Plans for extending the North Park Blocks as a Green Loop connection came under scrutiny by the Portland Design Commission on Thursday.

Commissioners held a design advice meeting for the planned parks infrastructure as a condition of the Broadway master plan, a 2019 document that governs portions of the area in Northwest Portland.

The project encompasses Northwest Glisan to Johnston streets, east of Northwest Park Avenue. City planners envision a winding, elevated path for bicyclists and pedestrians to connect the North Park Blocks to the Broadway Bridge.

The North Park Blocks would carry the Green Loop — a pedestrian-friendly and bicyclist-friendly route that will encircle the Central City.

Yet the project isn’t expected to be built for years, and the discussion Thursday was hobbled by unanswered questions regarding timing, sequencing and the feasibility of building and maintaining a linear park in the troubled Old Town Chinatown neighborhood.

Gary Datka, a Portland Parks & Recreation project manager, said construction would begin sometime after 2030.

“We would expect somewhere between 2030 and 2035 this gets developed,” he said.

That raised the question of how the parks bureau should manage the area in the meantime. The properties are owned by Prosper Portland and not yet managed by Parks & Recreation.

Some of the parcels are likely to be used for laying down construction equipment, Datka said, so it doesn’t make sense to build park infrastructure before private development occurs, only for it to be damaged by construction activities later.

Portland Parks & Recreation “doesn’t want to build a bridge to nowhere in the interim,” he said.

Commissioners suggested some sort of interim park use would be appropriate.

“It really has to be an interim park,” Chairwoman Chandra Robinson said.

Commissioner Zari Santner cautioned that Parks & Recreation must prepare now to maintain the linear park before it’s built.

Santner suggested a public-private partnership could be used to maintain the area.

“That is something very, very fundamental that the parks bureau needs to address at this time,” she said.

The bureau “has never had the funding to take care of urban parks,” Santner said.

The design itself, from Portland landscape architecture firm PLACE, drew praise and concerns.

“The ascent, the massing, for me it works,” Santner said.

She criticized other aspects of the design, saying railings play too large a role and compete with tree plantings.

Designers heard from community members that the path design should provide adequate separation between pedestrians and bicyclists. The design accomplishes that with dividers, planters and other cues, PLACE designer Miguel Camacho-Serna said.

The ascending pathway will create room for a roughly 4,000-square-foot retail space underneath, Camacho-Serna said.

Commissioners urged designers and city staff to find ways to make the park work.

“There’s so much beautiful space for passive enjoyment, but the space for active enjoyment is maybe a little bit missing,” said Commissioner Sarah Vaz, who suggested food carts or small shops could help.

“It depends on how it’s going to be programmed and what the active uses are around it,” she added.

Also on Thursday, design commissioners appointed new officers. Robinson was named chairwoman, and Joe Swank vice chairman. Votes for both positions were unanimous.

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A proposed six-story hotel showed its new face to the Portland Design Commission on Thursday.

The Choice Cambria Portland would front Northwest Park Avenue, near the historic North Park Blocks, on half of a block between Northwest Davis and Couch streets. This was the second design advice hearing for the project; the first took place in August. Commissioner Don Vallaster recused himself from the hearing due to a conflict of interest.

The latest proposal from SERA Architects is better, commissioners said, but has room for improvement in how the building would relate to its surroundings.

The design team is trying to find a balance between modern expression and the Pearl District‘s urban fabric, said Jeff Roberts of SERA Architects. That was the aim of the previous proposal, but commissioners stated that it wasn’t working.

The team changed its design concept to instead embrace the trees on the North Park Blocks.

“What we looked at in detail was just the beauty and the structure of the changing seasons of the park,” Roberts said.

The form of the structure changed to a barbell, which allowed the addition of four guest rooms. Now the hotel would be 95,000 square feet and have 178 rooms.

Also, the exterior design shifted away from a dark green and tan stucco split to a brick, sandstone stucco and multicolor metal pattern envelope to represent tree bark.

However, commissioners stated it was a “fussy” number of materials.

“We go from brick, and then we set back about two feet and go to metal panels, and then we set back … maybe 10 or 12 feet,” Commissioner Brian McCarter said.

The exterior would work better with just one material, Commission Chairwoman Julie Livingston noted.

“Most of the strong context buildings are 90 percent one thing,” she said.

Materials aside, the Design Commission agreed that the proposed building concept and structure layout was improved from the previous iteration.

Due to the site location on the North Park Blocks, the landscaping fronting the park was highly debated. The hotel is the first building required to respond to the new Green Loop code, which mandates a 12-foot setback along 75 percent of the property lines adjacent to it.

The purpose of the setback is to provide a greater pedestrian pathway around the Central City. However, as stated in the previous Design Commission hearing, the setback separates people from the park. A large part of the discussion on Thursday involved the kinds of trees that could go between the park and the building to enhance the environment without shadowing guest rooms.

“What’s lacking in the park and what could these setback areas provide are truly lush landscape – a truly beautiful understory,” Commissioner Zari Santner said.

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