Whither Albina?

Sept. 25, 2024.

By: Fred Leeson

Brent Leggs addresses Albina Preservation Initiative

The leader of a bold national initiative to preserve Black historic sites took a walking tour of Portland’s Albina neighborhood and offered a few tips about big plans to create a new neighborhood on the bare bones of the old Albina.

 Brent Leggs is the executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action fund that is using $150 million in donations to help preserve important Black historical sites nationwide.  The intent of the national campaign is “to add missing chapters of our American history,” Leggs said.

His tour of Albina showed Leggs that “you can literally see how urban renewal erased physical history,” he said.  Nevertheless, “I saw beauty.  I saw community resilience.  It’s exciting to see the reclamation of history.”

 Albina’s physical landscape, amounting to the “downtown” of Portland’s Black retail, dining and entertainment community, was seriously fractured by construction of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum   and by an Emmanuel Hospital urban renewal plan that wiped out several blocks of small businesses.  After the urban renewal plan lost funding in the 1970s, some of the land remains vacant 50 years later.

One attendee at Leggs’ speech noted that plans for the new Albina consist of taller buildings than ever existed, meaning that the neighborhood will have nothing of the urban feel of old Albina.

 Leggs said the important steps are to preserve what is left.  And to work with developers who can be convinced that the new plans should try to save and complement the past.  “The stories of every day matter,” he said, adding that Albina’s community history should be recognized as part of Portland’s history.  Leggs studied marketing and business at the University of Kentucky before becoming involved in historic preservation, giving him an idea of the upsides and downsides of working with developers.

Leggs also urged that donations be made to complete restoration of the Billy Webb Elks Lodge, a building with a century of Black Portland history that was seriously damaged by fire.  The wood-frame building was erected by the YWCA in the 1920s for Black residents when Portland’s downtown YWCA was segregated.  After integration of the downtown YWCA, the building was sold to a Black assemblage of Elks members.  Restore Oregon is leading the renovation [project.

 The appearance by Leggs was sponsored by the Oregon Black Pioneers, Moreland Resource Consulting and Restore Oregon.  Leggs, who also is a senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, ticked off several recent preservation victories for Black historic sites.  They include the Washington, D.C., home of Frederick Douglass; the boxing gym of Joe Frazier in Philadelphia; the A.G. Gaston Motel, a civil rights venue in Birmingham, Alabama; the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza in Akron, Ohio; and Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, N.C.

In the 1980s, Cathy Galbraith, then executive director of the Architectural Heritage Center, undertook an extensive history of significant Black properties in Northeast and North Portland.  The “Cornerstones of Community” volume could prove to be a useful reference in rebuilding the “new” Albina.

Fred Leeson is a former president of the Bosco-Milligan Foundation and a member of the foundation's Board of Advisors.