Southeast Division Street, under your feet, put Portland on the national food map. Southeast Division Street, between 20th and 50th Avenues, developed in the early 2000s as a restaurant corridor that attracted some of the most ambitious young chefs in the Pacific Northwest, drawn by affordable rents and a neighborhood demographic willing to try anything. Gabriel Rucker opened Le Pigeon on Division in 2006; Naomi Pomeroy operated a series of supper clubs and underground restaurants that culminated in Beast, which opened on nearby Northeast Fremont.
Andy Ricker's Pok Pok, the Thai-influenced restaurant that launched on Division in 2005, became nationally famous and spawned outposts in New York and Los Angeles. The food corridor attracted James Beard Awards — Portland has won more Beard Awards per capita than any other American city — and the attention of food publications that had previously ignored the Pacific Northwest entirely. Division has since been joined by Alberta, Mississippi, and Hawthorne as competing food corridors, but it remains the street that initiated the transformation.
Between the restaurants are the hardware stores, Laundromats, and longtime neighborhood businesses that Division served before the food writers arrived. The tension between those two layers of the street defines what Portland's neighborhoods are arguing about.