On my way to Lone Fir Cemetery to see Portland Actors Ensemble’s production of Macbeth, I did a triple take at the changes that have occurred since Matt lived in this neighborhood and we regularly drove through this intersection.
On the Southwest corner, this four-story mixed use building. I couldn’t remember what used to be here and the portlandmaps.com 2013 aerial photo told me it was an empty lot. Actually, if you look at this aerial photo from 2004 you can see the intersection as I usually saw it, albeit from a street level.
This corner had a few two-story buildings, one of which held a recording studio or music-type place.
This was an empty lot. It’s now a big condo complex.
And here’s the corner that hasn’t changed. Because it can’t. Because it has a cemetery.
Down the street where these tall condos were, there were single family homes.
Ch-ch-ch-changes. It was weird how the place where one’s eye finds the sky had shot so dramatically upward in my absence.
Of course, all the new build looks the same. I mean, it’s a pleasing look, but still a little boring nonetheless. The red brick is nice at least. My brain is not remembering this particular corner, although I was a SE girl my first 2-3 years there and must have wandered around in that area on multiple occasions. Oh, is it near that place of Matt’s that got broken into?
If you draw a diagonal line from this corner to the cemetery’s opposite corner and then go up a few blocks that’s exactly Matt’s old apartment. We always walked towards Burnside and away from the cemetery when he lived here, and mostly just drove on this street to take me back downtown. So I don’t think of this as his neighborhood, but it probably is the same neighborhood.
I know it will be that way when we visit Arlington again! We will know it and completely not know it at the same time.