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.