Veterans Memorial Coliseum (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In this unprecedented year, it's been easy to miss the 60th birthday of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which opened in 1960. It would be even easier to miss that a years-in-the-making renovation for the arena has had to be placed on hold.
Yet the darker and more divisive things get, the more Portland needs this building: as a light-filled place for the community to come together. Writing this on election day, I'm reminded that The Coliseum's architecture is itself a symbol of transparent democracy: a secular cathedral.
And the restoration is still coming. It just may have to wait another year or two. But after 11 years since the Coliseum was first threatened with demolition, what's another?
Portland Memorial Coliseum, as it was originally known, arrived in a time of optimism. John F. Kennedy was elected president that year, NASA astronauts were about to blast into orbit for the first time, and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.
The city was also feeling ambitious. The Coliseum was seen as part of a broader venues push that included the ill-fated Delta Dome and intimations of an Olympic Games bid. Interstate 5 was also under construction, and so was the South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project at the edge of downtown. There's no denying that most of these developments were planned to take the place of neighborhoods where immigrants and minorities lived. But with the economy booming, both local and national leaders were in a mood for sweeping change.
Design
The Coliseum was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the legendary Chicago and New York-based firm that became America's premiere office-tower designer, be it the gorgeous Lever House in the 1950s or the One World Trade Center from 2014. Yet the firm was also a local one, having purchased the great Pietro Belluschi's firm after Belluschi's 1951 hiring as dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's architecture. SOM's Portland office, which operated from the mid-1950s until the early 1980s, designed not only the Coliseum but landmarks like the US Bancorp Tower and Autzen Stadium.
Rendering of Memorial Coliseum design (City of Portland)
SOM designed the arena to offer 360-degree views from its seating bowl to the outside. For most of the building's history, however, a retractable black curtain has blocked that view except for on a few special occasions like the annual Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade. I once watched the sun set over the entire downtown skyline from my seat at the top of the seating bowl during a Blazers exhibition game in 2010.
The building is also quite an engineering marvel. Despite being the equivalent of nearly three city blocks in size, the entire building is standing on just four columns. And the concrete seating bowl sits completely detached from the columns and the glass curtain walls that surround it.
Shortly after its completion, Memorial Coliseum was photographed by America's most acclaimed 20th century architectural photographer: Julius Shulman. His photos communicate the idea of the Coliseum as a kind of glass temple. Perched over the river and completely transparent, the Coliseum gleams. But Shulman wasn't the only talented photographer to turn his lens on the building. Seattle's Art Hupy took a series of nighttime pictures of the Coliseum that serve as an ideal complement to Shulman's daytime shots.
Memorial Coliseum in 1960 (Julius Shulman/J. Paul Getty Trust)
History
I can't believe I've written over 500 words so far and haven't even mentioned the Beatles or Blazers.
As the city's largest performance venue from its 1960 completion until the Rose Garden opened next door in 1996, Memorial Coliseum hosted the great musical acts of the mid-20th century. Most notable was a 1965 concert by The Beatles. In the audience that day was also the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who composed a poem called "Portland Coliseum," in which he referred to the building as "the new world auditorium."
In the 1960s and '70s, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones played there. In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac all took the Coliseum stage. In the 1980s I saw Van Halen, Rush, Sting and Billy Joel there (the latter was my mom's idea).
Naturally the lone contender that Beatles concert has for the all-time #1 event at Memorial Coliseum would be the Portland Trail Blazers winning the 1977 NBA championship there. This was the most joyous moment in our city's history, as a wave of pandemonium overtook the city.
"It was like the fall of Rome, the opening of the West and the discovery of atomic power," Robert Olmos and Steve Erickson wrote in a front-page June 6, 1977 Oregonian article. "The fall of Rome because Philadelphia 76er coach Gene Shue’s empire collapsed...The opening of the West because when the horn sounded ending the game, 12,951 fans stomped, cheered, cried and stampeded onto the court where the Trail Blazers had just made history. The discovery of atomic power because...well, you should have been there...A stranger in town would have thought Portland had gone mad. He would have been right. Blazermania had become a reality.”
A second NBA championship was won there in 1990 by the Detroit Pistons over the Blazers. Hall of Fame players like Detroit's Isaiah Thomas and Portland's Clyde Drexler competed in that series before Vinnie Johnson's championship-winning buzzer-beater at the Coliseum in Game 6. Two years later, the Coliseum hosted the NBA Finals for a third and final time, with Chicago winning two of three games in Portland before clinching back at Chicago Stadium in Game 6.
Two other basketball games at Memorial Coliseum were part of sports history. First, the 1965 Final Four was played there, won by UCLA as part of its 11-championship dynasty under head coach John Wooden.
And in 1992, the first ever "Dream Team" — a United States Olympic team comprised of professional players — played its debut game at Memorial Coliseum, as part of the Tournament of the Americas, a qualifier for the Barcelona Olympic Games. I was there that day in the audience with my dad as the United States defeated Cuba by 79 points.
Sports and music weren't all. How about Evel Knievel? He made one of his largest indoor jumps here. Or on a more serious front, two of the most world's most admired leaders of the past half century also spoke here: the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama. Not only do their names rhyme, but on this election eve, they couldn't be any more different than the incumbent of the past four years.
Demolition Threats and Protections
In 2009, the Coliseum was nearly demolished when Mayor Sam Adams and Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson announced a plan to build a new minor-league baseball stadium for the Portland Beavers next to the Rose Garden (now the Moda Center). The Beavers' longtime home, Providence Park, was being converted from a multi-purpose stadium to a soccer stadium, as part of the Timbers' joining Major League Soccer. After citizen opposition, Adams abandoned the Coliseum-demolition plan and sadly, a number of suburban municipalities explored for a minor-league stadium sight did not pan out, causing the team to move.
Meanwhile, the Coliseum was accepted to the National Register of Historic Places, giving it an additional (but not unbreakable) layer of protection. About that time, the name was altered from Memorial Coliseum to Veterans Memorial Coliseum, spearheaded by veterans who helped fight to save the building from demolition. (I respect and admire veterans but personally prefer the original name.)
Memorial Coliseum in 1960 (Art Hupy)
Adams and Prosper Portland (then known as the Portland Development Commission) then led a Stakeholder Advisory Committee to determine a new use for Memorial Coliseum, but the committee was being asked to determine single uses for a busy multi-purpose arena hosting over 100 events a year.
Eventually, the Adams administration moved forward with a proposed renovation of just over $30 million, but the plan was pulled from a planned City Council vote and shelved, after which Adams left office.
His successor, Mayor Charlie Hales, commissioned a third-party economic study that confirmed the Coliseum's value as a mid-sized venue that otherwise doesn't exist in the city. The study found that a renovation would pay for itself in increased booking revenue for the arena, and would bring $2 billion over 20 years in economic impact. Yet Hales too left office before further action was taken.
In 2015, Commissioner Steve Novick introduced to City Council a new plan, to tear down the Coliseum in order to build affordable housing. Yet both planning and affordable housing professionals found the Rose Quarter site to be insufficient for housing, given the lack of amenities and the island-like setting bounded by thoroughfares.
The Novick-led demolition plan did not move forward, but the threat was enough to see the Coliseum in 2016 receive another distinction when the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the VMC what's called a National Treasure, a distinction that has applied to less than 100 buildings and sites in the United States.
Blazers exhibition game at Memorial Coliseum, 2009 (Brian Libby)
The Plan Going Forward
So what now? Over the past three years, the city has spent about $5 million restoring the building. But that’s just a start. Since last year, the City of Portland has been taking steps toward a full-scale restoration.
As confirmed by Karl Lisle, who manages spectator venues for the City of Portland's Office of Management and Finance, the city hired acclaimed architecture firm Perkins + Will, and the firm is engaged in phase-one design work. But for now, the project is on hold until the pandemic is tamed and the funding situation becomes clearer. Money had been set aside, but that was before budgets took a hit citywide amidst the events of 2020.
As a co-founder of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum, it’s frustrating to see the Coliseum finally about to be restored, only to face an unexpected eleventh-hour hurdle. On the other hand, the important thing is the City of Portland intends to restore the building. It's not to say the restoration is guaranteed to happen, yet the period in which we question the Coliseum's long-term survival seems to have—knock wood—ended. And rightly so.
Preserving a large arena like Veterans Memorial Coliseum goes against a lot of tradition. After all, no stadium or arena can be protected by its historical legacy. We tore down the Boston Garden and we tore down Yankee Stadium. Yet those buildings didn't have a reason to be, a role to play, whereas the Coliseum does.
Coliseum interior following 2016 renovation (Brian Libby)
The one caveat, of course, is that it's not just Memorial Coliseum that needs a renovation: it's the entire Rose Quarter.
This place is arguably the biggest urban-planning failure in central city Portland over the past quarter-century or more. It's a dead zone when there isn't a Blazer game or concert.
But that's not because of the two arenas. It's because of everything else: namely three above-ground parking garages and One Center Court, which is a hybrid of office building with a fourth garage. You could have the Taj Mahal on the Rose Quarter site and those surrounding garages would still make this place a dead zone. Bury that parking underground, and the Rose Quarter will be transformed.
Meanwhile, let’s just take a moment to toast this extraordinary work of midcentury-modern architecture by one of the great American architecture firms. Let’s hope that someday soon we can all visit the restored Coliseum, and that the urban setting it’s part of is one of pedestrians and connections to the river, not parked cars.
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