The Hawthorne: Epicenter of funk

The Belmont/Hawthorne area is what I stumbled on to my first day scouting Portland. We’d been though the town years before on our way to the gorge, but this trip was just to case the place, see if it was the kind of burg we could swallow after hanging onto our sanity after five years on the 495 belt outside of Boston. I came down the slopes of Mt. Tabor onto Hawthorne Blvd and said to myself, yes, this is more like it. Stopped at a likely looking restaurant, the Cup & Saucer, and had a great breakfast of scrambled eggs, cream cheese and jalapenos. After the smoke-smuggered dives we’d put up with for the previous half-decade, that was heaven. I reported back positively to the mother ship that night and a few months later we were ensconced, never to leave.

 

Sticker Shock! Slap-on art in PDX: Northeast

I love the funk that grows into Portland’s cracks like the winter moss — filling the voids with the visual language of a big city. Graffiti and murals get more attention, but the humble sticker gets its due. Slapped onto the back of traffic signs, signposts of any kind, and especially electrical boxes, you’ll find promos for bands, ads for thrift shops, and unfathomable expressions of outrage and angst. These are samples from Northeast – around Kerns, Laurelhurst, the Hollywood.