produce multiple conflicting emotional experiences at once. Here is a tribute to the great pioneers of this form of affect, the great BBC, 'The Office' (single quotes used in tribute to the Queen's English). We're not sure that the American version ever got as edgy as the British one.  So if you haven't see the BBC version be prepared for the best/worst.

Want to do a good deed for a day? Want to help improve your neighborhood? Want to hold the power to give away money?  Well, now's your chance.  Metro ( Portland's world famous, one-of-a-kind wonky regional government) is recruiting a volunteer from the Cathedral Park Neighborhood to sit on the North Portland Enhancement Grant committee.  Committee members get to award money from the North Portland Trust Fund. The fund was set up as a give-back to the community after Metro located a landfill in St Johns.  The landfill is now closed, but the cash keeps flowing. Good for you, North Portland!  Over the last 22 years the fund has given out an average of $1000 a year to neighborhood improvement projects such as tree plants, farmer's markets and the region's pioneering new "underwear exchange program"  Projects benefit residents, businesses and...ok...I made that last one up... there's no such thing as an underwear exchange program (shudder)... But the money goes to good things.  Read more below.

The photo here is of sidewalk construction along North Lombard Street south of Kelley Point Park.  I happened upon it on a Saturday dog walk.  The multi-use path that runs along North Marine Drive connects Smith & Bybee Lakes with Kelley Point very nicely.  According to ODOT signs, the construction of an extention headed south to North Rivergate Boulevard will be completed this summer.

 A man was found dead in the lot of the old Albina Fuel property near Northeast 32nd Avenue and Northeast Broadway across from the Hollywood Fred Meyer this morning, according to media on the scene.  The police, who taped off the area, including the northeast corner of the Fred Meyer parking lot, described the incident as a "suspicious death." Media reported that a motorist flagged down a police officer at approximately 11am, stating that they had seen the deceased laying on the ground.  The body was removed from the scene at around 4pm.

UPDATE: The Oregonian reports that an autopsy is planned for Monday.

Everyone loves a good show. Looks like the Roughriders are taking on the Wonderful Wizard for this spring's production.  Theater arts classes were recently (2007) restored at RHS, and the productions they have put on under the direction of Jo Lane have gotten lots of great local feedback.  So, you should be off...off to see the Wizard..the...no, I mean the Wonderful Press Release of Oz (below the break).

L. Frank Baum's classic musical, The Wizard of Oz, RSC version,

celebrates 70 years with a production in North Portland at the Roosevelt

When an entirely new St. Johns Boosters board was elected Dec. 7 it marked the end of one major era in the organization's history. With 53 mail in votes cast, the ballot return constituted a record high, according to Gary Boehm, the most recent Booster president. Boehm had been president of the organization since 1996, heading up an arguably unprecedented and insoluble group of leaders comprised of Joe Beeler, vice president since 1997; Debbie Reichlt, member since 1999; Michael Peterson, member since 1999; and “Skip” Martin, member since 1998. All of these stalwart members resigned or relinquished their board seats last year.

The 80-year-old civic and business association has a legacy of activism dating back to 1927. The group played a key role in helping to build such neighborhood landmarks as the St Johns Bridge and Roosevelt High School, the St Johns Plaza and gateway signs.