April 2025

March 2025

Hysterically Historical #2

By Pete Jacobsen
Posted: 03/29/2025

I seem to be mildly addicted to history. Early this millennium, while living in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, I was elected by the neighborhood association as their representative to Southeast Uplift, the neighborhood coalition for the 20 neighborhoods that roughly match the area of Eastside Village. SE Uplift has its own building on Main street (near the Fred Meyer's) and somehow I ended up doing a lot of the maintenance on the building.

While trying to diagnose a heating problem, I discovered a storage room full of boxes, themselves mostly full of paper. Three of those boxes contained historical information about SE Uplift. I was hooked!

In those days, SE Uplift's claim to fame was that it was instrumental in stopping the Mt. Hood Freeway. To those of you not in the know, that freeway, planned as early as 1960, was to run from I-5 near the Marquam bridge, roughly along Powell Blvd  out past Gresham. 1750 existing homes were to be demolished. About 450 were actually condemned and acquired. There was to be a major interchange where it crossed proposed I-205 (which at that time was planned for the 52nd Avenue corridor - imagine that!). 

There were strong, continued protests from eastside Portlanders about this freeway, and eventually the project was killed. There's an off-ramp (would have been 300-A) on I-5 south that goes nowhere, a reminder of that planned freeway. The 400+ homes that were acquired (and many demolished) were resold. And sometime later, SE Uplift folks started "remembering" that they were instrumental in the cancellation.

Back to those three boxes of historical information. I read through them, discovering the minutes from the meetings back to the days of the freeway decisions. There was only one reference to the freeway, and the SE Uplift board had supported the freeway plan. So much for oral history!

I'm looking forward to a less dramatic history of Eastside Village, but I still want to know what happened. If you're willing to share your (large or small) part in that history, send me a note at [email protected].