Preacher at the 24 Hour Church of Elvis, Portland, OR
At the Church of Elvis, you can get a marriage license and ceremony for five bucks. You can experience the rantings of a rabid barker/game show host/preacher woman. You can see a live demonstration of a c. 1976 toy Jamie Somers Bionic Woman Repair Station/Beauty Salon. "Sometimes there's only a thin line between beauty and repair," our hostess says.
The 24 Hour Church of Elvis isn't 24-hour, isn't a church, and hasn't got a lot of Elvis. What it is a garish, turgid, jumble of 70's toy store, junk shop, and flea market. A few years ago, it was called Where's the Art? - The World's First Coin-Operated Art Gallery, which was accessible from the street, 24 hours a day. The remnants of the coin-op machines were installed in an upstairs room and surrounded by all sorts of junk, some purposefully offensive, but most very colorful and irresistible.
Wedding set with spinning Elvises at the 24 Hour Church of Elvis
Frank at barely functional coin-op machine at 24 Hour Church of Elvis
Many of the coin-ops don't work anymore, and many blinking lights don't blink anymore; our merry hostess didn't seem that interested in really keeping the place up. However, like much of my favorite American kitsch, the Church hints at a mysterious, wonderful, lost past. As if we've arrived after the heyday, but we're glad for the chance to see it before the whole endeavor lurches off a cliff.
Site visited July, 1997. Cost: A couple bucks. 720 SW Ankeny, Portland, OR. Marriages, T-shirts, Elvis ID cards and Elvis drivers licenses available. A sign on the door says: "24 Hour Church of Elvis: Usually open Noon to 5, 8 - 11 a lot. Call (503) 226-3671 for reassurance"
NOTE 6/19/02
I got an email (from kimmiebear - thanks!) that she had heard the Church of Elvis was now closed. I tried the number above, and the system said that number was either not in service or no longer valid. Yikes! Can it be true? I feel lucky to have been able to visit the Barbi Doll Hall of Fame while it was still in existence in Palo Alto, California, before the whole kit and kaboodle was sold to Mattell... Sometimes kitsch is fleeting, like a butterfly momentarily backlit by the sun, and you have to capture it while you can...
An email from someone married at the Church of Elvis, 5/30/04:
How sad that it may be closed now. In August of 2000, my husband and I got "married" there. Nancy Reagan is the signer of our marriage license. The witnesses were our teenagers, and a couple from Belgium. He spoke no English and was mortified by the whole thing. His wife was having a grand time playing the tambourine and marching around the block as part of the wedding processional. I still tell people about the place, and hopefully it will re-open somewhere. The coat with hundreds of eyeballs on it was worth the price of admission itself.Ellen
Another fabo email, from 5/14/06:
My husband and I were married at the Church of Elvis for real! For 25 dollars she could perform real ones. One summer night when it was pouring down rain, we pulled 2 strangers off the street and got hitched. We're celebrating 5 years in June.Colleen
This informative message came in from Doug 10/27/06:
Hi Frank,
I just saw your kitsch website and liked your page about the 24-Hour Church of Elvis. It did indeed have a mysterious, wonderful past, and I thought you might appreciate some more information.
Back in the 80s when the 24-hr C.O.E. was known as Where’s The Art, I was good friends with Stevie Pierce, the proprietor. I helped her wire up many of the coin-operated gadgets, and I programmed the Commodore 64 computer that controlled everything. The first two coin-op exhibits were a Michael Jackson fortune telling machine and a miniature version of the Let’s Make A Deal game show. One Halloween we mounted the Let’s Make A Deal thing on a board with shoulder straps that Stevie carried around Portland.
The various coin slots and pushbuttons were mounted in the door, where we had replaced the glass with plexiglass so we could cut holes in it. There used to be a machine called the Prize-O-Matic that dispensed little prizes – plastic insects, army men, anything Stevie could get in mass quantities for 2-cents or less or by dumpster diving – through a slot in the door, at the end of whatever experience the customer had paid a quarter for. Each prize was accompanied by “an original work of art” – a piece of paper about 1-inch square splattered randomly with paint and glitter, which Stevie made in large sheets and cut up. The Prize-O-Matic, being made mostly of cardboard, was not super-accurate; every so often it would dispense two prizes, or none.
For several years Stevie lived in the gallery itself, sleeping in a hidden bed built above one of the display windows, surviving on the quarters people put in the coin slots. She dreamed of one day moving the gallery to New York City, where she thought the increased foot traffic and proximity to wealthy patrons of the unusual would make her rich and famous. She tried like crazy to get national publicity, sending videotapes to the David Letterman Show and others, but never had any luck. She did however get a fair amount of local press, and was known as Portland’s most Unabashed Self-Promoter. The gallery was written up in numerous newspapers around the world, including the Wall Street Journal and the Peking Daily. I think it once got a small blurb in People magazine.
The high point was probably when a radio station in Chicago or Cleveland heard about the Church of Elvis, ran a contest and flew two people to Portland to get married there. By that time Stevie had acquired a minister’s license and could perform legal weddings. The wedding took place on the sidewalk on a cold, damp morning at about 5 am, so it could be broadcast live on the drive-time radio show in Cleveland or wherever. The narrow street was clogged with local tv and radio crews. But Stevie never clicked with the bigtime. Eventually she was evicted when the Greek restaurant adjoining the gallery wanted to expand. She moved the gallery a couple blocks away, to where you saw it. Jay Leno finally stopped by that location and interviewed her, but nothing really came of it.
Stevie was formerly a corporate lawyer for AT&T in New York. She worked on some of the documents that broke up the company and was present when they were signed. Soon afterward she gave up her law career for art, and the rest is history. I talked with her on the phone in July. She still lives in Portland, and she said she was thinking about starting up the gallery again if she can find a good location. She has a website – http://www.24hourchurchofelvis.com
Stevie is definitely one of the wackiest people I have ever known, and quite a treasure.
Doug
Thanks, Doug!
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