Imagine a City

On a mild spring day in 2018, Ed Washington did something he does quite often—gave a tour of his former hometown.

Mr. Washington carried a few laminated photographs and maps, but the tour mostly consisted of empty fields and stories. A busload of tourists bounced in their seats, my sister and I among them, as Mr. Washington narrated the former city to life. He pointed out the former sites of his elementary school, Joe’s Market, a stand of trees where he had once built a clubhouse. “That slough there used to have a bridge across it,” he recalled. “That’s where we would have some of the best dirt-clod fights with the kids from down on Cottonwood.”

At one stop, we got off the bus and gathered next to a large field. A handful of dogs ran across the grass. I could see the low trees of a wetland in the distance. Mr. Washington could see another view: his old neighborhood, filled with rows of matching two-story apartment buildings and people long gone. He gestured across the empty field to where his family’s apartment once stood and shook his head. “Now, I know you all like dogs—but they poop where I lived!” Our group chuckled. It was a lighthearted quip, but also a haunting moment, an acknowledgment of the palimpsest that is this site—one story layered on another.

Ed Washington is well into his eighties now, but it’s easy to imagine him as a kid building clubhouses and throwing dirt clods. He is lively, warm, and quick-witted. In the decades since his childhood in Vanport, he has built an esteemed career in public service and civil rights, serving as president of the Portland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and serving several terms on the region’s Metro Council—notably, as its first African American representative. Ed Washington was seven years old in 1945, when his family left Birmingham, Alabama, for Oregon. He was ten in May 1948, when the Columbia River burst through an earthen dam on the west side of Vanport, destroying the city and displacing his family and friends, as well as thousands of others.

As Mr. Washington exemplifies, the children of Vanport are, today, its world makers. The world unmade Vanport through flood and forgetting. And now Vanport’s children are remaking it through storytelling and testimony. For the past decade, they have been gathering again and sharing their memories—not just of the traumatic event that changed their lives, but of the singular community that existed before the flood. 

In 2014, a grassroots collective called Vanport Mosaic formed in collaboration with these survivors to reclaim the story of Vanport. The group refers to their work as “memory activism,” and they encourage all participants to see themselves as “memory activists”—armed with knowledge of past harms and injustices and emboldened to enact a more just future. Their tagline reads: “In these times of collective amnesia, remembering is an act of resistance.”

Vanport was built in 1942 by the Kaiser Company to house tens of thousands of workers for their defense shipyards. At the time, people from all over the country were flocking to the Kaiser shipyards along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers for wartime jobs, including thousands of African Americans from the southeastern US, like the Washingtons. The ensuing housing crisis in the Portland area was measurable and material—there simply was not enough housing for the massive population boom—but it was also social. Kaiser’s racially diverse, working-class migrant labor force needed places to live, and they were not welcomed in Portland. City leaders overtly disparaged new arrivals while stalling on new housing projects, and some Portland residents organized to keep Black workers out of their neighborhoods. To break this impasse, the Kaiser Company purchased a large plot of low-lying land along the Columbia River—outside city jurisdiction—and built their own worker housing. Once complete, the Kaisers passed the keys over to the newly formed (and less than pleased) Housing Authority of Portland (now Home Forward) to manage.

Technically, Vanport was one large federal housing project, but to appreciate the full scale of it, it is best to imagine a city. In addition to hundreds of apartment blocks, Vanport had its own public school system, library, sheriff’s department, grocery stores, buses, hospital, cafeteria, a constructed lake and beach with imported sand, communal laundry centers, multiple recreation centers, and, in its later years, a college. The amenities were notable, but not exactly luxurious. Residents complained about pests, mud, and constant noise. The living spaces themselves were small and constructed with cheap materials; walls between apartments were reportedly so thin that you could hear a neighbor sneeze two units away—a serious issue in a community full of around-the-clock shift workers.

At its peak in 1944, more than forty thousand people lived in Vanport. This bustling community was Oregon’s second-largest population center, as well as one of the most racially diverse communities that had ever existed in the Pacific Northwest. By 1944, scholars estimate that the population of African American residents was three times higher in Vanport than in the rest of the state combined. Black Oregonians were not only residents, but leaders in the community: Oregon’s first Black teachers, deputy sheriffs, and recreation staff worked in Vanport. Indigenous Americans, too, found new homes and opportunities in Vanport, with many leaving reservations for the first time in generations to take defense industry jobs. In 1945, the fabric of the community grew even more intricate, as Japanese and Japanese American families, having lost their homes, businesses, and capital during wartime incarceration, moved to Vanport seeking a new start. Within this remarkably pluralistic community, Vanport’s schools were always racially integrated. However, the Housing Authority illegally imposed segregation in housing assignments, even keeping two separate waiting lists for open units: one for African Americans, and one for everyone else.

Today, the eight-hundred-acre site consists of a manicured golf course, a dog park, a wetland, a recreational raceway, and a complex of sports fields. If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, you’ve passed right by it. The lake is still there, now a toxic pond, with posted signs warning against consuming too many fish from its waters. While no one has an official Vanport residential address anymore, dozens of people live on or near the site, in tents under freeway overpasses and RVs parked on side streets. The streets and sloughs that gave Vanport its shape still exist, some of them with the same names: Victory Boulevard, Cottonwood Street, Denver Avenue. A few historic markers note the ephemeral existence of one of the most unique and racially diverse communities in the twentieth-century Pacific Northwest. One of the only tangible artifacts that remains is a concrete slab set in the ground near one of the sloughs, once the entrance to Vanport’s 24-hour movie theater.

Laura Lo Forti first heard about Vanport after moving to Portland in 2012. She was surprised so few people in her new community seemed aware of it. Applying her background in journalism and multimedia storytelling, Lo Forti secured a grant for an oral history project to document the stories of Vanport.

It was supposed to be a six-month project. Twelve years later, it has become her life’s work.

Today, Lo Forti serves as the executive director of Vanport Mosaic, but she prefers terms such as “story midwife” and “cofounder” to any official title. Lo Forti is quick-moving and slight. She is always under a grant deadline, always eager to cheer on a new project idea, and always impeccably dressed. (“I am Italian; I don’t wear T-shirts,” she says.)

In 2015, Lo Forti and theater artist Damaris Webb, cofounder of Vanport Mosaic, created a festival to commemorate the sixty-seventh anniversary of the flood. Every year since, in late May, Vanport survivors and their descendants, as well as artists, scholars, neighbors, activists, and community leaders, have curated the multiday Vanport Mosaic Festival to tell a new story of Vanport. The festival includes more than the typical set of public history offerings. There are plays, panel discussions, musicals (yes, Vanport: The Musical), films, walking tours, jazz song cycles, bike rides, oral history screenings, survivor testimonials, city hall proclamations, concerts, museum exhibitions, art installations, birding tours, performance art pieces, mourning rituals, community sing-alongs, and at least one rose-planting ceremony. Each year, festival organizers seek to integrate Vanport’s history into vital present-day conversations about racism, displacement, resistance, land use, housing policy, the climate crisis, creative practice, and more. Each year, new people come and learn about Vanport—longtime residents of Portland and new arrivals alike. Each year, at least one new survivor shows up with stories and photos to add to Vanport Mosaic’s online digital archive.

The festival’s most important event, however, is not open to the public: the annual Vanport survivor reunion. Former residents gather and reminisce, bringing photos and dragging along grandkids. Attendees share memories and recall their favorite teachers and characters. (Mrs. Ada Wood, the school’s band teacher, inspires especially enthusiastic recollections.) Those who were born at the Vanport hospital wear buttons that proclaim: “I am a Vanport baby!”

This spring, the tenth annual Vanport Mosaic Festival will take place. At the first planning meeting of the season, Lo Forti reminded the lively group of festival curators: “Don’t forget—after that first year, we thought that was it!”

Recently, Lo Forti reflected on how the original undertaking grew from a six-month interview project into the grassroots nonprofit it is today. “I love to think that the reason why the story expanded in such broad and unexpected ways is because we allow the survivors to expand their own stories.” 

“What happens,” she asked, “if we actually listen to communities, and we create spaces for communities to explore together: What is the meaning of our experience?”

Lo Forti may be writing the grants for Vanport Mosaic, but she sees the project as a community effort with a life of its own. “It’s incredible—you see this line and then all these branches, people who come in with their piece of the story.”

My piece of the story comes in around 2018. Even though I grew up only a few miles away, I didn’t know about Vanport. I did not learn about it in my public school or hear it discussed at the family dinner table. But as an adult, the stories of Vanport have become a touchstone for me: vital to understanding my hometown of Portland; to imagining more just possibilities around issues of safe housing, livability, and racism; and to recognizing my responsibility to my neighbors—past, present, and future. Inspired by the survivors I met through the Vanport Mosaic Festival, and following a few trace pieces of archival evidence, I began a research project on the music, soundscapes, and silences of Vanport, which turned into a dissertation—“The Music of Miracle City: Vanport, Oregon and the Sonic Imaginaries of Multiracial Democracy”—for a dual doctorate in history and ethnomusicology. Through this work, I now participate in the annual festival, adding stories of Vanport’s music and soundscapes to the scholarly and public conversation about this remarkable place.

There is no audio archive of Vanport itself, so the bulk of my work requires a sensory translation. “Listening” to Vanport involves a lot of looking—at photographs and event announcements and community newspapers and meeting minutes. The floating strains of boogie-woogie from the swing-shift dance; the conflict between two neighbors on either side of a thin wall; the Vanport junior high band practicing for the Junior Rose Parade; the “singing of men from the southern hills” on a Vanport porch, as described by a visitor—none of these sounds are recorded, but all can be “heard” in the archival material of photographs, oral histories, and written documentation.

In multiple senses, Vanport has been a silenced history: unrecorded, erased, underexplored, and marginalized. In his influential book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot outlines four moments in which silence enters the historical process: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” At any and all of these stages, people make decisions that prioritize certain perspectives and silence others.

Avant-garde composer and music theorist John Cage described silence within musical composition not as the absence of sounds, but as “ambient sounds” that operate outside the intentional arrangement of the composer. At a moment of rest in a musical score, sound still exists in the concert hall: a flautist shifting in their seat, a cough from an audience member, a car horn on the street outside. Historians who pursue “silences” in the archive do this work of listening to the sounds that are not on the literal (or metaphorical) page, not intended by the original composer—sounds outside the established record. 

In some ways, Vanport is a clearly delimited site: It existed in this place for a certain length of time. But it is also deeply connected to other silenced histories in our region. Each summer, drums at the Delta Park Powwow sound out over historic Vanport and the homelands of the Clackamas Chinook. In the winter of 1855–56, the US government forcibly removed the Clackamas and other Willamette Valley peoples from their lands to the Grand Ronde Reservation. Only a thousand yards from Vanport, the soft peal of chimes rings out over the MAX light-rail stop at Portland’s Expo Center, which, in 1942, was transformed from a livestock exposition hall to a temporary detention center for hundreds of Japanese and Japanese American families. Upriver from Vanport, one can “hear” the crushing silence of the Columbia River as it flows over Celilo Falls, the largest assembly point for hundreds of tribes in the Pacific Northwest for more than a thousand years before Lewis met Clark. Until the river was dammed near the Dalles in the 1950s, the roar of Celilo Falls resounded for miles.

I had the opportunity to go back to Vanport with Ed Washington this past fall. He still regularly leads tours of Vanport with the Fair Housing Council, although fewer these days. But he has not slowed down, and that day, he led our group on a three-mile walk to one end of the site and back, narrating all the way. 

As we walked, we saw hundreds of migrating geese flying over the golf course. We paused to watch an egret hunt for fish in the slough. Mr. Washington was careful to keep us on the sidewalk, mentioning that a golf course marshal had reprimanded him for straying too far onto the grass on his last visit. When we finally got back to the parking lot, a dog owner leaving the park saw me break out my lunch and scolded me.

“Why are you eating food at a dog park?” he snapped. 

Taken aback, and admittedly tired and hungry, I responded vaguely, “It’s not just a dog park.”

Thousands of people left Vanport on May 30, 1948, when the floodwaters arrived. Others lost their lives. Many Vanport refugees recall thinking they would return the next day, not yet knowing the full scale of the destruction. They never returned. Survivors never received remuneration for what they lost; no entity has yet been held accountable for the tragedy.

Ed Washington avoided the site for twenty years. But eventually, he went back. “I could never get Vanport out of my mind. I just couldn’t,” he told me recently. Once he returned to Vanport, he studied the maps, the landscape, the history, and his own memories, and he learned to orient himself in a Vanport completely changed. It is powerful to see Vanport through his eyes—everything it was, is, and could be existing at the same time.

No one seeks to make this low-lying, flood-prone land a city again. But the memory of Vanport, once eerily described by its own leaders as the “city with everything but a future,”  is still very much alive and flourishing.

Vanport was not a perfect place; it was noisy, muddy, racially segregated, and, ultimately, unsafe. But our elders remember arriving there as children and experiencing things we still dream of today: diverse and well-funded schools with an emphasis on arts and music, well-paying jobs, a sense of shared purpose, accessible public spaces and communal amenities, affordable childcare for working parents, a roof overhead for all, and a community where—in Ed Washington’s recollection—all you needed was a baseball to make a friend.

As the years go by, fewer Vanport survivors will be here to share their stories. Someday, the last Vanport survivor reunion will be held. Mr. Washington and his compatriots are growing older, and they leave it to us to create a future for our region that includes the memories of Vanport—its tragedies and its possibilities. They have planted the seeds, and we will help them grow.

Tags