Over the past fourteen months of lockdown, homeless camps have multiplied throughout the city, wherever there is available space. You might say they’ve multiplied like a virus. They line the freeways, border our city parks, and pimple our streets. The other day I saw a tent right in the middle of Hawthorne Avenue.
My husband and I have been photographing these camps, in the hope of raising awareness. They are occupied during the day, with people scratching out their existence. There are babies in these camps. Artwork. Barbecue grills and laundry hanging to dry. People become homeless for all sorts of reasons. Drug addiction, mental illness, job loss, family issues. Whatever the reason, as a society we are failing these fellow human beings.
The contrast between wealth and poverty deepens, in a manner we arrogantly associate with Third World countries. In our Irvington neighborhood contractor’s trucks line the streets as people take advantage of the pandemic slowdown to renovate their homes. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, “home” consists of a tent. Or maybe a blanket in a storefront. People hide away in their homes when there are so many who do not have one. We are taking these pictures and posting them on Instagram to bring these camps, and their residents into the open. Only when see these neighbors as ourselves, and not as “the other”, will we begin to get a grip on this complex problem and begin to change things.
When I was fifteen visiting Portland a guy told me that Portland was “the spiritual center of the universe”. It took awhile to get back here. When we moved to Portland in 1992 it felt like an overgrown college town to our New Yorker eyes. Counterculture coexisted with rednecks. Downtown was sparkling clean. The future “Pearl District” was home to warehouses, artists, and heroin addicts. If you wanted a good meal you went a hotel or the Ringside Steak House. By the 2000’s Portland had become Portlandia, trendy restaurants opened every week, and luxury condos sprouted in the Pearl. Now Portlandia has fallen on hard times. It is still the spiritual center of the universe in my heart. Portland will rise again, when this lockdown ends and we get some innovative, responsible leadership. It won’t be Portlandia. It will be something different, hopefully someplace more diverse, more inclusive, more humane. In the meantime let me quote the lyrics that keep running through my head from Portland songwriter Casey O’Neill, which say it so much better than I can:
Steel bridge at sundown walking along over the poisoned water
Skyline of the city covered in grey fog
We’ve seen the seasons come and go
The clouds roll in, storm by storm
The people flood in on a great migration
Give me destruction
Sharpen the edge
Let me walk on shattered glass
Down Belmont and 10th
Out to our western hills and east out to the mountain
Blooming in the valley
My little dark rose
My little dark rose
Shine darkness shine
Shine darkness shine
Standing on the steel bridge in the drizzle and the grey
I hear music on each side of me and I sing its refrain
It’s the sound of Greg Sage, turn up “the Chill Remains”
Dead Moon lighting a fire in the western world
No matter where I run to or how far I stray
I will always return to you, nestled in your thorns
And somewhere in the numbers in an old man bar
Are the ones who won’t forsake you
My little dark rose
My little dark rose
wendy's opinion on just about everything 