As mentioned in a previous newsletter (July-August 2021), our neighborhood has distinctive historical features, and parents can engage their children in learning about some of them. Here are a few more fun Beaumont-Wilshire facts, with follow-up questions for explorations by young historians!
House numbers
Families can spot identical white-tiled house numbers on about half the houses in our neighborhood. They were installed as part of a city program in the early 1930s. Portland grew quickly between 1900 and 1930 (from 90,000 residents to more than 300,000), partly by annexing newly sprouting neighborhoods. Most of those new developments had their own street numbering systems, so Portland had a hodgepodge of addresses. By the late 1920s, the Portland postmaster complained that 2,000 pieces of mail were going astray every day because of the confusing house-addressing system! So the city council voted unanimously in 1931 to re-do all the addresses in the city, with Burnside Street dividing north and south and the Willamette River dividing east and west and all house numbers emanating outward from those baselines. The city furthermore authorized $10,000 to pay for new black-and-white ceramic number tiles to be set in aluminum frames for every house and business in the city. In a typical Depression-era effort, house-numbering crews of five men (three of whom had to be from the vast ranks of the unemployed) were dispatched with ladders, screwdrivers, and small wheeled wooden carts to carry the tiles and frames. For 23 months those crews walked the city, installing the new white tile numbers at the city’s expense on almost 94,000 homes and buildings. How many of those historic numbers are on your street? How long would it take you to find twenty of them still on houses in Beaumont-Wilshire?
Portland’s population
And what do you think the population of Portland is today? Take a guess, then find the answer and other interesting facts at this U.S. Census Bureau site: www.census.gov/quickfacts/portlandcityoregon
Wilshire Park
What is now Wilshire Park used to be a parcel of land owned by one of Portland’s richest and most famous men, Jacob Kamm. (He has his own Wikipedia site!) Born in 1823 in Switzerland, Kamm immigrated to the U.S. when he was eight. By the age of 25 he was a steamboat engineer on the Mississippi River, then he migrated to California during the 1849 Gold Rush to pilot a steamer on the Sacramento River. Soon Kamm was hired away by Oregon businessmen to help build the first steamboat in our state to sail people and goods between Astoria and Oregon City. Kamm parlayed that success into a business empire that eventually included steamboats, rail lines, banks, and real estate investments, including the Wilshire Park chunk of land that he hoped to develop into a housing subdivision. Kamm died at the age of 84 after being hit by a bicyclist near his downtown Portland mansion (which you can still see today at 1425 SW 20th Avenue). His estate left his property along NE 33rd alone for some years, then decided to sell it to a group of investors in the 1920s who wanted to convert it into a tourist automobile campground, something like a KOA of today. Over a hundred nearby neighbors protested (too much auto traffic!), and so for many more years the tract sat undeveloped and became an unofficial forest playground for neighborhood kids. The Kamm estate finally sold it in 1940 for around $28,000 to the city for a public park. How many acres large do you think Wilshire Park is? (An acre is roughly the area of a football field.) Find the answer here: www.portland.gov/parks/wilshire-park
Wilshire Park’s trees
Wilshire Park has one of the best collections of trees of any Portland park. How many trees would you guess are in the park? (Hint: it’s over 300!) What is the most common kind of tree in the park? How tall can that species of tree grow? For a virtual tree walk, tree map, and tree inventory of Wilshire Park, roam around in this site, then go to the park and see how many different kinds of trees you can find and identify: https://pdx.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=320f84b7a6c4406fa030776c7a813b5b
Fremont Street
Fremont Street was as busy a commercial center in the 1920s as it is now. Henry and Anna Witt’s Buy-Rite Grocery Store was where Pizzicato Pizza is now. A few doors down, where the Sabiang Thai Restaurant is, sat Watson’s O-So-Good Restaurant and Sandwich Shop. The Dutch Village building at the corner of NE 41st and Fremont Street was built in 1928 and has housed everything from a grocery store to a pharmacy to a dry goods store that carried textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and personal care products. The building where The Arrangement is today used to be a gas station with a small attached store that sold a few items like milk. It was called Gas Town USA.
Editor’s Note: Got a fun fact or two to share about the neighborhood or local area, past or present? If so, send them to me for publication (editor@bwnapdx.org). Keep the ball rolling!