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Street Scene, Portland, OR © Robert Pallesen

The Wet Streets of Portland

Portland, Oregon

Bob Cronk

hi guys-

breaking from my normal posting to bring up something really important to me.

have you heard of powell’s city of books? they’re famously the world’s largest independent bookstore, lauded as a family business, tourist landmark, and progressive icon of portland oregon.

i work there.

currently our union is fighting to have the company pay us a living wage.

it’s embarrassing how little powells pays us- we barely make more than minimum wage right now- and most people don’t know that the famous business they’re supporting treats its workers like dirt.

when asked to consider our wage proposal, our lead hr officer stated: “We have all worked jobs where the pay and our personal needs were not in alignment.” this isn’t about personal needs “being in alignment.” my coworkers can hardly afford rent or afford to even feed themselves with our current wages.

what am i asking for?

[email protected]

it can be as short and sweet as you want to make it. we want to show the company that people are paying attention to the example they set and won’t stand for it.

also literally just sharing this post to let everyone know what we are asking for helps too. share it on booktok, tell your friends, tell your book club, spread the word. powell’s skates by on its reputation and in doing so hides its betrayal of the workers that dedicate their lives to make it the special place it is.

thank you for reading ❤️

links to our original union instagram post: here

and read some examples of community member emails: here + here

Heads up, fellow Portlanders and book lovers.

Salmon Sculpture, Portland, Oregon

reblog to kill your landlord with a sword

Uh my step mom actually had something to do with this in a way and it is an even more ridiculous story than that title even suggests

Story?

Sure!

So my step mom works for a local union and sometimes they get workers who are in a tough spot and need a little extra help financially. The union has an organization that handles their charitable monies and my step mom is one of the people that fields these calls and passes them on to that organization.

Now if im remembering the earlier parts of this story okay, one day she gets a call from a man who needs some help with bills like rent or something. They help him out, he's super grateful, job well done.

Now a couple weeks or months later, idk, they get another call from this man. He and his roommate are having some issues with their landlord, who lives in his own house on the property. Apparently the guy keeps barging into their rented place unannounced and drunk, belligerent, threatening them with crowbars and 2×4 and shit. The man, quite rightly, wants to get outta this. He's newly sober and stressful situations like this are Not Good for people going sober of any sort. So the union starts working with him to get him some other housing.

Someone else at the union gets this next update and passes it onto my step mother, who recounts it to me as I stand with my jaw to the floor in our living room.

So apparently on one fateful night this man in question was out of the house. And his roommate was home alone. And the landlord came barging in again.

Except this time he comes in holding a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and a Michael Myers mask on to top it all off, and he's raving about how he's going to kill them all and then himself. Like he's totally lost it.

Now the roommate of our man is like actually factually scared for his life because this is quite a bit too far. And he now has to deal with this situation or he is likely going to die. So. He grabs a decorative anime sword of our man's off the wall and beheads* him.

Yep. With an anime katana. It's like one of those fake stories on tumblr. Except this actually goddamn happened.

* I am skeptical about that having been a beheading. This was not a honed sword, and not a practiced swordsman. However none of us have enough information to say it WASNT a beheading, full or not. And anyway the landlord was killed so it doesn't quite matter if he was mortally stabbed or not-so-cleanly beheaded.

Regardless! The man called us up to let the union know what happened, and they got him outta there ASAP. And the roommate was NOT charged because he was defending his life and there was a long history of them having to call the cops to get the landlord out of their place to prove such.

So uh there you go. And can I just say the whiplash that I had when seeing this post cross my dash was really something. I even screenshotted it and sent it to the house group chat and my step mother and dad started cackling in the other room because it is such a weirdly close to us story to see on this random site. Like please understand it wasn't even reported on in the news.

There you go! There's the story!

Wow, props to your step-mom and the union for getting him out. Hope he finds a better place to call home.

[image: screenshot of the headline and subtitle of the Willamette Week article linked below: "Prosecutors Decide Portland Man Committed No Crime by Killing His Landlord With a Sword. The landlord, armed with a hammer and pellet gun, had snuck into his rental property in a Michael Myers costume."]

reblog to support your local renters union in case you ever have to behead your landlord with a sword

Halloween Ends sounds wild.

Street Scene, Portland, OR © Robert Pallesen

Portlandia, Mako Miyamoto

Mt. St. Helens eruption, view from Portland Oregon (1980)

Atomic Portland

Portland, Oregon. (1974)

Lloyd Center - Portland, Oregon

Ideas for Lloyd Center were conceived as early as 1923. The mall was named after southern Californian oil company executive Ralph B. Lloyd (1875–1953) who wished to build an area of self-sufficiency that included stores and residential locations. However, the mall wasn’t built until 37 years later, due to major events such as World War II, the Great Depression, and Portland’s conservative anti-development attitude. The mall opened August 1, 1960 in a 100-store, open-air configuration. At the time it was the largest shopping center in the Pacific Northwest and claimed to be the largest in the country. In 1960, Lloyd Center was located very close to the downtown retail core and was the first major retail development to seriously challenge it, aimed almost exclusively at commuters utilizing Portland’s then-growing freeway system, especially the adjacent Banfield Expressway. The original anchor stores were Meier & Frank at the center, Best’s and Nordstrom’s Shoes anchoring the west end, and J. C. Penney and Woolworth anchoring the east. By 1987 the mall was aging and enclosed malls were becoming the norm across the United States. Between 1988 and 1991 the mall was gradually renovated. The former Nordstrom spaces had been gutted and refitted as inline stores, followed by a mall-wide renovation around late 1990-early 1991 which fully enclosed the mall and added a food court. The remodeled shopping hub was rededicated in August 1991. The mall is still open today.

PDX

Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a condition for release from jail.

Legal experts describe the move as a blatant violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, but at least 12 protesters arrested in recent weeks have been specifically barred from attending protests or demonstrations as they await trials on federal misdemeanor charges.

“Defendant may not attend any other protests, rallies, assemblies or public gathering in the state of Oregon,” states one “Order Setting Conditions of Release” for an accused protester, alongside other conditions such as appearing for court dates. The orders are signed by federal magistrate judges.

For other defendants, the restricted area is limited to Portland, where clashes between protesters and federal troops have grown increasingly violent in recent weeks. In at least two cases, there are no geographic restrictions; one release document instructs, “Do not participate in any protests, demonstrations, rallies, assemblies while this case is pending.”

Protesters who have agreed to stay away from further demonstrations say they felt forced to accept those terms to get out of jail.

“Those terms were given to me after being in a holding cell after 14 hours,” Bailey Dreibelbis, who was charged July 24 with “failing to obey a lawful order,” told ProPublica. “It was pretty cut-and-dried, just, ‘These are your conditions for [getting out] of here.’

“If I didn’t take it, I would still be in holding. It wasn’t really an option, in my eyes.” [...]

Several protesters who were let go on July 23 had bans against demonstrating added by hand on their release documents by Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta, who signed off on them, a review by ProPublica found. Acosta’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

For those released on July 24, the restriction was added to the original typed document, also signed by Acosta. One protester arrested and released earlier in the month had his conditions of release modified at his arraignment on July 24. The modified order, signed by Acosta, added a protest ban not previously included. [...]

The ACLU’s Somil Trivedi said, “Release conditions should be related to public safety or flight” — in other words, the risk that the defendant will abscond. “This is neither.” He described the handwritten addition of a protest ban to a release document as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.” [...]

In many cases, the charges leveled at Portland protesters are closely tied to their presence at the protest — and not to any violent acts.

Eighteen of the 50 protesters charged in Portland are accused only of minor offenses under Title 40, Section 1315, of the U.S. Code. That law criminalizes certain behavior (like “failure to obey a lawful order,” as well as “disorderly conduct”) when it happens on federal property or against people who are located on that property. In other words, it describes behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be a matter for a federal court.

Dreibelbis, like other protesters to whom ProPublica has spoken, said he was arrested for being on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse. Because the federal government owns the land under the sidewalk, another protester (who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid influencing his upcoming trial) told ProPublica it’s “common knowledge” among protesters that the sidewalk is a no-go zone, and setting foot on it risks federal prosecution.

So now there’s a Wall of Moms, Wall of Dads, and Wall of Vets. The allyship is real in Portland. ✊🏽

As a note- Hanging the flag upside isn’t disrespectful if that’s what you’re thinking.  Hanging the flag upside down means DISTRESS. It is an SOS.

This is SUCH an important point. "Just doing their jobs" is not an excuse for war crimes. It wasn't in 1941, and it isn't now.

“We came out here dressed in tshirts & doing hula hoops… they started gassing us. So we came back w/ respirators. They started shooting us. So we came back w/ vests… they started aiming for the head. So we showed up wearing helmets… now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.” via @MauraBarrettNBC, featuring @MacSmiff