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Offbeat Oregon History Podcast:
A short daily reading from the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column, featuring true Oregon stories hardly anyone knows — stories of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold, of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and buried treasure.
North End Girls:
PAGE 54:
A hand-drawn map from the 1860s showing the locations of the various nascent cities vying for regional dominance in the area of what is now the Portland Metropolitan Area. "Hall Kelley's City" would later become East Portland. (Image: Joseph Gaston)
PAGE 56:
The sternwheeler Wide West, shown here, was built in Portland in 1877, operated proudly and profitably for a decade, and dismantled ten years later. It is possible — unlikely, but possible — that the Wide West was the riverboat that was involved in the midnight rescue of Nancy Boggs' floating bordello in 1882. (Image: Salem Public Library)
PAGE 58:
The view of the Albina grain docks from out on the water, sketched in 1888. (Image: The West Shore magazine)
PAGE 59:
A crowd of well-wishers gathers at First and Stark to celebrate the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1883; the line connected Portland, Oregon with Portland, Maine, with plenty of stops in between. When this photo was taken, Nancy Boggs would have just moved off her storied riverboat and set up shop in a land-based brothel two blocks to the right of where the photographer stood to make this picture. (Image: Salem Public Library)
BONUS AUDIO:
The girls of Chinatown: This image links to a podcast from Doug Kenck-Crispin and Andy Lindberg's "Kick Ass Oregon History" series, in which they tell about the girls who worked the streets and brothels of turn-of-the-century Chinatown.
PAGE 60:
An advertising flyer for the newly remodeled Erickson's Saloon, the famous loggers' watering hole at Second and Burnside in the North End, in the late 1890s.
PAGE 62:
The notorious Oregon Steam Navigation Company "boneyard," covering the waterfront at the north end of the North End and stocked with old and dilapidated steamboats. (Image: City of Portland Archives)
PAGE 66:
Cordray's Musee Theatre, a popular vaudeville house in downtown Portland, as it appeared in the late 1880s. (Image: The West Shore magazine)
