Chess mates

• No matter the accent, everyone bellies up to the chessboards on Foster Road

By Connie Pickett

The Portland Tribune, Aug 6, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Vasyl Savchyn sits at a folding table before a green and tan chessboard. The black-and-white pieces are all set up, just waiting for orders.

The retired Ukrainian immigrant and expert chess player breaks into a brilliant smile that lights up his lined, craggy face.

“Come, come,” he says with a thick accent, beckoning a passer-by to sit down at the table in Southeast Portland’s Laurelwood Park. “Come play chess.”

That’s about the sum total of Savchyn’s English, but it doesn’t matter. Chess is a game that transcends language, cultural, economic and neighborhood differences, a truism that’s about to be proved once again on a breezy Friday afternoon in the tiny park in the center of the Southeast Foster Road business district.

For years, the district has been thought of as a low-income area, crime-ridden and graffitied, not a place conducive to getting out of the car, strolling around and shopping.

Busy Southeast Foster Road serves as a diagonal shortcut from inner east Portland to the outer southeast, passing by a lot of nondescript, unappealing storefronts. The four lanes of heavy traffic are inhospitable to pedestrians.

But neighborhood leaders are working to reverse the trend with events like Chess in the Park, which continues every Friday through Aug. 30, and this weekend’s Foster Road Sidewalk Celebration.

“We’ve found that business districts and neighborhoods become more alive when people are out on the streets and walking around,” says Sabrina Freewynn, community organizer for the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program.

“We’ve learned we have to slow traffic down and get motorists out of their cars to enjoy the neighborhood. Part of Chess in the Park is to do that.”

Other projects in the works include storefront renovations, a traffic management plan and a business directory, showing both the diversity of the types of businesses as well as their owners, says Freewynn, who is assigned to the Foster Target Area Project, a community-driven program partially funded by the city to reinvigorate the business district.

It’s already working, Freewynn says.

“Four years ago, there was not a single coffee shop on Foster,” she says. “Now there are several. It’s an indicator that you are getting foot traffic. Coffee shops don’t survive otherwise.”

Cultural gap narrows

One goal of the weekly chess event is to bridge the cultural gap between Portland’s largest concentration of Eastern European immigrants and their English-speaking neighbors in the three neighborhoods Ñ Foster-Powell, Mount Scott-Arleta and Creston-Kenilworth Ñ surrounding the Southeast Foster Road business district.

“It’s so much less intimidating to connect with somebody of a different language and culture across the chessboard,” Free-wynn says.

The brightly colored signs and balloons advertising Chess in the Park caught the attention of Bill Stouffer, a Creston-Kenilworth resident and chess fanatic who once was rated by the U.S. Chess Federation.

“This is a good way to bring the community together,” he says.

Shortly after 4 p.m., Savchyn settles in for a match with Paul Moiceev, who moved to the Foster-Powell neighborhood six years ago. “I like the idea of these weekly games very much,” says Moiceev, a computer technician.

He translates for Savchyn, who says he has been drumming up interest for the weekly chess event by passing out fliers to his chess buddies in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

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