PLACE.
Honoring history and complex truths
Our first three Under the Overpass episodes were filmed under awe-inspiring bridges located in Portland, Oregon, the city that we call home. The architecture of these outside spaces let us continue to create safely, despite a global pandemic. Singers got to sing, filmmakers got to film, and viewers were offered a reprieve from the chaos of current events in our world. We feel grateful for the places in our city that allowed us to make and share art in these times.
For our fourth episode of Under the Overpass, we decided to focus our lens on the idea of “place” in a different way. The city of Portland is not only spanned by bridges, but also by a troubled history that continues to overshadow people’s lives in the present.
For most of the 20th century, the Albina District in North Portland was home to the majority of the city’s Black population. As redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification undermined the area throughout the 1960s and 70s, the vibrant Black community was forcibly uprooted as their homes were razed. While the city of Portland promised to replace the homes of Black families who were displaced, decades later, the survivors and descendants are still waiting, still displaced, and still working to rebuild.
We shot the film at locations along N. Williams Avenue in the Albina District, and the “overpass” we feature is the beautiful gazebo in Dawson Park, still a hub in the Black community of Portland (more below). You’ll see images of the original architecture and community at places like the Hill Block Building, which is now a vacant lot.
In partnership with the Emanuel Displaced Persons Association (EDPA2) and the creators of Sanctuaries, Darrell Grant’s forthcoming chamber opera about the displacement with Third Angle New Music, Resonance invites you to learn more about these places and support the work being done to make sure that Portland’s redlining history is not ignored.
DAWSON PARK
Dawson Park, located in North Portland along Williams Avenue, has been a place where people have gathered for notable social and political movements including Civil Rights marches and community celebrations. It even famously hosted Robert Kennedy’s last public speech one week before he was assassinated in June 1968. For the last 50 years, Dawson Park’s dominating feature has been the Cupola, a copper-domed gazebo in the southwest corner of the park. The beautiful dome and brick flooring of the gazebo were salvaged from the Hill Block building and placed in Dawson Park in 1978.
Its landmark status as a meeting space for Albina residents lives on today.
THE HILL BLOCK BUILDING
The Hill Block building, built by Charles H. Hill, Albina’s first mayor, was at the center of the bustling business district for Albina. It housed several businesses, including a market and a coffee shop, and was a popular gathering place for the Black community. In the late 1960s, Emanuel Hospital began planning a 19-acre health campus around the existing hospital. In clearing the land for this project, the City of Portland removed the last remaining sections of commercial area and displaced many residents. Despite all this loss, funding for the project ran out, and the health campus was never built.
The entire block has remained vacant ever since.
Read more about the Hill Block Building.
EPISODE 4, Sanctuaries in Dawson Park
In our next episode of Under the Overpass, premiering Wednesday, May 5 at 3pm, Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani stands and recites a poem in the middle of that vacant lot, four descendants and survivors from EDPA2 share ideas in a roundtable discussion under that historic gazebo, and while we are at Dawson Park, we also get to listen to an incredible performance by Damien Geter and Darrell Grant of a “bonus track” from Grant’s forthcoming chamber opera Sanctuaries.
May we continue to honor the places that carry the memories of our city’s communities and allow us opportunities to envision a better future.