F*** the rich? Maybe not always a good idea

That first bit is a piece of graffiti I saw on a hidden staircase landing while on my walk today from Chapman School up to Pittock Mansion. For those of you who know the neighborhoods such a walk would lead through, you also know that the graffiti artist did a better than usual job of targeting his audience. Those neighborhoods--Northwest Portland, Kings Heights-- were not built for the weak of wallet. The earth was literally moved in order for the homes to be built there; Laura Foster does a good job describing the sluicing process necessary to construct the terraces in her book Portland Hill Walks (yes, I finished City Walks and have moved on to other company for my days). But Portland in all of her admirable social consciousness does tend to have a fairly vocal divide between the haves and have nots, so let's take a look at perhaps the most familiar symbol of wealth in this town, Pittock Mansion.

First of all, Pittock was not exactly landed gentry. The apocryphal story tells us that Henry Pittock came to Oregon at nineteen and eased himself into a job at The Oregonian, but his boss could not afford to pay him and instead handed over to Henry ownership of the paper. This would have been around 1860, just before Portland truly began growing into the city we think of it as being today.

Moreover, the Pittocks may have been physically above all the rest of the rabble milling across the muck and planks that made up our city streets at the time they lived in the mansion from 1914-1919, but that's about the extent of their separation, as far as I can tell. For instance, Georgiana Pittock, also of humble origins, not only had a hand in starting Portland's Rose Festival, but also helped to found the Martha Washington Home for Single Working Women and helped found the Ladies' Relief Society. She sounds like a surprisingly progressive turn of the century woman I would feel fortunate to know today.

And lastly, the early demonstration of some of the values Portlanders hold very dear today, i.e. keeping things local and building to work within a landscape rather than over top of it, were part of the original conception of the mansion's design. None of this makes the Pittocks sound like the cliche obliviously wealthy family. But a lot of it does make them sound like we should perhaps be grateful to have had them as a cornerstone in the city's lineage.

Wow. Had you known me fifteen years ago, you might have never guessed I would write a blog post defending the very wealthy, and there is something deep within me that still twitches a bit at the thought. However, I like to think I've grown.

Also, I do want to include one bit of trivia about Georgiana I ran across here, but couldn't easily verify at a "more reliable source": the doyenne of the home was apparently so frugal that she saved the silver foil from her tea packages for years, and then later used the foil to cover the ceiling in the entryway of the mansion. Gotta love a DIY girl.