Mischief was afoot as Thanksgiving morning dawned over the Cartlandia food cart pod in Southeast Portland.
About 4 a.m., three people were captured on surveillance footage breaking through a chain-link fence and wheeling away a 300-pound, 5-foot-tall shoe sculpture that had stood in the food cart pod for more than a decade.
The giant neon shoe reappeared several hours later in a Craigslist advertisement for “free stuff,” with its dimensions listed as “Really frickin big.”
“Human sized shoe sculpture with mini basketball hoop game inside,” the Craigslist post said. “Don’t know where it came from but i want it gone.”
But by the time Cartlandia co-owners Roger Goldingay and Carol Otis arrived at the corner of Southeast 77th Avenue and Harney Street, less than half a mile away from their popular food cart pod, the shoe was gone.
“I just can’t believe somebody took it,” Goldingay told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Wednesday. “It was not a happy Thanksgiving.”
The shoe was almost stolen two weeks ago, when two people were caught on surveillance footage breaking into the food cart pod’s fence and attempting to drag the sculpture away, said Jim Ginotti, who manages the pod and owns one of its businesses, The Blue Room Bar.
The shoe was found the next morning tipped on its side, he said. The two people who broke in were never identified.
Goldingay and Otis said they filed a police report over the shoe’s Thursday disappearance but haven’t received any updates about the sculpture’s whereabouts.
Sgt. Kevin Allen, a Portland police spokesperson, said the agency doesn’t yet have suspect information to release.
Ginotti said the Thanksgiving heist is the latest in a long string of thefts at Cartlandia, where he’s had to repair the fence at least 50 times over the past several years because of break-ins.
“We can laugh at this, but there’s more to it than that,” Ginotti said. “After a while, you just throw your hands in the air and go, ‘I just don’t know what to do.’”
Goldingay said he purchased the shoe more than ten years ago from a Chuck E. Cheese on Southeast Foster Boulevard as a way to make the site — once an abandoned used car lot surrounded by barbed wire — more attractive to families.
“I thought it was so cool, and it was the first thing I bought with the little bit of extra cash I had to just kind of fancy the place up,” he said. “It’s been there since the very beginning.”
But Ginotti said that as the years have passed, the area surrounding Cartlandia — specifically the neighboring Springwater Corridor — has changed.
Ginotti said hundreds of people used to bike along the Springwater Corridor every day, particularly in the summer. But over the past several years, he said, the bicyclists have disappeared — along with their business.
Thefts at Cartlandia have surged during those years, with people grabbing tip jars from food carts and stealing light bulbs and barrels of water, Ginotti said.
Otis said they decided against putting out a holiday tree this year because they knew it would inevitably be stolen, as all of last year’s holiday decorations were.
But the theft of the giant shoe — which Otis said has no purpose aside from play — was the most painful.
Since the shoe’s disappearance, owners of Cartlandia businesses have sent her pictures of their children playing with the sculpture over the years.
“When the shoe was stolen, it was symbolic to us of losing a sense of whimsy, of family-friendly fun we tried to create,” Otis said. “For the other thefts, we understand because of some of the difficulties people are facing. This took a little bit of the heart out of us.”