Neighborhood demolition

"McMansions" move into Magnolia

The invasion of Magnolia by the land snatchers was not a "shock and awe" campaign. Initially, it was gradual — a house demolished here, another there, to be replaced by three- and four-story McMansions. The neighborhood was changing, as all neighborhoods will over time.

I didn't like it, but I told myself that change is inevitable. It can be good. It can revitalize a neighborhood, but Magnolia as I have known it is being destroyed by land snatchers who seize houses only to demolish them. This change is not good.

In recent years, the land snatchers have become rapacious. In the last year alone, I have witnessed the demolition of at least six homes within blocks of my house. The charming traditional homes of Magnolia, the elegant Tudors and the modest cottages, are now an endangered species. I drive down a street in my neighborhood, looking at houses I have long appreciated, and all I see are possible — no, probable — demolitions.

I never thought the one next door to me would be demolished, but recently it was — an $850,000 teardown. Now the land snatchers are at my property line, and my property is experiencing the effects of their construction equipment. So am I, and it's not pleasant.

My southwest slope was torn up when a large cedar tree south of my property line was violently uprooted by an excavator operator who seized the tree in the machine's steel jaws and shook it like a cat shakes a mouse. My 60-year-old tulip tree was mutilated by both an auger and a concrete pumping machine — large branches snapped off like toothpicks.

The noise is constant as the machines rumble and roar next door, and dump trucks line up in the alley behind my house — six of them one day. My grandson would love it. I hate it.

But what I hate most is the fact that I am helpless. There is nothing I can do to prevent the land snatchers from having their way with Magnolia. This developer has another house to demolish just down the street — and so it will go, house by house, until Magnolia is completely changed from what it was and is.

But perhaps it won't matter because the newcomers won't remember how Magnolia used to be before the invasion of the land snatchers. As for me, I'm leaving.

Carol Nickisher, a Magnolia resident for 19 years, taught English at the University of Washington. She loves old houses, and is house-hunting in one of Portland's older neighborhoods.