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Before Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood grew around Crystal Springs Creek, the stream formed a wetland in what is now Westmoreland Park.

When the park was created in the 1930s, Crystal Springs was channeled into a shallow, concrete duck pond. A $2 million project under construction this summer will remove the pond to bring the creek closer to its natural state.

Restoring the wetland will foster urban trout and salmon populations, including chinook, coho and steelhead, said Ronda Fast, environmental program coordinator for Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services.

“(Crystal Springs) is an amazing resource,” she said. “It has the potential to be an amazing salmon-bearing stream.”

Springfield-based Hamilton Construction Co. tore out the concrete that lined the duck pond and has started forming a more natural creek channel with sand, silt and top soil infill from other construction projects in the Portland area, project manager Chris VanderPloeg said. The new channel will meander through the park off of Southeast McLaughlin Boulevard, he said.

More than 50 large logs with roots still attached will be strategically placed in the creek bed to create pools and riffles that mimic natural fish habitat, VanderPloeg said.

“We have to place those logs as the plans show,” he said. “It’s all been basically engineered.”

Once the creek is diverted into the new channel, nearly 15,000 native plants – including 400 trees – will be planted to shade and cool the creek water, making it more habitable for fish, and less prone to erosion.

“It’s a fair amount of landscaping,” VanderPloeg said. “It will look real nice once everything is grown up.”

The city of Portland is sharing project costs with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Metro. TriMet also contributed $200,000 in construction mitigation for the Portland-Milwaukie light-rail project.

The corps is overseeing construction and hired Hamilton Construction for the job, said Michelle Helms, a spokeswoman for the corps’ Portland district.

Westmoreland Park’s shallow duck pond heated the stream water and didn’t have rocks and logs where young fish could hide and rest, she said.

“We’re helping to bring some fish passage back,” Helms said. “This is an active, popular park, but it wasn’t completely healthy from a habitat (and) fish perspective. It’s a pretty exciting project.”

The corps also is contributing a large portion of the money for an $880,000 project under way this summer to replace a nearby culvert off of Southeast Tacoma Street. Hamilton Construction will replace the 4-foot-wide pipe with a 14-foot-wide concrete culvert with a natural stream bottom.

The wider culvert will slow the water flow, easing the passage of the young fish upstream, said Karl Lee, a member of the Crystal Springs Partnership, a group dedicated to re-establishing and preserving native salmon runs in the creek.

“If all you get is big fish, we’re going to have a problem getting native fish populations up here,” he said.

Hamilton Construction started building the culvert and restoring the wetland last month. The culvert project and the wetland restoration are scheduled to finish in October and December respectively.

Because Tacoma Street is a busy thoroughfare, the prefabricated culvert is being installed one half at a time, Fast said.

Working in the tight space has been one of the trickiest parts of the job, VanderPloeg said.

“Right-of-way in there is only 60 feet wide,” he said. “You definitely have to make sure your tape measure is measuring correctly.”

The Tacoma Street culvert is among nine that the city hopes to replace by 2015. The culverts stretch between Southeast 28th Avenue and the Crystal Springs confluence with Johnson Creek at Johnson Creek Park.

Five culverts have already been replaced, allowing winter steelhead to return to the headwaters of Crystal Springs in Reed College Canyon for the first time since the 1970s.

Efforts to revitalize Crystal Springs have been in the works since the late 1990s, Helms said.

In 2004, Portland City Council adopted the Westmoreland Park Master Plan, which called for restoration of the Crystal Springs wetland.

The project required a lot of forethought, Helms said.

“It involves landscape architects, contractors, biologists and coordination with parks,” she said.

To construct the wetland, Hamilton installed concrete barriers that divert the creek into a temporary channel on the east side of the duck pond, VanderPloeg said. This allowed the pond to be drained slowly, he said.

“One of the biggest challenges is getting the water diverted,” VanderPloeg said.

Hamilton also had to be mindful of how the project would affect other parts of the creek, he said.

“The stream is so flat if you have any kind of hydraulic bump you’re going to raise the creek level.”

The Crystal Springs Partnership last month organized volunteers to help collect more than 600 native freshwater mussels and transport them upstream so they wouldn’t be harmed by construction, Lee said.

The Audubon Society of Portland helped relocate domestic ducks that lived in the pond before it was removed, Fast said.

Last week, city and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife workers caught fish in Crystal Springs near the construction site by using nets or momentarily stunning them with electric shocks, she said. The fish were counted and sorted before being relocated to a part of the stream outside the construction zone, Fast said.

“This project is a good example of you take care of what’s here so you don’t muck it up in the process,” she said. “It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of planning and coordination.”

Along with making Westmoreland Park more wildlife friendly, the project will replace a playground with a nature play area, and add walking paths, a boardwalk and overlooks surrounding the wetland, Helms said.

Crystal Springs Partnership members are thrilled with the restoration project, Lee said.

“It’s an example of what you can do for restoration in a very urban area,” he said. “We’re not in the wilderness, but we can still have fish and wildlife in this very urban setting.”