Sabin History - Part I: Origins

SABIN HISTORY - PART I

by Bill Youngren

Sabin as a neighborhood came about in 1968 and evolved into one of the most economically and ethnically diverse areas in Portland. The neighborhood moniker arose from the area grade school, which was dubbed Sabin Elementary in 1920. F.L. Sabin was a school board member in the early 1920’s.  I have been unable to find out much about him.

Sabin has a rich but checkered history. At the end of the 19th  century a group of investors bought a large land claim from John Irving’s widow. Captain Irving was a steam boat captain that held a large land claim on the east side of Portland.  Captain Irving died in 1872 and  had moved to Victoria, BC years earlier to lay claim there. His widow returned to Portland and lived the rest of her life here. This group of Investors had familiar  names like Thompson, Failing and others. They developed the Irvington area first as it was already platted and cleared. Sales were slow at first, and lots were expensive for the time.  When the streetcars arrived at the turn of the 20th century, interest in the area finally blossomed but the areas above Fremont remained farmland and a horse racetrack into the teens and early 20’s. After a fire destroyed the Irvington dairy in 1912 at the corner of 15th and Fremont, Dixon Place was formed east of 14th ave and Lincoln Park was formed west of 14th.  Dixon was Mrs. Irving’s maiden name.  The homes in the Dixon Place development were similar to housing stock in the Irvington area, but Lincoln Park was not as exclusive  and the housing stock could vary greatly in size and quality.

The principal developments that comprise Sabin are Irvington East, Irvington West, North Irvington and Irvington Heights, Dixon Place and Alameda Park, Lincoln Park (roughly 7th to 14th, Fremont to Prescott), and the area north of Prescott, which was not a designated development.  

The Irvington, Dixon Place and Alameda Park parcels were covenant neighborhoods and had racial and economic restrictions which remained legal into the late 1960s and which were still sometimes, though less so, adhered to into the 1990’s.

The area north of Prescott had fewer restrictions.  Though a more diverse citizenry could reside in these areas, all were of European origin. These people were of Slavic, German or Jewish descent. In the convenant areas, the vast majority were of Northern European ancestry.  African Americans  and Asians would have been unwelcome in either area and did not arrive in the neighborhood until after the 1948 Vanport floods and the bulldozing of South Albina for the Memorial Coliseum project in the 1960’s.  They were allowed only in covertly designated areas that were above Fremont or west of 15th Ave.   Housing was priced higher in the all-white zones, and mortgages and insurance would not be granted to African Americans who tried to move out of the these designated or what are known as “redlined” zones.  Historians and social scientists have documented that these egregious and illegal practices occurred into the 1990’s.  A map of African American population concentrations and migrations concurs to this day with the redlined zones. 

Sabin, though, as a neighborhood can take pride in our present.  We are still a diverse neighborhood with a strong central school. We have an history of citizen activism which has helped us weather upturns and downturns and often rapid transformations. When Sabin was combined into a neighborhood in the late 1960’s the area the area had, for at least a decade, become more economically and ethnically diverse than any time in the history of the area.  Due to the aging of the original residents and the common and pernicious phenomenon called white flight  (Caucasian people selling and moving away as African American residents appeared),  the Sabin area began to suffer from city government neglect, financial disinvestment and blight as property values plummeted and poorer residents replaced middle class ones.  

Sabin’s boundaries were created to encompass parts of the wealthy and all-white areas of Alameda Park and East Irvington with the poorer parts of Lincoln Park and upper Dixon Place. They created a neighborhood with a school that could draw from diverse racial and economic backgrounds and thus be more fully integrated and stronger for it. Though in the last twenty years middle class and Caucasian residents have returned to this beautiful, historic and convenient neighborhood, we remain a diverse and vital neighborhood.

Next: History Part II: Housing Issues of the Last Two Decades

Your Sabin Front Yard

In his remarkably rich first book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan offers the image that the plurality of grass lawns planted by the tens of millions across America in the last century congealed into the singular and became one vast lawn stretching coast to coast, with the concrete hardscape of our highways the heavily travelled paths in the awful sameness of it all. Well, that was then, and this is now: look around the Sabin community of beautiful Portland, Oregon, and you will see a wonderful variety emerging out of that sameness, with some front yards full of flowering plants and others sporting vegetables, tall grasses, herbs, impressive stones, sculpture, street trees, and native shrubs. In Sabin, you see people using mulch to control weeds and save water. You see gardens attracting bees and butterflies. Some front gardens are fenced for pets and children while others have the open character of Oregon beaches. Some are blank slates. Some bespeak neglect, in other words: opportunity, adventure.

This essay is written for those Sabin homeowners who don’t yet know what they want to do with their front yards. Whereas in the dismal past folks just planted grass and mowed it, now your options seem limitless and bewildering. How do you figure out what to do?