Willamette Falls from future Riverwalk Phase 1 site (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Six days ago, I and a few reporters and politicians gathered at the corner of Main Street and Highway 99E in Oregon City to see up close a natural wonder that has been sequestered from public access for generations: the magnificent Willamette Falls, the nation's second-largest waterfall by volume and the largest waterfall in the Pacific Northwest.
To stand at the edge of Willamette Falls, on a viewing platform that's part of Portland General Electric's hydroelectric infrastructure, as we did last week, brings a mix of feelings and the knowledge of a strange marriage.
Enveloped by mist coming off the falls and unable to even speak above its roar, with scores of birds circling overhead hoping to pluck salmon and steelhead, it felt like one was looking out at a west coat Niagara Falls. Really Willamette Falls is only about one-fourth the vertical drop of Niagara, but with the Willamette River carrying so much Cascades snow melt and the infusions of other tributaries, all as the banks narrowing at this spot, its power seemed immense. I was reminded of how my mom has made pilgrimages around the world to see waterfalls, awed by not just a natural but perhaps even some kind of spiritual power.
At the same time, be it up close or from a distant roadside viewpoint, one can't view Willamette Falls without also seeing the 22-acre former Blue Heron Paper mill beside its basalt banks, or the locks and hydroelectric turbines that utilize this natural force to generate electricity. Then there's another 20 acres or so on the other side of the river, at the West Linn Paper Company mill. And it's been this way for over 150 years. One of Oregon's key founding fathers, John McLoughlin, built a sawmill besides Willamette Falls in the 1850s. Later, America's first electrical transmission using long-distance power lines was made from here to Portland. There have been lumber mills here, flour mills, and more.
It was through the Blue Heron site, comprised of some 50 derelict industrial buildings, that our press tour walked with representatives from the City of Lake Oswego, Metro, and a representative from design firm Snøhetta to see plans for the new Willamette Falls Riverwalk, which eventually will give visitors the same view of the falls that we had.
But that up-close view of Willamette Falls may still be several years away from being made public. The first stop on last Wednesday's media tour was the site of Phase 1 in the Willamette Falls Riverwalk, for which groundbreaking is set to begin next year with completion in 2022. It's maybe 100 yards from the falls, much closer than the public has ever been but only about halfway through the Blue Heron site to the falls. It's right on the river, however: a beautiful viewpoint. And Snøhetta plans to renovate an industrial building there as well, called Mill O, the former Oregon City Woolen Mill, will become the Riverwalk’s visitor center.
Phase 1 of the Willamette Falls Riverwalk (Snøhetta)
This phase, for which about $20 million has already apparently been raised and one of six total phases, will give visitors a taste of the falls but also leave them wanting more. Doing so will also give visitors a sense of the Blue Heron industrial ruins, which are remarkable in their own right. The Willamette Falls Riverwalk design also reserves some buildings to be stripped down to their structural framing, a ruin reminding us of what was once there.
Talking with partners from Snøhetta and Mayer/Reed (the local landscape-architecture partner on the project) on hand during the tour, they cited the Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord, Germany as an example: where ruins of a former coal and steel plant that closed in 1985 were retained in a park design by Peter Latz. The same could be said of a former industrial site-turned public space in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant.
Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord, Germany (Wikimedia Commons)
The design unveiled last week includes a number of other phases. The Yard is an alcove where Snøhetta envisions a kind of outdoor room with descending stairs down to edge of the basalt shelf on which the development sits, and within a few feet of the restored habitat on the banks of the river, which is also a major component of the Riverwalk project. The Woolen Mill Overlook will serve as the end of the extended Main Street, with 360-degree views of the dam, a boiler complex, and the Yard area. And the Clarifier path takes one around a large circular water-treatment structure, which treated wastewater from the paper-making process.
Renderings of the Woolen Mill Overlook and Yard phases of the Riverwalk (Snøhetta)
Of course the showstopper will be the up-close view the waterfall itself, and for that, once it's built, the designers envision a two-story viewing platform with a 360-degree view of the region available on top, but also with seating and places to reflect. Beside a view of the falls the design will offer openings to view the turbine chamber below.
Falls viewing platform rendering (Snøhetta)
Even if it will take a while for this vision to be completed—perhaps more than a decade—it's hard not to be excited, either about the natural-wonder and industrial-ruin aspects of the project or the designers involved.
Snøhetta is one of the premiere architecture and design firms in the world, their portfolio including landmarks like the National September 11 Museum in New York, SFMoMA's recent expansion in San Francisco, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, and perhaps the project that put them on the map, the Oslo Opera House. Snøhetta could almost be compared to a starchitect's firm, and yet they are a really team of designers instead of one famous name and a series of associates. They engage in deep research and outreach before a project takes form, but they also possess a willingness to look beyond what the public or the past may indicate. With the help of Mayer-Reed and Dialog, they've produced a compelling design that is much about what it takes away as it is about what they add. I love the retention of buildings in their skeletal form as a kind of historic ghost-architecture that will remind us of the past. The designers have also endeavored successfully to create a sequence of steps that lead to the up-close Willamette Falls viewpoint: a weaving of new buildings, renovated old ones, and the Riverwalk itself, which will create a there there, and a kind of narrative that leads to the big viewpoint. I hope this design gets built: all six phases of it.
And once it's successful, one wonders what the future might hold, like the conversion of the still-functioning industrial facilities on the West Linn side of the river, and a new series of viewpoints. After all, the West Linn side more directly faces the falls.
Mill H overlook and Clarifier path renderings (Snøhetta)
Willamette Falls itself may be the attraction, but we are also talking about a whole new neighborhood of Oregon City that will eventually be constructed. If driving south on Main Street, this central spine of the town just stops when you get to Highway 99. But it doesn't really stop. It just continues on but no longer allows the public to walk down what is physically just a continuation of Main Street. It continually amazes me how past generations, starting in the late-19th century but particularly in the 20th century, never had qualms about blocking public access to riverfronts. Normally we're just talking about standard stretches of urban shoreline, where every city in America on a river had some kind of industry happening. But Willamette Falls provides a more extreme case, where it that working waterfront is blocking a kind of junior Niagara Falls.
Views of Willamette Falls (Brian Libby)
Metro councilor Carlotta Collette, who was part of last week's tour, told a story of several years ago touring the site with representatives of Blue Heron Paper in an industrial building right near the falls as part of an effort to help retain the eroding jobs there as the company faced decline. At some point she looked through a hole in the wall and caught sight of the falls, but Collette remembers being hustled along, hoping she would forget about the falls as if there were some honor code to protect the secret of the falls' magnificence and prevent clamor for public access. It's like Leslie Nielsen's hapless cop in The Naked Gun telling people "nothing to see here" as a building explodes. But in the case of Willamette Falls, it worked for more than a century.
It's not to say industry should never have been here, of course. Taking advantage of the power of Willamette Falls is an indelible part of the Oregon story: the formation of industry that helped drive an economy and, over time, transform not just Oregon City but the entire state. And there is something wonderful about these industrial ruins that the Snøhetta team obviously recognizes and wants to make part of the Riverwalk narrative. Architectural ruins of all kinds, be they of a thousand-year-old cathedral or a rusty relic of our parents and grandparents' time, can have tremendous power. They tell an honest architectural story: not just of buildings' creation and ongoing use but their decline, and thus a narrative about inevitably changing times.
I can't wait to see it all come together.
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