Long before the Pearl District became a trendy shopping and residential area, and even when it was a gritty industrial area, it contained single family homes and rooming houses. This circa 1925 photo shows NW 10th Avenue at Irving street looking north. The large structure on the far right is the back of what we know today as the Ecotrust building. And amazingly enough, a portion of the wall on the left, including door openings and steel shutters, still stands at the corner with Johnson Street. The block is in the center of this aerial photo taken in 1939 after the wooden structures had been removed.
(City of Portland Archives)
Vintage Portland 
Looks very different today: http://goo.gl/maps/kH6NO
Almost 90 yrs later 🙂 http://www.flickr.com/photos/poetas/5553851336/
If you follow the google maps link and “walk” down to the corner you can see the google maps car in the reflection of the bus shelter
ohh, so this is the building that still has part of the facade standing, in front of the parking lot for the Ecotrust building. interesting.
@mark:
Yes. That entire building on the left was still standing when they started on the EcoTrust building. They tore it down (left just a facade), in order to have a larger parking lot. It may be on a streetcar line, and be an “environmental” organization, but they still felt they must have their parking. Ironically, it was a new parking lot between their building and the streetcar stop!
I have always wondered about that wall!
The house closest to the near corner was probably at least 45 years old. It has no front porch railing. The fencing looks quite strange. An addition on the rear appears to be a kitchen. Most all window shades are closed. The yard tree trunk is an untrimmed mess. Looks pretty low class and evidently the owner had no pride of ownership. The rooming house next to it had the front repainted but the side of the structure was left as it was. That was common in low class neighborhoods. People in those days had no deoderant, bathed only a couple times a month and had only one or two suits of clothes which were infrequently laundered. No wonder they did not care much about where they lived in leaky creaky vermine infested places.
Randy C: my grandma was living in that house in 1925!!
Just kidding 😉
Eric,
I had a great-aunt who had a coat that was trimmed in vermine. That was before anti-fur activism and sanitation.
Sadly, vermine are now extinct and we now have to settle for the baser ermine fur.
Actually I try to find out which of those two houses was the 166, North Tenth Street in 1922, where my grandfather was living. Street names changed in 1891 and numbering, in 1931. Next web (http://www.lovejoypettygrove.com/) says this address corresponds to 716 NW 10th Avenue. And Google maps drives me exactly there.