Knowing your skyline: 1911's Yeon Building

Yeon Building (photo by Bradley Maule)

BY BRADLEY MAULE

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a series by writer-photographer Bradley Maule on buildings that have held the distinction of being the tallest in Portland.

In the years following 1905's Lewis & Clark Centennial Expo, Portland was a veritable boomtown, and the downtown skyline rose in step with the population. The circa-1907 Wells Fargo building's reign as the tallest in town lasted but a few short years, when the name Yeon left its first notable imprint on Portland architecture, on the corner of SW 5th & Alder.

The 15-story Yeon Building, completed a century ago in 1911, came not from the same famous desk as the Watzek House and the Visitors Information Center by John Yeon, but his father, John Baptiste Yeon. The elder Yeon made a fortune in the lumber industry and wanted to give back to his adopted city, something he expected "should help Portland by appearing as well as possible," wrote The Oregonian on August 21, 1910.

Yeon hired San Francisco's Reid & Reid architects, who had already designed The Oregonian's original (pre-Belluschi) offices and who would a year later design the Jackson Tower (née the Oregon Journal Building), to maximize both the terra cotta craze and the city's 200-foot height limit. The Reid brothers crafted an exterior of bright white to stand out even more than the cream colored terra cotta popular elsewhere, including Wells Fargo.

Yeon Building (photos by Bradley Maule)

With a three-story colonnade featuring ionic columns to accentuate the height, the building was topped with a cornice which has since been removed, leaving the armament form seen today. At the behest of Yeon himself, the cornice extended around all four sides of the building (as opposed to only the two which faced the street, as was common), and like the Jackson Tower, had built-in electrical wiring for evening accent lighting. The University of Oregon Libraries' digital collection has a number of Yeon Building photos prior to the cornice's removal here.

Yeon Building (photo by Bradley Maule)

Higher still than the cornice, a rooftop flagpole extended the building's pinnacle another 60 feet. It's been flag-less for years, but Urban Renaissance Group's Portland office, who manages the building for New York's Jonathan Rose Companies, says there are plans to reinstall a flag as part of the building's current renovations being overseen by Portland's SERA Architects. The renovations include a green retrofit and a re-imagining of the first floor retail space. This space will be occupied come February by Vancouver-based First Independent Bank, who sold the building to Rose Companies after foreclosing on its previous owner, negotiating the retail space as part of the sale.

Yeon Building (photos by Bradley Maule)

Decades before John Yeon left his indelible mark on the style regarded as Northwest Regional, his father's regard for the Northwest region was exemplified perhaps no better than by his financial contribution to and supervision of the historic Columbia River Highway's construction. John B Yeon State Park, 30 miles east of Portland in the Gorge, has several hiking trails directly across the river from Beacon Rock. The younger Yeon, among his landscape preservation achievements, purchased a 75-acre riverfront property directly across from Multnomah Falls, and created a landscape of lawns, meadows, wetlands and trails called The Shire (officially now The Shire: John Yeon Preserve for Landscape Studies under the U of O). Fittingly, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge house their offices in the Yeon Building.

The one hundred year old Yeon Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Its ongoing renovation and green retrofit will go even farther toward its preservation.

Yeon Building (photos by Bradley Maule)

Brad Maule is a photographer living in Southeast Portland. His web site is PortlandUrbanResource.com.

 

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Comments

[Fred Leeson]

Thanks for the reference to the missing cornice, and the link to the archive photo showing what it looked like. I could never look at that building without wondering about its original appearance. I was told once, and have never confirmed, that the city government encouraged the removal of many old cornices in the 1930s or 1940s after some cornice pieces fell to the street. (I don't know if this is true.) But it is apparently that MANY older downtown buildings lack cornices. I would have thought that a terra cotta cornice on the Yeon would have been amply secured, but perhaps not. Or perhaps it was shorn for some other reason.

[Jim Heuer]

It's interesting that neither of the two signature tall buildings featured so far in this series was designed by a Portland architect. It's even odder that this fact was not remarked by Mr. Maule, even though there was a large, highly talented group of local firms from which the owners for these buildings could have chosen. We'll likely never know why a Portland-based firm wasn't chosen for either of these buildings -- perhaps the cachet of the out-of-town firm was important to the owners to establish their sophistication ...

In any event, even though the 12-story Wells Fargo Building was the tallest steel framed building in Portland when it was completed, it was not the first steel frame tall building in Portland. That distinction appears to be held by the building next door to the Yeon Building, the 8-story Swetland Building, for which the steel frame was already rising when the first permits were issued for the Wells Fargo structure.

The Swetland Building is striking for its dramatic horizontal banding and absence of ornament, marking it as strongly influenced by the then-new Prairie School and the modernists of the Midwest. If anything, it was a radical departure from the Classical Revival style buildings that surrounded it -- not the least of which was the Yeon Building, built 5 years later, with its bold colonnade in the Ionic Order along its upper stories.

Ultimately, most of the taller downtown buildings erected in the period from 1905 to 1915 were designed by Portland architects, including Whidden and Lewis, Emil Schacht (who designed the Swetland Building), and, of course A. E. Doyle whose stylistic conservatism locked Portland into the Classical Revival style for a generation.