By Owen Wise-Pierik

The history of the Eliot Neighborhood has been something that has brought culture and identity to it’s residents for a long time. It is something of controversy, life, and community. However, the neighborhood is changing. In order to keep the legacy of Eliot alive, Laurie Simpson and Arlie Sommer have teamed up with a group of Community Development undergraduate students from Portland State University to create an oral history project for the Eliot Neighborhood. Fusing together informational interviews of long term residents in Eliot and historical research, the students will create a historical walking tour of the neighborhood, bringing out oral narratives to show the changes and the history that exists here.

Continue reading “Allies of Eliot” Continue The Oral History Project

The Eliot Neighborhood Association and Boise-Eliot School are about to begin the Eliot Oral History Project!  This project will bring Boise-Eliot middle school students together with Eliot residents to listen and record their stories and piece together an oral history and walking tours of the neighborhood.

Continue reading Oral History Project Starting

When most people think of jazz, Portland, Oregon, is not the first place that comes to mind.  And yet, for a golden decade following World War II, the Eliot neighborhood, a thriving African American neighborhood that would soon be bulldozed for urban renewal, spawned a jazz heyday.  Such luminaries as: Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzie Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and local talent; Wardell Gray and Doc Severinsen headlined Portland clubs.  The fact that Portland was a port city with a busy railroad, and had a bustling shipbuilding industry, made it ripe to become a jazz Mecca.  Jumptown, by Robert Dietsche is a fascinating blend of music, politics, and social history.

Continue reading A Review of Jumptown

If you have read many of the postings from the “History” category on eliotneighborhood.org or if you are a regular reader of the Eliot News newsletter you probably recall reading about a history book in the works.  Author Roy E Roos, who has written many Eliot News articles over the years, finished the book last fall.

Continue reading Neighborhood History Book

Compiled by Martha Gies with help from historic preservation activist Cathy Galbraith, Executive Director, Bosco Milligan Foundation.

Continue reading Eliot: A Brief Chronology

Jane Weber graduated from Grant in 1948, attended University of Oregon, where she earned a Bachelor’s in General Arts & Letters in 1952, then took a one-year post-graduate course in medical records at Duke. Returning to Portland, she worked in the records department at St. Vincent’s until she and Don Bachman, whom she had married in 1958, adopted their first child. They had adopted two girls and a boy by the time they had three daughters of their own.

Continue reading Eliot Remembered – Jane Bachman

Emma and Finn Brown came from Biloxi, Mississippi, to the Pacific Northwest by train, and settled in Vancouver, Washington, in 1949, where their only child, Annie Louise, was born at St. Joseph Hospital. Finn first got a job working at a cannery; later, when he was hired on at Rich Manufacturing in Portland, they moved across the river. Emma went into domestic service with a family in Dunthorpe, with whom she worked for more than two decades. Widowed in 1978, Emma Brown, has also outlived many of her clients. Today she is 84 and still working part time.

Continue reading Eliot Remembered – Emma Brown