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Sheets of white water roared down a rocky ledge, near the former Blue Heron Paper Co. mill site, spraying mist onto visitors wearing hard hats.

Mike Marxen, a landscape architect with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, poked through the crowd to gaze at Willamette Falls.

“Finally,” he said. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. Now that I’m here, I really appreciate the scale of it.”

The up-close view of the falls was a much anticipated finale to a recent tour of the former industrial site in Oregon City for approximately 60 Portland-area design professionals and others. The event was organized by city officials to gather feedback on efforts to redevelop the 23-acre site and create public access to Willamette Falls, the Pacific Northwest’s largest waterfall, for the first time in decades.

In September, Portland-based Langley Investment Properties bid to buy the site for $4.9 million. The firm faces a Saturday deadline to put money down toward a purchase, Oregon City planner Christina Robertson-Gardiner said.

Portland-based Walker Macy has developed a master plan, slated for spring adoption, to reconnect downtown Oregon City with the site. In the plan, Walker Macy staffers propose potential reuse of the site’s historic buildings by outdoor apparel manufacturers, restaurants, art galleries or studios and educational institutions.

Tour attendees had similar visions after exploring a series of abandoned industrial buildings and seeing the falls. Some suggestions were creation of a boutique hotel or a riverfront brewery. Marxen said he would like to see installation of interpretive panels that highlight the site’s natural and historical significance.

“I like the potential for restoring the natural riparian areas as well as the historic aspects,” he said. “There is so much potential for interpretation, historical or otherwise.”

Lisa McClellan, a principal with Portland-based Scott | Edwards Architecture, was one of several tour attendees who compared the site to Portland’s Pearl District. She said she remembers having similar enthusiasm in the 1990s for redevelopment of the formerly industrial Pearl District into mixed use.

“I totally saw the potential in the Pearl District,” she said. “Just because (the former Blue Heron property is) an industrial site doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of potential there.”

Kirk Davis, regional director for engineering firm Glumac, said the tour felt like one he took in the late ’90s of a former Blitz-Weinhard brewery in the Pearl District. He later worked as an engineer on The Brewery Blocks, a redevelopment of that property that served as a catalyst for other projects in the neighborhood.

“If you were able to walk the Brewery Blocks in 1999 and then go there today, the entire neighborhood has been changed in those blocks,” Davis said. “That is what I see for the entire downtown Oregon City.”

As he looked out at Willamette Falls during the tour, Davis said he envisioned a boutique hotel with a five-star restaurant on the top floor that he could take his wife to on their 40th wedding anniversary in six years. While walking through the former mill buildings he saw a shopping district.

“Standing in (the buildings) I can see – oh my gosh – this would be such a great linear retail mall,” Davis said.

Renovation of one of the former Blue Heron buildings into a brewery would be a great use of the space, said tour attendee Janet Spriggs, a principal with CAPITAL Engineering and Consulting.

One of the most fascinating parts about the site is its history, she said. It housed Oregon’s first sawmill in the 1830s. Flour mills followed and operated until 1908, when paper production began. Blue Heron Paper Co. took over in 2000, and went out of business in 2011.

Ideally, Spriggs said, development on the site will respect this past through reuse of buildings.

“Kind of embracing that industrial feel – I like that, retaining what it took to make that site,” she said.

Robertson-Gardiner said the city will encourage the developer of the site to renovate existing buildings when possible and retain historic aspects.

“That industrial massing is very important, just keeping some of those buildings to maintain that authenticity,” she said. “Main Street Oregon City is very small buildings. Here we have some bigger buildings that could bring some new uses.”

There are many ways for a developer to capitalize on the site’s prime view of Willamette Falls, Davis said.

“We’ve got this jewel that has been hidden from the populace,” he said.

Reworking the site for mixed use will be tricky, but worth it, said Maureen Raad, natural resources project manager with ESA Vigil-Agrimis.

“The challenges are apparent, but the potential is huge,” she said. “I can’t imagine it’s not going to happen.”