I was near a gang-related shooting in northeast Portland a few years back. Six youths between the ages of 13 and 17 were shot. None of them were killed and apparently none of their injuries were life-threatening. It happened on Albina, not too far north of Killingsworth and Alberta. The shooting followed a high school football game and reports suggested rival gangs were involved.
Events such as these are, of course, scary and awful. But they do one thing well for poor neighborhoods: they keep property values and rents low. Alberta Street, for instance, has long been in the process of gentrifying, attracting youngish hipsters, artistic vagabonds, and well-paid professionals from elsewhere because of the relatively cheap rents, coffeeshops, active night life, and art events.
But that influx combined with the rise in more refined eateries, galleries, yoga studios, and an eclectic mix of shops, led to the gradual rise in the price of homes and the cost of rent. There were—and still are—grumblings about this, of course, because few long-time locals want painters who have high-paying day jobs at Intel driving up rent because they want to be able to continue to live in their neighborhood. But, of course, to the Intel painters, rent looks cheap and the area is cool so they want to live there, too, and they’ll compete to live in the best houses and condos and apartments the area has to offer which, naturally, drives up even the prices of the less desirable spaces.
So, in a way, nearby gang-related shootings seem like a good thing because the well-paid certainly like cool but violence is another matter. If enough violence occurs the well-paid riff-raff may flee preventing the area from completely turning into a playground for wandering trust fund babies and overpaid techies who desire quality sushi, amenable coffeeshops for telecommuting, overpriced bars for picking up tattooed and pierced women or men, and a front row seat for the happenings on Last Thursdays.
The problem, for those who don’t want that sort of thing, is that it’s been precisely what the area has become and the process has been in motion for more than a decade. That is known well enough. Even Killingsworth has its own stretch of gentrification, though not as severe. The property values are still lower and the rents are still cheaper than north and south of Alberta (if not affordable for the true vagabonds and wanderers, the poor and underemployed).
A band of young men and women, about a dozen of them, all squatting in an abandoned house not far south of Killingsworth, but quite a bit farther east from the shooting on Albina, brainstormed about ways to not only keep the area from gentrifying further but to drive down property values and rents. The shooting changed their thinking about what they wanted to do. They hadn’t considered violence previously but once they realized how effective it was they thought: “We need a more visceral, public, violent act to create an even greater scare in the area to chase away the young and robustly middle-class Tech fraternity from venturing ever further this way, driving up the prices of chai tea lattes while pushing for neighborhood yard maintenance ordinances.”
So this group came up with a plan. Their planning was meticulous. They decided on an event but only as the first phase in what they hoped would become a long-term complex of interconnected events to scare the shit out of anyone with middle class money from moving to the area. If all went to plan, they might even be able to scare away the middle class money already embedded in the northeast neighborhoods.
The first phase of their plan was to create a nuisance at a busy intersection. They chose Alberta and 15th. Four of them were to stop traffic coming from each direction by holding handmade “stop” signs. The other eight were to split up into groups of two and set up four orange cones around themselves to create a space in each quadrant of the intersection. While within their cones each pair was to drop his or her pants and shit on the pavement. Once they had all shit, each was to pick up their respective piles, walk or run over to the cars directly in front of them in their lanes and spread their feces all over the windshield, the side windows, and door handles—provided there was enough shit to cover it all. To make sure there was they saved up excrement in the days before the event. Anyone trying to stop them from carrying through with their plan would meet with far more physical hostility.
The event itself went off rather well … for a time. The stop sign holders successfully halted traffic despite the honking and yelling from drivers. As the shitting pairs began their business most of the honking and yelling stopped. The happenings became more of a fascination rather than an annoyance. It was Alberta Street after all. As the shitters finished shitting, perhaps aided by laxatives, they picked up the fresh feces or reached in their bags for day-old spares, ran to the cars nearest them, and began smearing the windshields with feces. One elderly lady driving a Saab sat in shock as her windows and door handles were smeared with dark brown and greenish slime. A middle-aged woman driving a Prius screamed but otherwise did nothing. A younger couple in an old Volvo were overwhelmed by fits of laughter.
The last car, though, a brand new and very large white GMC pickup held a stout middle-aged man who screamed obscenities and then got out of his car with the intent of hurting the young man who had climbed onto the hood of his truck to smear his shit on the windshield. The others saw this and quickly ran to the young man’s aid. The stout man of the white truck had grabbed the curly-haired youth and landed a couple blows but the gang of curly’s mates dove onto the big man, wailing away with punches and kicks.
As the melee continued, a number of filmmakers descended onto the scene. Some had been in the process of making their way to the intersection having heard through the social media grapevine that there was a happening, one had been there from the beginning filming with his iPhone, and others were catching the scent of the action. From up and down Alberta, men and women ran with their hand-held cameras and smart phones to cover the action. In all, there wound up being fifteen filmmakers who descended on the ass-beating of the middle-aged truck driver. They surrounded the group and caught the action from all angles. The iPhone lad filmed the scene from above while lying across the hood of the cab of the white GMC. Before long there were sirens in the air and a heavy wave of police officers descended on the fracas to break it up. It took some doing as the officers realized that they were all being filmed. There were cries of police brutality as some were pulled off rather violently from the pile. One of the young men, not curly, took a swing at a police officer (later claiming he didn’t know he was an officer) and was soundly slammed to the pavement with his face ground into the asphalt by a knee pressing down on the back of his neck.
Another wave of police officers came onto the scene to arrest and herd away the young group and, gently, walk the filmmakers away from what was being called the “crime scene.” The middle-aged man was carted off by paramedics to an ambulance parked a few blocks away—that was as close as it could get with all the cars backed up. Yet another wave of police came and began directing traffic. Within an hour there was little evidence that anything at all had happened.
As the participants in the event were being booked, the filmmakers conversed with one another and talk of a collaborative video or movie-short arose. However, too few wanted to share their videos with others, insisting that they had the best footage and thus didn’t need to collaborate. Instead, what emerged was an idea for a film festival, one with jury prizes. There were to be fourteen films competing and because only the iPhone user got footage of the events that led up to the beating it was agreed that his film would be the feature and not in the running for prizes. The various filmmakers called their contacts, agents, event organizers, and whatnot, and by the end of the day the festival was being advertised everywhere around Portland.
Newspaper accounts called the Alberta event a flash mob gone awry. The local television anchors chuckled heartily at the idea that it was a prank and then nodded solemnly when acknowledging the violence before smiling again to announce upcoming stories like that of Chippy, the three-legged dog who could climb trees!
But the spreading rumors were where the action lied. “Was it a gang of terrorists?” people in Lake Oswego asked. At churches and bars in Beaverton the discussions turned to the disrespect for property rights. In the Sellwood neighborhood there was little talk at all as people listened to folk music in coffeeshops before wandering down the street to browse through antique stores. On Division, Hawthorne, and Belmont the conversation was all about the film festival, about where it was going to be and how to get tickets. On Burnside and even Broadway the conversations were mixed, some talking of the event itself as incredible public performance art while others claimed to know one of the filmmakers before launching into great tales about what had happened. Of course there were many other conversations besides, some just saying, “typical northeast violence” or “I wish shit like that happened more often in Portland.” Only rarely was the event considered political activism.
The participants themselves were looking at a series of misdemeanors and felonies. A few filmmakers and journalists who had not been present desperately wanted interviews with the supposed performance art assailants. They chose to remain silent and allow the event to speak for itself. The problem, of course, being that no one understood the event and not a single interpretation suggested the purpose was to scare the middle class from the neighborhood.
At coffeeshops in St. John’s conversations swirled about how there happened to be so many filmmakers on the scene so fast. In one conversation I overheard, an individual said, “If you throw a dart anywhere in Portland you’ll likely hit a filmmaker, musician, writer, or software engineer … or somebody who’s all of the above!” It was agreed that filmmakers in Portland were a dime a dozen. The conversation then shifted to wondering why there weren’t more filmmakers on the scene to capture the entire event. Only the lonely iPhone user caught it all.
Later that evening the film festival started. In a matter of days the event was ready and a venue was chosen. Alberta Street seemed like the prime location to host the event but competing interests won out and the Clinton Street Theater was where the films and videos were shown. Each one was roughly the same but from different angles. Some were shaky and slightly out of focus, leading some viewers to proclaim that they were superior because they captured the “rawness” of the violence. One video’s audio perfectly captured the cracking noise of the man’s skull being stomped by a woman’s heavy steel-toed boot. Oohs and aahs rang out throughout the theater. After the fifth or sixth video the “narrative” was well-known. There was disappointment in the videos that missed the woman’s boot cracking the man’s skull, but hearty cheers for the only video that caught curly biting the man’s ankle.
The audio on some video was almost nonexistent and that created yet another effect, the effect of soundless violence. During the first video shown without audio the audience sat quietly, almost reverently, enthralled by the visceral effect of violence without screams or expletives or crackling cheekbones. But during the second video without sound that was shown the audience yelled out the sounds on their own. As the videos kept coming the audience took on the vibe of a Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd, yelling expletives along with the “characters” in the videos, standing up to footstomp along with the woman, pretending to be kicked in the gut and doubling over. Laughter and jeers rang out.
After the last video was shown the iPhone video was played. It started from near the beginning of the event, capturing the four who held stop signs and the other eight setting up their cones. The audience was fascinated for many had only heard about what preceded the violence through rumor, most of which turned out to be completely wrong. By the end of the showing, after the sky’s-eye view of the beating from the top of the cab of the white truck, the audience stood and gave a thundering ovation. The iPhone filmmaker stepped out along with the rest of the filmmakers and they took a bow. The jury chose the video with the best crackling sound of the woman’s boot striking the man's face as winner of the festival. Presumably, contracts were signed with small independent film outfits for distribution rights, though some of the videographers had set up their own Web sites to show them online. One was already on YouTube by the end of the festival (it had been agreed to hold off sharing any of the footage online before the festival concluded).
The buzz, after the festival, was that Alberta was where things were really happening, where real artists went to create, to enact public performances. In the months following the incident, there was an even greater influx of professionals who moonlighted as artists descending on the Alberta Street area, spilling over to Killingsworth, across 15th and even MLK toward Albina. They came from all over, from Division and Hawthorne, from the Pearl and the Southwest Hills, and even, surprisingly, the Murray Hill area of Beaverton. There were camps, of sorts, where those from Intel, Tektronix, Yahoo!, IBM, Nike, Adidas, Magnum, and more, moved in and around. Alberta and the surrounding streets between 8th and 15th became known as Little Niketown and Killingsworth between 18th and 25th became known as Tek Town. Property values doubled and rents tripled during that time.
The man who had been beaten severely suffered multiple lacerations on his face, a crushed cheekbone and eye socket, a broken jaw, cracked teeth, broken ribs, and severe bruises throughout his body. He recovered, over time. There was little public sympathy for him. It was discovered that he was a contractor with corrupt relationships with city employees and members of various councils. It was revealed that bribes and kickbacks were his means of gaining sweetheart deals through city zoning and county contracts. In a way, it could be said that justice had been done.
But if that was the case then the political activist/performance art/violent perpetrators wound up not as heroes but as caricatures in a film festival. They faced a battery of misdemeanors and felonies. The police and attorneys had tried to shut down the festival, wanted the footage for evidence, but the videographers and their handlers had moved too quickly. The footage from some videos was used in court and it led to a series of misdemeanor convictions for nine of the defendants. They received probation, community service, and heavy fines. Two of those nine received sentences for thirty days in county jail. Three others were convicted of felonies. Two of them were sentenced to a year in prison and the woman whose boot was caught on film cracking the man’s cheekbone and eye socket was sentenced to two years. In alt-news interviews a few of those convicted of misdemeanors expressed humiliation and disgust that their efforts had led to an explosive influx of well-paid professionals to the area. Their plan for further events never materialized. As far as anyone knows, the group simply drifted apart.
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