If you drive across the Morrison Bridge from downtown, you will soon enter the Buckman Neighborhood. One of the city's oldest, it was within the town of East Portland until it was annexed to the city in 1891. Along with Albina, Brooklyn and Lair Hill, it is part of an inner ring that Portland historian Carl Abbott has labelled the stopover neighborhoods where immigrant groups initially settled before moving on to other outer neighborhoods.

The present Buckman Neighborhood extends from Burnside on the north to Hawthorne on the south, and from 28th Avenue on the east, and the river on the west.

Once, densely packed 19th century working-class housing and tenements extended to the river but almost all of these dwellings were torn down and replaced by 20th century commercial and industrial buildings so that 12th Avenue is the current western residential boundary.

Today, there are more than 1,500 residential buildings in an eclectic mixture: small late 19th century working-class cottages and Queen Anne houses of various sizes, early 20th century upper and middle-class houses, and multi-family dwellings and apartment houses built in every decade since the 1920s.

Buckman's dwellings also span three periods of the city's development: a small-town, late 19th century Victorian walking city, a rapidly developed, early 20th century streetcar residential district, and a mid-to late 20th century neighborhood that experienced decline and revitalization in the modern suburban/automobile era.

Although Buckman has its share of grand, 19th century Victorian mansions, now often restored and nicknamed, "painted ladies," small wooden cottages and multi-family boarding houses and tenements have always been more dominant.

Three of the most common types of late-19th century single-family houses were the workers' cottage, an urban American standard, and two types of early settler houses with two rooms each; one with a door-in-the-gable end and one with a door-in-the-side type. All three house types have also been called Greek Revival style houses but most had little architectural ornament of any kind.

Once there were thousands of these small dwellings, which can be seen in early Portland photographs, but most have either been remodeled beyond recognition or torn down and replaced by larger dwellings.

Standing between these small houses and larger Victorian mansions were well-built types of Queen Anne (or Victorian) cottages, ornamented with machined shingles, brackets and molding, newly available for average houses. These "cottages" housed a growing middle-class in dwellings with highly industrialized stud-construction systems and elaborate wooden ornamentation. But before 1900, they typically lacked public utilities (sewage, gas, electricity) and other modern conveniences like refrigerators, toilets and washing machines.

Forms of popular housing with modern conveniences arrived in Buckman soon after the turn of the 19th century in one of Portland's most significant building booms marked by the opening of the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905.

Three distinct types of housing symbolize this era: the common four-square house, the Arts and Crafts duplex and the streetcar commercial building with second floor apartments.

While these forms of early 20th century housing don't look modern today, they brought modern standards of living with technological kitchens, three-fixture baths (sink, toilet and bathtub), public utilities (electricity and sewers), dining rooms and closets—all unknown housing standards to average Buckman residents of the late 19th century.

Other new house forms in the early 20th century include Buckman's popular porch-gable house, with its prominent front gable projecting on top of the front porch, and various forms of the duplex, and four-plex, particularly the corner-bay duplex with its prominent second floor bays and porches.

Like middle- and working-class housing elsewhere in the city, Buckman's housing was constructed by hundreds of private contractors who borrowed ideas from numerous catalogs and architect designed houses. But like contractors from around the country, they blended national styles to produce locally dominant house types in every neighborhood of the city.

In Buckman, one dominant sign of the contractors development are groups of similar houses, three-in-a-row. Today we can call them the "Buckman threes" because of their powerful presence throughout the neighborhood. Together they vividly tell the story of early 20th century middle-class housing development and how small-scale local builders, not large-scale developers, built (and continue to build) Portland's substantial residential neighborhoods.

Following the Great Depression and especially during WWII, many of Buckman's larger houses were sub-divided. Many four-squares were separated into upper and lower apartments, today often signaled by two doorways on the front porch, one new and one original plus two mailboxes, two gas and electric meters.

In addition, various forms of multi-unit apartments begin to appear after 1920. Courtyard and row house apartments in various period revival architectural styles came first. After WWII, larger forms of multi-unit housing accommodating the car began to appear with corner lot, "L"-shaped plans and often motel-style apartments with continuous, second floor walkways.

Today Buckman presents a full range of Portland's historic housing divided between late 19th and early 20th century single-family houses and multi-unit apartments of the last half-century— a sometimes uneasy truce and mutual coexistence between different scales and images of neighborhood—and a continuing story of residential Portland.

-- Thomas Hubka

Thomas Hubka is a Portland-based author, architectural historian and Professor Emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has recently taught architecture courses at the University of Oregon, Portland State University and Portland Community College and offers neighborhood tours for the Architecture Heritage Center.