For months something wonderful has been rising above our little green gallery in Portland’s Pearl District.

The Casey, June 2007. Those two stories of green brick in the foreground are the Bullseye Gallery

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Leaving the bucolic idyll of North Lands, I’m back in London for one drizzly Turner-esque day, a climactic decompression chamber in which to re-orient myself to the less romantic side of Bullseye, before I fly home to the daily challenges of a small business, its piffling aggravations and less than dreamy realities.

An overcast boat ride between the Tate galleries seemed an appropriately lugubrious place to reflect on a variety of attitudes I find particularly annoying in Bullseye’s marketplace.
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Factory schmactory. I’m on my way to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to set up Bullseye’s stand at COLLECT, the international art fair for contemporary objects.

Fifteen hours, three airports and a cultural canyon away from Garlic Gulch.
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In response to my story yesterday about Bullseye’s beginnings, I got this email from Linda Steider:

“I used to bring my students from the gorge to tour the factory & especially loved it when our tour guide would point out the old beam that was left in place from when the factory was being built around the houses without tearing them down first. Is the beam still there?”

Linda’s question sent me back to the archives for this tour of THE YEAR WE BUILT THE NEW FACTORY OVER THE OLD ONE.

The first Bullseye “factory” was a little frame house in a Southeast Portland neighborhood called Garlic Gulch. As the company grew - and the neighbors evacuated, the guys would buy the house next door, until they owned 5 or 6 shacks cobbled together with corrugated metal and duct tape.
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