Green Zebra Grocery, the business we’ve said has the best bike parking in Portland, is just two days away from opening their second store. And they’re putting bicycles front-and-center.
At 8:00 am on Thursday a parade of zebra-striped bicycles will roll from the the original Green Zebra on Lombard in the Kenton neighborhood to the new store in the Lloyd District (808 NE Multnomah). They’ll arrive via Portland’s best protected bike lane and park at the edge of the sparkling new public plaza of the Hassalo on Eighth development which is home to a building named “Velomor” and a bike parking facility with 1,200 spaces (the largest in North America).
Green Zebra’s opening is a big milestone in the Lloyd District’s ongoing transformation from suburban-style, 1960s industrial park to a more modern, dense and vibrant urban place. We captured this transformation in a three-part series we published last summer.
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(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)
There are a lot of companies that act bike and community-friendly, but Green Zebra is legit and store Founder and CEO Lisa Sedlar is the real thing. In her former job as CEO of New Seasons Market she was directly engaged with the (sometimes controversial) Williams Avenue project and she positioned their Williams store to optimize the experience of bicycle riding customers.
“The days of driving to the big store and parking in the big lot and doing the big shop are a thing of the past — it’s time consuming and wasteful,” Sedlar said in a press release this week.
Not only is her store adjacent to the Multnomah Street bikeway on the ground floor of a bike-centric residential development, she’s also pulling out all the stops to express Green Zebra’s bikey bona fides: on Thursday they’ll raffle off a new Marin bicycle and they’re sponsoring a bicycle repair station from 3:00 to 6:00 in partnership with Go Lloyd and Left Coast Bicycles.
And the best news of all: Green Zebra and American Assets Trust (owners of the Hassalo and many other buildings) are sponsoring a repair and replanting of the concrete planters that create the bikeway separation on Multnomah. The store is bringing in experts from City Repair who will plant pollinators along the entire corridor. That’s fitting because the color of the bikeway’s buffer zone is officially known as “beeswax.”
Swing by on Thursday to check it out. For more details about the grand opening check out GreenZebraGrocery.com.
Disclaimer: Green Zebra and Hassalo on Eighth are BikePortland advertisers but they had no editorial influence on this post.
— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – jonathan@bikeportland.org
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It would be nicer if they paid to make the cycleway permanent instead of putting new planters in the buffer. The woonerf and car-free blocks created by this development are pretty cool though. Would love to see more of that kind of people-oriented housing/retail built around town.
I could actually see a future where the city works with AAT and other businesses in the lloyd to build much more excellent bikeways. All it would take is some leadership at City Hall. The opportunity and potential is starting us all in the face.
Multnomah should be made bus and bike only from at least the rose quarter to 15th. They could reverse the flow of the busea sp that they drive on the left side, using the median for bis stops and leaving the rest of the space for wide bike lanes and bike parking.
Theres no need to have any cars on that stretch of Multnomah. There’s already plenty of car access to parallel streets and intersection with the parking lot exit west of 16th can be closed. Make all cars enter and exit through halsey for that parking lot and move the valet and loading zones to 9th. Boom. Easy, car free commercial area. Plus with buses running the opposite direction, they wouldn’t get stuck at the rose quarter waiting for inbound / outbound buses, the turn from 15th on the 8 would be better and the 77 could make the turn much easier. Win win for everyone except the 10 or so people who will have to park / walk one block further away than they used to. Plus, there would be no bike / bus merges.
“The store is bringing in experts from City Repair who will plant pollinators along the entire corridor.”
so we can expect bee stings on our future visits?
Plant milkweed, get monarchs! Different plants attract different types of pollinators.
Only if they’re running stop signs.
“pollinators” tend to be insects and other active pollen-transporting and flower-visiting organisms (bees, ants, insects, birds, bats, etc). I think the term you are maybe looking for is pollinator-attracting plants (like bee-balm, butterfly bush, and other flowering plants) ??? Unless they are planting bee boxes, bird houses, and bat nests in the planter boxes.
Or maybe they will fertilize the atmosphere with bike-themed cycle-dispersing vectors…
I rode through the area yesterday, and got stung by a bee. It was texting while it flew; I asked it (politely) to stop; it followed me to the next stop light and then stung me. It didn’t bother stop to see if I was ok, and the police won’t take a report. Between the horse stabbings and bee attacks, the Springwater and the Lloyd are both becoming no-go areas for me. I know it isn’t PC, but can’t we just buy these damn bees a bus ticket to Provo or somewhere and get them off our streets?
I really don’t think the Multnomah bike infra is all that great; the signal timing is lousy for cyclists, the pavement’s not that great, and the last time I used it I was almost right-hooked at one of the Lloyd Center parking entrances.
I don’t think the users of Multnomah’s bike infra are all that great. I cross between 7th & 9th in the crosswalk about four times a day, and I have only seen ONE cyclist stop for pedestrians in there, ever. They usually just blow by and pretend not to see you.
Excited for this!!!
The planters do take up quite a bit of space. They look pretty when maintained. Certainly prettier than a bunch of jersey barrier.
I wanted to like this store, especially because of the bike-friendliness being touted — until I rode there and checked it out.
It had all the hallmarks of button-pushing gentrification that I have grown suspicious of: young, earnest, almost entirely white, pierced-and-tattooed clerks; the most expensive convenience-store coffee I’d ever seen; and narrow aisles filled with all sorts of really cool “healthy” brands I’d never heard of and could not afford.
It was all just a little too precious for me. I don’t know whether it’s a sign of gentrification or a cause of it — some aspects of gentrification seem very chicken-or-egg these days, including infrastructure for bicycle-friendliness — but either way I just don’t feel a need to support it.
Happy shopping everybody.
Totally agree.
I don’t like that Green Zebra promotes the Organic racket and pushes anti-GMO pseudoscience onto shoppers. However, I do like that it’s a smaller-scale neighborhood-focused shop and encourages people to walk and bike rather than drive. So I guess it’s a wash?
” Green Zebra promotes the Organic racket and pushes anti-GMO pseudoscience onto shoppers.”
Yes, they should be pistol whipped for this.
Please show us the pro-GMO science.
Well, for all the anti-GMO stuff, no one has actually shown it will harm you. There aren’t allergies or mutant plants growing vines around people.
There are downsides to GMOs, especially corn, but those downsides aren’t what you hear in the typical organic section or store. Golden rice will be very useful if they can get it to market. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/07/173611461/in-a-grain-of-golden-rice-a-world-of-controversy-over-gmo-foods
I beg to differ. That bee didn’t learn to text by itself.
“no one has actually shown it will harm you”
True, but also a strawman. The chief objection to GMOs is that they harm the planet, not necessarily the consumer of the product, by enabling increased use of herbicides and/or pesticides.
But as far as harm to the consumer goes, I will point out that no one has yet proven that it will not harm you. The Precautionary Principle prevails when it comes to what my family puts into our bodies.
>> I don’t like that Green Zebra promotes the Organic racket
Green zebra sells sporting equipment???
There’s a large Safeway in the Lloyd District.
that would be a raquet.