The Wednesday edition of the Oregonian has an article updating the status of the Milwaukie MAX project. Unfortunately, the graphic that they ran is out of date and inaccurate.
The map in the article has the following errors:
– The line will not end in Milwaukie at Lake Road. Current plans call for it to extend an additional mile south to Park Avenue in unincorporated Clackamas County.
– The line will follow the Tillamook Branch Alignment through the City of Milwaukie.
– There will not be a station at the Southgate Theatre site. The only station in Milwaukie will be at Lake Road.
I read the neighborhood website regularly and with great interest in all of the things that are going on. Congrats on the great new site. It is really a lot of fun and very informative.
As someone who lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s and early 60s, it is interesting to read about all of the transportation developments and issues in the neighborhood. It is exciting but I would just observe that Brooklyn was once a place that did not need cars for ordinary living, and it seems that things are simply returning to that time.
We had a house on Franklin, about in the middle of where the Bank is now. In ’54, my mother, who had grown tired of feeding the coal furnace in the basement converted to oil. In order to pay for it, she sold our car and for about two years, we simply did not have one at all. However, there really was not great necessity for one anyway, given Brooklyn’s location and the services that were available within the neighborhood at the time. There was a bank, a post office, a big drug store, a good-sized supermarket and many specialty stores within easy walking distance. I went to Brooklyn School, which of course was also within easy walking distance.
If you needed big shopping, you simply caught the Powell bus and went downtown to Meier and Frank and the other big department stores. It took all of fifteen minutes and the fare was less than a quarter. If you needed entertainment, there was the Aladdin (which in those days showed B movies and older Hollywood hits). When you wanted the first run stuff, again the Powell bus took you right downtown to the first run palaces like the Paramount and Orpheum. When the Lloyd Center was built, there was no straight shot but you could always go downtown and transfer. There were even a couple of doctors in the neighborhood or in nearby Bybee as well as a dentist.
My mother worked at what was then called the Medical School, now the Oregon Health Sciences complex. She took the Powell bus and transferred to another bus on the other side of the river to get up the “hill” as she called it. She would have loved to see the sky tram. Still, it only took her about 30 minutes to get to work if she hit the connections right. Even after we got a car again, she took the bus because it was cheaper than paying the parking fees.
I of course had a trusty bicycle and was often sent off to store to pick up small things. There were no bike lanes but with the rather restricted and sedate traffic within Brooklyn, it was safe.
Clearly, Brooklyn was not designed for the age of the automobile with its narrow, twisting streets and dearth of garages. Like the other older neighborhoods of Portland, it was designed for a “walk to the store and get it” age with everything was within a few blocks of where you lived.
Brooklyn is poised to fare well in the coming return to mass transit and placing things within easy reach. There is a trend out here in the Midwest where I live to build smaller grocery stores for local traffic as well as branches of hardware and what we used to call variety stores. You should see that happen to as things decentralize in the coming age of lower energy consumption. One of the leaders out here in that trend is Walgreens with stores that combine drug stores that have small grocery stores and a few hardware items on a small piece of land. Big box stores are great for big stuff, but really wasteful and silly when you only need a few screws or a single sack of groceries.
So, it is great news that Max is coming which will make things even easier for things like getting to the airport. However, it would seem that Brooklyn is ideally suited anyway for the move away from getting in your car every time you want to get something or get to work. It is really reverting to the way it was designed anyway.
I am making my annual trek to Portland In August and am anxious to see all of the new stuff as well as walk the old streets again. This time, I am even staying in the neighborhood.
So, best of luck on your continued journey back to the future.
Ron Nugent