Portland and New Orleans: river cities considered
The Lower Garden District in New Orleans (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Call it the summer travel edition of Portland Architecture. After all, sometimes it takes leaving home to understand it properly: a sense of perspective.
That was true for me 22 years ago this month, when I arrived for college in New York in 1990, having enrolled at a university there without ever visiting the city first. The culture-shock was strong, especially since I arrived in hot-humid late summer during a sanitation-workers strike that resulted in huge piles of trash on local sidewalks. Even so, going to NYC divulged me of certain small-town naivete and helped me better understand Oregon, my home, both good and bad.
Recently I visited New Orleans for the first time, and the experience has lingered in my mind. Perhaps that's in part because this was the first time I'd flown somewhere since before the pandemic began. It was also one of my only visits to the American South, which feels like a whole different country. But it reminded me of seeing New York for the first time: gritty but in certain spots undeniably beautiful, and full of energy.
It took me a couple days to get acclimated, especially since it was very hot and humid. After one multi-hour morning walk, it looked like I had dived into a pool with my clothes on. Yet it was hard not to be enthralled by the architecture of New Orleans, particularly its houses: all those wrought-iron balconies on the outside, and all the high-ceilinged, transom-window-lit spaces inside. New Orleans also has a kind of energy that I appreciated: not just a party atmosphere for which the city is famous, but because it's a more culturally and racially diverse city than Portland.
The Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans (Brian Libby)
Perhaps most of all, though, I enjoyed being out on the water, be it the Mississippi River, which I crossed via the Algiers Ferry, or Lake Pontchartrain, which I crossed by car along a 25-mile causeway. In New Orleans it's impossible not to be aware of the water, because only the levees are keeping the city from being overtaken, and its history is full of tragic hurricane strikes and floods. Even the city's extraordinarily pothole-ridden streets are because of the water underground, constantly shifting the topography. Yet the combined presence of the river and the massive lake makes New Orleans an extra-special location, just as the combined presence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers is inherent to Portland's DNA.
A few days ago I came across one stat indicating that both Portland and New Orleans' downtowns are struggling. The Recovery Rankings feature data compiled by the University of California at Berkeley about downtown recoveries, based on 62 North American cities' cell phone activity between spring of 2019 to spring of 2022. It ranked Portland 60th, next-to-next-to last, with 41% of activity recovered. New Orleans was only nominally better at 50th. It reminded me that that both cities are really about their great neighborhoods more than their central business districts. And the fewer people live downtown, and the more it relies on offices, the harder it is to come back.
What sticks out for me the most is that Portland is still a young city. It lacks the grit of New Orleans, as well as the aforementioned diversity and energy. Yet there is every bit as much beauty, and maybe more of a sense of possibility.
A screen shot from the Recovery Rankings page (downtownrecovery.com)
In the weeks after visiting New Orleans, I got thinking more and more about how the cities are oddly similar. They're both river cities that are surrounded by lush green landscapes, vast enough to make the metropolises still, even with modern sprawl and population growth, feel somewhat isolated, or at least humbled by the scale of the forests surrounding them, be it tropical or temperate. I started working on a video travelogue and explored the fraternal-twin relationship of New Orleans and Portland in a recent Portland Tribune column.
Ultimately the most significant distinction between these two cities (besides perhaps their demographics) is that Portland is more focused on the future than New Orleans. In the latter city there is a richer history and historic urban fabric, but I saw few works of new architecture mixed in the old beauty. Even so, I became interested enough in this idea, and these comparisons, that I talked to two media and arts colleagues who have lived in both cities.
"City By Water," a New Orleans travelogue (Brian Libby)
Matt Davis, a former Portland Mercury reporter and editor whom I got to know in the late 2000s, moved directly from here to New Orleans in the early 2010s (before returning to his native England and then settling in New York City). I've always enjoyed Matt's candor.
"I found New Orleans refreshingly culturally direct," he told me by email. "People were much more inclined to tell you what was on their mind than in Portland, where people tended to skirt around the issue. In that way, the Mardi Gras celebrations and the rich music scene had a similar in your face-ness, probably a Catholic-inspired, French-inspired "this is what we're doing" quality to them, where Portland's felt more indirect and subtle."
"It extends to the civic life too," he added New Orleans is honestly corrupt. I'd describe Portland as self-satisfied or corruptly inclusive. Like, we THINK we're doing the best version of civic engagement. In New Orleans everybody just knows you run for office to enrich your friends and family! New Orleans, too, is actually remarkably small. I was struck by that, often. Portland's downtown core is small, yes, but the outlying neighborhoods give the city more scale. I'd say I preferred living in Portland for livability, and I preferred living in New Orleans for grit and excitement."
The French Quarter (Brian Libby)
I also talked to Brian Borrello, who has called Portland home for more than 25 years but was born and raised in New Orleans. Borello is well known for his environmental works and public art projects. As described by Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art, "His experience with a broad array of sculptural and graphic techniques, and a versatile range of conceptual approaches is evident in his paintings, sculptures and public art pieces. As a visual artist, Brian is particularly interested in creating awareness of human life in balance with other life forms and with our shared environment. In his art for the public realm, he seizes opportunities to make 'places' by activating urban spaces through image, form and symbol, in response to history, community and context. "
We wound up having a longer conversation about New Orleans and Portland, which follows.
Portland Architecture: Can you tell me about the New Orleans neighborhoods where you grew up?
Brian Borrello: The first house my family bought was in Broadmoor, one of the lowest points in New Orleans: a former lake they filled in. And it often flooded. That's one feature of New Orleans, a city that's six feet under sea level. Then at some point, we moved out to the Gentilly area, right by the lakefront, which then was sort of the burgeoning suburbs that's still in town. And we lived right on right across street from Bayou St. John, which was a connecting point between Lake Pontchartrain and the river, part of this series of canals and bayous. Once upon a time, there was sort of a Venice like canal structure that supported the industry in New Orleans.
New Orleans and Portland are both river cities in these lush green landscapes. Is that part of what drew you here?
a pretty accurate observation. I was a city kid, but growing up, my uncle and my grandpa would take me out into the swamps and teach me woodcraft, how to fish and hunt how to gut an animal and shoot a gun. It's kind of a southern rite of passage. My grandpa had a camp at Honey Island Swamp, an hour outside of town. on the Pearl River: deep cypress swamp, pretty primordial, pretty snake-infested, pretty awesome. That nature connection was one of the reasons that drew me up to Portland, because you can be in the forest within an hour: in some pretty deep woods. You have to go a little further to find the old growth. But there's not a lot of old growth left in Louisiana. In a way, it's kind of part of the same legacy, an area of colonization: a presence that pretty much cut down all the old-growth trees.
City Park in New Orleans (Brian Libby)
When did you come to Portland?
I came here a few times beginning in 1996 and just kind of fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. Portland being a new city, to me it’s a little bit more forward-viewing, you know, a little bit still establishing its identity.
New Orleans is an old city that’s been under Spanish and French and English domination. You had opera houses and cafe culture and the slave trade: all this stuff before Portland was even founded. New Orleans is kind of always looking towards the past for culture and architecture. Everything's about Mardi Gras and the sort of vestiges of culture and food and arts. It was a pretty significant cultural footprint there that was distinct from the United States, even before Manhattan and San Francisco and everything else, but kind of waned. Even now as it’s sort of reinventing itself as a foodie town, it’s definitely with an eye towards the past: the heritage of architecture that you saw: all the old brick buildings with the ferns sprouting out of them, the tropical type building styles with the French doors and the high ceilings.
That heritage can be an inheritance but also a burden, I’d suppose.
Yes. I felt the need to kind of get out and see some new horizons. I needed something completely different. I’d traveled and lived in New York for a bit, Los Angeles. Did my graduate studies in Arizona. The Pacific Northwest seemed like it was kind of green and growing progressively. At the time I moved up here, you know, TriMet was doing light rail stuff and incorporating public art. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to do more public art. And in a lot of art over all, there’s more of a spirit of embracing the new. In New Orleans, history influences a lot of what you're able to do. Some of my good friends are architects down there and they're always, you know, trying to do something new, but always having to face the, you know, the historic New Orleans preservationist community.
I loved traveling across Lake Pontchartrain on the causeway. For a portion of that 25-mile journey across the lake, the land was so flat I couldn't see the horizon. It felt like we were on this highway into the ocean or to infinity. That experience and riding the Algiers Ferry across the Mississippi reminded me in a visceral way how New Orleans and Portland are water cities—each at a delta near multiple bodies of water and each, not coincidentally, receiving a lot of rain.
I think New Orleans might get even more rainfall than Portland, but not as consistently. There are these big cumulonimbus clouds that come off of the Gulf in the afternoon. Those thunderstorms do their thing and then it's just a steam bath, and then it goes away. And of course the danger is the storms are increasingly getting more numerous and more intense. I wish you could've gone to New Orleans before Katrina, because it changed everything, you know?
Could you talk a little bit more about that, how the storm changed the city and how it impacted your family?
I'd been through some intense storms before I moved. I went through Hurricane Betsy as a kid [in 1965]. We watched a lot of carnage in the neighborhoods there with trees and old carports disappearing and places flooding and stuff. Hurricane Camille [1965] pretty much wiped out a good chunk of the Gulf Coast, did a lot of damage to New Orleans, and I saw that aftermath. Very humbling. But Katrina was different. Just to be clear, though: Katrina didn't destroy the city. I describe it as the Great Federal Flood of 2005, that resulted from the compromised and shabby levee system. I considered myself pretty much bicoastal up until 2005, dividing my time between Portland and New Orleans. I still have family there, and I had a little studio space for cheap, a couple of hundred bucks a month. I’d fly down there, do shows pretty regularly, make art. But my studio took about six feet of water. There was this dirty line, like a bathtub ring that just went and cut across, you know, everything: all socioeconomic barriers, Black, white, everything. We lost four of the five family homes in Katrina. My family home had to be demolished.
It seems like Portland hasn’t had its Katrina moment yet, but with the earthquake that’s predicted for our region, that may change.
Katrina taught me something. When the storm hit I went down there and saw the mom and pop establishments were pretty much the first to come back online and feed people. My friend had a café, and she pretty much opened just to feed her neighborhood. All the corporate stuff—the Popeye’s and the Burger Kings—just folded up. You always imagine, you know, you pay your taxes, you're part of the social contract where you do all the right things, and you figure somebody's got to come take care of that, government or whatever. But there was no cavalry coming over the horizon to save people after Katrina. It was a big fucking mess and lot of, ‘Well, too bad you should have just not built on a floodplain.’ To this day, I still have a lot of disappointment about that. But also it was a reality check. It's like, you know, with an earthquake, you know, it's going to be us. It's not going to be the National Guard coming to save the day.
The Mississippi River from the Algiers Ferry (Brian Libby)
How has that impacted affordability? That was one of the city’s attractions, much like in Portland until recent years.
Up until Katrina, which again, was a pivotal moment of change, it was a cheap place to live. After Katrina, everything had to be rebuilt to, quote, modern standards. Almost everyone who could had a new mortgage, or a new loan to rebuild, and it all got expensive. Where you could once upon a time live pretty cheaply, that went away. In the before times, you've got a job, you're making rent, and you can spend some time on the front porch and cook that pot of beans, play the saxophone and have a porch party or take a week off for Mardi Gras. Some of that affordability left with Katrina. But I'm really concerned about that loss here in Portland too. As an artist, you always have a gravitate towards the places cheap rents. We do our best work in the cracks between things. When I lived in New York, it was a warehouse or when I was in Los Angeles, it was a it was an airplane hangar. In New Orleans, it was studio space that was fashioned out of garage space. And when I moved to Portland, I moved into a Quonset hut on Alberta Street. My rent was less than 500 a month, which is crazy to think about today. Then at some point my landlord told me, “I'm going to I'm going to triple your rent.”
How are the cities different?
I think the obvious distinctions is between Black and white cities. New Orleans is absolutely a Black city.
That was one of my favorite things about the city: that different energy you get from a place with diversity and a sizable Black community. I saw a large communal group of bicyclists go by one evening, and almost none of them were white. Nearly the opposite would be true in Portland.
I remember back in the Nineties going down to Jazz Fest not long after the unrest following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. I remember being surprised that the vibe was just so chill. Everybody was talking about that first not-guilty verdict and how it was really fucked up. But there was a sort of ease. It’s not to say there isn’t discrimination, because there is most definitely that. Yet I think that Black people and white people have lived, side by side for centuries now in New Orleans, and at times there’s more of a sense of collective culture.
What both cities’ Black populations share is displacement. There’s the I-10 freeway in New Orleans, which destroyed a lot of Claiborne Avenue were destroyed, in a plan by Robert Moses. That was all Black businesses, along places like Basin Street, which forms some of the roots of jazz. All those clubs and homes got destroyed to build that that freeway, the same as Portland with and Albina. These freeways got built pretty much over the path of least resistance, which was a Black neighborhood.
A Garden District house associated with painter Edgar Degas (Brian Libby)
Are the cities different in temperament?
New Orleans is a party town and it's got a nightlife that’s kind of unstoppable. You can kind of find something to do at all hours, for better or for worse. And that's it's another reason I moved here: I had to give my liver a break. New Orleans will feed all of your appetites. And I've seen any number of artists and creatives that kind got besotted by drugs and French Quarter nightlife. I realized if I really wanted to get some stuff done, New Orleans was going to be aiding abetting the other the other distractions. That was that was another reason I had to put some distance between them.
I still see Portland as a young city, still kind of finding its identity, finding its way. I'm just hoping it doesn't get priced into boutique land and priced out of affordability. I'm not seeing the housing situation improving right now. We're focusing on how to find pods for people on the streets and on the freeway corridors instead of going way upstream and looking at the real cause, which is Wall Street and investor acquisition.
A lot of a lot of my artist peers have disappeared into other places simply because of, not being able to afford to make it here or to find a place to make their work, because as an artist, it's not just living space, but it's work space. New Orleans has that same kind of challenge now that it's been discovered as a good real estate investment. But the perception of crime in both of the cities is now kind of taken a little bit of the shine off. I think maybe there's a little bit of a silver lining with that perception. It maybe makes things a little bit more accessible to people.
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