"So the idea of closing libraries instead of jails never came up?"

"We're not closing libraries," County Commissioner Serena Cruz says with exasperation. She is perhaps tired of endlessly arecent decision not to provide additional funding for jail beds this fiscal year.

Currently, suspects arrested by city police officers for crimes such as burglary are taken to county jails and then released back onto the street within hours.  The system of releasing suspects based on jail space availability is referred to as the matrix.

Portlanders have learned to wait patiently for those perfect summer days: temperatures in the 80s, cloudless skies, long sunlit evenings. But there is a stormy flip side to the sunshine. As in most cities, Portland's crime rate rises significantly during the summer months.

The reasons for the spike range from forgetfulness of residents who leave doors unlocked before heading to the beach, to the simple fact that more people are outside and therefore vulnerable to crime.

In a blooming love affair between artists, merchants, civic leaders, and educators, a school playground and an empty lot in St. Johns will transform into a walking arts fair during the Third Annual Window Project, running July 30 through August 20, with reception for the artists to be held August 17.

Sponsored by Art on the Peninsula, this event will feature over 60 North Portland and visiting artists who will display their artwork in over 30 locations, including installations in a dozen windows along St. Johns’ downtown core.

The Boise Neighborhood Association voted last month to permit real estate developer The Kaiser Group to build a ten-story condominium complex in the community. City Hall approved the plan as well, and passed a Spot Zoning Variance to allow the project in the predominantly industrial area near the intersection next to Boise Eliot School, just east of Fremont and Mississippi.

You may have spotted them at the Rose Festival wearing their signature red berets. Or, perhaps you saw the news reports confirming that, yes, the Guardian Angels are back in town. The Guardian Angels are a volunteer group of highly trained, unarmed citizens that patrols city streets and transportation systems like the Interstate MAX.  They are trained to deter, prevent, and report crime.  In many cases, Guardian Angels will interrupt a criminal act and place a suspect under citizen’s arrest.

New York resident Curtis Sliwa started the Guardian Angels in 1979. The first patrols were made up of 13 of his friends, family, and neighbors. They rode the New York subways in groups to deter violence, and patrolled neighborhoods and events. 

Since that time, the Guardian Angels have grown into an international organization with 5,000 volunteers and 60 chapters worldwide.

Michael McDaniel, current leader of the Portland chapter of the Guardian Angels, first joined the group when it originally formed in 1983. Since then the group has suffered fits and starts, leaving Portland without a running chapter since 1995. 

Now, more then twenty years later, McDaniel is back and dedicated to building a lasting Angels presence in Portland.  Misconceptions range from fears about vigilantism to concerns surrounding liability. McDaniel is changing that as he aims to educate the community and inspire a new generation to take to the streets.  

Some people around Kenton have been wondering if City Hall means what it says about fixing up the Kenton commercial district in North Portland. It’s been on the city’s radar screen for more than a decade but Kenton residents have yet to see change.  

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. 

In 2006, The Sentinel dedicated considerable coverage to the effort to rename North Portland Boulevard after civil rights leader Rosa Parks. In October 2006, Sentinel Publisher Cornelius Swart wrote an editorial in support of the name change.

But by the summer of 2007, as the first new Rosa Parks signs began going up on Portland Boulevard and became visible, a small backlash against the name change began to arise amongst residents. Little did they know that another street-renaming controversy was waiting in the wings.

In August 2007, The Sentinel street edition expanded on earlier online coverage about a campaign to change the name of North Interstate Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard. The Sentinel reported that several neighborhood associations along Interstate Avenue had given initial support for the idea, but businesses were unaware of the proposal.

The efforts quickly grabbed citywide, statewide, and then national headlines as a determined activist group met with increasingly vocal opposition. Accusations of racism on one side were met by allegations of back-room deals at City Hall.

To those who invested their passion, energy and precious time to this paper, and to whom I am indebted for the rewards of this endeavor: Michele Elder, Will Crow, Theresa Rohrer, Colleen Froehlich, Roger Anthony, Rebecca Robinson, Jason E. Kaplan, Vanessa Anthony, Laura Hutton, Todd Anthony, Dave Johnson, David Sharp, Alex Blackwood, Yvette King, Charlotte Johnson, Dave Trabucco, Steven Ye, Connie Summers, Colleen McDonald, Chelsia Rice, James Yeary, Peter and Donna Bogdanov, my daughter, family and devoted creditors. Thank you.

~ Cornelius Swart

Any journalist will tell you that a good lede is elusive. The first sentence of a news or feature story, the lede must hook readers with irresistible brain bait that lures them into the next paragraph and beyond.

We’ve pored over thousands of articles here at The Sentinel, so many that after a while stories of brownfields and Business Boosters and Bachelor’s Clubs and brouhahas blend together, regardless of an individual piece’s quality. There are some stories, however, whose ledes lift them from interesting to instantly memorable. Mara Grunbaum’s lede for “Grand Masters from Astor” is a prime example.

The very first story The Sentinel printed when publisher Cornelius Swart came on board in September 2004 was about a day in the life of a neighborhood police officer who was leaving the beat.

We followed officer Cliff Bacigalupi as he walked the street, talking with neighbors and trying to track down a local counterfeiter.  Since then, we’ve made police coverage one of our primary focuses:  We’ve devoted an edition to crime prevention almost every year and provided what seemed to be day-in, day-out updates on the various moves to close or consolidate North Precinct over.

Many newspapers run with the adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”  However, our readers made it clear they did not want that kind of coverage from their community news service.  We set out to cover crime from a prevention- and solution-oriented angle, with an occasional story of truly exceptionally strange crimes (a bomb found at Peninsula Elementary School, January 2009) and coverage of what sadly seems to be an increasing number of cases that raise questions about police misconduct. Tension between the police and the policed has been a constant tightrope.

Portland’s theatre scene has yet another small company in its ranks with the new Northeast troupe BaseRoots. This fledgling company, however, sets itself apart through its mission: to promote African American actors and present work that “showcases the unique African American experience.”

Founded in the spring of 2009 with the help of sponsorships from Miracle Theatre Group and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, BaseRoots is a self-identified African American theatre company in a city where such groups are exceedingly rare.

According to Andrea White, a BaseRoots co-founder, Portland has historically offered few roles for black actors. Those that have been available are often ones where the character is explicitly defined by race, an experience she describes as “tiresome.”

Project at 8629 N. Crawford St.
Cathedral Park neighbors have been closely following a new multi-lot development near the intersection of North Burlington and Salem avenues.

Three-story multifamily condominiums with two or three bedrooms each will be going in at 8629 N. Crawford St., according to Jerry Offer, a planner for Otak Architects. Offer referred additional questions to the Otak architect on the project, Sinan Gumusoglu, but Gumusoglu did not respond to The Sentinel’s request for details.

A total of three lots and 18,000 square feet of land at the location are listed as belonging to East Coast-based M&T Bank and Chesapeake Holdings West, LLC. There is as yet no name for the project.
Barbara Quinn, chair of the Friends of Cathedral Park Neighborhood Association, heard that Otak is simply designing the condos for the out-of-town owners. She hopes that Otak will answer neighbors’ concerns at the next association meeting. With permits still pending, she feels there’s time to make sure the designs fit with the neighborhood.

Consolidation is difficult but necessary, new investment should follow
Photo of Charlene Williams, Principal at RHS's POWER Academy from Sept 2009

Over the years, The Sentinel has  attempted to cover schools in North and Northeast Portland. We profiled public, private, and charter school options in North Portland (Sept. 2006). We opposed the merging of Jefferson High School and Harriet Tubman Middle School (2005), advocated for school uniform dress codes (Dec. 2007), and highlighted the rise of Roosevelt High School’s new alumni association (March 2006). We followed the successes and defeats of a half-dozen charter school start-ups and dozens of triumphs at public elementary and middle-school programs.

It’s been two years since the Portland Trail Blazers launched their “Rise With Us” slogan, a mantra that epitomizes the franchise’s hope of soaring back into NBA prominence on the broad, youthful shoulders of Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge and Greg Oden.

As Portland prepares for their second consecutive playoff push — with Oden lost for the season after left knee surgery and Roy returning from a nagging right hamstring that kept him out of the lineup for four weeks — “Rise With Us” has become more than a 127-by-59-foot vinyl sign that hangs on the giant grain silo across from the Rose Garden.

In a few short years, Jeff Joslin went from mild-mannered land-use manager to headline-making rabble-rouser to redeveloper of Clackamas County’s decommissioned Bull Run Powerhouse.
Joslin made waves — and Sentinel headlines — in late 2007 when he spent nearly $40,000 of his own money fighting the expansion of the ESCO landfill across from his Sauvie Island property on Northwest Gillihan Road. At the time, he was still a city of Portland planner.

The planning for the second season of the St. Johns Farmers Market has hit a snag as representatives of the market and the St. Johns Boosters quarrel about jurisdiction over the downtown plaza and whether the market’s sale of perishable food is hurting local businesses.

Last July, the much-anticipated market was officially established in the St. Johns central plaza.  It was organized by a board of directors, headed by Simone Streeter and shepherded along by the efforts of many volunteers.

Uncertainty has consistently remained certain in the nearly three years that Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services has been trying to develop the 0.16-acre brownfield at North Lombard Street and Baltimore Avenue. But by the end of this month, a final decision may be reached on proposed buildings for the site.

For the first two years of the proposal process, restrictions on the site scared away potential bids, and only recently have flexible terms attracted three proposals from real-estate developers. The three groups are developer Jeana Woolley in a partnership that includes Bloc Design Development LLC; Cavenaugh & Cavenaugh LLC; and a partnership among Innovative Housing, Inc., LRS Architects and Walsh Construction.

You never know how much you miss something until it’s gone. Only after I heard The Sentinel would close its doors was I finally forced to take stock. The grief came in waves.

At first my heart went out to the man, publisher Cornelius Swart, who’s been pounding these streets around the clock. For years, he has forgone the big money that ad agencies would love to throw at him for creating spots for Pepsi and Walmart. Instead, he’s been thanklessly fighting the good fight in North Portland.

At many large papers, technology has advanced to the point where obituaries are now being written through an automated process so sophisticated, so digitally crisp, that the work doesn’t even need to be outsourced to the Philippines.

In the spirit of Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that businesses are people too, let’s punch out a modern obit notice for The Sentinel's Street Edition:

The Sentinel was born in the early 21st century.  It was a newspaper about North and Northeast Portland.  Survivors include The Oregonian, Portland Tribune, Willamette Week, The Mercury, Northwest Examiner, The Skanner and the Portland Observer. It was predeceased by The Portland Telegram, the Portland Reporter and the Oregon Journal.

 
In most issues, The Sentinel was the guy at the party who talked too much.  It had something to say about a lot of things going on in St. Johns, City Hall, the high schools, the rec centers.  The Sentinel had already tried out that new restaurant on Interstate Avenue.  That freak-folk band playing at the White Eagle?  The Sentinel heard the CD last week.