Signage outside an upcoming Portland chocolate cafe, 1670 New American Chocolate House, was removed Tuesday morning after an artist linked its branding to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The artist, Molly Alloy, pasted words and a dotted arrow to connect the three colonial ships printed outside the 1670′s future home to slavery. The cafe, found at The Rodney building in Portland’s upscale Pearl District, is expected to open by year’s end.

In an open letter to 1670 posted Monday to Alloy’s Instagram and other social media, the artist tied the chocolate bar’s original branding to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and to Saffron Colonial Kitchen, a since-closed colonial-themed restaurant in North Portland.

Late Tuesday morning, a worker was scraping the sign off the windows of the Northwest Glisan Street business.

Alloy’s social media posts on Monday called out the 1670 branding:

“Many people who walk by your display will immediately understand that a ship of that silhouette, transporting cacao in the year 1670, would be closely connected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and likely to also transport human beings in horrific conditions. So what is the story that you are trying to tell us by using this as your branding?”

And the improvements we made to the window display pic.twitter.com/TiG7WDKEBQ — Molly Alloy (@MollyAlloy) November 12, 2019

Alloy, a co-director at the Washington County Museum, goes on to note that 1670 was the year a public house selling chocolate opened in Boston, timing that corresponds to a rise in “the enslavement of Africans for cacao production to meet the rising demand of this new market.”

“Let’s not forget that the cacao plantations and chocolate houses that inspire this brand were on land stolen from indigenous peoples in a period of ongoing and systematic genocide up and down the American continents,” Alloy writes. “And that the land we are on today is also stolen; and that Native people today are still violently and systematically oppressed.”

After Alloy’s adjustments, the sign read, “In 1670, The New American Chocolate Trade Increased Demand for Enslavement of Africans.” The arrow makes the sign appear to depict the triangular trade “Colonial Greed,” “Abducted People” and “Genocide and Stolen Land for Export Crops."

Portland artist Molly Alloy added information about the slave trade to this sign touting the arrival of a new chocolate shop in the Pearl District.

Little information about 1670 was publicly available Tuesday morning. A page on the Steelhead Architecture website describes the project as a “chocolate production and cafe.” Before it was removed Tuesday, the cafe’s sign suggested it would open this fall, while a Facebook post from the iBuildPDX construction company’s Facebook page announced a “grand opening before the holidays 2019.”

A representative for The Rodney building did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“As artists and community members we felt compelled to resist the erasure of all this context; we could not passively support the giddy perpetuation of wealth built on violence that your window display flaunts,” Alloy writes. “So, we adjusted the display to create an opportunity for truth and learning; a potential site for collective dialogue.”

-- Michael Russell