Renew this Urban and Urban this Renewal
I guess it’s Revitalization. That convenience store — Peterson’s on 5th (as opposed to the other Peterson’s at the other end of 5th) — has been unceremoniously kicked out by the city. The reason, it appears, is that some fancy smancy department store is opening up across the street in that store front where that fur store used to be located. The convenience store has become undesirible in the city’s vision of future commerce. Nothing much has changed about that spot since I have bene in this city. At the end of the Yellow Line, at the end of fareless square, under an enclosing, and therein lies the problem: the riff raff flow in and through and linger — perhaps if they can shingle enough change run in to buy a moldy heat lamp hot dog. And so Peterson’s great crime to the city seems to be an apathetic refusal to clear away and scare this floating humanity debris that comes at the end of Fareless Square under that enclosing. Which does not serve the needs of the more upscale business moving in across the street, and I suppose the hypothetical businesses coming in with the new amenities promised with that underground parking garage. Now I understand what seemed kind of a perfunctory note left some weeks back, “No Loitering”.
A couple spots backward, a Chinese restaurant sits owned by the man who came in a weak second in the last Portland mayorial contest. It’s a business which was allowed to fall behind on its rent — something that came up during the campaign, and it remains undisturbed. Perhaps if these two businesses were flipped, the city would get what it wants from the particular location because Mr. Dozono would accomodate the city on his own in what I suppose they want: I believe it amounts to Mr. Dozono in this hypothetical scenario or Mr. Peterson as it is now running out of the store every fifteen minutes with a broom and shaking his fist menacingly at the vagrants.
Ah well. The sham process has passed, the mocking public hearings that have been the hallmark of the Tom Potter mayorship have come and gone — to be fair to Mr. Potter sham hearings are the way our system works — and we take another step forward into the Glorious Future. I would be surprised if I spent more than five dollars there in a total of more than five years.