April 21, 2005
Glossed-Over History At The PDC?
This Seems Oddly Familiar
This morning we experienced a distinct sense of deja vu all over again while reading today's "Top of the Town" column in the new Portland-centric weekly pull-out section of The Oregonian.
The Portland Development Commission has a new historical display in the lobby of its Old Town digs. But the time line glosses over its first and one of its most infamous projects: the South Auditorium.
...
Missing, though, is much mention of the social costs of the redevelopment. During the work, 450 buildings were torn down and 1,500 people displaced from what had been a diverse neighborhood of Jewish and Italian immigrants.
Back during September of last year, the AIA Gallery in downtown Portland had installed what we termed a month-long advertisement for PDC. We wrote the following after attending the opening:
While the tour through the history of Portland's downtown development (which takes up the gallery's front room, and so is the first thing one sees of the exhibit) is certainly interesting -- especially the opportunities to see from before-and-after comparisons to some areas of downtown which tend to make it rather clear that we are better off than we were -- some of the recounting suffers from glossing over the more controversial aspects and effects of urban renewal.
And although the article in question is now offline (thanks, OregonLive!), we also mentioned a Randy Gragg column on the same exhibit, which made much the same points.
In a perverse sort of way, we hope that the timeline that's been placed at PDC's headquarters is some portion of that same exhibit. The alternative is that they produced an entirely new one and made the same mistakes they made with the first one despite the clear and public crticisms the first time around.
Comments (6)
doretta on 21 Apr 2005
To me, the South Auditorium area feels like the most sterile part of the city.
Jack Bog on 21 Apr 2005
Wait 'til you walk around South Waterfront. That is, if the doctors and the new condo-dwellers from L.A. don't get Erik to gate it off.
The Forbidden Zone on 21 Apr 2005
South Auditorium isn't part of the city; it's on the moon. What a disaster.
Paul on 21 Apr 2005
From what I have learned, the catastrophe of South Auditorium isn't the sterile Le Corbusier-esq towers but the communities displaced by PDC's dozers.
Frank Dufay on 21 Apr 2005
I lived at Portland Center --one of those monolith high rises-- for several years while I worked full time at City Hall and went to PSU and Lewis & Clark at night. It was convenient. I had a nice view from my balcony. But most people didn't walk --I mostly didn't have a car-- and would take the elevators down to their cars and drive out the garages. Despite the "density" you didn't really interact with your neighbors. Very cold, and sterile, with no street life in the immediate vicinity. Our Chinese restaurant on the first floor plaza closed for lack of foot traffic and customers.
Isaac Laquedem on 21 Apr 2005
The South Auditorium urban renewal project was run more or less in parallel with the State's construction of the first (most southerly) part of Interstate 405, the Stadium Freeway. At the time the theory of the redevelopment people (shared in other parts of the country) was that if the government built a good-looking, neat, clean, orderly set of buildings (or had developers build them) then activity would follow.
One reason for the renewal project was that I-405 cut through Second and Third Avenues, and cut the neighborhood in two. The Jewish community on the north side of the freeway were cut off from the synagogues on the south side, and the freeway itself took out the Jewish Community Center about half a mile to the west. (It also forced out Mosler's Bakery, which made the best bagels and challah in town.)
In effect PDC tore out one functioning community and hoped that another one would grow back in its place.
Street life demands a certain amount of sloppiness and wasted space -- or more politely, a certain amount of unplanned area and flexible space, which can change its uses with the changing populations that visit it. South Auditorium didn't allow for that kind of space, and the green spaces that were supposed to attract casual outdoor life morphed into not much more than outdoor hallways.