Unbuilt Projects
 

There is work going on in the old Dude Ranch, is this project finally starting? http://www.jumptown.net/

Haven't seen any announcements... but let's hope they're moving forward. :fingerscrossed:

Un-freakin believable! I thought this was dead? Whats the deal? I love this project, i so hope it gets built :)

again... the new year. =D
careful, let's not jinx it!

before everyone gets too excited... i doubt there's anything happening there. has anyone seen this thing go through design review? i know sometimes they slip by us, but i've never seen anything. and check out portlandmaps, there's nothing going on, except what looks to be some minor remodeling.

I watch the pre application, design commission and land use hearing officer agendas religiously and haven't seen a thing.

couvscott: I haven't figured out how to do that can you send me a link?

http://www.portlandonline.com/bds/index.cfm?c=35625&

I heard that Disjecta may be moving into the building once renovations are complete.

Jumptown is dead.

Building permit activity and PR/news
 

There has been some increase in permit activity for the Allegro on portlandMaps.com. Entries from the Work/Case Description field of the Permit/Case Report are listed below.

1. 177 condo units, 20 stories, 4 level sub-grade parking, 13,160 sf 1st flr retail.
2. 1ST PHASE EXCAVATION AND SHORING
3. 2ND PHASE EXCAVATION AND SHORING, INLCUDES MAT FOUNDATION FOR NORTH WALL BRACING.
4. ******Foundation only to bottom of 2nd floor***************

http://www.portlandmaps.com/detail.c...&seg_id=138491

There also was a PR/news item in the Daily Jornal of Commerce on Sep 28, 2007 advertising the hire of Jon Eberhardt as a drafter for the Allegro mixed-use tower.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...8/ai_n21023131

Not quite what Ken Yeang had in mind, but pretty cool nonetheless.

http://www.theskanner.com/articleima...oadway_300.jpg


Storied Building Revived
Once-hopping jazz spot will become a center for artists
By Brian Stimson of The Skanner

You could easily walk by this blighted building without ever noticing it. Known to many as Multi-Craft Plastics, the building has been vacant for years. But before that, it housed a plastics factory, a pharmaceutical drug maker, a confectionery and ice cream parlor. Rumor says during the 1920s it was a speakeasy. But for a golden moment in the 1940s, it was The Dude Ranch, one of Portland’s premier “Black and Tan” jazz clubs.

Now, a local developer and musician, Daniel Deutsch is lovingly restoring the building to create a community art space that will reflect its storied past.
Pat Patterson, the first African American to play basketball for the University of Oregon, owned and ran The Dude Ranch along with his friend Sherman “Cowboy” Picket. According to jazz historian Robert Dietsche, who wrote the Portland jazz history book “Jumptown”, The Dude Ranch was, “the shooting star in the history of Portland jazz, a meteor bursting with an array of the best Black and Tan entertainment this town has ever seen: strippers, then called shake dancers, ventriloquists, comics, jugglers, torch singers, world renowned tap dancers like Teddy Hale, and of course the very best of jazz.”
No wonder it attracted legends such as Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins and Lucky Thompson, as well as countless others. With hat check girls, waitresses dressed as cowgirls and all-night card games, Dietsche writes that the Dude Ranch was packed with everyone from politicians and Pullman porters to zoot-suited hipsters.

“Racially mixed party people who couldn’t care less that what they were doing was on the cutting edge of integration in the city that had been called the most segregated north of the Mason-Dixon line.”
In 1946, the city shut it down. Few believed that big stakes gambling and an accidental shooting were the real reasons behind its closure.
“There was too much race mixing,” Dietsche told The Skanner. “It was a black eye for City Hall. They looked for any excuse … and there were so many.”

What the city couldn’t close down was Portland’s love affair with jazz. During those years, you could find jazz at any time of the day or the night. The city was bursting with newly arrived workers for the shipyards and other war support industries. And Williams Avenue – an economic area that spanned many blocks on and off the street — featured a jazz joint on nearly every block.

“It was quite a scene,” said Dick Bogle, jazz columnist for the Skanner and radio host on KMHD 89.9. During that period, Bogle said Blacks were confined to living west of Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.), giving club owners a targeted geographic area of talent and patrons.

Bogle said he began frequenting jazz clubs in the 1950s. He was too young to have entered the doors of the famed Dude Ranch when it was open. But he does remember the race mixing. Whites were always welcome in the clubs on Williams Avenue, both as players and patrons. But the openness wasn’t reciprocated in the Downtown clubs, at least for Black patrons.

Why the Dude Ranch was singled out for allowing race mixing could be any number of reasons, but Dietsche said he thinks it also had to do with the gambling. “Portland was a pretty wide open town except for mixed races,” Dietsche said. Vice was everywhere – prostitutes made their contacts at places such as the Dude Ranch, and gambling occurred in house, he said. Where there was jazz, he said, vice was sure to be there too.

A New Era

When it was built in 1923 as the Hazelwood candy complex, 240 N. Broadway featured an ice cream parlor and eatery on the ground floor, with candy, donut and confectionary rooms upstairs. As the Dude Ranch, bands were featured on the ground floor and at least one of the upper floors in the original corner building was dedicated to gambling.
All good things eventually come to an end. For jazz, both Dietsche and Bogle say changing music styles, urban renewal, unrestricted housing, civil rights battles and eventually gangs, brought about the end of Williams Avenue’s jazz joints.

240 N. Broadway became the headquarters of Mutual Wholesale Drugs during the 1950s. And in the 70s — after urban renewal, Interstate 5 and the Rose Quarter had changed the neighborhood beyond recognition – Multicraft Plastics turned it into a factory.

Developer Daniel Deutsch, a board member of the arts group Disjecta, bought it in February 2007. The building had been sitting vacant for several years and other developers bidding on the project wanted to tear it down. But Deutsch recognized the value of the original building and hired designer Andy Powell to help him turn the 66,000 square foot structure into a gathering place for artists.

Dubbed the “Leftbank Project” the building will house studios for up-and-coming artists, as well as larger spaces for established firms. There will be enough room for gallery shows and possibly a music venue. The main ballroom will probably return to its original use as an eatery.
“In a big sense, it’s a great big experiment,” says Powell, who also helped design the interior of the Someday Lounge downtown. “It can be a hub for creative, progressive projects.”

Powell said Deutsch isn’t trying to maximize profits from the building. The plan is to create a sustainable model that balances artists/firms who can afford to pay market rate against those who need more affordable space. In other words, Powell says, they don’t want 240 N. Broadway to become just another step toward gentrification.

The renovation will include repairing or replacing warped, waterlogged floors, broken windows and a leaky roof. Yet, despite years of neglect, the main ballroom has survived. Its original woodwork is intact, along with a dumbwaiter, an antique walk-in safe and a an enormous defunct boiler system.

Powell is shooting for high environmental standards. Construction crews will use sustainable building products; dozens of the original windows are being restored; and the heating unit is one of the more efficient on the market.
“We believe the single greatest act of sustainability is saving the building,” Powell said. “Reusing is probably the least impactful thing we can do.”
By next summer, when tenants should begin moving into 240 N. Broadway, each of the three buildings that make up the site will be decorated to reflect the era and purpose for which they were built. Plans aren’t yet firm, but Powell wants to decorate the outside walls with photographs that illustrate its journey from a confectionery and industrial workplace to the hottest jazz palace in town. Visible to everyone who passes by, its contribution to Portland’s history will never be forgotten.

http://photos.friendster.com/photos/...338259048l.jpg
(photo:me)

Too bad they can't build Jumptown ON TOP of the original building. This is great that this is going to be preserved and restored. I look forward to checking it out when it's finished....and hopefully catch some live Jazz.

Towers that never came to be
 

I think this is such a cool tower. I'm sad it wasn't built.

SW 5th Avenue
SW 6th Avenue
SW Clay Street
SW Market Street

Information from Robert Harvey Oshatz webpage www.oshatz.com

C.A. Bright Tower

http://www.oshatz.com/images/highrise/89-s.jpg

http://www.oshatz.com/images/highrise/90-s.jpg

http://www.oshatz.com/images/highrise/88-s.jpg

http://www.oshatz.com/images/highrise/91-s.jpg

C.A. Bright Tower
Portland, Oregon
Designed: 1978

This 450,000 square foot, thirty-story mix use tower was proposed for a square block in downtown Portland. Elevated four stories above its formal entry at the upper plaza level; the tower is column free around its perimeter at ground level. Most of the street level site would have public access offering pedestrians the only public urban space in this area of the downtown core.

The ground plane slopes down from the southwest corner to the northeast corner, dividing the site into three plaza levels. From the northeast, the pedestrian would be free to move gently down to the lower plaza level offering 20,000 square feet of retail space surrounding a central reflecting pool. The pool receives water in falling streams from a fountain on the middle plaza level. There would be 8,000 square feet of retail space on this level with display kiosks defining its perimeter. The plaza features a sculptured overhead trellis that cantilevers out from the core of the tower. The trellis appears to be floating out in space as it partially protected pedestrians from the elements and giving human scale to the plaza levels.

The tower has a non-static design composition. The changing nature of the vertical and horizontal elements is achieved through a transitional stage where the heights of individual vertical elements step down into horizontal components. This modulating movement is related to the visual movement of the sun around the structure. Yet within all the transitional movement, there is an identity of repetitive floors in patterns of three.

http://www.oshatz.com/text/brighttower.htm

and from the WW on why it wasn't built

Another unrealized project, Oshatz's C.A. Bright Tower (1978), would have made virtually anyone's list of intriguing downtown buildings, for this was no staid model of Portland livability. Resembling in design a stack of China plates, or perhaps an apartment complex inhabited by the Jetsons, the Bright Tower was unceremoniously scrapped when its visionary benefactor died shortly before construction was set to begin. It lives on only as a JPEG image on Oshatz's website.

http://wweek.com/editorial/2745/1959/

Mark...thanks I have been looking for renderings of the Bright Tower.. I couldn't remember its name.

You guys should post that Jumptown Tower that was proposed a few years ago by Ken Yeang.

Oh wait, here it is!

http://media.sustainableindustries.c...town-Tower.jpg

http://wweek.com/photos/3134/news54.jpg

there was that initial rendering of the ODS tower you posted a while ago mark, does that count?

Has anyone seen the original renderings for One Pacific Square in Old Town? It's my understanding that there were three towers and only the shortest was built.

^I'd like to see that too!

yeah, I think any rendering of what could have been built in Portland should be posted...

Where the ODS tower sits originally the Morrison Tower was suppose to rise. I remember the full page renderings of the tower in the Business Journal but I have Googled and can't seem to find it. I liked it much better than the present ODS.

Don't forget the Oak Tower.

Thanks, Randy.