Haunted house
I see that whoever they are who run Pittock Mansion are planning to spruce it up.
“We would like to host events, we might actually want to rent the place if somebody wants to have a mini-gathering. We haven't done any of that so we want to be proactive, we're going to explore and do it in a much more thoughtful manner,” she said.
Gangopadhyay calls the plan "Pittock 2.0," a multi-year vision and fundraising effort to transform the museum internally and how it approaches community engagement. Part of that will include expanding the storyline of museum exhibits by lifting the voices of marginalized communities.
Nobody's talking too plainly about the big gorilla in the front parlor. Henry Pittock, for whom the place has long stood as a sort of monument, was a notorious racist, and an influential one at that. These days we don't memorialize folks of that ilk.
Look at what's happened with Harvey Scott, who with Pittock owned and ran the Oregonian newspaper at its inception. Scott's name is eventually going to be taken off everything it's currently on, from a local school to a local mountain. A couple of years ago, the black bloc-sters ripped his statue off its Mount Tabor pedestal, and it's never to see the light of day again.
Remember, Pittock's fancy mansion is owned by the City of Portland, a world leader in history erasure. Chainsaw Rubio and the parks people are in charge at the moment. That the joint is still named after Pittock is pretty amazing.
Turning the place into something compatible with today's official story lines may turn out to be impossible. At the rate we're going, they may wind up converting it into low-income housing with a surrounding homeless camp. Or maybe Sam Adams can move in when he's appointed city manager in a year or two.
People should leave the poor old rich dead guy alone. Sure he might have had some odorous views on minorities, but that was over a century ago. And he probably wasn’t that different than most other Oregonians at the time in regards to his views. And he certainly isn’t the reason that blacks are still such a small minority in Oregon today. You see, they possess something called free will. Strange right?
ReplyDeleteI mean, even someone as revered as Muhammad Ali had some views on things that would be considered controversial nowadays. Is anyone suggesting that we should cancel the greatest heavyweight champion of all time? No they aren’t, and it would be ridiculous to even suggest such a thing.
The view from the toilet in the main bathroom is quite stunning on a clear day! Henry could certainly survey his domain from that vantage point!
ReplyDeleteAs for his political views they were the “norm” back then and that should be noted not expunged.
They should turn it into a homeless village.
ReplyDelete