What was built
- Established or development period
- 1940s
- Peak period
- 1950s–1960s
- Who built the community
- Black shipyard workers and families, many relocated after the 1948 Vanport flood destroyed Oregon's largest Black settlement.
- Black population
- The large majority of Portland's Black population, concentrated in Albina by redlining.
- Businesses
- Black-owned businesses along Williams Avenue and Russell Street.
- Financial institutions
- Not yet documented
- Churches
- Mount Olivet Baptist and Bethel A.M.E.
- Schools
- Not yet documented
- Hospitals
- Not yet documented
- Newspapers
- The Portland Observer and the Skanner.
- Entertainment & cultural institutions
- Jazz clubs along Williams Avenue.
- Other community institutions
- Not yet documented
- Black land & property ownership
- Black home ownership concentrated in Albina by lending and covenant practices that barred Black buyers elsewhere.
- Economic significance
- The center of Black Portland's economic and cultural life.
What happened
- What happened?
- Successive public projects cleared Albina: the Memorial Coliseum in the late 1950s, Interstate 5 in the early 1960s, and the Emanuel Hospital expansion of the early 1970s, which demolished more than 180 homes for a hospital wing that was never built after federal funding collapsed. Later gentrification displaced much of the remaining Black population.
- Trigger or precipitating event
- Coliseum siting, interstate routing and a federally funded hospital-expansion clearance.
- Underlying historical context
- Redlining that concentrated Black residents in Albina, followed by repeated public-project clearance and later speculative redevelopment.
- Method of destruction / displacement
- Urban Renewal · Highway · Eminent Domain · Government Acquisition
- Date or period of destruction
- 1956–1973 and 1990s–2010s
- Confirmed / documented deaths
- Not yet documented
- Estimated deaths
- Not yet documented
- People displaced
- Thousands of residents across the successive projects; the Emanuel project alone displaced roughly 170–200 households.
- Homes destroyed
- More than 300 homes for the Coliseum, 1,100+ units for I-5, and roughly 188 structures for the hospital expansion (figures vary by project record).
- Businesses destroyed
- Dozens of Black-owned businesses.
- Acres or property lost
- Not yet documented
Afterward
- What happened to the land?
- Coliseum, interstate right-of-way and vacant lots that sat empty for forty years after the hospital project collapsed.
- Was compensation paid?
- Condemnation payments; in 2013 Legacy Emanuel publicly apologized for the displacement.
- Was the community rebuilt?
- No
- What was rebuilt?
- Not yet documented
- Destroyed or displaced again?
- Not yet documented
- Second displacement date
- Not yet documented
- Second displacement cause
- Not yet documented
- What exists there today?
- A rapidly gentrified district, the Albina Vision Trust redevelopment plan and the Williams & Russell project on the former hospital-clearance land.
- Descendant, reparation & restoration efforts
- Albina Vision Trust, the Williams & Russell Project returning land to community control and Legacy Emanuel's 2013 apology.
- Historical significance
- A community cleared three separate times by public projects, now the site of one of the most ambitious community land-return efforts in the country.
Sources
- Source lookupFind
City of Portland, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, Historical Context of Racist Planning (2019)
- Source lookupFind
Oregon Historical Society collections
- Source lookupFind
Karen J. Gibson, 'Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940–2000,' Transforming Anthropology (2007)
- Source lookupFind
Portland Development Commission urban renewal records
"Find" opens a focused search for legacy references that do not have a stable link; "Open" goes directly to the source.
Last verified: 2026-09-20. This is a living historical collection. Additional communities and documentation will be added as research and verification continue.