Carrie Brownstein started it. In the "Portlandia" and Sleater-Kinney star's 2015 memoir "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," she had this to say about her adopted city:

"When I'd visit Portland in the '90s, it had a seedy quality to it. Just watch Gus Van Sant's 'Drugstore Cowboy' if you want to get a fairly realistic picture of some of the locals. Like Seattle before the dot-com boom, Portland -- and the Pacific Northwest in general -- still felt like a place people came to disappear. You can hear that heaviness in the music from that era, the sadness in Nirvana, Mudhoney, Crackerbash, the Wipers (who were from earlier years) -- the sounds embodied the emotional equivalent of getting washed up on the beach somewhere. You can feel at the mercy of your surroundings in the Northwest, subsisting on dreariness until even your internal landscape feels soggy. It's depressing, and before the money came in, before the buildings started to reflect the bright ideas and optimism, that sadness was reflected back much more poignantly."

Last week, a Brownstein fan put this memorable excerpt up on Reddit, launching a thread on the social-media forum that quickly gained momentum, with dozens of longtime Portlanders jumping in with remembrances of the way things were.

"I used to tie a flannel shirt around my waist, put on my tall docs, and walk around pioneer square hoping to get cast as an extra grunge kid in X-Files," offered a Redditor using the name Tubbagutz.

Wrote another: "Back in jr high, my friends and I would take the bus from Vancouver just to go to 2nd Ave for punk rock we couldn't find at Fred Meyer, and Cal Skate for parts and stickers. The 'big city' was intoxicating to a 13 yr old."

Brownstein was an obvious choice to get such a discussion started. The rocker and actress has both Portland street cred and, far rarer, Portland celebrity cred. And her IFC comedy series made a splash in its very first episode, in 2011, with a song satire that declared, "The dream of the '90s is alive in Portland."

That dream -- chiefly about living your own life however you want to define it -- is still very much alive. But the reality of the '90s is mostly gone. Portland Redditors were quick to make this argument.

"85% of the people that have moved here in the last five years would have NO f---ing interest in living in that town, or even visiting... trust me," wrote one Redditor using the handle Counterkulture. "None of the bars would be snobby enough, none of the restaurants would have menus that would, in any way, appeal to them. Housing/apartments, etc., same deal."

Counterkulture certainly has a point. Portland in the 1990s was dirtier, less trendy and more dangerous than the city we live in today. It was largely still a working-class city. The swank Pearl District didn't even exist yet. The Lovejoy viaduct came down only in 1999, opening the mostly derelict industrial area to redevelopment. The decade started with a tavern owner as mayor (Bud Clark) and ended with a radical environmental activist camping out for 11 days on the ledge of a downtown building (Tre Arrow).

Author Chuck Palahniuk, in his memoir/city travelogue "Fugitives and Refugees," related a reasonably commonplace occurrence in downtown Portland in the years between Clark's mayoralty (which ended in 1992) and Arrow's sit-in on that ledge: being jumped by a group of guys on a "wilding" excursion.

"Twenty-five points!" one of the attackers exulted after his punch knocked Palahniuk to the ground. "After that," Palahniuk wrote, "every time anyone kicked me in the head, someone shouted, 'Ten points.' Or they shouted, 'Twenty points,' if they kicked extra hard or their shoe landed in my face.' This all lasted about the length of a traffic light. Then they were running away, and I got up and shouted after them. Then they were chasing me, and I ran for the lights and traffic of W Burnside Street."

So why do so many people lament this Portland's demise, like the Redditor who insists, "I miss dirty, weird Portland"? Because at least you knew you were truly alive, goes the thinking. Because you felt like you were getting in on the ground floor of something important being built, something uniquely Portland. Plus, the Trail Blazers were title contenders every year.

This was the Rose City where waves of Santa Clauses faced off with police in riot gear. Where anarchists in town for an "un-conference" broke windows and banged on parked cars as part of a planned "wandering vandalism" excursion. Portland in the 1990s was, of course, where Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love met. Love spotted the soon-to-be grunge-rock legend shortly before he took the stage at the Satyricon.

"You look like Dave Pirner," she told him -- Pirner being Soul Asylum's lead singer, who, unlike Cobain at the time, had made a name for himself on the national music scene. Cobain's response: He wrestled her to the floor.

Love also had yet to become a rock star at this time. She had been making her living in Portland as a stripper.

"I didn't have a gimmick," she said in 1992 of her stripper stage persona. "I see girls now who are trying to be alternative. They won't make a dime. You've got to have white pumps, pink bikini, f---in' hairpiece, pink lipstick. Gold and tan and white. If you even try and slip a little of yourself in there you won't make any money."

It would be another nine years before Portlander Selena Mooney launched the "alternative" nude-models/burlesque-performers outfit SuicideGirls. Mooney's tattooed, goth-like women are now as mainstream in the Rose City as "Star Wars" movies, so much so that the business has relocated to Los Angeles.

Many longtime Portlanders clearly feel like something meaningful has been lost over the past dozen or so, increasingly upscale years, something that made Portland special. Those who think the city today is special found the Reddit thread a bit disheartening.

"Goddamn," a Redditor with the user name Ttihay wrote, "I feel like the only one who likes this city."

Well, buck-up Portland 2017 fans, because Brownstein, at least, still likes the Rose City too. In the paragraph before the one that made it onto Reddit, she wrote this:

"Portland became a respite and a true hometown [for me]. ... Portland has a nurturing quality, a placidity. For better or worse, it's a perennial but shyly hopeful city; if we had a gesture it would be a shrug."

-- Douglas Perry