The former 10th & Alder food cart pod (Nicolai Kruger Studio)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
After a long delay, I'm happy to announce that Season 2 of my podcast in collaboration with XRAY FM, In Search of Portland, just debuted yesterday.
I hope this post doesn't read as shameless self-promotion, but I think readers of this blog will find the show interesting. It's a slightly different focus than Portland Architecture, which is not to say that new buildings aren't of interest, but simply that on the podcast I like to feature places with layers of history. Be it a building completed in 2020 or 1920, those sites always have a past, and that past, along with the present and future of that site, collectively say something about our city.
For this first episode, our destination is what’s currently a construction site downtown at 10th and Alder called Block 216. It’s set to become a 35-story tower: the city’s fifth-tallest building. A five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel is planned here, as well offices and condominiums.
The tower was designed by GBD Architects, the local firm I talked to last season for an episode about the Portland Armory. GBD has designed lots of towers like Block 216, but they’re complicated to pull off: veritable cities unto themselves. The client is BPM Real Estate Group. On its website, GBD explains:
"At 844,117 square feet, the project will likely be the largest Portland building of its era, and it will house a complex blended program: 160,000 GSF [gross square feet] of office, a 249-key five star hotel, and 138 for-sale private residences. Between residential and hotel uses, floors 19 and 20 are dedicated to amenities shared by the hotel and private residences. The amenity spaces on level 19 include a double-height pool, a spa tub, showers, lockers, a fitness area for residents and guests as well as a spa facility that will be open to the public. The amenity spaces on level 20 include a restaurant, and bar, and guest lounge. The ground level will bring 13,000 square feet of lively retail, three distinct entry lobbies for each use, as well as loading, trash, back of house, and the hotel bar."
Renderings of the future Block 216 tower (GBD Architects)
During the pandemic with millions filing for unemployment, I’ve wondered if construction might come to a halt. After all, that’s what happened during the last recession, to the nearby Park Avenue West tower. So far, though, construction on Block 216 has not ceased.
But ultimately the new tower is not why I decided to make a podcast episode about this block. Instead, I wanted to look back, first at the parking lot that was here for a half century starting in the 1960s, with special attention to the 10th and Alder food cart pod located here until recently. I got interested in Block 216 for how it told a more than century-long story about the city.
For most of the past century , downtown has been dotted with surface parking lots. One company, City Center Parking, for much of that time enjoyed a near monopoly. These lots were consistently profitable. I mean, what’s better than an asphalt block that needs no upkeep, no investment, but regularly returns each month many thousands of dollars in revenue? Portland prides itself on being one of America’s more pedestrian-friendly cities, with an urban growth boundary encouraging high density over suburban sprawl. Even so, until recent years downtown was a kind of checkerboard of these simple surface lots.
Thankfully, though, that’s changing. The Goodman family sold City Center Parking 10 years ago and kept much of the land from those surface lots, allowing a nice re-invention as property developers. Many of these lots now have buildings on them, or will soon. That’s why Block 216 is a construction site today.
But I think most people walk past the construction crane at 10th & Alder and think about the food carts that were here. A little over a decade ago, Portland’s culinary scene exploded with mobile street food vendors, as a generation of talented young chefs and entrepreneurs went DIY.
And we all benefited, because in Portland’s food carts could find a lot of international cuisines you wouldn’t have been able to find in brick and mortar restaurants.
10th & Alder was just one place out of many in the city to find these movable feasts. But in the late 2000s and early 2010s this block became a destination: not just for hungry office workers and students and tourists, but food media from all over the world.
In this episode, I first talk with Brett Burmeister, editor of the Food Carts Portland blog, about the 10th and Alder food cart pod and the explosion of street food in Portland. Brett ate at his first food cart in 1991 and has roughly 1000 visits to street vendors in Portland and beyond. He’s has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, Saveur and The Guardian, among others.
But before the parking lot and the food carts came an earlier history, with buildings dating back to Portland’s 19th century beginnings.
There was the Selling-Hirsch Building, completed in 1896, which was not only a beautiful three-story work of architecture but over the first half of the 20th century its tenants tell a story of America, from political activists protesting to give women the right to vote to the women’s suffrage movement to in the 1910s to a training center for Red Cross nurses during World War II.
Selling-Hirsch building, 1965 (George McMath, via Architectural Heritage Center)
There was also on this block the People’s Theater, part of a huge boom in Portland theater building that even helped prompt the renaming of Seventh Avenue to Broadway. It was completed in 1911 as just the second movie theater in Portland. It was built by the People’s Amusement Company, founded earlier that year, which eventually grew to control over thirty theaters across the Pacific Northwest. On its opening night of 11-1-11, a performance by opera singer Arthur Ellwell was followed by a comedy film short called A Disturbing Canine. General admission was ten cents.
Designed by Newcomb Engineering, the People’s Theater featured a Classical Revival style with three massive arched openings atop its elevated grand staircase, all modeled after 1875’sParis Opera. Carved classical muses to the left of the arched entries represented music, drama, and cinematic art. Inside, the lobby was trimmed in Mexican onyx and there was a custom $10,000 organ.
People's Theater (Architectural Heritage Center)
In 1929, the J.J. Parker Theaters chain purchased the People’s Theater and renamed it the Alder Theatre, with added seating and a new projection booth. But a year later, as the Great Depression arrived, it was sold again and renamed the Music Box (one of numerous downtown theaters to hold that name). But the theater closed in 1952, torn down shortly thereafter for the surface parking lot that remained there until 2019
The episode’s second interview is with Val Ballestrem, education manager at Portland’s Architectural Heritage Center. I talk with Val about the buildings that used to stand on this site like the Selling-Hirsch and the People’s Theater, and the people who built them.
One thing I realized working on this episode is that Block 216's past and present have a lot to do with recessions. It was the Great Recession of 2008 that helped give rise to the food-cart movement in Portland. The People's Theater was sold on the eve of the Great Depression. It was torn down during the recession of 1953. And going further back, it was the Panic of 1893 that set in motion a house on this block being torn down to make way for the first commercial building here, the Selling-Hirsch.
In the weeks and months ahead, our second season will feature seven more buildings and sites.
The second episode is all about the Ladd Carriage House, another 19th century gem that, against all odds, has survived all the way into the 21st — but only after surviving a demolition threat courtesy of owner First Christian Church in 2006. In that episode, I talk to architect and historian Paul Falsetto about saving the Carriage House, and interior designer Tracey Simpson about creating the wonderful restaurant inside: The Raven and Rose.
In Search of Portland's third episode focuses on Centennial Mills, the former complex of flour and seed mills that, perhaps more than any other site in the city, set Portland's economic engine in motion. Owned by the City of Portland for the past two decades, it was initially set to be cleared for an extension of Waterfront Park, but after public outcry over demolition, has seen a succession of redevelopment proposals fall through, and the city agency charged with managing the process, Prosper Portland, also has since demolished nearly all but the tallest flour mill building. In this episode, I talk first with historian, Portland State University professor and former Oregon Historical Society director Chet Orloff about Centennial Mills' history, and then with Prosper Portland's Lisa Abauf about efforts to redevelop the site.
I have to give thanks to all those who have helped make In Search of Portland. Nonprofit radio station XRAY FM produced the show, with a special assist from editor Jonathan Covington-Brehm. Mutual Materials and Capstone Partners are sponsors of the show. Architect and illustrator Nicolai Kruger creates an original drawing to go with each site we feature. Maxwell Griffin provided graphic design, including the show's logo. And the show's music is courtesy of Beauty Pill.
I was surprised to discover that in 2019, In Search of Portland was actually XRAY's top-rated podcast amongst the many it produces. It took me some time to learn recording from home, but it's great to be releasing these episodes again. It's fun to dig a little deeper.
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