It has been a rough year in most of the world, but I think Portland leveled up its suffering on the path to sainthood.
The pandemic shutdown decimated the city’s economy and emptied its streets. The already large homelessness problem hit turbo. Unemployment reached record levels. The protests, police brutality, tear gas, and federal invasion added icing to the cake of misery. Forest fires smothered the city in smoke in September, a final spear jabbed into the side as the city waited for more unrest.
However, the one thing that has sustained me through all this has been doughnuts. Back in April, when I spent my days driving an empty bus around an empty city, full of shuttered businesses, I noticed my favorite doughnut shop (Angels Doughnuts, formerly Tonallis, on Alberta) was still open. It was the one thing that seemed to be open on the street while the world doom scrolled out of control.
I bought a doughnut, masked up, my first time in a business outside of a grocery store since the pandemic began. Eating the sweet treat walking home just about made me cry, the normalcy of eating a doughnut when I couldn’t take anything for granted anymore overwhelmed me. I returned again and again throughout the summer, as the year got worse. I stopped at another favorite on my way to work, Heavenly Donuts on Lombard, hours after police had cracked down on a protest at the police union headquarters across the street and the smell of tear gas hung in the air. Doughnuts became a sweet life preserver keeping me afloat while Portland seemed to crumble.
I thought about doughnuts a lot while I drove the 12 last week up and down Sandy Boulevard. Sandy has seen a lot of change the past decade, and has watched Portland grow up from The Clearing to Stumptown to Rip City to Portlandia.
Nothing captures the changes in Portland more than one food item, the humble doughnut. And the 12 goes by quite a few doughnut shops (five by my count). Daydreaming about doughnuts, and catching up on one of Portland’s busiest routes, got me thinking about the city, where it’s been, where it’s at, and where it’s going.
Before cars, before buses, before streetcars, before the railroad, before fur traders, before Lewis and Clark, before horses, before even the wheel arrived in North America, Sandy Boulevard was here in what is now Portland, Ore. It was a path connecting a marshy landing on the east side of the Willamette River opposite a clearing in the woods on the west side, to indigenous settlements near what is now the airport, the Grotto, and along the Columbia and the Sandy rivers.
Sandy Boulevard is a curving diagonal slash against the tyranny of the grid. It is also a busy four lane street, that narrows and widens as it drops through the blocks.
Sandy is a mix of development, containing everything from old streetcar style commercial development, the beautiful Hollywood Theater, old industrial buildings, bland post-World War II strip malls and motels, and the latest in high rise big city condo living.
In the Roseway Neighborhood where Sandy intersects with Fremont and 72nd, Annie’s Donuts has been frying up donuts for a long time. Its pink roof shelters a small shop that doesn’t look like it has changed much with the times. Donuts are lined up in a glass case. Coffee warms in a carafe on a hot plate. A small seating area with formica tables was taped off because of the pandemic, and Plexiglas now separates customers from the workers, but besides that everything is still jelly filled and fried.
Annie’s looks a lot how Portland used to look in decades past: working class, no frills, down to earth. Before Portland became cool, it was a conservative blue collar town in a remote, provincial corner of the country, a low slung city known mostly for rain, strip clubs, and the Trail Blazers. It had jobs and neighborhoods like any other city, but it was a smaller place with simpler tastes.
But Portland had change in its future.
If there is one doughnut place that straddles old and new Portland, or I would even say was a catalyst for Portland growing up, it is Voodoo Doughnut. Say what you will about what it has become — the hordes of tourists lined up in the pink cattle guards, the chain of locations nationwide, that they now accept credit cards — it’s hard to emphasize how groundbreaking it all felt back in the 2000s.
I remember visiting its original location in Old Town one time on leave from the Marine Corps with a friend in the 2000s. It was a hole in the wall place in a seedy part of town, surrounded by a porn theater, strip clubs, and dive bars. There wasn’t much inside, just a counter, and a spinning glass display of doughnuts and no line in sight, unless you counted the junkie sitting against the wall outside. A disinterested person behind the counter with cool looking black hair, wearing a t-shirt to a band I’d never heard of, and with lots of piercings and tattoos asked what we wanted. Bauhaus was playing loudly. We tried to order the codeine cough syrup filled one we heard about, but was told they had to stop making those a few months ago because someone snitched on them to the health department. I ended up with bacon maple bars and I think one covered with butterfingers or Froot Loops or something. Definitely not your standard apple fritters from the Safeway bakery case.
It’s hard to describe how revelatory the bacon maple bar was before every doughnut shop in the country started doing it and before there was that brief period in the late-naughts when they put bacon on literally everything. It was weird; meat and doughnuts had never previously existed together before. I remember describing it to my fellow Marines when I got back to North Carolina, and they were appalled by the idea. Except that it worked, it’s that little bit of maple that runs off the pancake onto your slice of bacon during brunch, the sweet savory combo that is actually delicious and less weird than you think.
The word got out about this weird little doughnut shop in Portland. Suddenly people were visiting Portland, and carrying pink boxes with them on the airplane back home. The lines grew outside the shop, they expanded it, added the cattle guards. Of course, people visited Portland for other reasons besides Voodoo, but it didn’t hurt that it appeared in all the travel shows, the travel articles, and became legendary.
The 12 goes by two of its locations, the original in Old Town and the its shop just off Sandy on Davis. While it still churns out Bacon Maple bars and other concoctions, it definitely feels less punk rock than it used to. It grew up along with Portland. What was once an inexpensive city where you could work part time in a doughnut shop and on your art/music/circus performance the rest of the time and still afford to live here, isn’t anymore. The Sandy Hut, a long time dive on Sandy across the way from the Davis Voodoo is now surrounded by high rise condo buildings. Along with the Safeway in Roseway, there is a Whole Foods in Hollywood. Portland went from being blue collar to being kind of bougie and getting Blue Star.
Voodoo isn’t the only one at fault for this. You could blame real estate developers. You could blame Californians. You could blame Portlandia. But Portland was probably more than just the victim of its own success; if everyone wants something a piece of something a little weird and quirky, it’s hard for it to stay that way forever.
Actually never mind, go ahead and blame it on Portlandia.
Portland grew up. It was no longer a hipster paradise for those in the know. Sure, there was still the Naked Bike Ride and Last Thursday on Alberta, but the last few years the city has felt different. The rent skyrocketed. The real estate market became red hot and competitive. Long time residents got priced out of their neighborhoods or out of the city altogether. The traffic got really, really bad.
Coco Donuts has several locations in the city, one of them next to the 12’s downtown northbound timepoint. If Annie’s is old school, Voodoo weirdo goth kid gone corporate, Coco is sleek and modern. It has white walls, natural stained wood, and white metal shop stools to sit on before Covid. Whereas Annie’s has diner coffee, Coco has its own consistently solid proprietary roast. Voodoo’s doughnut’s verge on the weird (they sell one shaped like a dick for crying out loud), Coco sticks to mostly classic flavors with some newer trends.
Coco makes good, solid, reasonably priced doughnuts, even if the decorating aesthetic of its locations scream New Portland. But, honestly, that isn’t a bad thing. As Portland has grown up, we’ve gotten world famous restaurants, been on the forefront of brewing and coffee, and gotten to taste more flavors of the world as more people move here. It became a more expensive city, but in many ways it also became a nicer place to live.
Before the pandemic, I remember driving the 12 down Burnside and getting stuck at the light and looking over at Voodoo. I remember feeling kind of sad, with the cranes going up everywhere constructing buildings most Portlanders couldn’t afford to live, the bougie restaurants, the people with money and tech jobs who had moved in, it made the city feel less interesting, like it had lost something. Sure Old Town was still one of the more “sketch” neighborhoods in Portland, but now Voodoo was a certifiable tourist trap in the middle of it with lines, selfie sticks, and cattle guards. It felt like the local culture had left behind its blue collar roots, and money and gentrification had priced out all the weirdness that had made Portland interesting in the first place. Portland had lost its grit and was getting a shiny, glassy, anodyne future.
The pandemic changed that. Encampments filled many empty lots and sidewalks. Plywood went up over closed businesses. A wave of looting hit a downtown already emptied of office drones and shoppers. Graffiti sprung up on the plywood and blank walls, making the city look like a fill in for 1970s New York City.
I drove the 12 the weekend after protests broke windows and left graffiti in the Hollywood neighborhood. All those bright shiny buildings looked worse for wear, and I worried about some favorite businesses on the street and if they would survive all of this. Portland wasn’t as nice as it had been last year when I lamented its loss of grit. I now regretted being sad about how nice Portland was, now seeing how bad things have gotten.
That’s the beauty about doughnuts though, no matter what a place might do, or the building it’s located in, at its heart the doughnut is an egalitarian treat. It is the treat of the people, and a treat you can take with you, perfectly portable in this moment of not being able to eat in. It’s a round wonder of sweetness, you take one bite, another, and then another, until you circle back around to where you started.
Portland started life as a working class city at the confluence of two rivers in the rainy Pacific Northwest. It got fancier the past decade, but 2020 has definitely knocked the wind out of it. Maybe all the grit, crime, graffiti, and grime are temporary blip in Portland’s upward gentrifying trend, or maybe this year brought us back to where we started from.
I know the 12 will see what happens though. Old, new, fancy or not, it will see what happens. Sandy has always seen change, and the 12 will just keep driving. And there will always be a whole lot of good doughnuts on Sandy.
As I set out to buy doughnuts to taste test earlier this week, I walked out of Annie’s. I bit into a still warm maple covered old fashioned on a cold, fog covered Sandy Boulevard as I waited for the 12. It was delicious and perfect in every way. I knew Portland would be OK.
THE DOUGHNUTS:
So which one is best? I purchased two kinds of doughnuts each from Coco Doughnuts, Voodoo Doughnuts, and Annie’s Doughnuts. I also purchased doughnuts from Doe Doughnuts in Hollywood, which makes delicious vegan doughnuts and ice cream but their fancier flavors did not line up with the parameters of this taste test. Doe’s makes a solid doughnut for being vegan and I would not feel ashamed bringing vegan or dairy free friends there.
I bought a chocolate covered raised and a buttermilk bar from each, because I love both those kinds of doughnuts, especially buttermilk bars.
Voodoo surprised me by having the best chocolate covered raised of the pack. The frosting tasted perfect, the doughnut itself dense but still delicious and fluffy enough. Coco’s frosting was too thin, the doughnut itself did not hold its own. Annie’s doughnut was classic, and delicious even if the chocolate frosting was noticeably darker than the others.
Coco had the best buttermilk bar, the doughnut was fluffy, a perfect density, perfectly fried, and with just the right amount of glaze. Voodoo’s was fine, just not as amazing or perfect as Coco’s. Annie’s left a lot to be desired. Its iteration was too thick, too dense, overcooked, and nowhere near the quality of the other two.
All three shops are still great stops and Portland classics. Coco’s coffee and buttermilk bar is one of my favorite combos in the city. Voodoo makes good doughnuts, although like most Portlanders, I would never stand in a line for them. And if you live in Roseway, you already knew how delicious Annie’s was.
Fast Facts:
Does it go downtown? Yes.
Does it go to Walmart? No.
Does it go to Fred Meyer? Yes, in Burlingame and Tigard
Does it go to the MAX? Yes, downtown and the red line at Parkrose TC
