For my transect walk, I decided to walk around East Bayside/Munjoy Hill and look at the kinds of educational infrastructure in place around the neighborhoods. Before leaving on my walk, I made sure to look on Google Maps and see where there were schools, as I wanted to check areas around schools to see what I could find in terms of playgrounds and playspace for children and what I noticed about where children were playing. These were my findings:
- East End Community School (43.670622, -70.253396): The East End Community School has a gated playground area and sports fields. I’m curious to know whether this is for the school only, or whether the public has access at certain times, but I didn’t see any informative signs.
- Eastern Prom Location 1 (43.670853, -70.253569): The upper portion of the Eastern Prom has a few tennis courts and a baseball field, but no playspace for younger children.
- Eastern Prom Location 2 (43.670853, -70.253569 à close enough to Loc. 1 that coordinates are coming up as the same): The middle portion of the Eastern Prom has a dilapidated playground and a baseball field. The playground does not look like it as been renovated in many, many years.
- Emerson School (43.668339, -70.244983): The Emerson School had absolutely no playground infrastructure.
- Shailer School (43.667031, -70.250599): The Shailer School had no playground, but an open grassy park area next to the school. In front of the park was a sign about opening and closing times for the park and playground, but I could not see any playground. I drove around the school’s driveway to try and see if there was a hidden playground, but found nothing.
Many locations where I anticipated seeing some kind of school were just residential. It seems like the schools were converted into housing recently. On Google Maps, there were at least 3 schools with addresses that I passed that just did not exist.
I was greatly under-impressed with the amount of playgrounds and easily accessible playspaces for students after school. I saw no students walking outside, though this might have been I took my transect walk on a rainy day. I was not able to get to Portland in time for school dismissal, which I believe is much earlier than our general end of classes, but overall there were almost no public playgrounds that were accessible to kids. Even the playspaces on Eastern Prom are hard for students to access, as to get to the playgrounds, kids need to cross large streets with fast moving cars (and their parents may not let them do this by themselves).
As for the neighborhoods of Munjoy Hill and East Bayside, they are definitely more “gritty” neighborhoods as Sharon Zukin would say in “How Brooklyn Became Cool.”{1} It is hard to tell which areas are impoverished, as all the buildings are built in a similar New England brownstone-equivalent style, but some are less well-kept than others. Because of the weather, there were very few people out on the streets. It was not an uncomfortable experience to walk around, but I felt like it was not what I saw that was impressive in relation to school and playground infrastructure, but what I did not see. There is an incredible lack of playgrounds and open playspace for students in the Munjoy Hill/East Bayside area. The only relatively young people I saw seemed to be about late high school/college age and were smoking in front of a house in East Bayside.
I originally was looking more into transportation in Portland, but decided that I thought infrastructure as it relates to education would be more interesting. I think that from what I saw in Munjoy Hill and East Bayside, Portland definitely needs to improve on its education infrastructure. While I do not know what educational infrastructure exists in other neighborhoods of Portland, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of playgrounds and playspace for students. When I did my café ethnography, I was surrounded in the café by parents and their young children. To see such a vibrant community of young parents and their children was very exciting to me, but educational infrastructure in the city should be improved to support those children’s needs.
{1} Zukin, Sharon. “How Brooklyn Became Cool.” In Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 35-62.
As I took my transect walk around the east end I felt the same way about the lack of educational infrastructure. I went on a Sunday, and it was not raining, but also did not see really any kids outside on the playgrounds. Do you think that there is a stigma in this part of Portland over kids playing outside? Perhaps tension with older and younger residents? The infrastructure does exist but is currently not being utilized to its full potential. The education aspect of infrastructure I think is very important because it influences the way in which we are conditioned to learn from a city starting at a very young age.
I am really glad you focused more in educational infrastructure for your transect walk because Alex and I both focused on transportation. We did not notice much usage of the few playgrounds in the area and it made me wonder how much usage they would receive on a weekday. It sounds like your experience, like ours, may have been affected by the timing of your visit. I wonder if the dearth of playgrounds and children using them are unfortunately correlated. Perhaps if there were more playgrounds, there would be a lot more children using them and parents do not take their children to playgrounds because of their belief that they are not easily accessible. And of course, weather also plays a role as you noted and is something especially important to consider for Portland. Maybe some type of indoor play facility would be a really smart investment?
I agree with your analysis of the style of the neighborhood. I think the slight socio-economic changes on the East Bayside/ Munjoy Hill area are somewhat hidden by the New England style of houses, but my transect walk turned up an interesting path of beautification and renovation in that area. Granted, it was either due to business necessities or appearance-fueled grandeur, but the theme was there. I don’t remember walking by any schools, which may point your note about a lack of “typical” place markers, i.e. parks.
Regarding improving educational infrastructure and building more playgrounds for children, I think it will really help your argument if you looked into what are currently the daily schedule of a Portland youth like? And if they do not have access to a playground, what are their alternatives? Are there going to be significant barriers for usage even with an increased number of playgrounds?