Jacob Grier writes:

I like bikes. I like coffee. I especially like biking to coffee, which is one of the things that drew me to moving to Portland, Oregon, many years ago. Sometimes I also like giving myself a big dumb project, like, say, biking to 100 different coffee shops. Did Portland even have 100 coffee shops within biking distance that were worth visiting? I didn’t check when I started, but it seemed plausible. So one sunny spring day following one of our notoriously gray and rainy winters, I decided to do it, posting a photo from each one on Instagram with the hashtag #biketobeans.

This was in 2023, and biking to 100 coffee shops appealed to me as a way of getting back in touch with the city after the tumult and isolation of the pandemic years, to break out of the routine of a shrunken world. The project was also a kind of personal repudiation of the right-wing portrayal of the city as urban hellscape. At the same time that I was cruising along Portland’s river-spanning bridges and tree-lined streets, then-candidate Donald Trump was describing it as a “shambles” and “a burned-down hulk of a city.” Earlier this month, responding to something he saw on television, he insisted that “paid terrorists” are ruining the city, making it “like living in Hell.” As with other blue cities he’s targeting, the allegation of violent chaos is intended to establish a pretext for policing with the National Guard over the objections of local leaders—or as he put it on Thursday, “to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that.”

Is it really as bad as he says? It sure doesn’t look that way from the view on two wheels, experienced in real life rather than mediated through screens and social media. My project took me through hundreds of miles of Portland, branching out to every quadrant of the city. What better way to get to know what’s really going on in one of America’s most progressive cities, caught between its own struggles with good governance and an authoritarian president determined to exaggerate its problems to justify a military crackdown, than through its myriad coffee shops? [Continue reading…]