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​The HISTORY OF VANPORT

How Oregon’s Second Largest City Vanished
​in a Day

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Historical context provided by
​ Natasha Geiling
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

The mere utterance of Vanport was known to send shivers down the spines of "well-bred" Portlanders. Not because of any ghost story, or any calamitous disaster—that would come later—but because of raw, unabashed racism. Built in 110 days in 1942, Vanport was always meant to be a temporary housing project, a superficial solution to Portland’s wartime housing shortage. At its height, Vanport housed 40,000 residents, making it the second largest city in Oregon, a home to the workers in Portland's shipyards and their families.

But as America returned to peacetime and the shipyards shuttered, tens of thousands remained in the slipshod houses and apartments in Vanport, and by design, through discriminatory housing policy, many who stayed were African-American. In a city that before the war claimed fewer than 2,000 black residents, white Portland eyed Vanport suspiciously. In a few short years, Vanport went from being thought of as a wartime example of American innovation to a crime-laden slum. 

A 1947 Oregon Journal investigation discussed the purported eyesore that Vanport had become, noting that except for the 20,000-some residents who still lived there, "To many Oregonians, Vanport has been undesirable because it is supposed to have a large colored population," the article read. "Of the some 23,000 inhabitants, only slightly over 4,000 are colored residents. True, this is a high percentage per capita compared to other Northwestern cities. But, as one resident put it, the colored people have to live somewhere, and whether the North westerners like it or not, they are here to stay."
Faced with an increasingly dilapidated town, the Housing Authority of Portland wanted to dismantle Vanport altogether. "The consensus of opinion seems to be, however, that as long as over 20,000 people can find no other place to go, Vanport will continue to operate whether Portland likes it or not," the 1947 Sunday Journal article explained. "It is almost a physical impossibility to throw 20,000 people out on the street."
Almost—but not, the city would soon learn, completely impossible.

Delta Park, tucked along the Columbia River in Portland’s northern edge, is today a sprawling mix of public parks, nature preserves and sports complexes. Spread across 85 acres, it houses nine soccer fields, seven softball fields, a football field, an arboretum, a golf course and Portland's International Raceway. It's spaces like this—open, green and vibrant—that make Portland an attractive place to call home; recently, it was named one of the world's most livable cities by the British magazine Monocle—the only U.S. city to make the list. In the park's northwest corner sits Force Lake—once a haven for over 100 species of birds and a vibrant community swimming hole, now a polluted mess. Around the lake stand various signposts—the only physical reminder of Vanport City. But the intangible remnants of Vanport live on, a reminder of Portland's lack of diversity both past and present.

Portland's whiteness is often treated more as joke than a blemish on its reputation, but its lack of diversity (in a city of some 600,000 residents, just 6 percent are black*) stems from its racist history, of which Vanport is an integral chapter. When Oregon was admitted to the United States in 1859, it was the only state whose state constitution explicitly forbade black people from living, working or owning property within its borders. Until 1926, it was illegal for black people to even move into the state. Its lack of diversity fed a vicious cycle: whites looking to escape the South after the end of the Civil War flocked to Oregon, which billed itself as a sort of pristine utopia, where land was plentiful and diversity was scarce. In the early 1900s, Oregon was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity, boasting over 14,000 members (9,000 of whom lived in Portland). The Klan's influence could be felt everywhere, from business to politics—the Klan was even successful in ousting a sitting governor in favor of a governor more of its choosing. It was commonplace for high-ranking members of local and statewide politics to meet with Klan members, who would advise them in matters of public policy.

In this whitewashed world, Portland—Oregon's largest city then and now—was known as one of the most segregated cities north of the Mason-Dixon line: the law barring blacks from voting in the state wasn't revoked until 1927. Most of Portland's black residents before World War II had come to the city to work as railroad porters—one of the few jobs they were legally allowed to hold in the state—and took up residence in the area of Albina, within walking distance to Portland's Union Station. As the Albina district became a center for black residents, it also became one of the only places in the city where they were allowed to live. Extreme housing discrimination, known as redlining, prohibited minorities from purchasing property in certain areas: in 1919, the Realty Board of Portland approved a Code of Ethics that forbade realtors and bankers from selling or giving loans for property located in white neighborhoods to minorities. By 1940, 1,100 of Portland's 1,900 black residents lived in the Albina district centered around North Williams Avenue in an area just two miles long and one mile wide.

Like it did to so much of the country, World War II changed the landscape of Portland completely. In 1940, just before the United States entered into the war, industrialist Henry Kaiser struck a deal with the British Navy to build ships to bolster Britain's war effort. Searching for a place to build his shipyard, Kaiser set his sights on Portland, where the newly opened Bonneville Dam offered factories an abundance of cheap electricity. Kaiser opened the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation in 1941, and it quickly became known as one of the most efficient shipbuilding operations in the country, capable of producing ships 75 percent faster than other shipyards, while using generally unskilled, but still unionized, laborers. When America entered the war in December of 1941, white male workers were drafted, plucked from the shipyard and sent overseas—and the burden of fulfilling the increased demand for ships with America's entrance into the war fell to the shoulders of those who had otherwise been seen as unqualified for the job: women and minorities.

Black men and women began arriving to Portland by the thousands, increasing Portland's black population tenfold in a matter of years. Between 1940 and 1950, the city's black population increased more than any West Coast city other than Oakland and San Francisco. It was part of a demographic change seen in cities across America, as blacks left the South for the North and West in what became known as the Great Migration, or what Isabel Wilkerson, in her acclaimed history of the period, The Warmth of Other Suns, calls "the biggest under reported story of the 20th century." From 1915 to 1960, nearly six million blacks left their Southern homes, seeking work and better opportunities in Northern cities, with nearly 1.5 million leaving in the 1940s, seduced by the call of WWII industries and jobs. Many seeking employment headed West, lured by the massive shipyards of the Pacific coast.

With Portland's black population undergoing a rapid expansion, city officials could no longer ignore the question of housing: There simply wasn't enough space in the red lined neighborhoods for the incoming black workers, and moreover, providing housing for defense workers was seen as a patriotic duty. But even with the overwhelming influx of workers, Portland's discriminatory housing policies reigned supreme. Fearing that a permanent housing development would encourage black workers to remain in Oregon after the war, the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) was slow to act. A 1942 article from the Oregonian, with the headline "New Negro Migrants Worry City" said new black workers were "taxing the housing facilities of the Albina District... and confronting authorities with a new housing problem." Later that same year, Portland Mayor Earl Riley asserted that "Portland can absorb only a minimum number of Negros without upsetting the city's regular life." Eventually, the HAP built some 4,900 temporary housing units—for some 120,000 new workers. The new housing still wasn't enough for Kaiser, however, who needed more space for the stream of workers flowing into his shipyards.

Kaiser couldn't wait for the city to provide his workers with housing, so he went around officials to build his own temporary city with the help of the federal government. Completed in just 110 days, the town—comprised of 10,414 apartments and homes—was mostly a slipshod combination of wooden blocks and fiberboard walls. Built on marshland between the Columbia Slough and the Columbia River, Vanport was physically segregated from Portland—and kept dry only by a system of dikes that held back the flow of the Columbia River. "The psychological effect of living on the bottom of a relatively small area, diked on all sides to a height of 15 to 25 feet, was vaguely disturbing," wrote Manly Maben in his 1987 book Vanport. "It was almost impossible to get a view of the horizon from anywhere in Vanport, at least on the ground or in the lower level apartments, and it was even difficult from upper levels."

Seemingly overnight, Vanport (named because it was midway between Portland and Vancouver, Washington) became Oregon's second biggest city and the largest housing project in the country, home to 40,000 workers at its peak (6,000 of whom were black). At its opening in August of 1943, the Oregonian heralded it as a symbol of America's wartime ingenuity. "Vanport City goes beyond providing homes for defense workers," the article proclaimed. "It is encouraging all possible conditions of normal living to parallel the hard terms of life in a war community."

The year 1948 had been a particularly wet year, even by Oregon standards—a snowy winter had left the mountain snow pack bloated, and a warm, rainy May combined with the spring melt to raise the level of the Columbia River to dangerous heights. By May 25, 1948, both the Columbia and Willamette Rivers reached 23 feet, eight feet above flood stage. Officials in Vanport began patrolling the dikes that day, but didn't issue any warnings to Vanport's residents; the United States Army Corps of Engineers had assured the HAP that the dikes would hold, and that Vanport would remain dry in the face of increasingly rising waters. Still, the HAP safeguarded its files and equipment—removing them from their offices in Vanport, along with some 600 horses from the adjacent racetrack.

On May 30—Memorial Day, 1948—Vanport woke up to a flyer from the HAP that read:
REMEMBER.
DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT.
YOU WILL BE WARNED IF NECESSARY.
YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO LEAVE.
DON'T GET EXCITED.

The dikes did not hold. At 4:17 p.m., a break came in a railroad dike that separated Vanport from Smith Lake, along the city's northwest edge. What began as a small hole—just six feet, initially—rapidly expanded, until water was steadily streaming through a 500-foot gap in the dike. As water seeped into the city, homes were swept away in the flood, their foundationless-walls unable to withstand the force of the water. According to Rachel Dresbeck in her book Oregon Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival, it wasn't the HAP or city police that first alerted residents to the incoming flood, but students and faculty from Vanport College, who had come to Vanport on a Sunday in order to collect and secure their research projects. Though the Columbia Slough succeeded in absorbing some of the incoming water, within ten minutes, Vanport was inundated. In less than a day, the nation's largest housing project—and Oregon's second largest city—was destroyed. 18,500 residents were displaced, and roughly 6,300 were black.

In the days following the Vanport flood, rumors swirled in the local press. "Official" estimates of casualties—doled out liberally to reporters by those not directly involved with the investigation—were in the hundreds, and eyewitness accounts told stories of dozens of bodies being carried down the Columbia River. Days into June, no bodies had been recovered from the flooded town, stoking rumors that the HAP had quietly disposed of bodies in order to lessen the blame for its mishandling of the situation. One news story suggested that the HAP had arranged for at least 600 bodies to be stored in the Terminal Ice & Cold Storage facility downtown; another story claimed that the government had quietly and by the cover of night loaded 157 bodies (or 457, depending on the telling) onto a ship bound for Japan.

Most derided the rumors as "ugly" and "irresponsible," and they were right, but they reflected the general distrust of the public—especially the now-displaced residents of Vanport—toward housing and city officials.
"If it had been a totally white population living there, would it have been different?" Ed Washington, once a resident of Vanport, speculates. "Probably. If they had been poor white people, would it have been different? Probably not."

Both black and white workers lived in Vanport, but unlike defense housing in Seattle, which was built in an integrated fashion, Vanport had been a segregated community, and the black workers were kept separate from the white workers. According to Vanport resident Beatrice Gilmore, who was 13 years old when her family moved from Louisiana (by way of Las Vegas) to Oregon, the segregation wasn't mandated by law, but came as a result of practices from the HAP. "It wasn't openly segregated," Gilmore says. "The housing authority said it wasn't segregated, but it was. There were certain streets that the African Americans were assigned to."