How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

12: The Politics of Diversity

203| John stepped off the elevator, ignored offers to go for beers, and walked through downtown Seattle streets. There were so many white men to choose from. Everybody was a white man in downtown Seattle. —Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (1996) Later that evening, everyone would remark at one time or another how roomy 2932 West Sixth Avenue had become all of a sudden. . . . Within a week, Eleven (or perhaps Speed) would remark that the single-family bourgeois dwelling had a lot to recommend it, that the commune was a thing of the past, and that he was thinking of moving into a suite of his own in Kitsalano, provided that it was not full of drug addicts. —John Gray, Dazzled (1984) on August 19, 1969, Riverfront for People held a picnic on a highway median strip in downtown Portland, oregon. on a midsummer day when the mountains and coast beckoned many Portlanders, 250 adults and 100 children spread their blankets and opened their coolers and baskets on a barren strip between four lanes of busy traffic on Front Avenue and an even busier four lanes on Harbor Drive, a 1940s freeway that divided downtown from the Willamette River. Meeting at nearly the precise spot where pioneers had erected Portland’s first buildings, the throng comprised young and enthusiastic activists who thought that Portland deserved a park along its downtown waterfront. CHAPter tWelve The Politics of Diversity | CHAPter tWelve 204 the motive was the scheduled demolition of a great white elephant—a two-block building constructed in the 1930s as a public market. the structure sat between Front Avenue and Harbor Drive. For highway engineers, removal opened up the possibility of more lanes for more traffic along the river. For the hastily organized Riverfront for People, it opened the chance to replace concrete with grass, speeding vehicles with people strolling the downtown riverfront. the City Club of Portland, a good-government study group, weighed in with a report that called for “varied public use . . . and attractive pedestrian access to the esplanade and the river itself.”1 in october the activists convinced the powerful state Highway Commission that a park was at least a possibility. there were two more years of study and debate before the city ripped up Harbor Drive. But it was the activists who introduced the idea, fought off halfway measures (burying Harbor Drive in a tube and topping it with sod was one idea), helped put open-minded leaders on the city council, and deserve the credit for what has grown into tom McCall Waterfront Park. nearly half a continent away, Mexican Americans in modest neighborhoods of San Antonio’s west side were growing increasingly dissatisfied with token representation in city government. Fire stations on the west side had the city’s older equipment and less experienced crews. Parks were more likely than elsewhere to be poorly maintained fields without play equipment. Low-lying west-side neighborhoods lacked both storm sewers and sanitary sewers, flooding when heavy rains poured off the higher north-side neighborhoods where most civic leaders lived. the catalyst for action was a flash flood on August 7, 1974. the organization that was available to channel the frustration was Communities organized for Public Service (CoPS), a coalition of neighborhood groups that had grown slowly over the past year with the assistance of the Catholic archdiocese . CoPS defined a list of very specific grievances, dug out supporting data, and confronted decision makers. CoPS members staged “deposit-ins” when they gummed up the operation of local banks by repeatedly making small deposits and withdrawals. CoPS packed city council meetings and forced the city manager to attend a public assembly on the west side, where he faced 500 residents more than ready to talk about storm sewers. the direct result was a bond issue to implement a drainage plan that had mildewed on the shelf since 1945. An indirect result was the erosion of Good Government League influence and the election of independent Latinos to the city council. the majority of CoPS members came from the Mexican American middle-class, churchgoing, achievement-oriented families with steady but limited incomes from government jobs and small businesses. the organization was particularly successful in utilizing the talents of Mexican American women, whose previous public involvement was limited to church groups tHe PolitiCs of Diversity | 205 and PtA meetings. the organization wanted specific service improvements, but it also wanted a...