GBD Architects thinks a mixed-use project awaiting its building permit could blaze a trail for other residential projects in Portland’s Old Town.

“The most exciting thing is, Skidmore/Old Town, it has this great nightlife, lots to do at night,” GBD principal Agustin Enriquez said. “But no one really lives there. In an era where every other area in Portland is absolutely on fire in terms of development, Old Town really hasn’t seen much new development.”

230 Ash, formerly known as “3rd and Ash,” is the first of the Goodman family’s proposed Ankeny Blocks projects – 11 buildings with the potential to reshape a 30-block area in downtown. This month, the family’s Downtown Development Group received approval for 230 Ash from the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission. Construction is scheduled to start in November.

The site is a half block along Southwest Ash Street between Southwest Second and Third avenues. Enriquez said the new building will fit well amid the vibrant scene on Second Avenue, next door to Kells Irish Restaurant and Pub and 1-year-old Pine Street Market.

The building will be six stories with 133 apartments – a 50-50 mix of studios and one-bedroom units. There will be a rooftop tenant amenity, underground parking for 63 vehicles and 8,600 square feet for restaurants.

Designing a building for a nationally recognized historic district like Skidmore/Old Town was interesting, Enriquez said. This type of district is relatively uncommon, he said, and the firm’s architectural approach was a bit different for this project than those in areas where GBD predominates, such as the West End or Northwest Portland.

“The hope for this project is it will usher in the next chapter for Old Town with a density of residential use that doesn’t yet exist much,” Enriquez said. “So understanding the historic context, the design effort was tuned to finding a solution that is visually compatible with the existing buildings, but doesn’t trivialize the reality that it is being built in contemporary times.”

GBD has its hands full at the moment with a number of high-profile projects in development, including the Oregon Square superblock in the Lloyd District.

230 Ash

Owner: Downtown Development Group

Architect: GBD Architects

Contractor: Lease Crutcher Lewis

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The latest stage in the journey of the Eric Ladd Cast-Iron Collection might soon conclude.

Preservationists are hopeful that new design guidelines for the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District will encourage reuse of these artifacts, now stacked like cordwood in an open-air lot under an overpass of Interstate 5.

The 110 or so innocuous-looking columns and grates, bearing the deleterious effects of corrosion and relocation, have been owned by the city (as the Portland Development Commission) since 2006. At present, it’s unclear who exactly wants to use them, but advocates are optimistic they’ll be part of the building boom moving forward.

Architects and developers don’t always go into business to preserve the past, and it’s thought by some that it’s telling there’s been so little interest so far.

A ‘wonderful moment’

Over the years, William A. “Bill” Hawkins Jr. moved from discouragement to acceptance that the Eric Ladd collection would never be fully utilized. But lately, he’s “hopeful.”

“I’ve had this wonderful moment in the last month,” said the architect and historian.

Hawkins is regarded as the cast-iron authority in Portland. His book, “The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland,” documents the role the one-time innovative building style played in shaping modern architecture, as well as the Rose City.

Cast iron was a national movement during the latter half the 19th century. Common to Italianate architecture, it was a new structural way to build using large, prefabricated, often ornate, iron pieces affixed to building fronts. They communicated owners’ wealth and status, and were cheaper to build and install than the stone masonry of the day. The style became the norm in Portland starting in the 1860s, when the area’s first iron foundries were established.

Coincidentally, that was also when much of old Portland was built. So instead of a cast-iron building here and there, as in previously-established urban areas like New York City and Paris, there was a whole section of Portland emblematic of the cast-iron aesthetic.

But time moves fast, and other voguish building trends came and went. The cast-iron came down nearly as fast as it went up. Fires ravished the growing city, and the heart of commerce shifted away from the waterfront. Later, in the 1950s, a man named Eric Ladd, fascinated with Portland’s past, worked to set aside and salvage cast-iron elements from approximately 12 demolished storefronts.

His collection was first stored at the Jacob Kamm House before being relocated to a farm along the Sandy River, where it sat for decades. The PDC purchased the pieces in 2006, but an effort to streamline design guidelines to encourage reuse of the artifacts was stalled when the discussion turned to other matters, notably zoning and building height. As staff and committee membership turned over, hope held by preservationists including Hawkins faded. Until this month.

A mixed-use project planned for Pine Street and Oak Street was at first rejected by the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission because of a design “unsympathetic” to surrounding architecture. But after returning from the drawing board with plans calling for cast iron, and other historically-appropriate considerations, the project team gained the commission’s support.

Unlike the previous guidelines, the new ones are concerned more with the “cast iron” than the “Italianate,” so new buildings look less like they’re mimicking a historical style. A companion resolution to the guidelines pressed city bureaus to make “reasonable efforts” to use the cast-iron elements in development and renovation efforts.

Another project offering hope for cast iron is the future home of Ankrom Moisan Architects. Though cast iron won’t be incorporated in the new building, the firm will display artifacts from the Eric Ladd Collection in a grove of freestanding elements along the building’s Naito Parkway frontage.

“We wanted to ensure the story of cast iron is told in our development,” Executive Vice President Murray Jenkins said.

Most of the interest in using the Ladd pieces in recent years has come from developers who have sought to use them as decorative art pieces and not as building exteriors or entryways, said Val Ballestrem, educational director at the Architectural Heritage Center.

As for why the Ladd iron is in limbo, Ballestrem has several theories. First, modern architects “can’t seem to fathom putting this old material on a new building.”

“I think that would be the ultimate statement of recycling and reuse – something that Portland used to be very proud of, but now I’m not so sure,” he said.

Second, the National Park Service, which oversees the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District, traditionally doesn’t like buildings that are reconstructed.

Lots of parking

No doubt, the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District has a different feel than the rest of the Central City, and part of it has to do with the parking lots. Portland effectively banned surface parking in the Central City in its 1972 Downtown Plan, though existing ones were grandfathered in. Today there are more than a dozen surface parking lots in the 17-block district, and most are owned by the Goodman family.

The rule discouraging parking lots led to an unintended consequence – as parking lots are superseded, remaining ones become more valuable.

Parking is now such a valuable commodity in downtown that observers believe a developer can achieve more profits with a parking lot, especially where building heights are limited to 75 feet.

“The economics are such that if you have a choice between running a parking lot and building a 75-foot building, you run a parking lot,” developer John Russell said. “It’s just bad public policy.”

Russell, owner of the Hallock-McMillan Building, has no love lost for parking lots.

“They’re about the worst neighbor you can have,” he said. “(They’re) dead. There’s no pedestrian delight about walking past a parking lot.”

But Hawkins and others think the status quo might change as land values keep rising. It’s thought that new construction could finally be more productive use of Old Town property. (The Goodmans recently unveiled expansive plans to redevelop a number of their properties.)

To renovate the Hallock-McMillan Building at Southwest Naito Parkway and Oak Street, Russell had cast-iron pieces forged – a painstaking six-month process. The building, designed by Absalom Hallock, among the first architects in Portland, was one of the first forays into cast-iron architecture in the city. Russell said he purchased it without understanding its significance in Portland architectural history.

Despite the hope surrounding new uses for cast iron, the state could do a better job incentivizing adaptive reuse of building materials, said Peggy Moretti of Restore Oregon.

Among the lessons of the cast-iron revival in Portland is the importance of effective urban planning, she said.

“First of all, don’t demolish something unless you have a plan for what to replace it with,” she said. “There were a lot of buildings that were torn down and just became empty lots. That was just awful. It just sucked the life right out of the district. Some of the ideas that we had about livable communities just didn’t exist back then. You know, we wouldn’t do that today.”

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