@ Jeffrey: you need to grow a sense of humor and if you think you can do any better as to comment to the contexts of the images you see, then get to work, old son–judging by your deep thoughts, you must be a veritable reservoir of pithy, relevant comment. We’re waiting.

And if you want to criticize provenance, fellah, I’m a native (and lifelong) Oregonian myself. John’s fine by me, and his Stumptown Confidential is one of the best here in Stumptown. I should do as well.

And a big SHIPOOPI! for my friends in Seattle; you can take that to the bank!

Now that that’s out of the way, let me point out a few things. For one, the fact that Mr. Stumptown is new to Portland and is actively interested in the history of Portland shows that he’s a pretty cool guy. There are plenty of yuppie Pearl District transplants who’d be happy to see our town turned into a kid-friendly shopping theme park. Stumptown Confidential hasn’t shown me that they support that kind of ignorance at all - to the contrary, I’ve learned a lot about my home city (yes, I’m a native) that I didn’t know. I’ve learned about a lot of architectural details that I would have been ignorant of - the Burnside arcades, for example. He’s been out taking photographs of forgotten landmarks, and I’ve never once heard him be less than reverent toward anything he’s written about. Finally, let me point out that he won best blog in the Willy Week, and that’s a poll of LOCAL voters - so take your trolling elsewhere, already.

“slumming in your home state” jeffrey ? please !! …… sounds to me like john appreciates your home state more than you do. and , as mentioned above, is curious about all of the things that make oregon such a wonderful place to live. you can moan all you want but places change , that is a fact, and with folks like john, just appreciate the fact that you have a (fairly) new person in your state who truly CARES about it.

His site opens my eyes to the rest of the country and makes me want to visit Portland and see the sites myself.

It makes hanging out with him fun because anything you want to talk about seems to fascinate him.

“Contempt” and “distain”? Not even close.

I came to the conclusion he’s slumming in my home state, and regard him as just another opportunistic new arrival who thinks Oregon would be the perfect place, but for the stink of all us Oregonians. He doesn’t realize, much less acknowledge, the scope of our struggle throughout the 20th century to build the clean, progressive state he’s so impatient to see evolve into his bright new future.

Sensing his shallow, contemptuous disdain greatly aids my belated understanding of the profound, anguished bitterness the Indians feel toward us.