Tag Archives: Rose Quarter

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, General, Music

Monday links: Romancing the Rose Quarter

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TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLET GAME: Remember the flap over Memorial Coliseum? Tear it down? Fix it up? Turn it into the doorway to a suburban-style, cookie-cutter entertainment and shopping complex? Build a minor-league baseball park in its place, with a concession stand serving grilled architects on a bun?

Portland Memorial ColiseumNiel DePonte has another idea, and you can read about it on this morning’s Oregonian editorial page, under the headline Imagine the Rose Quarter Performing Arts District. I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth at City Hall now. Or is that the sound of stonewalling?

But DePonte — Grammy-nominated percussionist for the Oregon Symphony, music director and conductor for Oregon Ballet Theatre, president and founder of MetroArts, Inc., which is helping to find and train the next generations of artists — has some good ideas. And right now the Coliseum in specific and the Rose Quarter in general need some good ideas. Give it a read. And if you like the idea, or parts of it, pass it along.

FAREWELL TO FRANK: This morning’s New York Times has a good appreciation of Frank McCourt, the New York Irish character and sweet writer who died Sunday at age 78. In 1996 McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, his harrowing yet tender memoir of Ireland and America and poverty and drink and survival, and it became a phenomenon, staying near the top of the best-seller lists for two years.

A lot of bad writing’s been committed in the name of memoir. Let’s take time, then, to celebrate a man who did it right — who told the tale more for his readers than himself, and told it with an innate understanding of what storytelling means.

MTC TURNS 100: … and we’d be not just remiss but downright dumb to not point out Mighty Toy Cannon‘s perky celebration of his first century of blogging at Culture Shock. He’s mighty frisky for an old guy. Some writers have got in trouble for misrepresenting the past. MTC niftily sidesteps that problem by brazenly misrepresenting the future. Or is he dead right? Check back in 2109, when our great-grandkids might be comparing him to Nostradamus. Congratulations, old-timer.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Rose Quarter/Coliseum: Is K.C. the sunshine gang?

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Broadway & 42nd Street, New York, 1880/Wikimedia CommonsA quick followup on our last post about Memorial Coliseum and how it fits or doesn’t fit into plans for a revamped Rose Quarter. In this morning’s Oregonian, Ted Sickinger files this fascinating report from Kansas City and its  Power & Light District, a glitzy entertainment district developed by the Cordish Co., which also wants to redevelop Portland’s Rose Quarter in partnership with the city and the Trail Blazers. It’s a good, balanced read that talks clearly about money, about the differences between Portland and Kansas City (Kansas City’s downtown was pretty much wiped out and any fix looked good), and about the audience for the new K.C. entertainment zone — pretty much suburbanites and out-of-towners.

Question: Is the city’s goal to set aside a chunk of prime real estate as a lure for out-of-town spenders, like Vancouver, B.C.’s Gastown or New York’s recently sanitized Times Square? Is that good policy? How will it help or harm already existing businesses and nearby neighborhoods in Portland? Will any Portland businesses be part of the deal? Sickinger points out that several of the Kansas City development’s prime tenants are owned by a subsidiary of Cordish — a cozy arrangement that suggests this will be a dropped-from-the-sky project, not an organically grown development.

And over at Culture Shock, Mighty Toy Cannon gives this blistering analysis of the Coliseum situation, connecting a lot of dots that needed to be connected. It’s highly recommended reading.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Journalism

Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back

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portlandmemorialcolWell, damn those architects’ pointy little heads. What right do they have to protest the demolition of a historically important building when a billionaire’s profits are on the line?

Astonishingly, that seems to be the subtext of this morning’s banner story in The Oregonian, under the reductionist headline, Save the coliseum, but for what? Unlike the paper’s previous reporting on the issue of razing or saving Memorial Coliseum, which has been solid, this piece feels like it belongs on the op-ed page. Even then, it’s poorly thought out — mainly, in its thrust, a repetition of the Portland Trail Blazer/City of Portland talking points and a flicking-away of the several legitimate counterproposals that have been made for use of the building. Now that Mayor Sam Adams has given the Coliseum at least a temporary reprieve, this morning’s story reads like the first strike in a counter-campaign to get it torn down, after all. That’s a legitimate goal for an opinion-page story, even though I happen to think it’s the wrong choice. But why am I reading it on the front page, in the guise of a news story?

I won’t get into the arguments in favor of preserving the Coliseum, which have been made well and often in several places (among them Portland Arts Watch, Burnside Blog, Portland Architecture and Culture Shock), except to say this: For all of Portland’s vaunted reputation as a well-planned city, it’s hardly overloaded with buildings of real architectural distinction, and that makes the potential loss of any excellent work of architecture a matter for deep public concern. I’m not an architect, and the International Style is hardly my favorite — indeed, I have a lot of issues with it — but you save what you have, and in the case of Memorial Coliseum, what Portland has is an elegant, almost startlingly pure expression of the International ethos. We’re not talking about an abandoned Home Depot here, in spite of City Commissioner Randy Leonard’s unfortunate stab at architecture criticism.

After establishing the impracticality of the architectural trade in general (why, you’d almost think they were college professors!), The Oregonian’s story gets down to business: The Coliseum is a money-loser. An accompanying bar chart reveals that, yes, for the past three years it’s lost money, mainly because the city’s spent close to $2 million in that time period on needed upkeep (the bill’s been $3.2 million since 2000). And it could cost another $13 million or more to make up for years of neglect and get the place in really good shape again.

Fair enough, although the chart also reveals that in the three immediately preceding years the Coliseum stacked up profits of $243,000, $338,000 and $275,000 — even though the Blazers, who have the sole right to manage and book the building even though it’s city-owned, haven’t had a lot of incentive to push the Coliseum to the detriment of their own Rose Garden a quick jog away.

Continue reading Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

Memorial Coliseum saved. Now what?

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Conceptual drawing for Lents baseball stadium, 1760. Wikimedia CommonsThis morning’s Oregonian headlined the news that Mayor Sam Adams and his partners-in-sports have backtracked and won’t take the wrecking ball to Memorial Coliseum, after all.

Hooray for that. But the story’s far from over.

Mark Larabee’s report says that aspiring mogul Merritt Paulson will shift his proposed minor-league baseball stadium back to the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland instead of trying to squeeze it into the Rose Quarter site controlled by full-fledged mogul Paul Allen, whose Trail Blazers organization wants to redevelop the whole shooting match for a highly questionable, theme-park-ish entertainment district. Fellow scatterer Barry Johnson, over at his alternate-universe blog on OregonLive.com, raises several pertinent red flags. Read his column — it’s important.

Questions:

1. Why build a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park at all? Lents might want it, and maybe it’ll be good for a neighborhood that could use a few good things, and certainly it’ll provide some decent (if short-term) construction jobs. But is it necessary? PGE Park, which is now slated to become a soccer-only stadium for Paulson’s new major-league soccer franchise, is still a great place to see a baseball game. We’re told the soccer league insists that member teams provide soccer-only stadiums, but let’s face it: “Major” league or not, we’re not talking baseball or football or the NBA or even big-league hockey here. Why not call the league’s bluff? After all, we’re all paying for this thing. It’s in the public’s best interest to (a) insist on the best deal possible, and (b) decide whether it wants to make a deal at all. Sam doesn’t get to decide that all by himself.

2. Why should the Blazers decide what the best use of Memorial Coliseum will be? Yes, I know the city cut Allen and his companies a sweetheart deal on management of the Coliseum and the rest of the district, which is part of the reason the Coliseum’s become run-down: The Blazers don’t have a lot of incentive to let it compete seriously with their own Rose Garden. Time for the city to rethink this thing and stand up for itself. The Coliseum needs to be reimagined as an attractor for the entire city, not just a money-maker for the Allen organizations. I still very much like the idea of a first-class participatory sports and recreation center. That would draw thousands of people into the Rose Quarter, year-round.

3. Why are Randy Leonard’s heels dug in? The famously assertive city commissioner, who has been Adams’ sidekick through this thing, says that with the Rose Quarter off the table for the baseball stadium, he won’t consider any option other than Lents for the new ballpark. “It’s either Lents or I’m off the deal entirely,” Larabee quotes him. Wait a minute: What about leaving the Triple-A Beavers at PGE Park, where they could easily be scheduled around the new big-league soccer team and would — hello — help keep the stadium from sitting idle most of the year? Our city council isn’t prepared to even consider that? This is the cheapest option. It might also be the best.

4. What about big-league baseball? We’re talking $55 million for a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park when (a) most Portlanders simply don’t care about minor-league baseball, and (b) there’s an even chance that in the next five to ten years the city could lure an actual big-league franchise? Then what? How much more will the city pay for a big-league stadium? Where will the stadium be? And what will happen with the little Lents park? Maybe we should just sit out this whole Triple-A deal and work on the real thing.

5. Can someone please explain how the Hooters at the city’s northern gateway is an improvement on the old Waddle’s restaurant it replaced? At least Waddle’s had a decent corned-beef hash. This may seem like a digression, but it’s not, really, because it echoes the main trouble with the Blazers’ proposed entertainment district: It substitutes tired, watered-down (if also pumped-up) cookie-cutter ideas about culture for the local, truly individual, real deal. To borrow a line from Nancy Reagan, maybe it’s time to Just Say No.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Theater, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink

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thomas_paineOur partner-in-Scattering Barry Johnson (who does not look like the portrait here of Tom Paine, rabble-rousing author of the political tract Common Sense) advocates a little citywide common sense in the continuing flap over Portland’s Rose Quarter and Mayor Sam Adams’ push to tear down Memorial Coliseum to make room for a minor-league baseball park and a suburban-style “entertainment district” of aggressively anonymous chain outfits on the order of a Hard Rock Cafe.

Barry writes in his alternate-universe column in this morning’s Oregonian that we all need to think more clearly about common sense the way the thinkers of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thought of it, as “an idea based on the best available evidence and therefore potentially persuasive to anyone.”

Barry’s pretty clear about the slapdash quality of the thinking on this rush-rush move. His summation of how we got into this municipal pickle has the blunt ring of truth:

The initial push to demolish Memorial Coliseum came from Mayor Sam Adams, who wanted 1) to make sure Portland got its Major League Soccer team, 2) which he could only do by building a new baseball stadium, 3) which would help him and the Blazers build their entertainment district if it landed in the Rose Quarter, 4) which, in turn, would serve his new convention hotel. Oh, and 5) he’d have to knock down Memorial Coliseum to do it.

Brian Libby, on his site Portland Architecture, also continues to hit hard and tellingly on why Adams’ plan is a bad idea (I’d argue that after Point 1 above none of it makes sense), and Libby’s helped rally the city’s architectural community to the cause. Keep checking him out, because he keeps adding new twists to the story.

I can only add, picking up on Barry’s theme of “common sense,” that we also think of the meaning of the commons — those areas that we hold in public trust, for the greater good of all of us. The division between what’s public and what’s private has long since been blurred: These days, big  projects increasingly come in the form of what’s called “public/private partnerships.” That’s why city and state governments pay hundreds of millions of dollars for big-league baseball and football stadiums, and it’s why, in Portland, the rehab of the old armory building into a home for Portland Center Stage came from a complex quiltwork of various governmental dollars. It’s not a bad thing: It gets things done. But it does muddy the sense of what’s public and what’s private and who benefits most. And it makes it that much more crucial for our political leaders to remember which side of the fence they’re on.

Continue reading Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

The city and the Rose Quarter: First, do no harm

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Le Malade Imaginaire, Honore Daumier

“Government should practice the same principle as doctors,” President Obama said the other day. “First, do no harm.”

He was responding to critics who say he’s been too timid on the banks, shying away from the get-tough part of the takeover business. Going too far, Obama argued, could make things worse instead of better.

Whatever you think of Obama’s tactics in this particular case, “First, do no harm” isn’t a bad principle for government, even — and maybe especially — when government decides it’s time to be bold. Be bold, yes. But also be sure. Before you do something radical, make sure it’s actually going to make things better rather than worse. That isn’t a conservative or a liberal stance. It’s just a sensible one.

It’s a principle that Portland Mayor Sam Adams seems to be ignoring in his rush to tear down Memorial Coliseum — one of the city’s best-designed buildings — and replace it with a $55 million minor-league baseball park as part of a complicated package to free PGE Park for exclusive use by a new major-league soccer team, push through a government-funded $200 million convention center hotel, and synergize with a Portland Trail Blazers plan to transform the Rose Quarter into an entertainment district that would seem to be more at home along a suburban shopping thoroughfare than in a vital corner of the central city.

Whoa, Nellie. What’s that choking sound? It’s the gurglings of architects, preservationists, planners, veterans groups, North/Northeast Portland residents and economic analysts reacting to having something shoved down their throats. In a word, ouch.

Fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson, in a post headed Demolishing Memorial Coliseum — a bad idea inside a bad plan, has an excellent analysis on his Oregonian/Oregon Live blog, Portland Arts Watch; read it here. Oregonian reporter Mark Larabee filed a good report on gathering opposition to the Rose Quarter steamroller here; and The Oregonian’s Ryan Frank reports here on Adams’ effort to push for the 600-room convention center hotel, a plan that so far is opposed by Multnomah County exec Ted Wheeler, whose support is necessary if the thing is going to get built. In addition, architecture and design writer Brian Libby has been weighing in frequently (and critically) at his Web site Portland Architecture, and Tim DuRoche has this sharply worded argument on his blog for Portland Spaces magazine.

I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe about public spending on sports. I happen to be a lifelong baseball nut, and although soccer isn’t my game, I know it has a big following here. A couple of points: Despite the argument that PGE Park is a bad space for Triple-A baseball, in fact it’s a terrific place to watch a ballgame, a little gem along the lines of Seattle’s old Sicks Stadium or even Boston’s Fenway Park. Sure, it usually has far more empty seats than filled ones — but that’s because baseball destroyed its minor-league system decades ago in terms of audience allegiance (how do you follow a team when the players shift week to week?). And this: Fifty-five million dollars for a 9,000-seat minor-league park? Does it get torn down in turn if and when the city lands a major-league franchise?

As for Memorial Coliseum, yes, it’s been allowed to get shabby. But that’s fixable. And a little imagination could turn it into a genuine attractor (and economic kick-starter) for the area. A few years ago, when he was The Oregonian’s architecture and planning writer, Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg championed a plan that would turn the Coliseum into a first-rate community athletic center, with Olympic pool, indoor track facilities and other active-participant draws. I thought it was a great idea then, and I still do — something to attract people to the area all year long. I’m sure there are other good ideas much better than tearing the old girl down. Can we seriously consider them, please?

Most of us laugh wryly now and again at Portland’s penchant to talk anything and everything to death before taking action. But while it may have cost us here and there, that earnest inclusionary tendency is also an essential part of what makes the city work. We don’t mind haste when haste is necessary, but we want deliberate haste — haste that pauses long enough to make sure that the issues are clear and the stakeholders have been heard. Around here, rushing things unduly is a hell of a way to run a railroad — and right now, what’s going on at city hall feels exacly like a railroad job. Is there a doctor in the caboose?

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly

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At the risk of making Art Scatter look like an architecture and planning blog (we’re deeply interested, but others cover the territory fare more systematically) a couple of things are sticking in our craw. Well, my craw, at any rate.

First, the Riverdale School District’s decision to tear down an A.E. Doyle-designed elementary school in Dunthorpe, a move that’s far from surprising but depressing and exasperating, nevertheless: You get the feeling that the board never took the preservation case seriously; it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim DuRoche, on his Portland Spaces blog, and Brian Libby, on his Portland Architecture blog. Read ’em and weep. Or get angry. Or both. This 1920 school building isn’t major Doyle, but it’s a model of how to do a modest building the right way — and after all, aren’t most buildings in most places modest? If you get the modest buildings right, the major buildings will follow suit.


Second — and not wanting to pick on Mayor-elect Sam Adams, who has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas — but what in the pluperfect hell is with his insistence on building that white elephant of a convention center hotel? I thought Metro had finally stuck a silver spike in this 600-room monster’s heart, but no: Sam just won’t let it die the death it deserves. This truly seems to be a case where money interests are overruling common sense and good public policy, which really ought to go together.

Let’s be clear about a few things.

— First, the chances of this $227 million project ever paying for itself are about as good as Bill O’Reilly’s shot at acing out Hillary and becoming Obama’s secretary of state. And let’s not even get into how much that estimated $227 million would actually end up being.

Continue reading Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly →