Yesterday’s location at SW Barbur Blvd. & Bancroft Street can be seen in this terrific aerial view from roughly above OHSU looking eastward. The main east-west street below us is Bancroft while Terwilliger and Barbur are the main streets that cross from left to right. The large building near the upper-right is the old Holman Public School. The manufacturing plant along the river sits about where the Old Spaghetti Factory and the South Waterfront district are now.
(City of Portland Archives)
Vintage Portland 
Mid to late 30’s seems right. Barbur Boulevard looks shiny & new.
There is a lot of great detail here. It’s too bad the school wasn’t saved, it has a nice lodge feel. You can see how mature and stately the yard was of yesterday’s post.
Traffic looks about the same.
I talked to an old timer some years ago who told me he used to ride his bike right down the middle of Barbur due to the paucity of traffic in depression era Portland…
Bancroft seems remarkably wide for a residential street. Looks like it was severed by Terwilliger in this photo and truncated on the east end at Kelly by the ROW that later became I-5. Is there any particular reason why, or is it just an artifact of platting?
@t-bag The interesting thing is I think I can count the same number of cars in both photos, and one photo is of course of a much larger area. There are not many cars parked along the streets in 1938.
@lefty I’m betting Bancroft wasn’t so much severed by Terwilliger as it was severed by the hill that Terwilliger happens to traverse. It would be a steep hill for a street to climb.
There’s that pesky Lowell street we had so much fun with a few months back. The stairs don’t look as straight as they are now. Are those even stairs?
I was trying to see if any of those in that little cluster next to that stairway/pathway were either of the ones from those pictures too (https://vintageportland.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/sw-barbur-lowell-c1933/). The one at the bottom of the hill seems awfully close to the bigger one, but that smaller one looks like it’s gone at this point here. And the house that is on that lot I guess must be the same one, since on Portland Maps it is listed as being built in 1908, but it looks so different! Probably I’m just not very good at sleuthing these as most of the regulars here.