Look at a street that completed one of Portland's most self-conscious neighborhood transformations in the early 2000s. North Mississippi Avenue had been a marginal commercial corridor serving the working-class neighborhoods of North Portland — historically one of the few areas where Black Portlanders could own property and businesses during the decades of exclusion — when artists and entrepreneurs began moving in around 2000, drawn by cheap rents and the kind of raw commercial space that had disappeared from hipper neighborhoods. What emerged over the following decade was a strip of independent bars, restaurants, vintage clothing stores, record shops, and galleries that became the template for Portland neighborhood cool in the years when Portlandia was being filmed.
The Mississippi Studios music venue, which opened in 2004, became one of the most respected small music clubs in the country. The ReBuilding Center, a nonprofit salvage warehouse a block off Mississippi, embodies Portland's ethos of sustainable reuse. The neighborhood's success generated the same pressures that reshaped Alberta Street: rising rents, displacement of the working-class residents who had sustained it.
Mississippi Avenue is a mirror of Portland's ambitions and its contradictions, sometimes reflecting both at the same time.