Poking Portland: Just one more quirk in the land of odds

PORTLAND, Ore. — Acupuncture is not just for people. It's also for cities — if the city is Portland.

Adam Kuby has stuck a 23-foot needle into the ground down by the Willamette River and hopes to plant more, choosing locations where he figures the city's "chi," or vital energy, needs some help.

Unusual? You bet. Unusual for Portland? Not really.

For several years, Portland has been reaping praise from lifestyle magazines from Men's Journal to specialty publications. But the magazines skim over Portland's quirkier qualities. To some, they make Portland even more endearing.

There's what's left of the 24-Hour Church of Elvis (online only these days), the Voodoo Doughnut shop, nude bike festivals, the 5K Bare Buns Run in Forest Park and what was billed as the world's longest drag-queen chorus line.

For kitsch lovers there's the Velveteria, a black-velvet-painting museum. Lots of taste, all of it bad in some eyes, unless you love it, and the owners do. A black-light room enhances your favorite Mack Truck Jesus, Elvis or bandito.

"You will never be the same after a visit to the Velveteria," the Web site promises. For those who love action, the "Zoo Bombers" are young adults who race on kiddie bicycles down steep and windy roads starting near the Oregon Zoo at speeds up to 50 mph. Details and photos of fractures and ghastly scrapes and bruises are posted on the Internet as badges of honor.

Among the latest additions to the panoply of Portland's oddities are Adam Kuby's giant needles. An artist who arrived from New York four years ago, Kuby says the acupuncture project is an attempt to get people to see the city in a holistic way.

"It is a visual way of expressing what a lot of people already know," said Kuby. The city is "one organism, one body, one very complex independent system."

Not to mention eccentric.

Ubiquitous bumper stickers proclaim "Keep Portland Weird." They were meant to support small local businesses to keep Portland from being big-boxed out of its identity.

But they've become a focal point for what might be a counterculture elsewhere.

Portland has been called The People's Republic of Portland (land-use rules irk some developers); Beervana, (it's loaded with microbreweries); the Rose City (the flowers are nearly worshipped here); and Sin City, a salute, of sorts, to its frontier past and recent bouts of permissiveness that some people find a bit much. Others just shrug. That's Portland.

The first President Bush called it "Little Beirut" for the hostile receptions he could rely on, and his son hasn't fared any better.

Portland's quirkiness is homegrown. At first the town was "Stumptown," a just-logged patch of rough riverside cabins in the mud. A wintertime coin toss in 1845 decided it would be named Portland, not Boston.

The place has always a little different.

Tavern-keeper and former Portland mayor Bud Clark was photographed some years ago with a raincoat wide open in front of a statue. "Expose Yourself to Art," the poster read, a classic then and now.

Teetotaling lumberman Simon Benson, hoping his workers would show up reasonably sober, gave the city the ubiquitous "Benson Bubbler" brass drinking fountains a century or so back, promoting pure water. Portland's beer consumption plunged. Undaunted, Portland brewer Henry Weinhard offered to pipe fresh beer, 24/7, through a downtown fountain. He got a polite "no thanks."

Portland's Skid Road was revered by loggers, sailors and miners flush with pay and looking for fun. Those who overdid it might wake on a sailing ship, "Shanghaied" as an unwilling crewman. There's a tour available of tunnels said to have been used for the purpose.

Skid Road included Erickson's Saloon, which claimed the world's longest bar. The late historian Stewart Holbrook writes that it measured exactly 684 feet, "a kind of symbol of local greatness and potency" worth fighting over. The building still stands, duly marked, in the old district, which is reluctantly becoming gentrified, sort of.