In the 1940s, the Northeast Portland neighborhood of Albina was an anomaly. In a city with a vast majority of white residents, the tight-knit neighborhood was a thriving hub for Black culture, politics, and social life.
But in the late 1950s and 1960s, Albina lost that splendor. The City of Portland leveled hundreds of African American-owned homes to make room for the Memorial Coliseum, the Rose Garden (today known as the Moda Center), and a new stretch of I-5—prompting a drop in Albina’s Black population, which is still declining today.
“Albina was thriving,” says Winta Yohannes, the managing director of the Albina Vision Trust (AVT), an organization that aims to restore Albina’s identity as a thriving multicultural center. “It’s unimaginable to think that [the I-5 would have been put there] if it were not an African American community.”
Yohannes and others at AVT see an opportunity to jumpstart their vision by endorsing an Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) plan to widen and cover a stretch of I-5. By capping and landscaping the space above the interstate highway and devoting it to community use, AVT believes the Albina neighborhood could be restored, 70 years after I-5 was built.
But making this plan a reality will require AVT to work closely with ODOT, one of the entities responsible for dismantling Albina in the first place. The plan to add freeway covers is part of a larger, controversial ODOT plan, the Rose Quarter Improvement Project, that aims to add two new traffic lanes to the stretch of I-5 that passes through Portland’s Rose Quarter, an area that overlaps with the Albina Neighborhood.
