Witnessing the tragic United Workmen Temple demolition

Ancient Order of United Workmen Temple demolition (Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

When doctors take the Hippocratic oath, they pledge to "first, do no harm," or as it literally translates from Latin, noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: "I will utterly reject harm and mischief."

Apparently property developers undergo no such oath.

That notion of rejecting harmful acts came to mind yesterday morning as I paid what will likely be my final respects to the Ancient Order of United Workmen Temple, the Richardsonian Romanesque-style historic building that has stood downtown at 914 SW Second Avenue since 1892. A few days ago, demolition crews began their job of tearing apart the building as it reaches its 125th anniversary.

The demolition is being spearheaded by Onder Development and Arthur Mutal, in order to make way for an office building. These developers are also demolishing the historic Hotel Albion (best known as home of the Lotus Cafe) on the same block to make way for a 20-story hotel. Both buildings would be designed by Ankrom Moisan Architects and built by Turner Construction. And the new buildings actually look pretty decent in the renderings, I must say. Too bad they'll arguably be tainted by what they trampled.

Despite my frustration and despite feeling appalled, I don't think it would be helpful to vilify the developers or anyone else. Arthur Mutal, for example, is involved in some historic rehabilitation projects around town such as the Cornelius Hotel. When I interviewed Arthur Mutal's Jeff Arthur and architects from Ankrom Moisan in December 2015, they both expressed reluctance to be part of the demolition and had valid reasons why their hands were tied.

"With the reality of the block size," Ankrom's Carolyn Forsyth said, referring to the possibility of a rehab into office space that they explored, "once you get a core in there that has all the stuff a highrise core needs to have, the plate left over is not something a modern office tenant would be fit to use."

"I’m a native Portlander and have been doing a lot of adaptive reuse and some historical reuse for about 10 years," Arthur said. "Whenever possible I like to keep older buildings intact and bring out their character. When we looked at that block, that was the goal and intent." 

"We haven’t made any final decision about anything. We’re still exploring options," Arthur told me that December day. "As we’ve gone through this we’ve realized the challenges are greater than we thought."

The fact that Portland is also now anticipating a major earthquake is also part of the story. To properly stabilize seismically an unreinforced building this size is not cheap.

What's more, Portland's and Oregon's surprisingly lacking historic preservation laws and incentives figure in here too. If there were state, county and city-level historic tax credits for renovations, it might have helped the developers get closer to feeling such an approach would "pencil out," as the saying goes.

The scene of the crime (Brian Libby)

Having considered all those mitigating factors—the size of the floor plates on a half-block building, the cost of seismic retrofitting, the lack of sufficient incentives—am I in a mood to accept or forgive the developers for what they're doing?

Not. At. All.

As far as I'm concerned, Onder and Arthur Mutal's actions amount to a kind of one-block Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. It's not a natural disaster, but make no mistake: it's a disaster. Restore Oregon has called this the most historically-significant demolition to happen in Portland in decades, and they're not wrong.

I've always found "pencil out" to be a conveniently vague phrase. After all, any building owner or developer could come up with a different answer to the question of what point the cost of a building's construction or renovation outweighs the potential profit they stand to make.

In the case of the office building that will be located on the United Workmen Temple site, maybe it's true that with seismic stabilization the leftover space on each floor would be smaller than what's sought for the most lucrative-to-lease Class A office space. At the same time, a quick glance at the many old warehouses in the Central Eastside and to a lesser extent Slabtown being renovated for creative companies would seem to indicate that many potential renters or buyers of office space are precisely looking for old buildings, with the brick walls and wood beams that speak to the continuity of the generations and give off an authentic ambiance and texture that is very rarely found in new construction.

I think of projects like the Brewery Blocks in the Pearl District, which 15 years ago replaced the former Blitz-Weinhard brewery with mixed-use, LEED-rated office and condo buildings, as well as renovating what became the Wieden + Kennedy building. I'm sure it wasn't cheap to preserve the old brewhouse and its smokestack like developer Gerding Edlen did. But you know what? I feel pretty confident those guys have made a lot of dough without losing sleep at night. I can think of any number of similar cases around town: the Ford Building, the Leftbank Building, the US Custom House, the Olympic Mills Commerce Center. Even if one were to argue those renovations were cheaper than the United Workmen Temple renovation and seismic upgrade would have been, those developers all added something positive to the city's fabric. They not only did no harm, but they actively did something good. And they still each made a profit.

As I saw first-hand this morning as well as in a stream of social media posts from those documenting the Temple's demolition, it is unequivocally too late to save this building. So where do we go from here?

For starters, we absolutely have to find a way to change the math and change the system. It is preposterous that we haven't updated the city's historic building inventory since the 1980s. It's a slap in the face to our citizenry and our shared history that building owners can de-list their historic properties. We need both more carrots and more sticks: more financial incentives to do the right thing, and more penalties for not doing the right thing—for the Onders of the world.

We must also not forget. For all I know both developers will go on from here to do good things. I mentioned Arthur Mutal's involvement in other historic renovations, for example, and that's laudable. At the same time, I wonder if a kind of unofficial Scarlet Letter is in order here. Anyone have a sewing kit?

This isn't character assassination. I'm inclined to believe these developers are upstanding Portlanders trying to make an honest living and, aside from this demo, are decent people. But they did perpetrate one of the most unfortunate demolitions the city has seen in decades. There will be no penalty for that. They will presumably find constructing an office and hotel on this site in booming downtown Portland to be quite lucrative, enough to laugh off some hotheaded writer or the historic-preservation nonprofits calling foul. And no one is really trying to stop that. But we do have the power to do some small but important things: to remember, to remind others of what was done here and who did it, and to try harder to build consensus big enough to overcome those who would oppose proper incentives for historic preservation at the city, county, state or federal level.

The long, yellow arm of the profit motive (Brian Libby)

It may get worse before it gets better.  Our knuckle-dragger-in-chief occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could easily do away with federal historic tax credits altogether despite their bipartisan support, perhaps to cut taxes for KKK members, to fund the rounding up of immigrants and journalists, or to literally go nuclear when some country won't build a Trump hotel on the site of a children's hospital. But whether it's the Ancient Order of United Workmen Temple or our ongoing national crisis, I'm trying to remind myself of the need to, as Jesse Jackson once implored, "keep hope alive." And to keep fighting.

Every city is continuously a work in progress, with construction cranes and demolition wrecking balls never out of service. And for the most part, that's the natural way of things. One era or generation or century's architecture is not always suitable for the needs of the next. Most buildings, moreover, are not so remarkable and historically significant that they must always be preserved in perpetuity.

Yet great cities preserve and protect their most significant architectural contributions through the decades, and cities are, of course, always made up of people like you and me who collectively determine, block by block and building by building, what will stay and what will go. Of course those decisions usually get made not just in terms of what is best for the city, but what might serve current needs, be they the need for profit or to serve the public. And sometimes we get car crashes like the Workmen Temple demolition, where that historic architecture is decayed and in need of some expensive TLC, with not enough incentives to take the dangerously sharp edge off the profit motive. There will always be casualties—buildings demolished that should be. But there will always be you and me and our neighbors, the people without dollar signs as our guiding light and without our integrity potentially eclipsed by said cash. Jesse's right that we have to keep hope alive. But we also have to do something beyond just motivation: we have to keep fighting. That's the only way a tragic day for local architecture like today will not have been without an eventual bright side.

 

Advertisements

Comments

[Marla Brown]

My husband's firm, GBD Architects, was in the Auditorium Building for 20 years. Many lunches and celebrations at the Lotus during those years. Even spent time at the Rodeo for lunch. We hope the Auditorium can withstand all the building activity.

[Scott Tice]

Thank you Brian.

[Jeff Joslin]

This is a truly tragic loss.

The Brewery Blocks is a more-than-appropriate reference. Though perhaps more motivated by tax credits, that's not the entire story. The facadectomy wrapped around Whole Foods was a labor of love an historic reverence. That, the retention and stabilizing of the stack, and the mothballing of the armory until it could find a use; were all accommodate by a much leaner project in a much leaner and more uncertain time. In other words, this facade - at least - could have been retained with sufficient will. Capital or engineering were not the constraints.

But at the end of the day, it principally comes down to Owner Consent, which is a STATE wide problem, not Portland-specific. The owner consent statute was strategically manipulated into place in the sleepier mid-90s as part of an overarching strategy to weaken land use laws. In my humble view, the ONLY way to head this off at the pass is to initiate a campaign that includes other partners throughout Oregon.

In the meantime, if Portland had the will, guidelines could likely be more-expeditiously crafted that would push on such projects to retain historic fabric. Portland's guidelines are mandatory approval criteria. One well-crafted guideline added to the Central City Fundamentals could provide the Design Commission a clearer basis to reject a proposal that has not met whatever test it establishes.

Many cities that established pioneering and aggressive landmark protections have done so in the wake of a profoundly unfortunate demolition. I only hope this is Portland's and Oregon's "Penn Station", so that this avoidable failure can be put to good use.

[Germo]

I'm pretty sure I came across this blog because of posts about another demolition, the Rosefriend Apts. That was ten years or so back. I'm sure this won't stop unless profound, unimaginable changes take place. Those who lament the destruction but don't fight for such change -- myself included -- don't really have much to say about it in the end.

[Fred Leeson]

Beautifully expressed, Brian. This demolition certainly affects our "sense of place." What interests me: How many new buildings contribute to our sense of place, to what makes Portland special and memorable? I have trouble thinking of ANY, with the exception of the Portland Building (like it or not). I've sat through any number of design commission hearings where architects talk of "activating the street." Often as not, it means a Subway sandwich shop or something. I find it discouraging and depressing.

[Brian Libby]

Thanks everyone for the comments. Germo, I hear what you're saying but I respectfully disagree. Lamenting the destruction may not be as effective as fighting for change in other ways, but public opinion and speaking out still matters. Even if commenting on a blog or writing a blog post doesn't do much, one can always contact members of City Council, or the developers at Onder Development and Arthur Mutal, or the architects and contractors, to let them know of the disapproval. We need to collectively all urge ourselves to do better. Changed preservation laws and changed behavior is what we're after, but talk is the beginning of that process, I'd like to think.

[T]

This is terrible And pains me

[Cold Water]

In its replacement, the block is condemned to another uninspired century. That hulking pastiche was living proof that historic and beautiful do not always walk hand-in-hand.

[Brian Libby]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Cold Water. You're entitled to your opinion. But many of us found the Workmen Temple beautiful. We're even willing to use our real identities to come out and say so! ;)

[David Dysert]

What's even more regrettable is the fact this building was demolished for the parking of cars. Onder could have developed a taller quarter block building and saved the temple building but you can't get enough cars parked in a quarter block footprint. Portland likes to think its progressive and green. Think again.

[Rob]

I hate to point this out but it's your elected bureaucracy that's created this outcome. Permits that take 9+ months, out of control wages (not minimum wage), code requirements that are out of control, SDC fees, fees for housing, a long protracted useless public comment process, a misguided design review process, a property tax system that benefits parking lots vs buildings, no real historic preservation program in Oregon.. the list goes on.

[poncho]

The latest Portland development wave is largely crap and goes against much of what Portland became noted for. Skybridges in South Waterfront, demolition of this very historic block of Victorian brick buildings, doomsday themed highrises, blank walls at the street for new buildings, buildings raised from the street for parking (hello CLSB) and Hardie on all new podium projects that 10 years ago would have been brick or even wood clad, I could go on. But hey, they all have carefully planned faux randomized windows!!!

[Carla lejade]

Thank you Brian for your article and care. I was in Portland this week and witnessed firsthand this gorgeous old building being demolished . I was horrified and found your article. What were they thinking? What about the city heritage- this can never be replaced and a bit of creative thinking could make it "pencil out". I'm tired of developers using this excuse. And your article tried to give a balanced look at both sides but there really is no excuse. I am from Bath,Maine a tiny historic town the developers tried to raze in the name of "urban renewal " in 1970. The residents fought it and thank goodness- now it's a thriving historic town which won one of the cutest towns in the NE.
Portland get your act together! Look at creative uses like Haus Haus in Palo Alto- an elegant old theater now a techy workplace and gathering spot - architecture preserved thank you! I am sitting in their court laughing now enjoying the archtute and hoping somebody takes up the reins in Portland before more of this kind of travesty happens.
Carla - RedShoeLiving

[Carla lejade]

Opps typo : I meant "sitting in their courtyard enjoying the architecture "
I got so worked up thinking about this travesty - it's very upsetting as a visitor to your potentially lovely city !
Portland take note- get an active architectural review committee and be tough.
Carla