8 • The Southwest Portland Post
NEWS
May 2013
Slides and lecture show old South Portland’s ethnic history
By Lee Perlman
The Southwest Portland Post
More than 100 people crammed into
the Cedarwood Montessori School last
month to hear a lecture and slide show
on South Portland’s history, especially
as it related to the Italian and Jewish
communities.
Historian Arnie Panitch provided the
commentary to a slide show of both
current and historic scenes by Ken
Kane. The event was sponsored by the
Tuscan Association of Oregon.
The venue was the school audito-
rium, which was once Oregon’s first
indoor pool. The building was origi-
nally Neighborhood House, built in
1905 by the National Council of Jewish
Women as a settlement house. As such,
it provided classes.
As such, it provided classes, rec-
reation and activities geared toward
immigrants. As one person at the
lecture noted, Jews never made up
more than 50 percent of the patrons of
Neighborhood House, which served a
succession of immigrant groups.
Indeed, old South Portland, which
Panitch said was bounded by South-
west Columbia and Hamilton streets,
Barbur Boulevard and the Willamette
River, was a community of immi-
grants.
Significant structures that stand
today include the Lair Hill Market,
created in 1912; Failing School (now
part of the National College of Natural
Medicine); and St. Mary’s Academy,
the oldest school in Portland.
Others include the former Carnegie
Library, now owned by the Portland
Bureau of Parks; the former Kesser
Israel orthodox synagogue building,
originally a Baptist church and now
the Church of God; and Italian restau-
rant Caro Amico.
Panitch noted that many of the area
streets were named for Civil War
heroes – Grant, Sherman, Sheridan,
Meade and Hooker. In 1931 came the
Great Renumbering, with the City sub-
stituting a new uniform set of build-
ing numbers to replace the systems of
what had been independent villages.
A major part of the area’s history
was the South Auditorium urban re-
Audrey Perino of the Tuscan Association of Oregon introduces historian Arnie Panitch.
(Post photo by Lee Perlman)
Houses in the South Auditorium Renewal Area in South Portland circa 1962. (Photo
courtesy City of Portland Archives)
newal district of the Portland Devel-
opment Commission, which displaced
2,000 residents on 54 square blocks.
The activity was justified at the time
by the alleged disrepair and crime in
the area. On the day of the lecture, an
Oregonian editorial praised the South
Auditorium project.
Panitch provided a different per-
spective; a 1963 slide showed a sign
on a condemned building which said
that the political process “makes the
Soviet Union look like a constitutional
paradise.”
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