Class warfare.
The last stop in Fareless Square on the west-bound MAX line is a city-owned Smart Park parking garage. There’s a convenience store on the first floor of the garage—one of three Peterson’s in downtown Portland.
Over across the street there’s one of those renovations where they tried gutting an old office building and turning it into a downtown shopping mall; never all that terribly successful, it recently landed a Brooks Bros. outlet as an anchor store—something hailed as genuinely “rejuvenating” by downtown business types.
Ever since, the downtown business types have been pressuring the city to evict the convenience store.
It’s a successful convenience store that makes a pretty penny for the city, holding its space for years now while other spaces about it have been rented out to fly-by-night shoe and luggage outfits and the sort of art galleries that subsidize those massive art-by-the-foot shows in Shilo Inns out by the airport. (To be fair, the Japanese restaurant and the arty-crafty gallery have been around as long as the Peterson’s.) —But in a spectacular confusion of correlation and causation, the downtown business types (who’ve hired their own private police force, and who back the reprehesible Sit-Lie Ordinance) looked at the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks that congregate about the convenience store under a parking garage at the edge of free-ride Fareless Square on the main light-rail line, and rather than—
- realizing that gutterpunks and shiftless kids and those between engagements and even the housing-deprived (among other types similarly declassé) will naturally tend to congregate in semi-public un-chaperoned roofed-over areas (like a parking garage) on or near public thoroughfares (such as a light-rail stop on the edge of a free-as-in-beer–travel zone)—where they might also purchase soda or jerky or a magazine or a newspaper, should they be so inclined;
—the downtown business types have instead decided that—
- the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks must congregate here solely for the soda and the jerky and the reading selection that’s not quite as impressive as Richardson’s or that of the public library just across the street, and the parking garage and the MAX do not factor at all in this equation, so: if the convenience store is evicted, then the colorful welter etc. will follow, and all will once more be well for the rejuvenatin’ Brooks Bros. and co.
—How heartening to discover that this “troublesome convenience store” is all that has stood between the Galleria and success. Would that all our economic woes could be salved so readily!
In addition to such spectacularly faulty logic, the downtown business types have completely forgotten everyone else who shops at Peterson’s: everyone who rides the MAX in from Goose Hollow and the west hills to shop or work downtown, and who picks up some refreshment or something to read on their way in or out. —Rather literally and demonstrably forgotten: an assistant manager of the aforementioned Brooks Bros. wrote an email to the mayor, from which we lift the following quote:
I fail to see why a disgusting store such as Peterson’s is allowed to stay open. . . . They cater to the dregs of the streets of our city.
What’s sad is, despite the money made for the city by its successful lessee, and despite the unsurprising lack of specificity in the recent flurry of complaints listed against Peterson’s (which cite only “various dates,” “various times,” and, yes, “various complaints”), the city actually seriously contemplated kicking them out—until all those “dregs of the streets” stood up and said, rather pointedly, “Hell no.” (What would the city have done had they kicked out the convenience store and noticed no drop in the noisy, colorful welter? Would afternoon commuters have sighed and blown five hundred bucks on a new blazer when they could no longer blow five bucks on a Snapple and a Wired?)
So the good guys won one, with a concession or two. Yay! —Meanwhile, if you’ve ever stepped off a bus or a subway or a trolley line and bought something at a bodega or a Plaid Pantry or a 7-11, be sure to write to Brooks Bros. and let them know what a dreg of the street thinks of their general attitude.
