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AUGUST 5. 2011
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Last Call
Two LGBTQ landmarks shut down, tear down
Dirty Duck razed to make
way for homeless shelter
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• • •
The home o f one o f Portlands longest
operating gay bars was torn to pieces the
week o f August 1 with little fuss.
The Dirty Duck Tavern closed two years
ago this month after serving the bear and
leather community for 25 years. Since then,
the building has sat mosdy vacant on the cor
ner of Northwest Third Avenue and Glisan
Street, to some just another eyesore in Old
Town. But former employees and clientele re
member it fondly, even if they’ve moved on.
Former patrons describe the Duck as “di-
vey,” “gritty” and “grungy.” Mark Armstrong,
a regular who was once named M iss Dirty
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NOW OPEN!
Print anything, m ail a n y w h e re .
Formerly Witham and Dickey
P r im a r y C a re
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M an y colors available.
Duck o f America in the bar’s annual mock
pageant, says he’d go to the bar to play pool
and “bitch darts.”
“We’d have little tournaments,” he recalls.
“You had to try to get the other person out.
I f you’d hit their number or their close out
or something, they’d say, ‘You bitch!’”
The property belonged to the Portland De
velopment Commission, which chose to end
the Duck’s lease in 2009. The PD C is swap-
ping the property with the Blanchet
House o f Hospitality, which has a
soup kitchen next door. Blanchet
House is building a new homeless center in
the Dirty Duck’s place.
The move was controversial to many in
the city— notably preservationists who
wanted to save the building. Formally known
as the Kiernan Building, it is a contributing
structure to the Chinatown National Regis
ter Historic District.
But protest from the gay community never
came to a boil. The Duck’s former owner, Gail
Kennedy, for the most part disappeared from
the community. And the bar’s clientele had
since moved to its new bear den, Pat Lana-
gan’s the Eagle in North Pordand.
“The bear community in Port-
° land has changed due to internet
dating and the changing makeup
o f Portland,” says Andy Mangels,
a former employee o f the bar and
^ cultivator o f the Oregon Leather
History Project. “The Dirty Duck
was such a unique place in that
nobody ever felt out o f place there
or unwelcome.”
Kennedy, for her part, has been
on “vacation” in the two years
since the Duck closed. She spends
most o f her time on the Oregon Coast, where
she does volunteer work. She says she needed
some rest after the Duck, which had only
been closed three days in the past 25 years.
Kennedy was a third-generation bar
owner at the Duck, and her family’s ties to
the gay community run deep. Her mother,
Margaret “M ama” Bernice, worked at the
Duck and owned a handful o f bars prior,
and her grandmother, Erma Anderson, co-
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