Alberta Street, under your feet, tells one of Portland's most complicated stories about art, community, and displacement. Alberta Street was for decades the commercial spine of one of Portland's historically Black neighborhoods, the area to which African Americans were largely confined by the racially restrictive housing covenants that governed most of Portland's residential development until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. When those covenants fell, white flight emptied the district; disinvestment followed.
By the 1990s Alberta Street had high vacancy rates, low property values, and a community that held together despite the economic neglect. Artists discovered it. The Last Thursday art walk, which has run monthly since 1997, brought galleries and studios.
Restaurants opened. Property values rose. And many of the Black families and low-income residents who had maintained the neighborhood through the hard years were priced out of it.
The Alberta Arts District is now one of Portland's most visited neighborhoods, celebrated for its murals, food carts, music venues, and independent businesses. It is also a neighborhood whose success came at a social cost that is openly discussed in the community. The murals on these walls include some of the most politically direct public art in Portland, refusing to let the neighborhood forget its history while it makes its art.