Seven acres of green have anchored the residential neighborhood surrounding Irving Park since the 1890s, and you are in one of Northeast Portland's foundational neighborhood parks. Irving Park sits at the intersection of Northeast 7th Avenue and Fremont Street in the heart of what was, for most of the twentieth century, the primary African American residential neighborhood in Portland. The Albina district — the name given to the Northeast Portland neighborhoods that Black Portlanders were largely confined to by racially restrictive covenants before the 1968 Fair Housing Act — extends south and east from here, and Irving Park was one of the few public spaces where the community could gather freely during the decades of legal discrimination.
The park contains one of the few remaining grass tennis courts in Portland, a baseball diamond, and the kind of mature shade trees that take a century to grow. The neighborhoods around Irving Park — Sabin, Irvington, Beaumont-Wilshire — have seen dramatic demographic change since the 1990s as rising property values displaced many of the longtime Black residents who had established the community during the period of exclusion. The tension between preservation and displacement, between celebration of neighborhood character and acknowledgment of who built it, is present in these blocks in a form that Portland is still working out.