There are more than 150 parks, and over 11,000 acres of land maintained by Portland Parks and Recreation. Parks play a role in providing a community gathering space, an area for exercise and more for communities. And recently, Portland voters cast their ballots on whether they support an increase to the Portland Parks levy. But how have parks changed over the years and which ones have we lost along the way? To answer these questions and more, Catherine McNeur joins us. She is a history professor at Portland State University and the author of two books, “Taming Manhattan” and “Mischievous Creatures.” Her new course, Parks & Portland, will be offered this spring and explores the history of the city’s parks and the ways they have changed culturally, physically and environmentally over the last two centuries.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. There are more votes still to be counted, but it seems that Portlanders have approved a major increase in the Parks and Recreation levy. The bureau oversees more than 150 parks and over 11,000 acres of land. But how have parks changed over the years? Which ones have we lost along the way and how does the history of parks fit into our broader history?
These are just a few of the questions that Catherine McNeur has been digging into recently. She is a history professor at Portland State University and the author of the books “Taming Manhattan” and “Mischievous Creatures,” and she joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Catherine McNeur: Thanks for having me.
Miller: You have wide ranging historical interests, but parks and public spaces have been an abiding one. What interests you in parks as a historian?
McNeur: I love parks because in many ways they’re a microcosm for the entire city. You can tell a city story through these open spaces, because it’s really the most public of public spaces, maybe alongside libraries. Really anybody can go into a park. Hopefully, ideally, everyone feels comfortable in a park, that’s not the case always. But the tensions that come up in a park really are very democratic tensions that can really reverberate through a city and reflect. It’s really a mirror for urban history, for Portland and for really any other place.
Miller: How much has our understanding of parks changed just in this country, in – I don’t know – 150 years? If you talk to a Portlander or a New Yorker in 1900, and you said, “What’s a park for? What do you do in it? How do you feel when you go there?” would the answers have been pretty much the same?
McNeur: No, they were different. But sometimes there are consistent threads. A park as an ornament for a city or as a tourism draw, those kinds of things have stayed consistent. But in many ways, especially around the turn of the 20th century, they were seen as gentrifying things that could really bring a city into its maturity.
Miller: In a good or a bad way?
McNeur: In a good way. That’s what’s wild. That’s how things have changed. We are more questioning of displacements and we’re more interested, ideally, in environmental justice and having access for everybody, whether through recreation programs or other sorts of things. But in the beginning, a lot of city governments were really just interested in pocketing more property taxes because of parks going in. So it has changed.
In some ways, it’s the same. People were excited about Macleay Park or the birth of Forest Park when that started, for the same reasons that we love Forest Park now. There’s threads that connect us to the past too.
Miller: You’ve been in Portland for about a dozen years now?
McNeur: I have, yeah.
Miller: When did you first get interested in Portland’s parks? Not as a recreationist or hanging out in the beauty, but the history of it?
McNeur: My own research, prior to this, has been really in New York, Philadelphia and East Coast cities, but my students were always researching Portland parks. So I was learning a lot through my students’ research papers. Also through public history projects – I partnered with the Portland Parks and Rec for a heritage tree program that we did, and I’ve worked with the Friends of Peninsula Park’s rose garden and did some site interpretation there. So I have gotten into the parks through that and getting into the local history too.
I just love going into a park and like learning something new about it, and then [seeing] the depths of different stories that are within a single space.
Miller: Can you tell us the idea behind this new course you’re designing, the one that’s gonna be taught at PSU in the spring?
McNeur: Yeah, it’ll start in April and it’s a walking tour based park, so really place-based history. It’s meant for new history students or new students generally, not even history majors, to really get a sense of what history can be, and to bring these spaces alive for them. So whether they’re from Portland or from out of state and getting to know the city freshly, we’ll go into these spaces and then get a history of, say … Mount Tabor, for instance, has all this wellness industries that came up around it because it was seen as this really healthy space. But also, the KKK came in and tried to bully out Chinese lumbermen who were working on Mount Tabor. So all these layers of history that predate the park and then come about because of the park, just getting to know the scope of the city’s history through space.
Miller: And the class itself will be a series of walking tours, it won’t be in a lecture hall?
McNeur: Well, some of it will start in a lecture hall and then we’ll take off from there to go into the parks. But it’ll all be outside. Through the rain, through the mud, whatever, we’ll make our way through the city parks.
Miller: Can you tell us about a place that does not exist anymore that I learned about through you, Hawthorne Park?
McNeur: So I had been doing research. A lot of this course is involving a lot of research at the great city archives at the Oregon Historical [Society]. I came across references to Hawthorne Park, and I was wondering if maybe one of the parks on the east side had a different name at some point, I was trying to figure out what they were referring to. And I realized that it was actually a park that no longer exists in the range of, I think, Southeast 9th to 12th, just north of Hawthorne, where the asylum property had been. And then once the asylum moved down to Salem, the Hawthorne family started turning it into a pleasure ground, which is basically a park you could go to if you paid admission. There’d be music and entertainment, ice cream, and you could picnic there, and it was really, really popular.
Miller: So a private park, right in the middle of Southeast Portland?
McNeur: Right, exactly. And if you go to the space today, it’s all warehouses. So I was really confused about what happened to this park that was very popular. It was in the news constantly, concerts were always being announced in the news, all that sort of stuff. There was a big spring that went through this park; it was actually one of the water sources for east Portland early on before Bull Run water came through. And right before the Hawthorne family was trying to sell it to the city, a bunch of campers who had been camping along the stream came down with typhoid. The city public health commissioner went in and tested the water, and all these scientists came in and tested the water, and found all these contaminants. It’s kind of germ theory era, people trying to figure it out … it’s a little fuzzy about exactly what was going on. But they basically shut it all down and fenced off the water. And the sale dropped.
Miller: So this was going to become a Portland city park?
McNeur: It was. It was being sold for about $150,000. And timely for today, a bond measure had passed to fund city parks. Instead, the city ended up buying Laurelhurst Park, Mount Tabor and other parks at that moment, instead of buying Hawthorne Park – because of the typhoid outbreak.
Miller: I missed that part. In the wonderful minute-and-a-half video that you put out – you can’t put [in] everything, which we can talk about – I just saw that as this sad, lost opportunity because of these real sicknesses, so an understandable decision. But I didn’t realize that the money that would have gone there was spent on other absolute jewels of the Portland Park system.
What are the lessons you’ve taken just from this one story?
McNeur: You can’t ever read a neighborhood as having always been there. There’s all these layers of history that go back, lost opportunities, like the palimpsest sort of thing, these layers that get scraped or rewritten on top of. And that’s what history is. It really brings a neighborhood alive, where I had kind of always passed through, passed by that neighborhood all the time, never knew about it. There’s that food cart pod or whatever that’s trying to bring back the … whatever. But …
Miller: But there’s no evidence of a series of springs and a mini forest, an entire three-block area that was once a kind of bucolic place.
McNeur: Yes. What I’ve learned, after I posted these videos, is that people have been responding to the videos and telling me they work in a building there and that the basement is constantly flooding. It’s probably from the spring.
Miller: The land doesn’t forget, even if we do?
McNeur: Yeah, exactly. It’s there, it’s just underground.
Miller: So let’s turn to the videos that you’ve been working on, because you’ve been posting short videos on Instagram and TikTok to give little glimpses of what you’ve learned. I wanna play part of one of the ones that you posted. This is about Laurelhurst Park and it is basically a short way to answer a question Portlanders may have had: why are there big mud puddles in various parts of this park in the winter? Let’s have a listen to part of your video.
McNeur [recording]: The landscape designer for Laurelhurst Park, a man named Emanuel Mische, actually had a plan to solve this mud situation in the early 19-teens. He was going to carve out a small brook that would weave through this part of the park and end at Laurelhurst’s famous lake. There would have been bridges and small little ponds along the way – Fern Pool, Mountain Laurel Pool, Sweet Bay Pool, Azalea Pool, with the Hollyvale Brook connecting them all to the Firwood Lake, or the “duck pond” as most of us know it. Budget issues forced Mische to curtail some of his plans for the park and simplify construction. Now, instead of a brook and small ponds, we have muddy puddles.
Next time your shoe gets stuck in the mud over here, be assured that Emanuel Mische wished it wouldn’t.
Miller: Can you describe what his vision would have looked like? We didn’t get this, but there are some visuals that you overlay in the video. Can you describe them?
McNeur: So if you’ve ever been in Laurelhurst Park during this time of year, when it starts to flood, it’s like right by the summertime dog park, basically he would have had instead a little stream kind of weaving through where all these puddles go, kind of going past a big stairwell, then through over to the duck pond. And inside there were little bridges that you could cross the stream at various points, there were tiny little pools of water at different points. It was supposed to be very bucolic, and it’s not exactly what has turned up. And it’s because a budget crisis hit and they just couldn’t continue on with that plan.
Miller: How often is that the reason for the history that you uncover, money questions?
McNeur: It’s often, actually. I’ve never come across people regretting having passed bond measures or levies, because ultimately they benefit from whatever happens with the parks. But people are often regretting what couldn’t come about because of lost budget issues.
Miller: When you put together a video like that, is this because you yourself were walking there, you got muddy feet and you thought why is it muddy here? How do you decide what to look into?
McNeur: I’ve been doing just general, broad research at the city archives and at the Oregon Historical [Society]. I’ll just look through and be like, “Oh, there was supposed to be a stream there!” And I’ve been in that park a ton of times. My dog has gotten stuck in the mud, I’ve been there. And so it kind of puts two and two together. And then I’ll be walking in the park with a friend of mine and just be like, “You know, this was supposed to be a stream.” I tell these stories to my kids and my partner all the time.
Then, when I started promoting the course, I was like, “I should maybe start sharing this sort of stuff more broadly.” And it has been well received.
Miller: What were you expecting? This is your first time being a social media video person?
McNeur: Yeah, that is not my plan. I did not have that in my bingo card for this year. Honestly, I created these little videos just to announce the course as a course promotion initially, and then they took off. I thought it was just for PSU students to really get a handle on what the courses would be like in the spring for a brand new course. But then all of these Portlanders started responding and giving suggestions about next projects like, “Can you tell me about bathrooms? I’m really interested in the history of bathrooms in parks.” And then I was like, “Oh yeah, I know something about bathrooms. I can go back to my research and pull that up.”
And it’s actually like turned my research process on its head where normally I do all of this research, and then at the end when I finish writing a book I share that, and I’m ready with talking points and things like that. Now, I’m in the depths of it. I’m learning a lot as I go, sharing little bits that I’m learning and then getting community feedback – which has been awesome, where people are like, “oh yeah, my basement floods, now I understand why.” Or, “here’s a story about this park in North Portland that used to have cows going through it” or whatever. And I get leads on news stories that I should investigate, even if I can’t take my class there. Maybe this is my next book, and then I can kind of get inspired by what people know about the parks.
Miller: Had you been more skeptical about this tool in the past?
McNeur: A hundred percent. I don’t consume a lot of media that way. What I have come across is there’s a lot of amateur historians who really bring gusto to these videos, but they also bring like generative AI to the images that they’re using – it’s just kind of a mess. So partly what I’m doing with these videos now that I’ve sort of rethinking the role, I’m going to have students also create little mini documentary videos like this, that I can then promote if they’re willing online.
It’s a way to get students thinking about what is legitimate? How do we share our sources? How do we make it very clear where we’re getting our materials from, so that this is legitimate history. It’s not urban legend kind of being spun out, but really checking our sources, making sure that we’re telling a good story that’s accurate.
Miller: You mentioned bathrooms. What should we know about bathrooms and parks?
McNeur: They’re always contentious! There’s been a lot of issues with bathrooms. Portland used to have paid bathrooms, kind of like European city bathrooms where you have to pay a fee to get in. They would change out the soap for every use, they were cleaning the stalls every time – that was at least the standard, I’m not sure exactly what the reality [was]. They were places for great gay cruising. It was always a contentious space, and funding came in and out, and bathrooms have gone in and out.
Because I’ve posted some histories of Portland bathrooms, I now learn a lot about Portlanders’ bathroom experiences through the comments on these videos. And I was like, “this is not what I signed up for.” But it’s interesting.
Miller: I want to go back to something you mentioned at the beginning about, ideally, this should be for everybody, but it’s not always that way. What have you learned about policing or law enforcement, or exclusion or inclusion when you look at parks?
McNeur: The Irving Park protests from the ‘60s is a good example of that where there was so much police surveillance of the African American community in traditionally African American parks. It’s a way to push people away from parks. It’s a way to make some people feel safe, but it’s a way that other people don’t feel safe. So looking at surveillance, looking at park lighting and things like that, benches and how benches are constructed and who’s allowed to sleep in a park, and all of these battles over public space really say something about a city in a given moment. Whether it’s saying something about a crisis that’s happening or if it’s saying something about how people are trying to solve a crisis, one way or another, it speaks to different moments in Portland’s history.
And I mean, these spaces, it’s not just negative, they’re also spaces for celebration, protest and community building too. So looking at these multilayers from different perspectives, not just the negative, but also the positive. They’re a mixed bag and I love that about parks.
Miller: Do you have a favorite Portland park for its combination of just what it is physically, visually, and also its history?
McNeur: It’s hard to play favorites. There’s some that I’m more familiar with just because I go to a lot. Right now, I’m very captivated by Lownsdale and Chapman Squares, because of the ways that that place has changed so much. And the fact that it was gendered – Chapman was only for women, Lownsdale was only for men – I learned that that was mostly about pushing protesters out of the space. It wasn’t just about protecting women and children, although that was the kind of written idea, but actually there had been a bunch of protesters in the early 1900s, and they were trying to clear these men out of the space and by making it a gendered space for women and children,
Miller: A place that then became famous for protests 100 years later.
McNeur: Yes, exactly.
Miller: Catherine, thanks very much.
McNeur: Thank you.
Miller: Catherine McNeur is a professor of history at Portland State University. She’s the author of the books “Taming Manhattan” and “Mischievous Creatures.”
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