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About The Southwest Portland Post. (Portland, Oregon) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 2011)
SERVING Burlingame • Capitol Hill • Garden Home • Glen Cullen • Hillsdale • South Portland • Multnomah Village • Raleigh Hills • Vermont Hills • West Portland INSIDE: Lines drawn on proposed Lake Oswego to Portland streetcar Southwest Portland’s Independent Neighborhood Newspaper Volume No. 19, Issue No. 4 www.swportlandpost.com Portland, Oregon Complimentary – Page 3 February 2011 Southwest Portland knitting groups are great places to make friends and relax By Polina Olsen The Southwest Portland Post The food is good, and the lighting is perfect. It’s a spot to make friends and have a beer. Maybe that’s why the SW PDX Stitch ‘N’ Bitch thrives two years after Wendy Lee started the knitting group on a hunch. Each Wednesday evening, Laughing Planet (4405 SW Vermont St.) lights up with bright yarns, clicking needles and gorgeous hand-knit clothes. Drop-ins gather around back tables over south- western burritos and Zappatista salads. Like all knitting groups, the best part is the people. All skill levels and ages are welcome. “I started the group two years ago before Thanksgiving,” said Lee who learned knitting about five years ago. At that time, the only local group met just once a month. “I wanted more, so I decided to start something. I never dreamed it would get so big.” Ravelry (www.ravelry.com), a free online knitting community, proved crucial to the group’s organization and ongoing success. The place to go for patterns, help with projects, and everything related to yarn, Ravelry provides space for worldwide virtual groups like “Fair Isle Knitting,” and local meetups like “SW PDX Stitch ‘N’ Bitch.” Spreading the word was as easy as posting when and where. Now the group has 138 members. Fifteen to 40 drop by Laughing Planet each week. We stopped by the group’s annual Christmas party. That night the large, laughing crowd prepared a cookie exchange and brought presents. As usual, ages ranged from mid-twenties to sixty-something. We met attorneys, stay-at-home- moms, teachers, and a budding novel- ist. Several women have cottage busi- nesses. Raya Budrevich sells hand-dyed yarn and custom-knit children’s clothes from her website blissfulknits.com. “I’m just trying hard not to go back to work,” she said as the mothers of young children nodded. Conversation drifted from book club favorites to the best way to make limoncello. Master knitters sat next to scarf makers. Everyone had a good time. Of course, other knitting clubs have sprung up around the neighborhood. Northwest Wools (3524 SW Troy St.), the Multnomah Village yarn shop, teaches classes and encourages drop- in groups. Each Sunday afternoon, Donna Arney, (seated red shirt) and Melissa Schmidt (standing) chat about their latest projects at knit night. (Post photo by Polina Olsen) the Knitwits meet and welcome new participants. They’ve sponsored an annual knitting cruise for seven years. This time, they went to Alaska. “It was so much fun for the women to hang out together,” said organizer Diane Wade. “We all knit berets and wore them to dinner. And, we had a book club. We read Skinny Dip. The beginning takes place on a cruise.” Wade specializes in charity knitting. “I knit all year for the Soroptimists,” she said as she picked up her needles. “I (Continued on Page 4) City wants to use the Jerome Sears Armory site for emergency use instead of housing By Lee Perlman The Southwest Portland Post While it may be used by the City of Portland for emergency management, the Jerome Sears Armory is no lonager being considered for affordable housing. (Post file photo by Don Snedecor) Don’t forget to renew your subscription. Form on Page 2. The Southwest Portland Post 4207 SE Woodstock Blvd #509 Portland, OR 97206 The City has given up on plans for housing development on the old Je- rome Sears Armory site, and is looking for alternative uses. “I just don’t think this pencils out any more,” Commis- sioner Nick Fish said in a voice mail message to the Post last month. Margaret Van Vliet, Executive Direc- tor of the Portland Bureau of Housing, told The Post that a local match for a project proposed by Community Partners for Affordable Housing, a non-profit selected to develop the site after the military had declared it surplus, would have been somewhere between $3 and $6 million. Part of this cost was the price of the four-acre site on Southwest Multnomah Boulevard, which the City had hoped the military would donate. “We’ve pursued a number of housing develop- ment projects in the last 18 months, a couple we’ve had to let go, and this was one of them,” Van Vliet said. The City gained the right to acquire the property in 2007. In 2008, after an extensive public process, housing was selected as the preferred new use for the site. According to Van Vliet, Mayor Sam Adams’ office favors using the property as a west side emergency staging area, providing storage for vital supplies for use in case of a ca- tastrophe. Christine Miles, a spokesperson for the Portland Office of Emergency Man- agement, told The Post that the City currently has no place for the storage of emergency supplies and equipment on the west side of the Willamette River, which could create a major problem if a major earthquake were to make the bridges impassible. It could also provide storage space for the Transportation and Water bureaus. It could be used to store snow-removal equipment, gravel and sanding trucks, and “a place where crews could store what they need for ongoing projects,” Miles said. Other possible uses could be classes and training for Neighborhood Emer- gency Team volunteers as well as City personnel, Miles said. “It wouldn’t be a place where trucks will just sit,” she said, although she was somewhat vague about how much activity would occur there on a daily basis. Miles said that the City had not yet determined that this is a suitable site. One key consideration is whether the federal government would be willing to donate the land for an emergency preparedness use, as they were not willing to do for housing development. City representatives plan to attend the next Multnomah meeting, set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, February 8 at the Multnomah Center, 7688 S.W. Capitol Highway. There the City will supply more specific information, community members will have another chance to react, and the association may take a position on the issue.
