LOVE the Blazers, but worried about their Rose Quarter plans

As The Business Journal and other media outlets reported last week, the Portland Trail Blazers have launched a campaign to remake the 36-acre Rose Quarter as an "entertainment-themed district "alive with activity 24 hours a day". I'd have thought making it feel alive on a regular old Tuesday afternoon would have been challenge enough.

Our beloved NBA franchise--did I mention the Blazers are the greatest NBA team in the history of the universe, and lifelong love of my sporting life?--has teamed with The Cordish Company, which also was a finalist for the Centennial Mills development commission. Cordish is based in Baltimore and has created similarly themed entertainment districts there and in Kansas, with projects in Philadelphia and Los Angeles on the way.

Cordish seemed to have the most corporate-feeling of the Centennial Mills proposals, the one that felt the least like a good fit for Portland. Or as Portland Spaces blogger Mike Thelin put it at the time, "about as good as a fit for Portland as a new NASCAR track in Pioneer Courthouse Square." Another Spaces blogger, Tim DuRoche, describes the developer's track record as "projects that jiggered loose much economic development in the way of high-voltage, big-bang retail, manufactured experiences but were sharply criticized for their garishness and cultural politics."

What's more, the very idea of a ghettoized "entertainment district" seems circumspect. It's true that, at least according to the Business Journal report by Wendy Culverwell, the Blazers would plan to have offices and residences in addition to clubs and restaurants. But plans for those kinds of spaces seem less thought out than bringing in entertainment outlets.

I mean, do you think a local outpost of the ESPN Zone sports bar chain is the right solution for The Rose Quarter's future? I watch ESPN more than any other channel, and I sure don't. I know the Blazers plan much more than that; I'm mostly kidding. I wish I could say I was entirely kidding. There's strong reason to feel like the spirit of Portland will be lacking and the feel of the suburbs will be in full supply.

Then there's Memorial Coliseum, which the Blazers have at least hinted could be either torn down entirely or significantly altered. It's such a tragedy: you really don't need two arenas sitting next to each other. I hate the clustering of sports stadiums, at least in central areas. They're hard enough to make feel an accepted part of the urban fabric with just one behemoth of a stadium or arena. Two is worse. So there's a logic in getting rid of Memorial Coliseum, of course. It's just really too bad, because architecturally it's so much better than the Rose Quarter. Memorial Coliseum is really unique to me; among all the basketball arenas I've ever seen, it's the most transparent. Because of the glass facade, you could be inside that building and be surrounded by the city. If the Blazers really want this entertainment zone, isn't there room for that kind of structure?

The team plans to utilize the Rose Quarter's link to the Willamette River, and that could be a special urban place if done right. But again, I worry that the Blazers and Cordish, even though they've announced lots of admirable intentions to build green, don't have the pulse of Portland of how to create the right kind of urban place for the center of the city. I think they need to parcel out this work in a way the organization almost assuredly wouldn't be willing to do: a design competition, for example. Or to hire an architect with great pedigree and let them not just follow a cookie-cutter quasi-mall plan but actually design a program. Or to hold a series of forums and brainstorming sessions with the public and with local leaders.

Then there's the talk of putting a minor league baseball stadium for the Portland Beavers on the Rose Quarter site. That's the last thing that should be on the table. This site is already over-crowded with behemoth arena buildings. We need some foothills to these mountains, not another mountain.

The Rose Quarter, even aside from its 200-plus events per year at the two arenas, is a hugely important urban intersection, where bus lines and MAX lines from all over the east side come together. Yet despite Portland's reputation for progressive urban planning, owner Paul Allen forced through a suburban-style environment with the threat always looming of pulling the plug. And Earl Blumenauer, then a city council member, was eager to get the arena on the light rail line; that may have caused as much trouble as it did good by allowing such an unsuccessful urban crossroads to be built the way it was.

To repair the Rose Quarter, the Blazers need to integrate this area into the fabric of the city. Instead of forwarding a cheesy "entertainment zone", they should be looking to erase all surface parking and above-ground parking garages, then add a mix of housing, commercial and retail, and do so in a matter that refrains from thinking of the Rose Quarter as an island. We need the Rose Quarter better integrated with land across busy NE Broadway and better pedestrian connections for people to move freely across the site. We need a building scale that allows small local businesses and not just big brewpubs that host sports-talk shows and serve cheap steaks to people coming from out of town for the night in their SUVs to see the monster truck pull and eat at Tony Roma's. We need the Rose Quarter to borrow a little of the Portland spirit happening in its backyard at Leftbank or the Eastbank Commerce Center or the Brewery Blocks. The Rose Quarter should incorporate onto its property the ambitious Lloyd Crossing sustainable infrastructure plan.

Again, let me be perfectly clear about the Blazers organization: I love you guys. I adore you. I bleed red and black. Sometimes I actually think my whole life is just about holding on long enough for either the Blazers or the Oregon Ducks football team to win a championship. When the Blazers won two Western Conference titles in the early 1990s, I jumped up and down and screamed and told half of New York City about it whether they liked it or not (they didn't). When the team lost the heartbreaking 7th game of the 2000 Western Conference Finals after holding a 13-point fourth quarter lead, I literally sobbed and blubbered. Not just a tear or two: outright crying. Even when it was the thick of the "Jail Blazers" era with embarrassment and unlikable players like Rasheed Wallace, Ruben Patterson, Bonzi Wells and Damon Stoudamire, I was with the team every step of the way. I was holding my breath when Rudy Fernandez got hurt last night. And Greg Oden? Calling him a bust is fightin' words in my house.

(By the way, we have the one of the best logos in sports. I'd like to see us go back to the lower-case font like in this picture of LaRue martin from the 1970s, but keep the symbolic troupe-leader's diagonal sash. Oh, and please don't sell out naming rights to the Rose Garden!)

But please, Portland, don't let the Blazers be in control of urban planning for the Rose Garden, at least not without a very transparent process, good co-leadership from the city and appropriate talent on both the development and design teams. I have every faith they can put a championship squad together. Kevin Pritchard is like a Michael Jordan of the front office, and Larry Miller has quietly done an excellent job as president. But these are basketball team builders, not city builders. I worry these are people, judging by affiliations and track record, with a bad combination of Robert Moses and Las Vegas as their guiding principle. And a development being green doesn't make it a good development.

I'd love to be wrong about this. Really, I would. But I worry the Blazers are just going to make a bad urban setting even worse.

Then again, if Roy, Alridge and Oden can win a championship, the team could just fill turn the whole place into a toxic waste dump and I wouldn't care.

Comments

[brett]

I'm with you on this, Brian. Stone Blazers fan even before I moved to Portland, and really proud now that they actually have players you can admire (Roy, Webster, Pryz ... actually, practically all of 'em). And that's no accident but a conscious policy of the management, which finally realized that bad characters can actually cost the team money if they undercut community support.
Now the question is: can the organization's new sensitivity to community values translate into the RQ redevelopment plan? And can anyone here suggest a model, a successful inner-city sports complex that "integrate[s] this area into the fabric of the city" as Brian suggests?

The RQ is such an offputting urban disaster as is that it seems like anything would be better than what's there now. It contradicts all of Portland's livability standards -- an intimidating desert around there when there's not a game going on, confusing to navigate and a barrier to urban liveliness, and I avoid it as much as possible. What would the Blazers and the city, respectively, have to do to make it work?

[PG]

To tear down the classic Memorial Coliseum, rather than renovate and reuse it, will make Portland's "green" pretenses similarly crystal clear. At least to me. Any sports plan that involves destroying it deserves zero consideration.

[Matthew]

Where do the plans to build a new baseball stadium (Memorial Stadium?) fit into all of this?

[stan]

The original sin of the Rose Quarter the is destruction/havoc caused by destroying Albina and then building Memorial Coliseum and I-5. Took out the grid that was there and more or less walled off the RQ from the rest of NE.

MC is a great building but I'm not sure how it can fit into the proposals that have come out in the last couple of weeks. Assuming that MC is demolished, building a AAA baseball stadium that works in urban environment doesn't seem that difficult. There's a lot of good examples of urban baseball stadiums being built in the last 15 years or so. That said, RQ isn't really an urban environment, it's a strange suburban/ urban/ industrial tear in space time continium.

Whatever work that is done in RQ needs to make sure there is better interaction with Broadway and the Convention Center area. Hopefully they wouldn't put the new stadium next to the Rose Garden but mix in some midrise buildings. Not sure where you'd get the money for that in the current financial/real estate climate.

Also, would be great if the Portland Schools building
(what an abomination) could be thrown in as part of this proposal and blown up. Not sure if the City of Portland is going to want to give up the revenue for the parking garages at the edge of RQ.

[billb]

The Memorial Coliseum is one of our Finest Works of Classic Modern Architecture , AND our Veterans Memorial. Tearing it down MUST be off the table. We saw some great ideas for turning it into a community sports facility , and with Obama Dollars we should act on them. This is like hitting a Triple , save/repurpose a good building , add community sports facilities , and Respect our Vets.

Put a Ballpark on the much better PPS site and give life to that neighborhood , and create a connection from N.PO. to the Rose quarter.

[Alex Stange]

Funny that the writer worries about "cookie-cutter" planning, then goes on to praise Leftbank and the Brewery Blocks. As a lifelong Portland resident, most of it on the inner eastside, those projects he praises are just as cookie-cutter to me. They're a different kind of cookie, but those kinds of developments are just as generic.

The suburban people want big-box retailers and a cheesecake factory, the city people will want boutique retailers and small restaurants. Make no mistake: neither vision is daring, both are cookie cutter.

You want to do something really adventurous: turn the site into something that can employ people in real middle class jobs, not just serving dinners and selling designer sunglasses. Build a trucking yard or a cement factory or something. Make cheap, no-frills office spaces so high tech companies like mine don't have to always locate in the suburbs. Why does the site HAVE to be some mix of retail and residential and commercial space? Isn't EVERY project in town like that now?

I agree that that Allen's plan will be awful, but a plan like what the writer suggests would be just as bland. It's only an aesthetic difference.

[robert]

Build a trucking yard or a cement factory on this close-in urban site?

You have got to be kidding me Alex Stange!

The metro area may need those kinds of jobs, but this is not the place for them.

[ws]

I've always thought the Memorial Coliseum to be a great looking building; the transparency allowing visibility of the undulating seating inside. The top of MC doesn't look so good, that's for sure, and should be improved. For a unique view of the city, it's great being inside it on a clear evening as the sun goes down.

The Rose Garden Stadium is of course, newer, with updated facilities, but I can't get to where I much appreciate its style. I don't know about the numbers, or what it takes to get a big complex like the RG able to make money. I haven't read the linked article yet, but that phrase: "entertainment-themed district "alive with activity 24 hours a day". . That just sounds like dreaming. This isn't NYC. 82nd Ave might be the only place in Portland where there's activity 24 hrs a day, and it's doubtful that the late night type on that street would be welcome at the RG.

[dave]

I'm dreaming here but it's too bad the Coliseum can't be moved to the PSU campus. Renovated, it makes a perfect college basketball arena.

[Douglas K.]

One thing that the Rose Quarter needs is a significant day-time attraction. There's got to be a way to turn the Memorial Coliseum into a public building that draws in many people during the day.

Maybe tear out the bowl inside and turn it into a year-round four-square block Farmer's Market? Or find a way to build in a bunch of interior stores and make it Portland's version of Pike Place Market?

It could house a museum (it would have been a great home for OMSI, for example) but we don't have any major cultural institutions looking for a new home. Maybe it could become a multi-museum, housing the Sports Hall of Fame and bits of the Oregon Maritime Center and a few other small museums and starter museums, all under one roof. Or create a major Gallery of Public Art owned and operated by the Regional Arts and Culture Council to exhibit the large collection of public art owned by the City of Portland and Multnomah County.

Maybe transfer the Coliseum to Metro and see if the Oregon Zoo could turn it into a public aquarium or a natural history museum? (Or both, like the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.)

What about a train and bus station? In the past, Jim Howell has suggested putting a new high-speed rail station in Rose Quarter. It would speed up train traffic on the Seattle-Eugene corridor if the trains didn't need to slow down to cross the Willamette to Union Station. So wow about turning Memorial Coliseum into a multi-modal station, replacing both Union Station and the Greyhound Station?

Whatever happens, there must be a way to keep the building in public use as something other than a barely-used sports venue. Demolition should not be an option.

[Charlie Brown]

to improve the Rose quarter, any new design should insist on reconnecting the city grid with that area.

The Memorial Coliseum is a wonderful building that is but a shell of its prior self. some of my earliest memories are going to that building and watching afternoon high school basketball in the 1960s, the Portland buckaroos and the Trail Blazers. I remember the grand entrance with the big elm trees and the flagpole that were removed for parking garages for the Rose Garden Arena. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that arena man to let us build anew."

[David Benson]

A dead-on blog.

The Coliseum is a modernist gem while the Rose Garden is a suburban mediocrity dropped thoughtlessly upon the Portland urban grid. What a pleasure it use to be to walk in the Coliseum concourse during the Blazer's halftime and view the sparking downtown across the river, or to drive by and see people milling inside. It was a show either way. The Glass Palace became iconic in a way the Rose Garden will never be.

At last, Paul Allen has learned how to build a great basketball team by hiring good people and letting them work. He has not yet learned how to build a good neighborhood. His urban planning judgment cannot be trusted. Don't unchain him.