On Friday, some Southwest Portland residents will wake to discover they now live in a new part of the city: South Portland.
That’s because, after over two years of preparations on the city’s part, Portland has established a sixth sextant. The new sextant of South Portland includes all current SW Portland addresses located east of SW Naito Parkway, or east of SW View Point Terrace in more southern neighborhoods. The change will apply to about 6,000 current SW addresses.
You can check if your home or business is part of South Portland here.
Portland City Council voted to designate South Portland as its own sextant back in 2018. The reasoning: Many SW addresses in the area have a zero as the first digit, which were often confused by first responders with houses bearing nearly identical addresses without the zero (for instance, the difference between SW 100 and SW 0100).
The new sextant will mean new addresses for its inhabitants. 3303 SW Moody Ave—an OHSU building in the South Waterfront—will become 3303 South Moody Ave, while the Old Spaghetti Factory will change from 0715 SW Bancroft Street to 715 South Bancroft Street. The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) will add stickers reflecting the change to street signs in good condition, and replace older signs. The old addresses will still be included as “aliases” in Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communication’s database, to cut down on confusion for first responders during the transition.
This marks the first time Portland has gained a new directional address distinction since 1931, when the city was split into North, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest Portland.
“With the addition of the South Portland address area, Portland has officially become a city of sextants,” reads a press release from PBOT. “However, many Portlanders do prefer to call the city’s address areas quadrants regardless of the total number. In this spirit, PBOT will also informally recognize sixth quadrant as a designation for the new part of the city.”
cool!
on the PBOT graphic, what is the blue square at the bottom of the new South area?
@esmo That’s the EVEN NEWER “South South” Octant, to be known as “SS.” If you can find it without inadvertently winding up in Tigard you win a prize!
WTF? Who voted for this BS? Nobody?
We’ve been calling it South Portland with air-quotes and rolling eyes for years. I’m thinking this is a way to market-boost this soul-less concrete jungle consisting entirely of high rise condos, hospitals, and hotels. It’s like the wanton unchecked gentrification happening everywhere else, but distilled into one special little sliver so the rest of us have a target-dense object to raze when our landlords finally assume their final forms.
not-so-fun-fact: South Portland was a neighborhood about a hundred years ago, but was destroyed by “urban renewal” in the late 50s. It was Portland’s version of “Little Italy” where many Italian (and also Jewish) people lived.
It’s about time. A lot of software flakes on those zero-first addresses, nobody wants a firetruck to be unable to find them.