No matter how long you’ve lived in Portland, Brian Libby’s collection of recommended central city walking tours likely will tell you many things you never knew about the Rose City.
“In Search of Portland, Exploring a Transforming City,” is unlike any tour guide you’ve run across. It’s partly devoted to architecture, heavily devoted to interesting historical facts unrelated to buildings’ designs, and sprinkled with Libby’s memorabilia influenced by more than 20 years of writing about Portland’s architecture, arts and music an independent journalist.
A sample of snippets to enjoy: An obscure building on SW 13th Avenue where The Kingsmen recorded “Louie, Louie,” the famous rock song recorded with such a poor microphone, the FBI tried to see if the song was pornographic; a music venue where Chuck Berry refused to perform until his $30,000 fee was paid in advance – in cash; the fact that the bouncy dance floor at the Crystal Ballroom wasn’t designed more than a century ago to thrill dancers, but to deter vibrations from streetcars and traffic passing by.
Libby’s sprightly writing suggests that the book could have been put together quickly. In fact, he worked on it for eight years and cites more than 60 articles for comments and quotations from articles he wrote earlier. Along the way, he discusses prominent architects from A.E. Doyle and Pietro Belluschi to more modern designers who have left important stamps on urban Portland in the 21st Century.
In short, “In Search of Portland” will be a pleasant and informative read for anyone who claims to like Portland as well as Libby does. That said, the volume has one shortcoming: no index. Should a reader want to find a significant anecdote for any reason after putting the book down, scanning though lots of pages is the only solution. Given all the places and people mentioned, an index would be a hefty addition. But it should be considered if this worthy work survives into a second edition.
