Portland, America

Having grown up in Portland, I tend to gravitate unintentionally toward spaces in other towns that remind me of home. While visiting another state, I usually end up stumbling upon a coffee shop or bar that feels somewhat familiar, perusing the local beer and wine selection or sipping a cup of coffee while reading the paper.

While Portland has been a center of quirky independent business for as long as I’ve known it, it used to be a more challenging exercise to find these types of places in many other cities. Recently, however, it seems to no longer be much of a challenge, even in the most unlikely town. The local-food/wine/coffee/microbrew culture that’s spread across America (and the world) has brought with it a particular type of restaurant, coffee shop and bar—and every one of them, while distinct, seems strangely familiar.

I spent the entirety of my winter break in Orlando, Fla. When I first started going there for the holidays a few years ago, it was exactly what you might imagine exo-Disney Central Florida to be: strip malls, palm trees, lots of concrete.

This, of course, is still mostly true, but a lot has changed recently. There are new bars with extensive microbrews on tap, quirky spaces with mood lighting and hodgepodge furniture, local art, food cart pods, spaces for local indie bands to play their sets to a young and moderately interested coffee shop crowd and vegan cafes growing their own vegetables out back. In effect, there is more than a little bit of Portland in Orlando.

I got to thinking, while sitting at a coffee shop/bar/movie rental/bookstore/music venue called Stardust Video and Coffee, that this type of urbanization, while easy to praise, also brings with it a sense of homogeneity. In seeking out areas that feel cool, I now feel like I never really leave home. Certainly, the buildings change, but within them lie familiar spaces that present a manufactured uniqueness, one that’s trying to be different and yet is distinctly uniform.

The cultural fad that is hipsterdom is based on clothing, movies, TV shows and art, but it’s also brought with it a certain type of architecture. Inside spaces have become more enclosed, walls erected or, conversely, completely torn down for the sake of minimalism. Bar and coffee shop owners arrange and remodel spaces to make them fit this new cultural sense of style.

If I can find a bit of the Northwest in Central Florida, it begs the question of whether the growth of this homogenous culture represents a loss of local culture or the filling of a void. From what I knew of Orlando seven years ago, I wasn’t impressed with my option of T.G.I. Friday’s for happy hour drinks, but I was probably missing out on a local culture that I failed to see because it was unfamiliar.

Much like local accents disappearing in the nationwide move toward a uniform American accent, this new local culture may have pushed out an old local identity. However, it’s also spurred a series of other local business ventures that may never have survived 10 years ago.

Breweries are springing up, urban wineries are shipping in juice from other states and overseas, locally roasted coffee (or maybe just more Stumptown) is being brewed in cafes, locally sourced food carts are staging street parties. This in itself is supporting an entire section of the economy that by popular accounts was absent just a few years prior.

Culture is, of course, always changing, and the notion that it should or even can be preserved is one that misunderstands the meaning of the term. The push toward independently run, locally sourced business brings with it a familiar culture to us here in Portland, and while the cool coffee shop in Orlando may still be located in a strip mall, its unique homogeneity is a sign of a cultural phenomenon that’s spread nationwide, and even to the most unlikely towns.

There’s a little bit of Portland all across this country, and I hope, at least eventually, this uniformity will give way to a new sense of local, one that will again differentiate cities from one another. In the meantime, it’s nice to peruse a local beer list in a place that feels a bit like home and yet is clearly very far away.