PORTLAND — Pioneer Courthouse Square — “Portland’s living room” — is a downtown landmark, a cherished lunchtime spot and gathering space. Yet 40 years ago this week, before the public park even existed, power brokers dropkicked it into the trash.
“It’s down the tubes,” then-Portland Development Commission chairman Louis Scherzer said on January 6, 1981.
Real-estate developer William E. Roberts called the plan to build Pioneer Courthouse Square “a dead letter.”
The problem: downtown business leaders didn’t like the “open-space” design, The Oregonian reported.
Opponents worried that the planned park’s inviting layout would attract vagrants, and that such an outcome would scare off shoppers in the struggling downtown core. They wanted instead a “controlled,” or closed, space. When that didn’t emerge from the public debate and subsequent nationwide design competition, many of the square’s well-heeled detractors refused to help raise the $1.6 million in private donations needed to complete funding for the development.
Roberts, the incoming PDC chairman in 1981, was one of the critics of the City Council-approved design by Portland architect Willard K. Martin. The city’s new mayor, Frank Ivancie, also was a determined foe of an “open” park.
“It’s very frustrating,” urban planner and design-competition jury member Sumner Sharpe said of the high-level opposition.
Every Portlander knows Pioneer Courthouse Square managed to get built — it opened in 1984, just three years after it publicly went “down the tubes.” So did the city go back and choose one of the competition’s also-ran designs?
Nope. For starters, all of the finalists were “open” parks, meaning the project’s critics wouldn’t have liked any of them.
Here’s a quick recap of the designs that made the final round of the competition:
The proposal from San Francisco landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who created Portland’s 1970-built Ira Keller Fountain, and Los Angeles architect Charles Moore earned praise from the jury for its “courageousness and invention.” (A 2009 American Institute of Architects exhibit about the park’s development described the design as an attempt “to evoke a local town center.”) But the jury worried that “the dominance of the design would tend to distract from any of the events that would take place in the square.” They added: “It should be built, but alas, not as our major public square.”
New York architects Peter Eisenman and Jaqueline T. Robertson apparently came closer to what the jury had in mind, with the jurors heralding the “physical simplicity and intellectual complexity” of their Modernist design. Still, the jury wasn’t quite satisfied, concerned that such a park, with its grid-like layout, would not spontaneously draw in downtown workers and shoppers.
The proposal by Philadelphia architects Robert Geddes and Michael A. Kihn included a covered garden and a large, illuminated vine-covered trellis that created a horseshoe shape. The jury noted the somewhat oppressive feel of the design, concluding that it wasn’t “the kind of space and setting that would be enjoyed in Portland” and that the trellis would be “an undesired intrusion” into the square itself.
Then there was the concept offered by the Boston firms Machado & Silvetti and Schwartz/Silver. The jury said this design, which featured a large glass greenhouse directly across from the historic Pioneer Courthouse, would be a “strong symbol,” calling the idea “handsome and compelling.” In the end, though, the jury decided the glass structure, the centerpiece of the park, had a “curiously consistent interior arrangement” that didn’t quite work.
The jurors ultimately settled on the broad, tiered design by Portland’s Will Martin, J. Douglas Macy, Lee Kelly, Terence O’Donnell, Spencer Gill and Robert Reynolds, an uncomplicated vision which O’Donnell described as a place “in which to gaze at the passing parade … ourselves.” The design received widespread praise when it was publicly unveiled — and it would go on to win various awards.
Despite the kudos for the winning proposal, the influential downtown business organization The Association for Portland Progress was not convinced. The city’s big-money people, the group insisted, weren’t going to help make the park happen.
“We’re back at square one,” Mayor Ivancie said after a fundraising drive was cancelled at the end of 1980, followed by the Portland Development Commission declaring it didn’t have the support necessary to continue the project.
Some of the park’s proponents viewed the business community’s opposition to an open-space design as an attempt to scuttle the project entirely, seeing as the federal grants that would provide most of the funding required such a design. If the city did return to square one, the park site — once home to the grand Portland Hotel and then to a desultory Meier & Frank parking lot — just might be entirely up for grabs.
Of course, Pioneer Courthouse Square overcame these 11th-hour public contretemps and behind-the-scenes political intrigues. It would be built without city officials having to go back to the drawing board.
The revival and ultimate success of the Martin-led design came from a confluence of actions — including late-stage support from Tom McCall, Oregon’s popular former governor, and a marketing brainstorm: engraving bricks in the square with the names of those who “bought” them, fueling public support and thousands of small-dollar donations.
Less than a year after the project had been declared “a dead letter,” both Mayor Ivancie and The Association for Portland Progress reversed their long-time opposition, and the park’s construction quickly moved forward.
