Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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An Extension of Home

An interview with Randy Gragg, editor of the new Portland Spaces magazine

According to the National Directory of Magazines, the number of home and home furnishings, or "shelter," magazines grew by more than 90 percent from 2005 to 2006, increasing from 110 to 210 titles. Randy Gragg, formerly the architecture and planning critic for Portland's daily newspaper, the Oregonian, is joining the fray in his new position as editor of Portland Spaces, a new shelter magazine published by Portland Monthly, Inc.; it will debut in mid-January. Gragg describes how and why he thinks Portland is the perfect place for a new kind of home and garden magazine, one that rethinks the definitions of home.

OH: Tell me a little bit about the idea behind Portland Spaces and why the world needs another home and garden magazine.

RG: I think that there's an opportunity to do something different with this genre, particularly here in Portland where there is a much broader, stronger regional sense of home--an urban sense of home, one that is really an extension of how we think about our house or our backyard or other places that we'd love to be. I think that there are two main pillars of the home and garden genre. The first one is this sort of fantasy aspiration aspect of it. The second one is the utility aspect of it. What we wanted to do at the most conceptual level is add a third pillar. "Yes" to fantasy and aspiration. "Yes" to utility. But now we want to add community.

OH: I like that. What other magazines are doing this kind of work, if any?

RG: I don't think there's really anything out there quite like that. People keep asking me, Are you doing a local Dwell magazine? Yeah, sure, there are elements of Dwell. There are also elements of Paper magazine, Sunset, Real Simple, and even Cook's Illustrated. I think that on an international level is where you see the closest analogy, because there are articles about products and style and fashion right next to articles about great cities, about Dubai or London. But I think you can take elements of that and bring it home and say, okay, what is the city-state of Portland?

OH: What are the regional philosophies that would help you tie these seemingly disparate things together into a bigger magazine philosophy?

RG: Well, I think that there are a number of forces. I mean, there's something intrinsic to the region, a geographical determinism of this place, the fact that there's a kind of intimacy to Portland--whether it's because the hills next to the river create this kind of room where downtown is or the decision to divide the city into 200-foot blocks, which is unique among American cities at this scale--that's a real determinant here, I think, because you're always a hundred feet from being able to change directions. You know, there are more corners per square mile here than any other American city except for Boston. There's an inherent conviviality, I think, to the small blocks--the more corners, the more opportunities for interaction. These are highly conceptual factors but they actually have an impact.

Then you fast forward to the seventies, where the inmates got the keys to the asylum and these very far-reaching decisions were made, both on a local level, in terms of the '72 downtown plan, where you had neighborhood activists shoulder-to-shoulder with the business community, developing a plan to save downtown. In the meantime, on a state level, Governor Tom McCall is putting up billboards, telling the Californians to come and visit, but don't stay, and creating a land use program out of fear that we would become California. You know, that's a vote for regional sensibility. It sets up an incredibly powerful metaphor of shared ideas of the future. It's only recently begun to crack with things like Measure 37.

But I think this is also a brand of the place that reinforces the idea that we are a region. I mean, other cities have civic pride. Everybody has civic pride but it's usually expressed through sports or something like that. There's really much more of a sense that we are a particular place, and that's becoming a very attractive thing.

I think in the city, there's a sense of home. You come here and you make an investment, and the kind of investment that you make is not characteristically different from what you're actually doing with your domestic space. That's why I think this magazine is possible here in a way that it isn't necessarily possible elsewhere.

OH: But why ground this philosophy in a home and garden magazine? Why not a regional magazine?

RG: Well, people build on things. Look at retail. It very seldom changes by leaps. It changes incrementally. So I think that as a business proposition, you look for a level of certainty and then try to expand from there. The way I think about that is, all right, our feet are firmly in the home and garden genre but our arms are waving around in lots of different directions. I hope that we will do the home and garden genre better than anybody else. But part of the way that we're going to make that better is by really thinking about this expanded notion of home.

OH: What kinds of home and garden trends will you be covering?

RG: The slogan that we've developed is that Portland Spaces is a magazine about all the places we call home. It's your backyard; it's your living room; it's your neighborhood. It's the place where you like to go for coffee and work with your laptop. It's your work place and it's also your city and your region. We will have sections in the magazine that will individually address these sorts of levels.

OH: It does seem like an interesting idea. What kind of things have happened in Portland to make this way of thinking and living possible?

RG: For one thing, the neighborhood shopping districts are rather extraordinary here. Some of that's accident and some of that is foresight. For example, the streetcar network in the Belmont or Hawthorne or Alberta or Mississippi neighborhoods was an earlier version of transit-oriented development. While a lot of other cities also had streetcar neighborhoods, many of those were wiped away. But Portland's always been a little sleepier, without the kinds of booms and busts that a lot of other cities have had. The time when a boom could have had a profound impact on those streetcar neighborhoods was when Neil Goldschmidt was in power in the seventies. Some very idealistic, young, urban-planning graduates were working for him who were extremely influenced by Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander and Kevin Lynch. They saw the opportunity and the intrinsic value of those streetcar neighborhoods and rewrote the city code that required parking for new commercial spaces. Well, after the seventies, you didn't have to do that anymore, and that preserved some of those streetcar neighborhoods rather than turning them into strip malls. Gradually, the neighborhoods came back and the idea of neighborhood preservation proved itself. Now, you have a kind of infrastructure. I describe it as the infrastructure of conviviality.

OH: It seems like current Portlanders are a kind of self-selecting group in some ways. I mean, folks who live in this city expect this kind of extended community.

RG: Well, other people are making the consumer choice to come here, because they like this kind of urbanism. It's a global, consumer choice.

The goal of the magazine is to think of home more widely, so that the magazine will really be embraced as representing Portland. I hope people will be proud of this magazine in the same way that they're proud of their city. I hope we can make it a reflection of the city.

OH: I found these stats online about total magazine editorial pages in 2006. Home and garden content is third behind entertainment and apparel and makes up 8 percent of all editorial pages, which seems huge. What do you think about this and about all of the current investment in home--Home Depot, remodeling, furnishing, Home and Garden TV? It just seems like there's a big surge of interest in domesticity.

RG: I don't know exactly what's driving it. I think part of it is that part of the population has a lot of disposable income. Yet, when hasn't the home been a pretty large focus in people's lives? Now we have this market capacity to indulge that. But I don't know that it's so extremely different. I think it's mediated more for sure. If you look through Bill Hawkins' Classic Homes of Portland, and you think about the importation of styles over time, what periods and styles were popular and how they were affecting the psyches of people, we've always been importers. We've always been consumers of taste and it's only magnified now in the same way that everything is magnified by this tremendous media capacity.

OH: But it also seems like there's more of a sense that we can change what our homes look like. I remember reading a story in the New York Times about how home remodeling is a relatively new phenomenon as far as being accessible to the middle classes.

RG: Yeah, that's probably true.

OH: If you look back far enough, people didn't remodel their homes. They dealt with their homes. If their floor plans were too small, they just dealt with it. They didn't knock down walls and open up spaces. Maybe they did things like change wallpaper, but they didn't do huge kitchen remodels.

RG: Yeah, I think there's another aspect of remodeling, which is that home is a place where people have control. I think the world seems very distant and difficult to influence in a way that is different now. People are less politically involved, less involved with their communities. And the larger section of the marketplace is influenced by suburbanization. If you don't have a community life, your community is your home, so there's an intense focus on that. But I think Portland's very much an exception to that.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities