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

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Field Work: The Portland That Was

Tucked between a tiny diner called Pa's Kettle and a strip mall mortgage business stands an oversized red and yellow sign welcoming visitors to the Division Street Corral in southeast Portland. Look past the sign, and there's a razed lot--not unusual for a city that's in the midst of several urban development projects. But the lot was once home to a 1950s and '60s dancehall that played host to touring and local bands like Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Fifty years ago, Portland cut its rock'n'roll teeth here, and this now-dusty spot is one of thirteen sites explored by The Portland That Was, an internet travelogue devoted to unearthing lost aspects of the city's culture by fusing old film shorts with commentary by area luminaries, and creating self-guided tours through downloadable films and detailed maps.

Film archivist Dennis Nyback, his wife, Anne Richardson, and artist Mack McFarland, a recent Portland transplant, came up with the idea at a dinner party. At that time Nyback already had a collection of more than five thousand obscure film shorts, many of them amassed during his time operating the Rosebud Movie Palace in Seattle, and wanted to make the rare footage available to the public. Richardson longed to use hand-held technology to create a different kind of viewing experience, especially given the location-based historical value of many of Nyback's films. McFarland helped fuse these ideas with his experience in internet broadcasting, crafting videos from Nyback's choice of shorts and creating an internet forum for viewers to download the films on portable viewing devices and experience Portland's history firsthand.

"We had a goal of introducing Portland to its own forgotten history," Richardson says. "We wanted to surprise people with how [geographically] close they were to historical events and to give them a chance to be time travelers."

With the help of Damon Eckhoff, who created the project's mash-up of Google Maps and YouTube, The Portland That Was participated in the 2006 Time-Based Art festival, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's annual ten-day celebration of experimental art. Nyback and McFarland presented three nights of films, culminating in an "All Night Caravan," which led a crowd through downtown, stopping at eight sites to watch the films projected onto the walls of various buildings that once housed these specific elements of Portland history.

Since the project's inauguration last year, the films have been available on the website Portlandwas.com. Visitors can download the films onto iPods or cell phones and create their own visual walking tours.

They can uncover lost Portland history by watching McFarland's favorite--a U.S. government film called Japanese Relocation combined with an interview with Portlander George Katagiri describing his experience in the internment camps that visitors can watch while standing in the Expo Center where these experiences took place. "It is one of those dark parts of U.S. history that needs not be forgotten," McFarland says. "Yet there are still folks who have never heard of this event."

The Portland That Was also allows viewers to stand in the halls of the former Lincoln High School, watching legendary voice animator Mel Blanc's second Woody Woodpecker cartoon and imagining him strolling down the halls of the school he attended until he was sixteen, his staccato laugh echoing off the walls. It lets Portlanders stand at that dusty lot on Division Street, watching the Raiders perform, realizing what an integral role the musicians played in the underground music scene fifty years ago.

Nyback, McFarland, and Richardson hope to create a tradition of "All Night Caravans," as well as develop a curriculum for teachers to access these films off the Internet and use them to teach Portland history. "That is the kind of thing a project like this can do for our society," McFarland says. "Provide a new way of understanding events in our history and reach out to a whole generation of young people who are accessing the world in these new ways."

--Leigh van der Werff

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

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities