99% Invisible - 154- PDX Carpet

Episode Date: February 25, 2015

Portlanders have a tradition when visiting their airport: taking a picture of their feet. It’s not to show off their shoes, but rather, what’s under them. They are documenting the famous PDX airport carpet. Julie Sabatier from Rendered has the … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Thank you for helping us keep PDX safe and secure. For Gavida, for us, please proceed to a white cagey telephone in the press seal. I flew into the Portland Airport recently, and when I got off the plane, I took a picture of my feet, in keeping with the local custom. A foot selfie. That's producer Julie Sabatye, host of the podcast, rendered, formerly known as Destination DIY. She lives in Portland.

And I almost always take a foot selfie when I'm at PDX, the Portland airport. I think I do it most often when I come home. Like, here I am, I'm back in Portland. The feet are actually not the most important thing about a Portland airport foot selfie. It's actually what's under your feet, the famous PDX airport carpet. It's allowed to suddenly 80s teal color with a repeating geometric pattern. Like any carpet you might see in an airport or a hotel lobby or an office building, it's probably not what you'd choose for your living room. The design I'm told is based on the way the runways and lights look from the air traffic

control tower, and also on the radar screen that the air traffic controller sees with that sweeping line going around and around, and the dots are the little blips representing airplanes. It's hard to say if it's the pattern people are responding to or the bright teal background color, but one thing is for sure. The carpet is very, very, beloved. There are even signs in the airport now saying, tweet your feet with the hashtag pdxcarpet. And it goes deeper than that.

Meet Emma. She actually has a pdx carpet inspired tattoo. It hurt a lot. Emma Milken is a 21-year-old Portland native, which means a lot of the carpet in the airport is actually older than she is. She got a tattoo of the carpet pattern on her back. This side and so yes, my left. Emma traveled a lot as a kid.

Her parents are divorced and her dad lives in LA. I think the first time I ever took a flight as an unaccompanied biner, I was probably 11, and I was freaking out. But the carpet had this kind of calming effect on her. On my way, that was kind of like my send off, the carpet was there. And I knew that it would probably be there when I got home. Several years later, when Emma decided to take the plunge and get a tattoo of the Portland carpet design, she realized she was not the carpet's only admirer, not by a long shot. When I got the tattoo, I posted a picture of it on Instagram. And one of my followers tagged at PDX Carpet upon further

inspection. I was like, oh my goodness, the carpet has an Instagram. The carpet has a Twitter and a Facebook page. And that's kind of when I knew that it was this kind of notorious Portland entity. It's important to know that the airport communications department says they are not running any of the social media accounts devoted to the PDX carpet. Emma says that occasionally people on social media make fun of her tattoo. But I'm just sitting back and letting people say what they want about it, but I am in love. I used to live in Boston. I cannot imagine telling Bostonites like, I'm obsessed with the airport carpet at Logan

and having someone go, yeah me too. Jeremy Dunn is a designer in Portland and he's another fan of the carpet. A couple of years ago, he decided to have some socks made with the carpet pattern on them. He spent about $500 on the minimum order, which was 72 pairs. So he was hoping some people would want to buy them. He posted them on our Instagram account and I think it was an hour, maybe two hours, and

they were all sold out. The carpet socks were so popular that Jeremy quit his day job and opened up a retail space. Jeremy socks are actually sold in the airport now, alongside many other items emblazoned with the carpet pattern. T-shirts, coffee mugs, throw pillows, tote bags, stickers, keychains, bike helmets, water bottles. There's even a PDX carpet IPA from a local brewery called Rogue. That's what's so interesting to me about this whole carpet phenomenon. It's great for PDX, it's basically free marketing for them.

But if the airport had tried to create this kind of fervor for the carpet, there's no way it would have caught on, at least not like this. I love this carpet. I love it. It's like a big thing, everyone buys socks and t-shirts. It just kind of represents Portland,

like we're kind of known for this in our airport, this carpet. It makes traveling a little bit more enjoyable, I guess, when I'm in the airport. We always do this selfie, you know, the foot thing. But maybe there's something that's just secretly magical about it. Oh, get a room, people. People have extreme, unprecedented, inordinate amounts of affection for the carpet at P.D.X. When you ask people why they love the carpet so much, they pretty much all say the same thing. When they see it, it reminds them that they're home. And that's sweet, but like so many great love stories, I'm afraid this one is coming to

a tragic end. That is the sound of Portland's heart being ripped out of its chest. Speaking of Pnex, workers are replacing the airport's famous carpet, you know that sea of teal with the red and purple blue accents. It's always hard to say goodbye, especially for travelers with an emotional attachment. A person came up to me and said, oh I love your tattoo. Did you know that they've already started tearing it up and I just kind of felt my heart sink. For carpet it's actually had a pretty long life. The oldest sections

of carpet have been in the airport since the late 1980s. There are things that you just can't repair. You can't just patch your way out of it. It really just looks tired and like it's served its life well. That's Robin McCaffrey. She's an engineering project manager at the Port of Portland, the agency that controls the airport. She's in charge of the Carpet Removal Project, which started in late January. Can you describe what you're doing, Ruther? I'm hooking the clamp to the carpet so the machine can pull it up. Mike MacLeaks works for 4M floor covering.

Actually, he helped install the carpet here at the end of the Seacon course in the mid-1990s. I laid all of this in 1995 for Rubenstein's contract carpets. So do you have any kind of attachment to it? None at all. You're not sorry to see it go. It's just carpet, that's my opinion. The machine they're using to remove the carpet looks like a cross between a motorized wheelchair and a zamboni.

It's called a panther. You attach the carpet to the machine and drive it forward to pull up these huge sections of carpet all at once. Most of this work will be done at night so it can have minimal impact on travelers. And it's going to take a long time. 13 acres of carpet does not get panthered away overnight. If all goes well, and perfectly, it will be earlier than November, but we're giving it a healthy window

and we're saying before Thanksgiving of this year, it will be completely done. When the carpet is all removed, most of it will be sent back to the manufacturer and recycled, but not all of it. They're giving away 4 1,000 square yard pieces. Businesses will have to submit proposals to get one, outlining what they plan to do with the carpet, how they will store it in the meantime, and how they will eventually make it

available to the general public. Whatever happens to the old PDX carpet, one thing is for sure. Its replacement has some big shoes to fill. People are going to hate it. Well, hopefully not. It might be a perfectly great design, but people will still hate it. They'll say, why didn't you replace all the carpet and use the same but-loved design? If they had decided to just re-carpet with the same design, that would have been cool.

See? Yeah, it does seem like the most obvious solution. But the decision to replace the carpet was made back in 2008 Before all the foot selfies and hashtag pdx carpet. I don't think at that time there was an awareness of that great sentiment that exists in the community for the carpet That we became aware of more recently. Did you ever consider Replacing the carpet with the same design? I think that we had thoughts about people asking that question.

Once we were well into it, and it already kind of come up with a conceptual design. Now, when you walk through the airport, you can actually see a sizable swatch of the new carpet. It's a darker green with a repeating geometric motif that's reminiscent of the old carpet, but busier. The business of the new design actually helps hide dirt and other wear and tear. In fact, there's a couple of different versions of the new design, one that's extra busy that they'll lay in higher traffic areas.

It looks like a tropical Jimmy Buffett version of the airport carpet and not in a good way. Jeremy done the sock maker is not a fan. It seems very swoopy and like you know it has more curves to it and it's a little bit different green and it's a little has some yellow in there you know and I think those are all to me those are all things that are not as appealing. Are you gonna make socks of the new design? Yeah, um, probably not. Yeah, I think it's tough if people don't have an immediate love, everybody wishes that

their design work was immediately adored. Michelle Vowe is a partner at Hennaberry Eddy, the firm that took on the unenviable challenge of designing the replacement carpet. And like most design work, there's a lot of thought and consideration that went into it. The inspiration for this had a lot to do with what you see from the air as you're coming in. And that green color that's the main background color for the carpet is much like that experience

of flying into Portland. We have a unique situation here where coming into Portland, the greenery of our surroundings come right up to the doorstep of our city. And those swoopy lines? Also we're looking at some of the that flight path, that pattern, and that curvature is your flying in. You know, if you were to look at kind of the way that aircraft curve around to align with the runways and come in.

Did you ever think about how people's feet would look on the new carpet? No, no, actually, I didn't. Even with all this thought and care, designer Michelle Vo is fully aware that this new carpet is going to be a hard sell. But she hopes it will grow on people over time. I think that the new carpet going down is something that will become endearing. I hope that it will and maybe it won't reach cult status

until 20 years out when it's time to replace it. But you know, that's okay, that's okay. You can't manufacture a cult following for an airport carpet. It has to happen on its own. You don't manufacture a cult following for an airport carpet. It has to happen on its own. You don't say. But I do think that part of the reason that people fell in love with the carpet is because people have a lot of love for the airport itself, which has kind of become a microcosm of Portland.

With local restaurants and food carts in the terminal, there's even a mini farmers market in the Seacon course. And so maybe the new carpet will eventually become a part of the airport the same way the old carpet did, crucial to the experience of coming home to Portland. Then again, maybe not. It's a lot like just having anything in your childhood replaced with something

you're kind of resentful towards the new, whatever it may be. And you could potentially grow to like it, but it'll never be the same as the original thing that you loved. Someday, Emma may love the new carpet. Like someday, I might learn to appreciate Star Wars the Phantom Menace with its Jar Jar Banks, emitter chlorine microbes that control the force. And... No, there's no way I'll ever like it. You hear me, George Lucas? I'll never like it.

You ruined it. You ruined everything! 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Julie Sabatier and Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan Avery Truffleman and me Roman Mars, special thanks to Brian Kramer. Julie Sabatier's Render is an independent show from the public radio world carefully crafted for an audience of makers, doers and curious minds. It's fantastic. It's a new member of the Maximum Fun Network along with some of our favorites like Bullseye, my brother and my brother in me in the flop house, find it and subscribe at renderedradio.org.

We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSund and architecture and interiors firm, who has laid down some memorable carpet in its time in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. I'm throwing rocks tonight. Rocket dude. This was a valued rock. This was a uh... Yeah man it really tied the room together.

This was a valued uh... Did I do one together dude? My rug. Were you listening to the dude together. This was a value dog. Did I do one together, dude? My rug. Were you listening to the dude's story, Donnie? Plector. Were you listening to the dude's story? I was mulling. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook,

we're all on Twitter and Instagram. Every runs the Tumblr, I make the Spotify playlist of 99PI songs, but I encourage you to explore the entire world of 99% invisible at 99PI.org. That rock really tied the room together did it not. Radio Topeo from PRX. you