Towards Carfree: Depaving DaySteven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference.
San Francisco architect David Baker depaves.
Depaving Day opened the Towards Carfree Cities conference here in Portland yesterday. One might call it a soft opening, given today’s kickoff speakers, if not for the hard work involved. With pry bars and shovels they tore up the pre-sectioned asphalt, turning a paved lot along the Williams Avenue bike route in North Portland into the precursor of a community garden.
Why? Because “asphalt is ugly,” Cassandra Griffith with the nonprofit Depave.org told the crowd, most of whom had already signed the waivers to volunteer in the transformation. “Besides being ugly, it’s not super eco-friendly.”
Indeed, she said the soil, fruit trees, and cover crops to come will help absorb the stormwater for both that property and a few of its neighbors. This is the first project for this depaving group, a genre within the larger carfree community here in Portland, but Gritth said, “We want to do a few demonstration projects and then we want to encourage everyone to do it at home.”
One of the depaving workers who calls San Francisco “home,” architect David Baker, was bleeding from the shin but still hauling wheelbarrows full of busted pavement to the bin. “It’s a good thing to do and a great way to kickoff the conference,” he told me.
Later, he was part of the group that had lunch back at my place for the week, the White Eagle Café, Saloon, and Hotel, before taking off on an afternoon bicycle adventure that took us on a tour of more depaved spots – after tending to a bloody victim of clash between bicycling and Portland’s extensive rail system.
Portland is a great city for bicyclists, who seem to be everywhere, and I’ve not yet experienced any of the driver aggression toward bicyclists that I sometimes get in San Francisco. But there are still dangers.
Baker, Jon Winston, Jason Henderson and I were riding to the afternoon Depaving Ride when we saw a woman who looked to be in her 60s crash after getting her bike tire caught in a rail line. We helped her out, tended the wound and called an ambulance. Amazingly, despite a serious looking injury – a gaping gash cut clear to the bone -- the woman was calm and upbeat the whole time.
We finally arrived back at the depaving site, where all the asphalt had been removed, just as the city’s bicycle education director, Timo Forsberg, was leading a ride of about 50 bicyclists on a tour of depaved sites around Northeast Portland. The first stop was a community garden that had once been an extended driveway.
Resident Kyla Mullen, who had been part of a stilter dance troupe at the depaving event, said, “I’m really passionate about what they’re doing.” The next stop was a full-on front yard “food forest” that had once been a front lawn and RV parking area. “We took it out because it was worthless and we planted edible crops,” said resident Norris Thomlinson, 30, whose girlfriend Theressa Latoski bought the place in 2001.
Thomlinson and his front yard "food forest"
In fact, the garden continues onto the next property, where a woman on the ride, Rachel Freifelder, lives. And across the street, there’s another property with torn up pavement in the process of being turned into a large garden. Freifelder is a avid and clearly talented gardener and gardening teacher who said she was tired of getting bounced out of community gardens and looked for a spot to call her own in this section of North Portland that has relatively cheap property in large parcels, but is still an easy bike ride from the city core.
They are all part of a large, intentional community of Portlanders who have taken their carfree lifestyle the next step.
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Comments (5)
The link is broken. Please fix. Thanks!
Posted by Just me | June 17, 2008 01:10 PM
Hi Steven,
If you or anyone you know took pictures of Depaving yesterday, please get in touch, thanks.
albert@depave.org
nice article, btw!
Posted by Albert Kaufman | June 17, 2008 02:13 PM
Thanks for the story and the quotes. The Depave.org website has been down yesterday and today -- in a stroke of awful timing -- but should be up and running again by tomorrow. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage everyone to try again to read more.
Posted by Kasandra Griffin | June 17, 2008 02:20 PM
Why are PG&E ads appearing on the SFBG website?
Posted by expatriate | June 17, 2008 03:27 PM
We've been over this, Expat:
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2008/04/weve_been_greenwashed.html
Posted by Amanda![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/nav-commenters.gif)
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June 17, 2008 05:04 PM