Wood Village City Hall (photo by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)
BY BRIAN LIBBY AND MATTHEW GINN
Our roving photo correspondent, Matthew Ginn, has been at it again, photographing metro area city halls. After first stopping in Vancouver to view its Brutalist home in last month's post, this time Ginn heads to the headquarters of two smaller suburbs: Fairview and Wood Village.
Particularly in Wood Village's case, this is not exactly a landmark public building of Roman columns and marble apointments. Without sounding too much like an elitist city slicker, the City Hall in this little town looks surprisingly like a manufactured home of the 1970s, a place where a child might recline watching Hanna Barberra cartoons or his/her parents put the new Pink Floyd album on their 8-track tape player. But in fairness, the population of this Multnomah County enclave is under 3,000 residents. A modest building probably befits this bucolic burg.
Wood Village was created on 50 acres of farmland around the Arata Estate in 1942 to house workers from the Reynolds Aluminum Factory during World War II. It was one of the first planned communities in Oregon, complete with single and multi-family housing, streets, stores, a water system, a sewage treatment plant, street lights, and a community building. But decades before the Reynolds plant came, the geographic point from Wood Village arose was markd by the farmhouse of English immigrants George and Hanna Shaw, where the corner of 238th Drive and NE Halsey Street now exists. The shaws came to Oregon to help build the transcontinental railroad through the Columbia Gorge. Their house still stands, serving as the Wood Village Manor Nursing Home.
Wood Village City Hall (photo by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)
What is now the City Hall was built as a community center for the Reynolds development. Some sources suggest it was built in 1942, while others say 1944. It became City Hall when Wood Village was incorporated in 1951. The building was renovated in 2009, most notably moving the public entrance to the west side of the building. Steve Winstead was the architect for the renovations.
Fairview's City Hall is a bit more substantial. Designed by Group Mackenzie and completed in 2000, it was designed to provide a strong civic presence for the community and to reinforce the pedestrian scale of development surrounding the 21,400 square foot facility. The building houses the City Council Chambers, the City Manager's office, and the Departments of Engineering, Public Safety, and Police.
Fairview City Hall (photo by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)
"In the Northwest tradition of designing civic buildings to look like large houses, deep red brick was selected for the City Hall exterior with a sweeping archway dominating the public side of the building facing Village Lane," a member of Group Mackenzie said of the Fairview project (in a statement of qualifications for building another city hall in Medina, Washington). With just over a decade of hindsight, one can see the design seeking to walk a line between modern architecture and neo-historicism.
Fairview has a long history of settlement. Members of the Multnomah tribe of Chinookan Indians lived here when the Lewis and Clark Expedition visited the area in 1806. By the mid 19th century, it was an agricultural area for hay, grain, and livestock operations. Railroad tracks extended to the area by the 1890s.
Fairview City Hall (photos by Matthew Ginn, Homestead Images)
When it was incorporated in 1908, Fairview’s city hall was near what is now Handy Park (Fairview Ave. (223rd) and Cedar St.). I believe they used this location until 1979, when they moved to another building at Harrison & 3rd (now a community center). That was the city hall until they moved to the current location in 2000. As of 2009, the Fairview population was 9,740. As recently as 1990, however, only 2,300 people called it home. Like many suburbs of the past 30 years, Fairview grew like a weed. In the case of this suburb, through, there is particularly noticeable dichotomy between pedestrian and automobile-oriented development. Fairview has a nicely preserved, human-scaled central business district, but it also is home to a factory outlet mall with a sea of surface parking. Initially Fairview was named for the picturesque site of the Columbia and Mt. Hood, for this is more or less the dividing line where the metro area ends (both its eyesores and its attractions) and the Columbia Gorge scenic area begins.
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