tworivers
Jan 8, 2007, 2:14 AM
Any of you notice this last Friday?
I say begin by bringing back the original exterior colors immediately. Then figure out the right way to restore the interior and get some cool Portland-centric activity in there...
The old Portland Visitors Information Center: Eyesore or a building worth saving?
Friday, January 05, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
Few buildings have seen the highs and lows that the old Portland Visitors Information Center has.
It began life in 1949 as the Portland Chamber of Commerce's elegant greeting center just north of the Hawthorne Bridge on what was then Portland's busy riverside highway, Harbor Drive. Designed by one of Portland's most famous architects of the day, John Yeon, as a carefully proportioned study in the still relatively new technology of plywood, it became one of only four Oregon buildings ever exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But now the old visitors center, better known as the former McCall's restaurant, has been mangled by 20 years of clumsy remodels trying to make it something it was never intended to be: a homey eatery in the middle of Tom McCall Waterfront Park.
Today it lives in what's best described as landmarks limbo. City-owned and on a local list of historically important buildings, it's too important to tear down but possibly too difficult to fix.
"It's a sad story," says William Hawkins, a preservationist and architect who designed the first restaurant retrofit and then watched tenant after tenant wreck both his and Yeon's ideas. "There's been a constant conflict between the original architecture and the needs of a restaurant."
That conflict may soon worsen. The building's landlord, Portland Bureau of Parks & Recreation, had planned to seek proposals this month for yet another restaurant. But Multnomah County created a new kink with plans to build a courthouse at the Hawthorne Bridge's western end. The bridge ramps will have to be rerouted and Southwest Naito Parkway turned into an underpass. According to a preliminary county engineering study, the visitors center's only direct lifeline to downtown -- a crosswalk at Main Street -- would be closed.
"Restaurants are precarious enterprises," says Robin Grimwade, the Parks Bureau's strategic planner who is putting the search for a new visitors center restaurateur on hold. "Any impeded access could affect the success."
Uneven track record
So, what will happen? A look at the recent fates of other Portland historic landmarks offers few clues. The city bankrolled the demolition of a similarly designated landmark, the 1923, Palladian-style Shriner's Hospital on Rocky Butte, to make way for affordable housing. Yet, former City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury tirelessly worked to raise more than $1 million to move and restore a home that turn-of-the-century lumber magnate Simon Benson lived in for a few years downtown.
Former Mayor Vera Katz was willing to strong-arm a downtown church to save the Ladd Carriage House at Southwest Broadway and Columbia Street, but no politician raised a pinky when the Schnitzer family demolished the Stockyard Exchange Building, historically important as the hub of Portland's days as the West Coast slaughterhouse capital and so beautifully preserved it was used for movie shoots. The Portland Art Museum spent millions converting a mundane 1967 art school wing into new galleries even though the building's designer, Robert Frasca, thought it should be demolished for something new. The congregation of Central Lutheran Church -- Pietro Belluschi's famed modernist melding of Japanese and Nordic styles in Irvington -- knocked down its iconic timber bell tower in 2005 without even bothering to get a city permit.
In short, old mediocre buildings often get saved while truly important ones don't. But the old visitors center offers a particularly fascinating twist: As preservationists and the city strove to save the building 20 years ago, its architect Yeon crafted an exquisite argument for tearing it down.
Yeon was never formally trained or registered officially as an architect (though he was dubbed an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1979). In the 1930s he led the first study of the Columbia Gorge (laying the early groundwork for its many parks and designation as a national scenic area) and developed the state's first parks plan, all while designing such masterful residences as the Watzek House, among the most internationally published houses ever built in the Northwest. He was a lifelong parks advocate and one of Portland's most forceful and effective historic preservationists, single-handedly saving downtown's stately 1916 First National Bank from the wrecking ball and the Temple Beth Israel synagogue from a disastrous proposed addition.
In short, Yeon's credentials as a designer, parks advocate and preservationist were unmatched.
Let it go, architect said
The Portland Visitors Information Center was the only public building Yeon ever designed. Yet within his rigorous hierarchy of civic priorities, the building was expendable. With Harbor Drive's transformation into Waterfront Park, everything changed. A commercial use like a restaurant, plus the parking it would need, Yeon wrote, was "the nose of the camel under the tent" -- a bad precedent that would turn the new park into "a target for promoters convinced their projects are civic assets deserving convenient free real estate."
As well, Yeon argued the building "would be severely damaged in the process of trying to save it." He had painstakingly designed it as a "pinwheel arrangement" of transparent and solid walls, focusing its few window views on a placid pool in an internal courtyard while screening the noise and ugliness of the adjacent highway and an ugly neighbor, the looming Oregon Journal building. With both gone, Yeon believed keeping his building no longer made sense.
On most counts, Yeon was right. Seen in the morning sun from the Hawthorne Bridge, the old visitors center can glow with every bit of its original beauty as a virtuosic Northwest riff on Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. But on closer inspection, kitchen ventilation blowers and vents erupt like boils from its planar roof. The placid courtyard pool was filled in long ago to make way for additional outdoor seating. The trellis's Cartesian geometries are now festooned with enough conduit and cheap lighting to qualify it for Peacock Lane's annual Christmas lights festival.
Then there is the paint. Yeon was a consummate colorist who applied the Northwest landscape's hues with a dexterity envied, and often borrowed, by many of his contemporaries. He articulated the visitor's center's wood curtain wall in the complements of deep blue-greens and reds similar to a spruce tree's needles and bark. It's now striped in garish blues and greens.
"It's so far removed from the original," says Hawkins. He still has the building's original paint chips on file, he says. "There's no reason in the world not to match it."
To Hawkins and other historic preservationists, the building is far from a lost cause. Despite Yeon's feelings, Peter Meijor, preservationist and a Portland Landmarks Commission member, says the visitors center meets all the important criteria for restoration: The building beautifully represents new architectural ideas and technologies percolating at the time; it hasn't been altered beyond repair; and it was a singular work by an important architect who deserves to be remembered.
"For those of us here and now, the building has a different meaning than it did to Yeon," Meijor says. "It's a terrific example of his work, and the only one in a public setting."
Despite the sad state of the building -- and Yeon's fulfilled predictions -- Parks Bureau Director Zari Santner says the steering committee overseeing Waterfront Park's 2002 master plan decided that what the old visitors center needed was a "truly good restaurant operator," hence the plan to try again.
But strategic planner Grimwade says the rerouting of bridge ramps might force the bureau to search for other kinds of tenants. He and Santner see the thousands of cyclists commuting over the Hawthorne Bridge daily and imagine that a shower, storage and repair facility might be a good use. A recent University of Oregon architecture studio studied new uses for the building, and several students also redesigned it for a bicycle facility.
But would Yeon's design work any better for gearheads and sweaty commuters? There's also the problem of what the restoration would cost. Hawkins guesses somewhere between $500,000 and a $1 million -- a high number for a building with neither the lovable Victorian gingerbread of a Ladd Carriage House nor the historic character of the Simon Benson home.
Twenty years ago, Yeon wrote that the city should be careful about designating landmarks while designers of them are still alive. "Ghosts," he wrote, "cannot be so troublesome."
But Yeon's forecast that the visitors center remodel would be an "architectural debacle" tolls clearly from the grave.
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575; randygragg@news.oregonian.com
I say begin by bringing back the original exterior colors immediately. Then figure out the right way to restore the interior and get some cool Portland-centric activity in there...
The old Portland Visitors Information Center: Eyesore or a building worth saving?
Friday, January 05, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
Few buildings have seen the highs and lows that the old Portland Visitors Information Center has.
It began life in 1949 as the Portland Chamber of Commerce's elegant greeting center just north of the Hawthorne Bridge on what was then Portland's busy riverside highway, Harbor Drive. Designed by one of Portland's most famous architects of the day, John Yeon, as a carefully proportioned study in the still relatively new technology of plywood, it became one of only four Oregon buildings ever exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But now the old visitors center, better known as the former McCall's restaurant, has been mangled by 20 years of clumsy remodels trying to make it something it was never intended to be: a homey eatery in the middle of Tom McCall Waterfront Park.
Today it lives in what's best described as landmarks limbo. City-owned and on a local list of historically important buildings, it's too important to tear down but possibly too difficult to fix.
"It's a sad story," says William Hawkins, a preservationist and architect who designed the first restaurant retrofit and then watched tenant after tenant wreck both his and Yeon's ideas. "There's been a constant conflict between the original architecture and the needs of a restaurant."
That conflict may soon worsen. The building's landlord, Portland Bureau of Parks & Recreation, had planned to seek proposals this month for yet another restaurant. But Multnomah County created a new kink with plans to build a courthouse at the Hawthorne Bridge's western end. The bridge ramps will have to be rerouted and Southwest Naito Parkway turned into an underpass. According to a preliminary county engineering study, the visitors center's only direct lifeline to downtown -- a crosswalk at Main Street -- would be closed.
"Restaurants are precarious enterprises," says Robin Grimwade, the Parks Bureau's strategic planner who is putting the search for a new visitors center restaurateur on hold. "Any impeded access could affect the success."
Uneven track record
So, what will happen? A look at the recent fates of other Portland historic landmarks offers few clues. The city bankrolled the demolition of a similarly designated landmark, the 1923, Palladian-style Shriner's Hospital on Rocky Butte, to make way for affordable housing. Yet, former City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury tirelessly worked to raise more than $1 million to move and restore a home that turn-of-the-century lumber magnate Simon Benson lived in for a few years downtown.
Former Mayor Vera Katz was willing to strong-arm a downtown church to save the Ladd Carriage House at Southwest Broadway and Columbia Street, but no politician raised a pinky when the Schnitzer family demolished the Stockyard Exchange Building, historically important as the hub of Portland's days as the West Coast slaughterhouse capital and so beautifully preserved it was used for movie shoots. The Portland Art Museum spent millions converting a mundane 1967 art school wing into new galleries even though the building's designer, Robert Frasca, thought it should be demolished for something new. The congregation of Central Lutheran Church -- Pietro Belluschi's famed modernist melding of Japanese and Nordic styles in Irvington -- knocked down its iconic timber bell tower in 2005 without even bothering to get a city permit.
In short, old mediocre buildings often get saved while truly important ones don't. But the old visitors center offers a particularly fascinating twist: As preservationists and the city strove to save the building 20 years ago, its architect Yeon crafted an exquisite argument for tearing it down.
Yeon was never formally trained or registered officially as an architect (though he was dubbed an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1979). In the 1930s he led the first study of the Columbia Gorge (laying the early groundwork for its many parks and designation as a national scenic area) and developed the state's first parks plan, all while designing such masterful residences as the Watzek House, among the most internationally published houses ever built in the Northwest. He was a lifelong parks advocate and one of Portland's most forceful and effective historic preservationists, single-handedly saving downtown's stately 1916 First National Bank from the wrecking ball and the Temple Beth Israel synagogue from a disastrous proposed addition.
In short, Yeon's credentials as a designer, parks advocate and preservationist were unmatched.
Let it go, architect said
The Portland Visitors Information Center was the only public building Yeon ever designed. Yet within his rigorous hierarchy of civic priorities, the building was expendable. With Harbor Drive's transformation into Waterfront Park, everything changed. A commercial use like a restaurant, plus the parking it would need, Yeon wrote, was "the nose of the camel under the tent" -- a bad precedent that would turn the new park into "a target for promoters convinced their projects are civic assets deserving convenient free real estate."
As well, Yeon argued the building "would be severely damaged in the process of trying to save it." He had painstakingly designed it as a "pinwheel arrangement" of transparent and solid walls, focusing its few window views on a placid pool in an internal courtyard while screening the noise and ugliness of the adjacent highway and an ugly neighbor, the looming Oregon Journal building. With both gone, Yeon believed keeping his building no longer made sense.
On most counts, Yeon was right. Seen in the morning sun from the Hawthorne Bridge, the old visitors center can glow with every bit of its original beauty as a virtuosic Northwest riff on Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. But on closer inspection, kitchen ventilation blowers and vents erupt like boils from its planar roof. The placid courtyard pool was filled in long ago to make way for additional outdoor seating. The trellis's Cartesian geometries are now festooned with enough conduit and cheap lighting to qualify it for Peacock Lane's annual Christmas lights festival.
Then there is the paint. Yeon was a consummate colorist who applied the Northwest landscape's hues with a dexterity envied, and often borrowed, by many of his contemporaries. He articulated the visitor's center's wood curtain wall in the complements of deep blue-greens and reds similar to a spruce tree's needles and bark. It's now striped in garish blues and greens.
"It's so far removed from the original," says Hawkins. He still has the building's original paint chips on file, he says. "There's no reason in the world not to match it."
To Hawkins and other historic preservationists, the building is far from a lost cause. Despite Yeon's feelings, Peter Meijor, preservationist and a Portland Landmarks Commission member, says the visitors center meets all the important criteria for restoration: The building beautifully represents new architectural ideas and technologies percolating at the time; it hasn't been altered beyond repair; and it was a singular work by an important architect who deserves to be remembered.
"For those of us here and now, the building has a different meaning than it did to Yeon," Meijor says. "It's a terrific example of his work, and the only one in a public setting."
Despite the sad state of the building -- and Yeon's fulfilled predictions -- Parks Bureau Director Zari Santner says the steering committee overseeing Waterfront Park's 2002 master plan decided that what the old visitors center needed was a "truly good restaurant operator," hence the plan to try again.
But strategic planner Grimwade says the rerouting of bridge ramps might force the bureau to search for other kinds of tenants. He and Santner see the thousands of cyclists commuting over the Hawthorne Bridge daily and imagine that a shower, storage and repair facility might be a good use. A recent University of Oregon architecture studio studied new uses for the building, and several students also redesigned it for a bicycle facility.
But would Yeon's design work any better for gearheads and sweaty commuters? There's also the problem of what the restoration would cost. Hawkins guesses somewhere between $500,000 and a $1 million -- a high number for a building with neither the lovable Victorian gingerbread of a Ladd Carriage House nor the historic character of the Simon Benson home.
Twenty years ago, Yeon wrote that the city should be careful about designating landmarks while designers of them are still alive. "Ghosts," he wrote, "cannot be so troublesome."
But Yeon's forecast that the visitors center remodel would be an "architectural debacle" tolls clearly from the grave.
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575; randygragg@news.oregonian.com