Cesar Chavez Boulevard

City crews are removing the 39th Avenue signs from Cesar Chavez Boulevard this year.

(Motoya Nakamura)

Jon Coney ran outside when he saw city workers removing a 39th Avenue sign near his Northeast Portland home earlier this month. The 12-year Beaumont-Wilshire resident wanted to know why the sign was coming down.

It's time, they told him.

Five years after the Portland City Council unanimously voted to change 39th Avenue to César E. Chávez Boulevard, crews are removing the old numbered street signs. Both names have been on display during the transition period.

This final step is reviving an issue that fractured the city and pitted Latino activists against the street's residents and business owners.

"It felt like one final slap in the face to the residents," Coney said.

Coney was one of nearly 800 residents on 39th Avenue to respond to a 2009 survey from the city auditor gauging support for the name change.

He was one of nearly 700 to vote "no."

To at least one of the name-change advocates, the removal of 39th Avenue signs brings satisfaction.

"I'm glad that it's happening, because I know there are some folks out there in the community who have not grown to accept it," said Martin Gonzalez. "But it is the reality. Things do need to change to reflect the growing diversity of Portland."

The City Council provided for a five-year transition period when commissioners approved the name change. Diane Dulken, a spokesperson for the transportation bureau, said the change gave residents and businesses time to deal with the necessary paperwork.

Crews are working from north to south on the street, Dulken said, removing one 39th Avenue sign at a time when they're in the area for other projects.

All signs north of Sandy Boulevard should have been removed, she said. Every 39th Avenue sign will be down by the end of the year.

Residents have expressed interest in taking the signs home, she said, but the bureau can't give away public property – or donate the signs to neighborhood associations along César Chávez, as one neighbor suggested.

The push to name a Portland street for Chavez, a civil rights activist and labor union leader, started with a bitter fight in 2007 to rename Interstate Avenue in North Portland. Gonzalez, one of the founders of the Latino Network, said people made "very racist comments" at neighborhood meetings.

The debate briefly shifted to renaming downtown's Fourth Avenue, but quickly thereafter came to a halt.

Activists renewed their efforts several months later with new options: Grand Avenue, 39th Avenue and Broadway. The fight again was hurtful and heated.

"The basic message we got was: Not in our back yard," Gonzalez said. "It rocked the perspective that people have here that the city is 'progressive.' It showed its true colors."

Laurelhurst resident Eric Fruits said what angered him most was the process. The City Council went through the motions of following the legal procedure, he said, but he felt commissioners had already made up their minds. It's over now, he said, and it's time for the old signs to come down.

Removing the 39th Avenue signs is important, said Maria Lisa Johnson, who did her best to broker peace during the debate several years ago. But the act doesn't bring closure.

"I acknowledge it probably will bring up some more tensions, but it's also part of the healing of moving forward in a changing community," she said.

"It's a symbol of a long struggle and my hope is that it is also a symbol of acceptance and going forward, not going backward."

-- Melissa Binder