How our columnist shed her Portland fetish and learned to love the blisteringly beige city of her birth.
I’m not sure my kid will ever move home. And I have no one to blame but myself.
I’m the one who introduced her to Portland, the one who dangled Powell’s Books, Voodoo Doughnut and the romance of rain under her young nose on trips to see friends over the years. After growing up in a parched desert, Annabelle was bound to soak up that dark green city like a sponge.
And she did, first in college and now as a recent grad – parking her banged-up, sticker-covered Subaru outside her tiny apartment on Division Street, a main drag packed with bars, coffee shops and cool businesses. My studio dance major teaches ballet to little ones, and right now she’s choreographing a high school production of Guys & Dolls. She also plays guitar and sings original songs in cafes and, not long ago, sold her zines, prints and felt creations at a pop-up at a groovy little store called Grover’s Curiosity Shop, just around the corner from her apartment.
Annabelle did it. She got out of Phoenix. She lives in a place with a DIY pancake restaurant; where no one tore down all the elegant, early 20th-century movie theaters; where people stand in the rain for hours just for the privilege of eating brunch.
If you’ve never been to Portland and you’re curious, check out the IFC series Portlandia, where Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein skewer the city – and its rampant population of hipsters – in eight seasons of television comedy sketches. It’s funny because it’s true.
I’m quite confident that no one will ever make a sketch comedy series called Phoenixlandia. We are not part of the cultural zeitgeist. I mean, we never even got a season of The Real World.
I’ve been considering, examining, lamenting and loving Phoenix for a long time. My whole life, actually, but particularly since I moved back to my native state in my mid-20s after school and work in Southern California, Washington, D.C., and New York City. I came home for two weeks, max. That was more than 30 years ago. I don’t regret my decision, but I’m not sure I’ll ever stop putting Arizona under the magnifying glass. Myself, too.
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote an essay for Phoenix New Times called “Phoenix Has an Inferiority Complex – Or Maybe You Do.”
New Orleans is sexy. Denver is earthy.
Austin rocks, Dallas shops. New York never sleeps. San Francisco is stunning. Los Angeles is starstruck. Boston is really smart.
And Phoenix? Phoenix is slumped on the Barcalounger eating potato chips and drinking beer, scratching itself, bored to tears. If Phoenix had a mother, she would say, “Get off your ass and take a shower! Get out of the house! You’re young, you’re handsome, you’ve got a lot going on upstairs. For Chrissakes, you’re the fifth-largest city in the country. You’ve got to be able to find something to do.”
But Phoenix is depressed. I think the city’s having a quarter-life crisis – you know, that new trend where 25-year-olds decide they’re all washed up because they’ve graduated from college and haven’t yet married, had 2.5 kids, bought a lovely house and made a million dollars?
A lot has changed in the last couple decades. The city’s settled into middle age and, for the most part, it’s a good look. Since I wrote that essay, Arizona State University has gobbled up Downtown Phoenix in (mostly) the best ways, infusing the city with density, infrastructure and bodies. We’ve got light rail, more public art, creative restaurants, bars and music venues. The original arts neighborhood, Roosevelt Row, is mostly breweries now, but RoRo (we actually have a neighborhood with a nickname!) feels vibrant every day of the month, not just on First Fridays. And if you want funky, there are stuffed animals hanging from yarn-bombed trees along Grand Avenue.
But this city is still steeped in self-loathing. In so many ways, not much has changed since I wrote this in 2005:
It’s totally camp to hate Phoenix. In the early ’90s, a local artist made tee shirts with booming yellow suns and the slogan “Phoenix Is Boring.” Reubens Accomplice, a local band, named an album I Blame the Scenery. And for years, I had Hunter S. Thompson’s opinion of Phoenix pasted to a wall in my office: “If there is, in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viscously overcrowded version of Phoenix – a clean, well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing.”
Is Phoenix so bad? Or do we suck because we think we suck?
Annabelle called the other day, and I asked her about it. I apologized for bugging her with something so esoteric. No problem, she said. “It’s something that I think about basically every day,” she tells me.
“People in Phoenix are hating on Phoenix – and so is everyone else.”
Why?
“I’ve gotten, ‘Oh that place shouldn’t exist. It’s in the middle of the desert.’”
And what does Annabelle think? She disagrees. “You know how we always talk about how in Phoenix you have to look for the cool stuff?” she asks.
That doesn’t happen in Portland. There, she says, all the cool stuff is right there for the taking. Somehow that makes it less cool. And she finds herself making comparisons.
“When I’m in Portland, I look for things that remind me of home. It’s hard to explain. The houses – there’s just this certain Tempe feeling, that maybe has to do with the ASU campus a little bit or the art galleries that you used to take us to like Bragg’s Pie Factory.”
Those memories “hold this really powerful, strong feeling of what I thought the world was going to be like,” she says.
“It would just feel so homey and at the same time so inspiring and would make me think about how excited I was to grow up. I feel like in Portland I look for places that feel that similar way. I don’t think I’ve quite found the feeling I got when we went to First Fridays in Phoenix.”
To my great surprise, it doesn’t go both ways for Annabelle.
“I’m not necessarily looking for things that remind me of Portland when I’m in Phoenix,” she says.
She loves living in a walkable city, loves that she still hasn’t explored every neighborhood and admits that the fact that she’s now 21 might have a positive impact on her opinion of her adopted city. But she’s not starstruck.
“Portland is almost like – it’s not like New York or L.A. where it’s actually cool, it’s like Portland is silly-cool. People here are ridiculous.”
It’s true that I always see at least one person on a unicycle when I visit Annabelle.
A couple of her friends recently found a clothing-optional spa, she tells me. “The Phoenix in me is, like, ‘These people are fucking ridiculous.’ In the middle of the workweek, these people are just going to a nude spa?”
Still, Annabelle admits she loves the quirky discoveries she makes all the time in her adopted city. And that she envies her friends in Phoenix who are finding cool stuff, too.
“I do see myself finding an underbelly of Phoenix if I came home.”
Easy to say in February, I tell her.
“The Phoenix summers are definitely brutal, but I feel like they are bonding,” Annabelle says. “There truly is nowhere else in the country [that has them] – for better or worse. I definitely take a pride in that. It’s kind of fun to be at an extreme, even if it’s awful.”
Fun enough to move home?
I got a solid, “Maybe.” I’ll take it.
After we hung up, I thought, maybe all of this is less about Phoenix having an inferiority complex and more about other cities – like Portland – having a superiority complex.
So, what’s wrong with a little hometown pride? I’ll give it a try.
Yes, Portland has Stumptown. But we have Cartel. Our art museums are better. We’ve got Chris Bianco. Powell’s can be overwhelming. And I’ve never understood why people freak out over the carpet at the Portland airport. I actually prefer the design at Sky Harbor, even though that carpet doesn’t have an Instagram fan page.
That was exhausting. I’ll keep trying. And I won’t give up on Annabelle moving home – someday. A few days after our call, she texted a photo of a prickly pear cactus she spotted on a walk in her neighborhood.
“In P land?!?!?!” I texted.
“Ya ikr??!?”
Amy Silverman
Born and raised in Phoenix, Amy Silverman is a multiple winner of the Virg Hill Arizona Journalist of the Year award. She also penned the memoir My Heart Can’t Even Believe It.
