Many days, I find myself Max-ing along First Avenue, once we ramp down from the Steel Bridge, and I have come to enjoy it immensely. It’s the buildings. There’s nothing quite like them. Two or three stories, mostly, elegant and tastefully restored, they are an instant invitation to consider the very beginnings of Portland as a city, because First Avenue, and the rest of the 20 blocks north and south of Burnside as far as Third, was the heart of the city’s first downtown.

It’s now the heart of the Skidmore historic district (or the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood — they have overlapping, though not quite congruent, boundaries), far from the center of town and far from the major development activity that has re-made the Pearl and is now remaking the West End. Thanks to certain accidental economic forces and planning “failures”, around one-third of the original wonderful cast-iron facade buildings in the Skidmore district have been preserved, enough for it to have earned recognition as a national historic preservation district.

These aren’t the only old buildings in Portland, not by a long shot, but they are the greatest collection of cast-iron architecture still standing in the country. More importantly, they are beautiful — I love the human scale, the almost whimsical details, even the brickwork. And the renovations that have kept them “alive” as buildings have shown them to be deserving of more centuries of life, meaning simply that they can adapt to new circumstances, new technologies, new generations of tenants.

So, that’s how I enter the territory of two recent columns in The Oregonian, one by Steve Duin in ardent opposition (along with the preservationist community) to raising the height limits for new buildings in the district from 75 to 130 feet on five specific sites at the district’s edge, and one by Anna Griffin (online it inexplicably suggests that Renee Mitchell is the author; it’s Griffin) about how Mayor-elect Sam Adams’ reorganized planning director Gil Kelley out of a job and what this might mean. The two are related, because Kelley is the one who proposed changing the height restrictions, pending approval from the national historic district people.
Continue reading Gil Kelley and the height of the Skidmore district →