Where the streets have two names

I’m all for commemoration. Great people who have achieved great things against great odds are worthy of our gratitude and respect. What I don’t understand is the necessity to commemorate these people by naming streets after them.

Over the last year, Portland experienced a seething debate over the proposal to rename Interstate Avenue “Cesar Chavez Boulevard”. The debate frequently devolved into a racial argument, as if a failure to support the change was a veiled commentary on the acceptance of Portland’s Latino population. Others accused the city of attempting to put a faux feather in its cap while pushing their plans on less affluent neighborhoods. (The shortest discussion in Portland history would have been a proposal to rename NW 23^rd to be Cesar Chavez Blvd. The thought of that happening is downright laughable.) Eventually, the city council voted that 39th Avenue should be renamed for Cesar Chavez. (Local activists have threatened that if the name change was approved, they would propose that the city rename NW 23rd to "Richard Nixon Ave.")

I didn’t support the change to Interstate, or to 39th, but it had nothing to do with Latinos or Cesar Chavez---it had to do with simple logistics. Quite simply, why must we commemorate our heroes with a street name? Portland has done it before, in 1989 when Union Avenue became Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, and in 2006 when the city, sans discussion, abruptly renamed Portland Blvd. as Rosa Parks Way. Great people who achieved great things---but why impose on every business on a miles-long road to reprint their business cards, stationary, web sites and advertising collateral? Why require a wholesale update of every local yellow pages directory? Why require ODOT to refashion every highway sign that makes reference to the street in question? The ripple effect of changing a street name is full of tremendous costs to every business (and even homes) on that street, along with huge costs to the city. (There are literally hundreds, even thousands of “39th Ave” signs posted at every street corner on that avenue, which stretches north to south across nearly the entire city.)

I live near Columbia Park. This lovely park isn’t close to Columbia Blvd, is even further from the Columbia River, and as far as I can tell was arbitrarily named. If the city wanted to rename it Cesar Chavez Park, that would be splendid. City maps would require updating, but otherwise, the financial impact on citizens would be completely minimal. The park would be every bit as enjoyable, and it could serve as ground zero for any local Chavez celebrations---something that’s harder to do on a street full of cars traveling 35 miles per hour.

Renaming streets seems like the quintessential example of government ridiculousness, incurring huge expense for a highly visible but barely symbolic gesture. Case in point: Every day my bus travels past Rosa Parks Way, where the “Rosa Parks Way” street signs have been fastened just above the “Portland Blvd” street signs, rather than replacing them. This seems like little more than lip service to Ms. Parks, since three years later, dual identity seems to contradict the whole point of the commemoration. And if we aren’t even going to fully commit, why pretend otherwise? Let the letterheads remain unchanged and find a way to wholeheartedly show our respect.

The Dark Side of Nostalgia

At work, we listen to NPR on a "boom box" radio that likely appeared in a K-Mart sale flyer in 1982 with starbursted pitches like "AM/FM/cassette" and "convenient compact size" (translation: bass-less 3" twofers---not much boom in this particular boombox). It works fine for the limited sonic frequencies produced by Noah Adams and Ira Flato, so we never give the machine much thought beyond the functionality of the "on" button.

Today Blair decided we should utilize the cassette feature, especially since there was a cassette already in the player: Fragile, by Yes. (While I'm fairly sure it was inserted by one of our prog-rock -loving coworkers, it seemed entirely appropriate that this archaic machine would feature a circa-1972 album behind its clunky mechanical door, and I prefer to think it had never housed another cassette.)

As it started, we talked about an article I had seen in which a woman talked about giving a walkman to her iPod-steeped teenage son, who inquired about the device incredulously: How do you switch to the next song? How do you access the other albums in the machine? ("It plays only ONE album? Wait, it plays only half the album? What do you mean, 'flip it over'?") We laughed about how dated cassette technology had become despite all of us growing up when tapes were the pinnacle of convenience.

We reveled in the strains of "Roundabout", "Long Distance Runaround", and all of the other titles that never made any mixed tapes of my youth. A short time later, Blair noted that the music had stopped, but there was still lots of tape left on the cassette. Immediately, we began troubleshooting the issue---"the battery light is on, that might be a factor", so we assumed it had been unplugged, but investigation revealed that the cord was still firmly planted in the socket. We spent a full minute pondering what could possibly be wrong, as mystified as cavemen trying to troubleshoot a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner.

Finally, Blair pushed eject, and as he removed the tape, a long magnetic fettuccini appeared, dangling between the cassette and the player. The player had "eaten" the tape. This would have been bad news 20 years prior, but today, we delighted in the disaster: The frustrations of tapes being dragged to their death by dirty capstan pins was a concept that had escaped our collective memory. As Blair stuck a pencil into the cassette cog to recoil the cassette, our retro cassette flashback was complete.