City Neglect Closes Another North Park Blocks Business

First, Glyph (another North Park Blocks eatery) closed in Sept 2015. Now Remedy.

Remedy Wine Bar featured huge windows that overlooked the North Park Blocks. A park-side location should be an asset to a gracious wine bar. But not when it’s adjacent to a space that city neglect has turned into a de facto homeless encampment.

Portland Parks Commissioner Amanda Fritz lacks an appreciation for public perceptions of safe and livable spaces. In a KGW interview she stated “Every neighborhood in Portland will be asked to find a spot to put a homeless camp.” 

We wonder what’s ahead for Portland in 2016.

Remedy wine bar interior

Pearl District Wine Bar Leaving Neighborhood Because of Homeless People From Willamette Week 1/20/2016  by Matthew Korfhage 

Pearl District wine bar Remedy, at the edge of the North Park Blocks on Broadway and Everett, is closing after three years.

Owner Michael Madigan says the problem is the neighbors.

Specifically, he believes that city sweeps of camps on the east side last June caused the houseless population to explode near his wine bar, and that the city has made a “conscious decision” not to solve the crime and drug use he says had become a problem in his neighborhood.

“One day last June when the city swept the inner Southeast,” he says, “Everybody showed up on the North Park Blocks. It was literally overnight.”

The city of Portland conducted a series of sweeps of east-side encampments beginning in May 2015.

“I counted 42 people between Everett and Flanders,” says Madigan, who is also owner of KitchenCru commissary space, CorksCru wine shop, and Bowery Bagels. “It had an immediate impact.”

Madigan says his business was down this summer by a significant margin year-over-year, after gains in the springtime.

He says that the problem was the crime he and his employees consistently observed near his wine bar, a second story space looking out on the park blocks that serves $15 wine flights, along with kale Caesar salad, and cheese and charcuterie plates including a $35 five-charcuterie platter.

Madigan says area hotels stopped sending customers to his neighborhood, and that the city was ineffectual in stopping drug use nearby, even when the city parked a police van outside the area. Remedy was named after a hundred-year-old pharmacy that once occupied the building.

“It was like the an episode of The Wire,” Madigan says of the North Park Blocks area. “As soon as the cops left, the drugs and the crime showed up again.”

He also says that people frequently urinated in the stairs that lead up to his wine bar.

“Every day those stairs are used as a latrine. There are public restrooms two blocks,” he says. “I remember asking people why. Why aren’t you going to those restrooms? They said, ‘The drug dealers won’t let us in.'”

Madigan says he talked to a police lieutenant about enforcing laws against camping, and smoking in parks, but that police were unable to do so.

“‘There’s a no smoking ordinance,'” Madigan says he told a police lieutenant. “‘Why aren’t you citing them for smoking?’ We were told that only park-rangers can cite people for park related ordinances.”

Local business owners took to documenting evidence of lawlessness on a website, northparkblocks.org. and formed an organization led by Michelle Cardinal—an owner of multiple properties and founder of boutique ad-firm R2C—to lobby the mayor and City Council.

“We took pictures of people having public sex in the parks,” he says. “One of our employees took a picture of a dealer injecting drugs into someone’s neck.”

In response to a video Cardinal produced, Mayor Hales and Commissioner Fritz visited the neighborhood, and the Oregonian published a series of articles documenting the “summer of lawlessness” in the park blocks. But Madigan says that this did not give him the results he needed to stay in the neighborhood.

He plans to re-open Remedy in an undisclosed space, after declining to renew his lease for an additional four years.

Glyph art cafe, also on the North Park Blocks, closed last September, citing similar concerns, although former owner Sandra Comstock said she believed that the situation had improved by the beginning of September. Madigan says the same, but that he thinks it will worsen again.

“When we moved in we knew the neighborhood was transitional,” he says. “We said all right, this will be a good thing to do.”

The last day of business at Remedy wine bar will be January 30.

Portland Tribune: Police Passive with Homeless Population

Police passive with homeless population
Reposted from:
Police Passive with Homeless Population
Portland Tribune October 2015

Written by Peter Korn

Hayley Purdy can’t figure out why police officers bike, drive and walk by the social chaos she lives with on the North Park Blocks and do virtually nothing.

Throughout the summer Purdy and her neighbors documented the increasing disorder in their part of downtown. They watched the proliferation of illegal campsites and the garbage piling up and they’ve had a few angry confrontations with squatters over broad daylight drug dealing.

Daryl Turner says he knows why. The Portland Police union chief says street officers have been walking by situations involving illegal homeless camping and sidewalk obstruction when in years past they would have taken action. And that’s because city officials refuse to provide police with clear direction and support in dealing with the growing number of homeless people who violate city ordinances, according to Turner.

“We have never, ever, by any leadership, been given clear direction on how to deal with the homeless population on sidewalks and in parks,” Turner says. “Without clear direction, cops don’t know what the city wants.” Continue reading “Portland Tribune: Police Passive with Homeless Population”

Oregonian OpEd: “Emergency” Response to Old News

Charlie Hales' homeless 'emergency' is three years oldBy William Russell – Executive Director of Union Gospel Mission  reposted from Oregonian 9/24/15

On Sept. 23, Mayor Charlie Hales declared a “homeless state of emergency,” with plans to aggressively combat homelessness in Portland. The announcement felt surreal, as if someone were announcing in 2015 that President Obama had won the 2012 election, or reading a “breaking news” story about the 1969 moon landing in 1972. Well before the mayoral pronouncement, we at Union Gospel Mission have been living the homeless state of emergency. I am confident this is true for many other agencies working hard to help this population.

… I agree with Michelle Cardinal’s observations in Andrew Theen’s Sept. 15 article “North Park Blocks: Summer of ‘lawlessness’ gets Portland’s attention.” The homeless problem on the North Park Blocks is very bad, and the situation needs to change. …

Full letter here.

KGW Feature: Cleaning Up the North Park Blocks

PORTLAND, Ore. — People who live and work near Portland’s North Park Blocks, north of Burnside Street, are relieved that a massive homeless problem has dwindled. Link to KGW story

Over the summer, men and women took over the park and created multiple problems.

Cardinal KGWMichelle Cardinal watched it develop from her window at work. Cardinal is the co-founder of R2C, a marketing business that sits across from one of the park blocks.

She’s not the sort of person who lets problems get the best of her.

When the issue of homelessness came to her door step, she knew it was time for action.

She took security pictures of people sleeping across the entrance of her company. She gathered up other pictures and stories of people being threatened and chased.

Some of the pictures show men and women putting needles in their arms. Two pictures show different sets of people having sex in public.

“We care deeply, not only about the homeless community,” said Cardinal. She also worries about the underlying causes of homelessness.

And she knew she had to speak out when others would not.

“There are a lot of people in this city afraid to speak about this issue. They don’t want to be labeled as heartless or anti-homeless and I would agree with that. And now, once we’ve started this dialogue, now more and more people are having this conversation,” she said.

Summer of ‘Lawlessness’ Gets Portland’s Attention

Summer of 'lawlessness' gets Portland's attention

From The Oregonian Sept 15, 2015

Cardinal said she’s happy that Hales and City Hall are paying attention and that more officers are patrolling. Fewer people linger in the park all day, she said.

But she expects the situation outside her window is “here to stay.”

She’s told Hales as much. “I said, ‘Mayor, the next New York Times piece is not going to be about how great our food and wine are.'”

Click here for full article