. Well, strictly speaking, it’s being replaced. This past month the Sellwood Bridge Project finally broke ground, and if everything goes according to plan, Bridgetown will have a new river span in 2015.

While most people probably won’t miss it due to the less-than-stellar safety ratings that it’s received, seeing a substantial hunk of the landscape get replaced is not without a certain mournfulness. Given the recent news of its doom, (and my general fondness for bridges) here are a few fun facts about Portland’s most truss-filled tattoo subject.

1. It replaced a ferry! Prior to the Sellwood, folks crossed the Willamette on a ferry called the John F. Caples. The steam-powered vessel took an average of 582 vehicles and 482 pedestrians across the river every day. The traffic was too much for a lone steamship to bear, though, hence the bridge. Nowadays, the two-lane bridge is not enough for its current traffic, so the current Sellwood will be going the way of the steamship.

2. It was Portland’s first fixed-span bridge! In 1925 the truss bridge was the first river crosser in Portland to not have a draw or swing span. The very first bridge in Portland was a wooden toll bridge roughly where the Morrison is today, and it was a hand-cranked swing-span bridge. The Hawthorne and Steel are both lift bridges. The Sellwood, though, was the first wholly immovable bridge in the city.

3. It was built for $541,637.19! That’s $6,678,393.75 in today’s money. All things considered, that’s actually pretty cheap for a bridge. The current project is several times that, with a current estimated cost of $268 million.

4. It’s been extensively repaired before! In 1960 the foundation of the bridge had settled considerably, and cracked concrete and askew columns had to be repaired so the bridge didn’t collapse. The foundation settling wasn’t unusual for the area, given the low, wet nature of the land in the area.

5. The handrail was not in the original design! The concrete, Gothic-style handrails on each side of the bridge are one of the few aesthetic flourishes on what is largely an unadorned, functional structure. The original design, though, only featured a metal guardrail.

6. It’s been the recipient of a TIGER grant! TIGER stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery. The grant program was started in 2009 as part of the stimulus package and is actually non-forced, as far as clever acronyms go. The replacement project .

7. It has a 3.5 star rating on Yelp! . The Sellwood Bridge gets a fair amount of bad reviews, but one five-star review reads “Hang in there buddy.  Don’t let the haters get you down.  Please let these 5 beautiful stars serve as encouragement to stay on the up and up.”

All things considered, though, it is good that the old thing is getting replaced. As much as a nostalgia-addled history buff such as myself might mourn the passing of substantial piece of landscape, a newer, better bridge is definitely the way to go. Of particular interest is that not only will the replacement bridge be safer for heavy vehicles, but .

The transit advocate and development enthusiast in me can’t help but be happy for the project. This is good news, all around, and I’ll probably be going “woo” at the dedication ceremony in 2015. But, for gooey reasons of historical nostalgia, I’ll miss the old thing, cracks and all.

by SoulRider.222 via Flickr

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Fans of can relax. The venerable restaurant is staying put.

Some time ago the property was acquired by the Vancouver-based C.E. John Properties, and there was some uncertainty as to what exactly was going on with the place. Was it going to be moved? Redeveloped? Closed?

When I contacted Besaw’s, the host who spoke to me on the phone only said, “As far as I know, we’re here for another four years.”

Yesterday, though, I heard from Tom DiChiara, the vice president of development at C.E. John. He went into a bit more detail.

“We have no immediate plans to make any changes,” DiChiara wrote in an email. “In the future, if we decide to redevelop portions of the site, the historic Besaw’s restaurant will remain at its corner location as it has for many decades. It will be an anchor to any redevelopment that may occur around it. We value its historical contribution to the north end, and it was a significant reason we acquired the overall property. Besaw’s will remain an operating restaurant for decades to come.”

This is great news for any kind of local history buff or preservation enthusiast. Besaw’s, after all, , and with an open date of 1903, it’s one of the oldest operating dining establishments in the city. Only Huber’s, Jakes, and Kelly’s Olympian (yes, the biker bar — , believe it or not) are older.

The decision to keep Besaw’s a part of Northwest Portland shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows the area. In an interview with the 91��Ƶ back in August, DiChiara called Northwest Portland a “great” place to live.

“It’s where I lived for a while when I first moved to town,” DiChara said. “I think the active streets and the walkable neighborhood and the streetcar – all of those factor into it.”

He went on to add: “I think we’re always focused on the close-in neighborhoods where ‘there’ is already there. You know, where the retail is always thriving and people want to live (and) where we can infill and build housing where it’s desired.”

The historic Besaw’s is definitely a “there,” and most certainly contributes to the neighborhood life of the district. Any further development on Northwest Savier will go hand-in-hand with the old restaurant, not roughshod over it.

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You’ve probably been counted. Right now, on fifteen downtown intersections, people are sitting about in the cold-ish weather of Portland’s December and counting pedestrians. Workers are sitting around and going “click” every single time someone walks by, contributing to a giant pile of numbers about pedestrian traffic. Who are they, though? Why are they there? And why is what they’re doing at all important?

The people-counters are tracking traffic at the behest of the Portland Business Alliance According to it site, the purpose of the survey is to “track pedestrian traffic volumes in front of key intersections within the downtown core, available retail space, and parcels poised for redevelopment.” The counts from its most recent survey from this past June can be found and .

Pedestrian traffic, obviously, has an effect on property values and the desirability of given pieces of real estate (location, location, location). It is crucial for quantifying which parts of a given grid are active hot spots of urban life and which ones are less successful. Portland, as you might have heard, is a city that’s somewhat enthusiastic about pedestrian traffic, and obviously present-day policies and planning contribute to that. Another thing that contributes to the massive amount of pedestrian traffic in this city, though, is the density of the grid.

“Density” is one of those worlds that gets thrown around with a certain amount of enthusiasm, but when people talk about it, they usually mean “how many humans you can cram into a given area.” The platting of Portland, though, has another kind of density. The city’s small blocks total up to 360 intersections per square mile. That’s a lot of intersections, and therefore a whole lot of nodes where pedestrians can change directions, move about and generally explore the cityscape around them. Don’t take my word for it, though. Pick up “” by Jane Jacobs (part of the holy writ of modern urban planning) and read Chapter 9. It’s called “The need for small blocks,” and any Portlander who reads it will probably nod in hurried assent as the author explains why walkable cities are, in fact, good.

(An aside – I’m a fan of the austere chessboard pattern that dominates most of Portland’s grid. It’s clean, intuitive and generally easy to navigate. However, is a rather interesting critique of the universal adulation Portland’s grid gets. The rest of the site is also good, provided that street layouts excite you.)

This is not a new thing. An oft-repeated but possibly apocryphal story about Portland and other West Coast cities concerns the origins of our present-day small blocks. The story goes that the reason for Portland’s tiny blocks had nothing to do with better pedestrian circulation, mobility or anything like that. Supposedly, the reason was that more blocks simply meant more corners, and corner real estate was more valuable because it was more likely to be in a high-traffic area.

Whatever the initial cause for our super-dense grid, those counter-clickers are providing a somewhat valuable service while sitting outside in the non-warmth.

The post Why you are being counted as you walk Portland’s streets appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Everyone remembers the Burger King. When Dean Gisvold, the board chair of Central City Concern mentions it, a chuckle emanates from the room. He’s only the first of four speakers to invoke the infamous burger hut. Several speakers later, Multnomah County Commissioners Chair Jeff Cogen is not nearly so reserved. “Who could look at a Burger King?” exhorts Cogen, waving his arms, “and think that this could happen?” The room explodes into cheers and applause. Everyone remembers the Burger King. It’s long gone now. A scant thirteen months later, a radically different building stands in its place.

The event in question was a reception for the opening of the Old Town Recovery Center (formerly called the Broadway Recovery Center), an expansion of the already existing Old Town Clinic. The Recovery Center employs a staff of 72 and i

s projected to have more than 4,000 visits per month. It is unique in that it puts both internal medicine and mental health facilities under the same roof. The interior is crisp, clean and light. The blond wood clicks underfoot, and a small b

amboo garden sits in the center of the first floor. “We didn’t want anything that looked like a clinic,” said Rachel Solotaroff, medical director for the Central City Concern. The place hardly looks like a hospital. Even the thick-glassed armed locking doors are nice to look at.

But enough of the human angle, let’s get to the good stuff. Let’s talk about the building! The Recovery Center (brought to us by and ) is innovative in a number of ways. First, it’s going for a gold-level LEED rating. According to Sean Hubert, the CCC’s director of housing, efficiency measures include Mitsubishi heat recovery ventilation, certified wood, a low amount of volatile organic compounds occupancy sensitive lighting and the ability to harvest as much as 50,000 gallons of rainwater to flush toilets.

“There’s no reason we should have potable water in our toilets,” said Jill

Sherman, vice president at Gerding Elden Development, the project manager.

The building is also ready for the , wherein developers attempt to reduce fossil fuels by 60 percent of the national average. So the Recovery Center is only the latest of Portland’s various eco-friendly built structures. (Honestly this is all kind of

par for the course in Portland. I’d be sort of surprised if a major project went to go up and the developers said “Nah, we’re not into sustainability.”)

Secondly, it’s built to actually get taller. While it’s only three stories now, the Recovery Center has been built so that additional floors can be added onto the top. According to Hubert, while the CCC was meeting with the Old Town and Pearl neighborhood associations, the parties involved wanted a certain amount of density, but the funding wasn’t all there yet. Instead of either building a larger, more expensive structure, they made one that could be added onto later. The necessary bits for a taller building are there – the piles go down over seventy feet, and three elevator shafts are already in place. “It’s been designed to be a much larger structure,” said Sherman. “The market is starting to get maybe better.”

Third, the building was designed, permitted and built very quickly. In less than two years, in fact. Construction started a scant thirteen months ago, the facility has been usable since Dec. 5.

And, lastly, the Burger King. The old Burger King that stood on the corner of Northwest Broadway and East Burnside Street was something of an eyesore, and was known as one of , a vector for drug use, prostitution and crime. It’s gone now, though, replaced with a structure that will hopefully alleviate precisely the problems that were once aggravated on that very spot.

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Portland is awash in dogs. We have . The North Park Blocks have . Four-footed things that go “woof” are everywhere.

While exact numbers about the canine population of Portland are hard to come by, we do know that Portland has . that Portland has 5.7 dog parks per every 100,000 residents, more per capita than any other American city. The green spaces and open spaces inside of cities are now being made with dogs in mind.

So what’s this mean? Well, it’s yet another indicator that Portland has historically been pretty good at urban development.

Dogs are an investment. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, depending on size of the animal. (And that is not counting the cost of the animal itself – ASPCA is solidly in favor of rescue animals, so it’s assuming that loving families are getting dogs for free. If someone does spring for the exotic purebred, though, that sends the cost of initial canine investment through the roof.)

While dogs certainly aren’t the animal equivalent of a sports car, they’re not cheap, either. To adequately care for an animal, the owner has to be, at the very least, pretty solidly middle-class, or at least non-destitute. The include Norfolk, Va., Madison, Wis., and San Francisco. All of them are reasonably affluent cities whose population demographics skew toward non-poverty.

Portland got that way on purpose. It’s not an accident that this is a city that’s now filled with pooch enthusiasts. Starting with the the city of Portland made an active effort to turn what had been a wasteland of parking lots into somewhere people actually wanted to go. Several campaigns of urban revitalization followed, and as stagnant as the current economy is, by and large Portland’s been on the upswing for the past few decades.

When you look at Portland’s staggering number of dog parks, don’t think of (please don’t), don’t think of the climate, and don’t think that there’s just something in the water here that makes people more amicable to having pooches. Rather, think of the large number of dogs as yet another indication of city planning pulling an affluent population from the periphery of the grid into the center. What’s more, the city has continued to actively cater and plan around the needs of that population, putting a non-insignificant amount of money, time and attention to planning and development that pretty much exclusively benefits dog-havers.

As someone who does not own any small furry mammals, part of my brain wants to scream in protest that my tax dollars are being used to benefit a niche demographic of which I am not a member. However, dog parks serve as social areas that facilitate interaction and can be something of a focus for a given urban district. Portland has striven to be a “twenty-minute city,” which conventionally means that drivers can get themselves to the CBD in less than, well, twenty minutes. The term has a more extensive meaning, though – it can also mean that district centers (like Hawthorne or downtown St. Johns) are easily accessible from residential areas.

As much as one might initially roll their eyes at Portland having so many dog parks (cue comments about hipsters and pugs), the dog park can serve as a component of a district center that draws people in just like a café, pub or neighborhood restaurant does. Having lots of dog parks means that Portland is solidly in favor of public infrastructure that focuses as a pivot for active urban life.

by O World via Flickr

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The area beneath the Burnside Bridge has been most strongly associated with Saturday Market. For years, the weekly craft market brought life and vitality to the sheltered area and turned what was normally an empty lot into one of Portland’s most active mercantile areas.

Saturday Market, though, has moved to sunnier, more open pastures just across Southwest Naito Parkway. While some bits of market activity do spill over into the area just beneath the bridge, for the most part it’s been nothing more than a shadowed dead zone, home to naught but a parking lot and a few interesting smells. What used to be the busiest place in Portland two days a week is now dormant full time. It’s precisely the kind of urban blank spot that would make Jane Jacobs cry.

The quiet is not going to last for long, though. Throughout the year a blank storefront under the bridge has been redeveloped by Venerable Properties and the University of Oregon for classroom use. Behind the opaque glass exterior, real stuff has been going on. When I visited the property, I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of the interior, but I did manage to sneak a peak at some of the construction. The surrounding area belies the new interior- it’s not just a box of bricks and dust. The glass-and-wood fixtures going in are much more evocative of a swank, polished university campus than anything else in Old Town. (The contrast, by the way, is by design. There was .)

According to Heidi Hiassen, the communications and marketing associate for the University of Oregon in Portland, students will start using the space starting winter term of 2012. According to , classes start Jan. 9. Hiassen says that “it will either be studio or classroom space,” but that “it may take a few terms for the students to figure out how to use it to their best advantage.”

The development beneath the bridge isn’t just significant because a new tenant is moving in. The expansion of the University of Oregon (my alma mater, by the way) is just the latest bit of development in Old Town that’s slowly been changing the character of the district. Old Town (also known as the North End, Slabtown, the Portland Tenderloin, and Couch’s Addition) has always been known as a sort of skeezy, low-end part of Portland and historically has been the part of the city to be most inhabited by homeless. The Salvation Army, Union Gospel Mission, the Blanchet House, and other charitable organizations have all been fixtures of the district for some time. Saturday Market has brought a large general population into the district for the weekends, and the neighborhood is known for nightlife and clubbing, but the University of Oregon is a different sort of animal. The U of O opening up additional academic space in the area means that students and instructors will bring a certain amount of day-to-day activity to a mostly-desolate section of street during daylight hours, is mostly populated by the homeless.

Whether this will at all change the character of Old Town, displace the present population, or liven up the space under the bridge downtown, remains to be seen in 2012.

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Occupy Portland made an . This time, it was in Shemanski Park, a name that led many Portlanders wondering: “Wait, what and where is Shemanski Park?”

If you live in Portland, chances are you’ve been there before and had no idea what its name was. Chances are, most of the Occupiers didn’t know what the block they were descending on was called. Most of the cops probably also said “Shemanki what?” when they got the call. Why? Everyone just thinks of it as part of the Park Blocks. While the collective name “Park Blocks” is the most bandied-about term for the stretch of nicely green land that goes through downtown Portland, it turns out that the individual bits of the Park Blocks actually have names. Shemanski Park is the area around the Shemanski Fountain, just south of Southwest Salmon Street. The block with the Abe Lincoln statue? That’s called Lincoln Square. The block with the Teddy Roosevelt statue? Roosevelt Square.

Shemanski Fountain was the gift of Polish immigrant Joseph Shemanski in 1926. The bronze statue within the fountain is called Rebecca at the Well. The elms that surround Shemanski Park, Lincoln Square, and the rest of it are not native to Oregon. However, it is one of the larger groves of elms in North America, as Portland’s collection of the trees were west of the Rocky Mountains and not wiped out by Dutch elm disease like their eastern brethren were. The whole area has been designated as a public space since 1852, a mere one year after Portland was incorporated, and seven whole years before Oregon statehood. However, folks in 1852 didn’t really have an idea of “parks” back then. It was originally cleared of trees entirely and turned into a plank road. Some twenty years later, the city re-worked it as green space and introduced the non-native elms to the area.

The man who redesigned the area to be a nice, Occupy-able park was none other than Fredrick Law Olmsted. Olmsted is probably the single most famous park developer in American history, designing numerous open spaces throughout the U.S., most famously New York’s Central Park. Olmsted’s sons would carry on his legacy as the Olmsted Brothers landscape design company.

So, that’s what Shemanski Park is. It’s a bit of Portland designed by the greatest landscape architect in American history, a public space whose usage predates statehood, and an area where you can look around and hang out with mostly-extinct trees. But it’s fine if you just call it “the Park Blocks.” Everyone else does.

Photo by via Flickr

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Quick! Think of a famous Portland sign! You probably thought of , didn’t you? Name another! Let me guess – Hung Far Low, right? Both of those signs, probably the largest and best known bits of flashing light in Portland, have been extensively restored in recent years (granted, Hung Far Low hanging without the neon), but recently another neon landmark got restored, thanks to .

The Butte Hotel has sat at the corner of Northwest Fifth Avenue and Davis Street since 1912, making it as old as the larger, higher-end hotels in town (for comparison: the Benson was also built in 1912, the Heathman in 1927 and the Governor in 1909.) The Butte has had several different lives – it’s been a pool hall, a bar, and a fish market, and nowadays is home to , and low-income housing in the Old Town area.

No one is quite sure when the iconic sign was first installed. Kathy Pape of the Central City Concern estimates that it’s most likely from the ’40s or ’50s. In any case, it was hanging from the building in 1983 when the CCC acquired it and already in a state of disrepair. This past year it was removed from the building, restored by and reinstalled directly on the corner of Northwest Sixth Avenue and Davis Street where it will no longer be obstructed by trees. Funding for the restoration came mostly from Central City Concern, though some other funds came from a Portland Development Commission fund aimed at improving storefronts along the Green and Yellow MAX lines.

This project is only the most visible part of CCC’s restoration of the Butte Hotel. Not only did it polish up the glowing landmark, but it also began extensive structural work on the building itself, which is now at full capacity.

“Further work done on the Butte will be sensitive to the historic value of the building and will fit in with the general architecture of the area,” Pape said. The undertaking is the CCC’s 14th restoration project in the downtown and Old Town area.

Urban beautification and development are all well and good, but the restoration of the sign is also great news for local history nerds (like myself) who enjoy bright, shiny objects. Portland, like many other American cities, used to light up with multicolored neon in the night. Downtown Broadway used to look , for example. Nowadays, , many of them are in various states of disrepair due to high maintenance costs. The Butte sign, though, now shines again over Old Town.

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The Portland Building is technically “historic” now. Last week the National Parks Service released a document formally announcing that the 29-year-old structure is worthy of historic preservation.

Now, I happen to think that the Portland Building is a hideously malformed monstrosity not worthy to bear the name of our fair city, but that is neither here nor there. The move does raise a question about Portland — where are the historical buildings, and what are we doing to preserve them? How is it that something as new as 1982 counts as “historic” in this city?

Many of the truly old buildings in Portland are clustered around the Old Town area and in the Yamhill district. (so, technically older than the state of Oregon itself, which joined the Union in 1859). Walking through Old Town, several of the more aged buildings are in various states of vacancy or disrepair.  (marking buildings as unsafe) dot the landscape. Several of the buildings bear small plaques detailing what they used to be, but a staggering number of them are wholly or partially vacant. The once-impressive , for example, is now vacant on the upper floors, and resembles a tomb more than anything else. That oldest building in Portland, the one from 1857? It’s empty.

While the Portland Building is nice in it’s own way (it did unleash Michael Graves on the world, after all) preserving it is not the most pressing thing that Portland could be doing when it comes to historical architecture. There are plenty of cast-iron buildings, old brick structures, and beautiful pieces of art from the 1800s that barely survive. ; you’ll notice that there are whole eras unrepresented in historic architecture. Very little from the end of the 1800s or early 1900s is still around, and every single original building in Portland (the city was incorporated in 1851) is gone. Iron has rusted. Bricks have crumbled. As innovative as Portland has been with planning and looking ahead, little remains of what was.

The Portland Building, as much as people might dislike it, isn’t going anywhere. It is unique and characteristic of the city, but at this point it doesn’t really need to be preserved, as it is still actively used and maintained. In the meantime, though, more than a few buildings that actually do showcase this city’s architectural heritage are wasting away.

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This Friday is that most hallowed of American economic holidays – Black Friday, so named because of retailers that supposedly move from being in the red to being in the black, for the year, on the day after Thanksgiving.

While it’s not consistently the biggest retail spending day of the year, statistics about this coming Friday are tossed about as a major indicator of how things are going in the world of consumer spending. Even if you’re not the type to camp outside of a to get the limited-time midnight deals, holiday spending does affect you. It’s not unheard of for retailers to take in more than half of their annual revenue in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So what are the prognostications about this year? What do economists see when they gaze into their crystal balls and try to predict the retail future?

Last year’s Black Friday was staggeringly huge – according to the National Retail Federation, over 212 million shoppers hit the stores last year . There are countries with purchasing power parity GDPs lower than that figure. . Last year, even in the midst of a recession, American shoppers on a single busy day spent enough money to out-buy Paraguay.

That was last year. This year, , with estimates in the neighborhood of 152 million shoppers opening their wallets across the country. While American consumers (i.e., us) aren’t going to be rocketing the economy out of a recession, low consumer seasonal consumer spending isn’t going to be contributing to any further fiscal woe for the U.S. We’ll be spending enough to come out on the moderate-to-good side of the equation.

So, even if you’re already sick of the ads and the jingles and the spam in your inbox announcing all kinds of sales, this is a big deal. Countless retailers are at this moment bedecking their stores with products and deals to get ready for a day that will be, justly or not, held up as a major economic indicator for the year ahead. And even if you can’t bring yourself to go into a crowd-choked Target, worry not. This year, . Black Friday might not always be the biggest consumer spending day of the year, but in some ways, it might as well be.

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