It's 3 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and a man in a summer-weight blazer stands in the doorway of the historic New Market Theater on Southwest Ash Street, holding an index card that asks, "Got an extra ticket?"
"He was probably one of the 30 people who called me at home last night," says Marc Moscato, founder of The Dill Pickle Club, which organized the behind-the-scenes walking tour of downtown Portland's Chinatown landmarks.
The Chinatown tours are the 2010 kickoff event for
, a nonprofit, volunteer group that aims this year to dig into "overlooked facets of Oregon history" and show that history is not dead and buried but living in the state's and city's walls and on the streets.
"We're doing five tours this year with the theme 'Forgotten Histories,'" says Moscato, who looks gratified as he watches nearly 50 people who did get tickets load up on pamphlets detailing upcoming Dill Pickle Club events, including a cycling tour of North Portland's African American murals and a weekend bus trip to eastern Oregon ghost towns.
"The first tour we did was WPA (Works Projects Administration) art, work from the New Deal and its legacy here in Portland," says Moscato, a 33-year-old filmmaker and author. "Even on Belmont Street, some of the sidewalks were done by WPA."
Future Dill Pickle Club ideas range from 10 mini-comics about Oregon history to a downloadable guided audio tour of Chinatown -- so many ideas that one appreciates why Moscato, pole-thin in retro-chic duds, appears on the edge of breathlessness.
"When people think history in Oregon, they think Lewis and Clark, the pioneers," says Moscato. "I think there are a lot of other strands of our history we don't acknowledge. In order to make sense of this place, it's right to start with historical stuff -- it has relevance to how we understand Portland now."
Today's tour, run in partnership with
, splits into two groups. Bob Luck, who grew up in Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s, will lead one; filmmaker Ivy Lin ("Come Together Home") will lead the other.
Moscato gathers up the remaining Dill Pickle Club pamphlets and heads to the University of Oregon's White Stag complex, where the tour will end with a lecture and slideshow by Dr. Marie Rose Wong, author of "Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon."
"It was always my ambition to start some sort of arts organization, some center for intellectualism and activism and community education," says Moscato, who after getting his master's degree in arts administration at the University of Oregon, moved back home to Buffalo, N.Y.
"The economy was terrible, no one could find a job, and it started me thinking about the Great Depression, and how, as an artist, one makes sense of this," he says.
The question led him to read about Ben Reitman, who in addition to being called "the hobo doctor" for ministering to rail-riders, drunks and prostitutes, was a founder of the Dill Pickle Club, a downtown Chicago hub of free thought and political activism from 1914 to 1934.
"It was a really interesting non-institutional learning facility, the kind of place where a lot of soapbox speakers would go," Moscato says. He became so enamored of the Dill Pickle Club that he wrote a book about it -- "Brains, Brilliancy, Bohemia: Art & Politics in Jazz-Age Chicago." Last year, Moscato and three like-minded artist friends decided to resurrect The Dill Pickle Club, first as a bar, then, realizing they lacked sufficient capital, as an organization that fostered art and ideas to create community through similar interests and the brisk exchange of conflicting ideals.
"I like to think about creating events where there are multiple perspectives, where people disagree," Moscato says. "We don't want to push any one agenda."
Others are apparently eager to take the trip with him. Every Dill Pickle Club event, according to Moscato, has been filled to capacity.
The Dill Pickle Club
More information about The Dill Pickle Club, membership ($50 a year) and upcoming events can be found at
.
Today's tours are no exception. The group huddles beneath the Chinatown gate at Burnside and Northwest Fourth streets listening to Ivy Lin explain how it was shipped from Taiwan in 1986. Then the group visits an apparently vacant storefront that houses the Bing Kong Bow Leung Association, one of several extant family associations in the area where ethnic Chinese sharing a surname can catch up on local news and gamble.
"I can't believe how much there is to do here," says Naomi Dagen Bloom, a New Yorker who retired in Portland with her husband. A former docent for the Tenement Museum in New York, Bloom missed the constant mix of cultures and races in New York City. The Dill Pickle Club's programs, she says, give her "a connection to ethnic Portland."
At the White Stag Building, Wong provides more historical context to the tour: the influx of Chinese immigrants in the 1860s when workers were needed; the 1882 federal act that banned Chinese immigration when workers were not needed; the attempts to make Chinese workers carry ID cards.
"Sound familiar?" asks Wong, the comparison to Arizona Senate Bill 1070 bringing equal measure of applause and loaded silence.
It is the sort of cultural and intellectual collision Moscato hopes Dill Pickle Club events provoke.
"I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunity to be in the place that I am," he says. "I feel really lucky to be pursuing this."
--Nancy Rommelman, Special to The Oregonian