Black History
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L OST N EIGHBORHOODS
Jumptown: Storied Building Revived
Once-hopping jazz spot
Brian Stimson
Of The Skanner News
Originally published Nov 08, 2007
240
N. Broadway. You could easily walk by this
blighted building without ever noticing it.
Known to many as Multi-Craft Plastics, the
building has been vacant for years. But before that it housed
a plastics factory, a pharmaceutical drug maker, a confec-
tionery and ice cream parlor. Rumor says during the 1920s
it was a speakeasy. But for a golden moment in the 1940s,
it was The Dude Ranch, one of Portland’s premier “Black
and Tan” jazz clubs.
Now, a local developer and musician, Daniel Deutsch is
lovingly restoring the building to create a community art
space that will reflect its storied past.
Pat Patterson, the first African American to play basket-
ball for the University of Oregon, owned and ran The Dude
Ranch along with his friend Sherman “Cowboy” Picket.
According to jazz historian Robert Dietsche, who wrote the
Portland jazz history book “Jumptown,” The Dude Ranch
was “the shooting star in the history of Portland jazz, a
meteor bursting with an array of the best Black and Tan
entertainment this town has ever seen: strippers, then called
shake dancers, ventriloquists, comics, jugglers, torch
singers, world renowned tap dancers like Teddy Hale, and
of course the very best of jazz.”
No wonder it attracted legends such as Louis Armstrong,
Thelonius Monk, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins and
Lucky Thompson, as well as countless others. With hat
check girls, waitresses dressed as cowgirls and all-night
card games, Dietsche writes that the Dude Ranch was
packed with everyone from politicians and Pullman porters
to zoot-suited hipsters.
“Racially mixed party people who couldn’t care less that
The Dude Ranch then...
...and now.
what they were doing was on the cutting edge of integration
in the city that had been called the most segregated north of
the Mason-Dixon line,” Dietsche wrote.
In 1946, the city shut it down. Few believed that big
stakes gambling and an accidental shooting were the real
reasons behind its closure.
“There was too much race mixing,” Dietsche told The
Skanner News. “It was a black eye for City Hall. They
looked for any excuse … and there were so many.”
What the city couldn’t close down was Portland’s love
affair with jazz. During those years, you could find jazz at
any time of the day or the night. The city was bursting with
newly arrived workers for the shipyards and other war sup-
port industries. And Williams Avenue – an economic area
that spanned many blocks on and off the street — featured
a jazz joint on nearly every block.
“It was quite a scene,” said Dick Bogle, jazz columnist for
the Skanner and radio host on KMHD 89.9. During that
period, Bogle said Blacks were confined to living west of
Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.), giving
club owners a targeted geographic area of talent and
patrons.
Bogle said he began frequenting jazz clubs in the 1950s.
He was too young to have entered the doors of the famed
Dude Ranch when it was open. But he does remember the
See JUMPTOWN on page 14
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February 22, 2012 The Portland and Seattle Skanner v BLACK HISTORY EDITION v Page 5