Charles Glaab: Framing US Urban History

Framing U.S. Urban History: Charles Glaab and The American City: A Documentary History (1963)

In the early 1960s, Americans were rediscovering cities as objects of intellectual inquiry as well as targets for public policy.

The single year 1961 saw publication of Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis, and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. These books took different intellectual stands, but all of the authors agreed that modern cities were phenomena that required fundamental rethinking/new thinking about current trends. Cities weren’t decentralizing properly said Mumford. Cities were killing their centers said Jacobs. Cities were growing into new forms that neither Mumford not Jacobs quite understood said Gottmann.

The next year came the book that I judge to be Glaab’s intellectual foil, namely Morton and Lucia White’s The Intellectual Versus the City.

Morton White was a professor of philosophy at Harvard and an expert on the American tradition of pragmatic reform and its failings. His landmark book was Social Thought in America (1949) with an examination of John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen. He grew up in the intellectually intense and politically charged environment of interwar Manhattan. He was an intellectual historian for whom ideas were fascinating in themselves, and who was therefore interested in the thinkers who occupied what were commonly recognized as the loftiest peaks of intellectual endeavor. The protagonists in The Intellectual Versus the City were men like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The general impression that a new graduate student took away from the book a few years after its publication was that cities were unlovable—perhaps necessary, but little to be admired. According to the back cover of my 75-cent 1964 paperback, “Our nation’s most distinguished artists, leaders, and intellectuals have proclaimed open hostility toward the city. Unlike the Englishman’s London or the Frenchman’s Paris, they have found nothing to love in the sprawling American metropolis. This significant and thoughtful study analyzes for the first time the major intellectual reactions to urbanism . . . .and offers some provocative conclusions as to why our cities have been the traditional object of prejudice, fear, and distrust.”

The Whites wrote their book from the academic citadels of Cambridge and Princeton and acknowledged advice from luminaries like Carl Schorske, Perry Miller, John Burchard, Lloyd Rodwin, and Arthur M. Schlesinger among others.

Charles Glaab came out of a very different environment—born in Williston, North Dakota, educated at North Dakota University and then the University of Missouri, employed first in Kansas, then Wisconsin, then Ohio. His monographs dealt with places very much different from New York or Cambridge—Kansas City, Neenah-Menasha, Toledo. As someone who still, after years in Oregon, considers the Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio to be the garden of the world, these are choices after my own heart.

The documentary history that Glaab assembled and edited from his base at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has fundamental merits as a text that still gives it a place on my bookshelf, its cover substantially assisted by duct tape. Its organization and categories are clear. Its excerpts are drawn heavily from magazines and popular journalism, and thus readable and accessible for novices. The selections are substantial enough to be helpful to instructors and researchers as well as students. Richard Wade assigned the book when I took his course in urban history at the University of Chicago in 1967. Ray Mohl reports that Bayrd Still assigned it in his urban history class at NYU in 1964.

Apropos of my argument, The American City is also an antidote to the Whites.

Reading through the selections, we get a much better feel for popular ideas as well as elite critiques. The intellectual protagonists in its pages are the sorts of civic leaders who tried to keep up on events and solve problems while leading otherwise busy lives. They are the travelers and journalists who want to explain phenomenal cities to their readers (or perhaps to titillate them). They are the reformers who addressed practical problems while trying to understand the urban dynamics

I count only one author—the interminable Henry James—who held himself completely above the fray. Other “intellectuals” were also politicians (Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson) or activist/practitioners (Daniel Drake, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams)

We also get a balanced view. Readers encounter fearful and negative evaluations, for where would a course in urban history be without The Dangerous Classes of New York or The Shame of the Cities? However, there are also evaluations that are variously excited, positive, and hopeful. European visitors with unhappy views of American cities (Alexis de Tocqueville, Rudyard Kipling) are balanced by those more sympathetic (Michael Chevalier, Anthony Trollope rather than his cranky mother). We get the views of important social scientists like F. J. Kingsbury, Adna F. Weber, Richard Ely, Paul Kellogg, and Graham Taylor. There are reformers and critics aplenty, but also indefatigable promoters like DeWitt Clinton and Jesup Scott and John S. Wright.

And Glaab’s selections introduced me to two of my favorite commentators: George Tucker, one of the founding faculty from Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia writing The Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in the 1840s, and the Urbanism Committee of the National Resources Committee writing in the 1930s. Without Charles Glaab, how long would it have taken me to encounter Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy?

As much as anything, The American City: A Documentary History sketches out a comprehensive intellectual history of American urbanization that recognized that, as George Tucker wrote, “whatever may be the good or evil tendencies of populous cities, they are the result to which all countries, that are at once fertile, free, and intelligent, tend.”

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admin, October 28th 2010 | Posted in Commentary

The book that turned Turner inside out

[This is a retrospective review of Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier, originally published on H-Urban.]

As the United States entered the 1950s, highway engineers were eagerly completing plans for Middle Western toll highways and anticipating national freeway system. Automobile stylists were turning Studebakers into rocket ships and dreaming of ways to turn rear fenders into tailfins. Meanwhile, Richard Wade was determinedly following the route of the early Ohio River boatmen. His itinerary took him downriver from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to Louisville and then to St. Louis on the Mississippi, with side trips
to Lexington and the limestone soil of the bluegrass country. His stops over several years of research were the local history rooms of public libraries, city and state historical societies, newspaper archives, and dusty rooms full of early municipal records in the
city hall basements and municipal annexes. At least in Pittsburgh, home of political boss and king-maker David Lawrence, Wade’s budding career as a Democratic Party activist helped to open records that were still carefully guarded after 150 years.

The result of sweltering summers of note-taking and writing was a Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation for the elder Arthur Schlesinger, published by the Harvard University Press as The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 in 1959. In the 1960s it entered the paperback world as The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis. In 1996 University of Illinois Press has reissued this American history classic under its original title with a valuable preface by Zane L. Miller, one of Wade’s most accomplished and influential students.

The Urban Frontier propounded a simple and startling thesis. Cities were the spearheads of the Anglo-American frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner had gotten the order of events mixed up. Urbanization didn’t follow the farmer–it made the development of
agriculture possible. On successive frontiers in the Ohio Valley, around the Great Lakes, at the margin of the Great Plains, on the Pacific Coast, and in the western mountains, urban settlements provided the necessary foundation for intensive resource
development. They processed and marketed crops, timber, and minerals; they furnished merchandise and supplies; they mobilized capital and management expertise to build roads, canals, and railroads; they provided the refinements of civilization that westering Anglo-Americans so desperately wanted.

Obvious as this point may seem to H-Urban subscribers, it contradicted the strongest trend in regional history in the 1950s. A few years before The Urban Frontier, R. Carlyle Buley won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840
(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1950). Buley’s book is a thick, nearly unreadable compendium of tidbits about farm life and pioneer society in the early Middle West. It assumed that Middle Western history was rural history and it romanticized the quaint practices of the folk. For fiction readers, Ross Lockridge’s immensely popular Raintree County (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948) offered the same message in a novel set in the Cincinnati hinterland of southeastern Indiana. The full title of the Lockridge book shows the power of the romanticizing impulse: “Raintree County … which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange.”

The Urban Frontier in this context was a wakeup call. “Get real!” it says. Take a look at social and economic realities. Look at the way that cities expressed and promoted the commercial capitalism that lies at the heart of the American experience. Wade’s study
thus extended the historical understanding of American growth that was being outlined in Louis Hartz’s brilliant Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace 1955), David Potter’s equally powerful People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954), and the studies of state economic development policy by Oscar and Mary Handlin, Hartz, and others.[1]

Wade’s insight rang true for me when I read the book as an undergraduate who wanted to be a historian but was not quite sure what to study. Wade was writing about my part of the country, for I was a fifth-generation Ohioan. He was also writing about my ancestors, who had been townspeople–storekeepers, telegraph operators, artisans, clerks, land speculators (quite unsuccessful, I might add). I decided then, and still believe, that Wade managed a great conceptual feat. The book confirms that Fred Turner asked the right questions about the process and meaning of American expansion, but just needed his answers turned inside out.

A key concept in The Urban Frontier is “urban imperialism.” A term originally used by Wade’s mentor Arthur Schlesinger in his classic essay “The City in American History,” urban imperialism is a historical-geographic framework for understanding the ways in which urban commercial networks organize and develop hinterlands through trade and investment. The concept has been applied successfully in other regions from Texas to California. It resonates with geographer James Vance’s model of a mercantile pattern of settlement and it underlies William Cronon’s recent sophisticated analysis of Chicago’s interactions with its region.[2]

The concept assumes that the United States was born in commercial capitalism. In Wade’s Old Northwest we find no gradual coalescence of rural subsistence society into a more complex economy. Rather the Great West grows as an outpost of New York, London, and Hamburg, striving from the start to reach distant markets and fertilized by
investment and migration. The mentalite of this Middle America was improvement, not stasis. As has been true for two centuries, the battles were over the right sharing of the fruits of growth, not the possibility of economic modernization.

Also basic to Wade’s interpretation is the role of cities in the transit of culture. Wade’s Cincinnatians and Louisvillers were a conservative bourgeoisie, interested in recreating the society that they left behind. They borrowed street names from Philadelphia, filled churches and meeting halls, and looked for guidance to east coast communities. Here Wade’s interpretation extended Daniel Aaron’s previous study of Cincinnati society and complemented Earl Pomeroy’s argument about the social and cultural conservatism of far western settlement.[3]

Like most other historians of the 1950s, Wade looked for patterns in the written record. In using public records, newspapers, and published documents, he engaged in very traditional historical research. He did not explore quantitative data sources, the built
environment, or other sources of information that could have enriched his interpretation–although he certain encouraged his own students to do so and later used such sources to great effect in Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (University of Chicago Press,
1969), co-authored with geographer Harold Mayer. Nor did he explicitly test social theory in the way that his second book, Slavery in the Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) would test sociological generalizations about the effects of
urbanization on social institutions and individual freedom.

Covering forty years of growth in five cities, Wade’s study is necessarily broader than it is detailed. It is a sketch map of a vast intellectual territory drawn from the most accessible sources. An explorer like Henry Schoolcraft or William Clark, he mapped broad contours and described large patterns that later intellectual surveyors and entrepreneurs could fill in. Those broad patterns, however, included all of the core topics of urban development, from economic growth to the differentiation of social classes to the creation of political and cultural institutions.

Wade’s study triggered a vast literature including case studies of individual western cities and comparative discussions on other urban frontiers and imperial realms. A generation of urban historians learned that the way to do urban history was to explore a theme across a multitude of cases. The result was outstanding studies by Ken Jackson, Howard Rabinowitz, Blaine Brownell, David Goldfield, Don Doyle, Timothy Mahoney, and many others.[4]

The Urban Frontier is a study of the public city–that is, the ways in which early city builders conceived and promoted their communities as economic engines and civic entities. The book describes ethnic differences, the presence of free and enslaved
African-Americans, and the stirrings of class divisions, but these are secondary to the theme. Many questions that we would now pose about the roles and experiences of women went unasked. Nevertheless, Wade’s book remains the most accessible study of the founding of an urbanized nation. It still carries the excitement of intellectual discovery that has made it so influential.

Notes:

[1]. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York: New York University Press, 1947); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948).

[2]. Arthur Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (June 1940): 43-66; James Vance, This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper’s College Press, 1977); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991).

[3]. Daniel Aaron, Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819-1839 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992); Earl Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1955): 579-600.

[4]. This lesson I learned in Wade’s University of Chicago seminar and tried to apply in my dissertation. Published as Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), it was a self-conscious effort to take Wade’s study into the next generation of Middle Western history.

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admin, September 10th 2010 | Posted in Commentary

Rocky Mountain Refuge: Constructing “Colorado” in Science Fiction

Note: What appears here is the abstract of a paper for the 2010 meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association. For the full paper, follow the link to the Word document immediately below.

Colorado as Refuge

Regional identities emerge from the interaction of imaginative representations and social and economic conditions. Business boosters, novelists, television producers, song writers, and a range of other contributors to popular culture start with conditions on the ground, abstract certain elements, and construct imagined regions whose identities take on trajectories of their own

Since the early 20th century, Americans have constructed Colorado simultaneously as the nation’s most accessible western adventureland and as its refuge from the threats of the future. We find the first Colorado in such disparate sources as tourist promotion pamphlets, the post-World War II ski culture, and the songs of John Denver, all of which attempted to erase the state’s troubled industrial past to allow the creation of a new, ahistorical image. We find the second in the NORAD complex at Cheyenne Mountain and in proposals to relocate the national capital to Denver to protect it from foreign invasion.

Science fiction writers have drawn on both constructed identities—Colorado as fortress and Colorado as tabula rasa—to imagine Colorado, and the central Rocky Mountain region more generally as a frontier of isolation.

Texts include Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow, Ursula Le Guin, City of Illusions, Stephen King, The Stand, Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, and Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Because none of these authors had a close association with Colorado or deep experience of the central Rocky Mountain region, I argue that they were drawing on a popular sense of the area’s physical isolation and social newness to construct fictions that reiterate and reinforce that very sense of isolation.

These fictional “Colorados” stand in contrast to the construction of other western regions in speculative fiction—to a vaguely ecotopian Pacific Northwest (Ernest Callenbach, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, David Brin) or to a dystopian southern California as depicted by science fiction writers far too numerous to list. The juxtaposition suggests the variety of roles that the American West plays in visions of the American future and the ways in which these visions draw on and reinforce distinctions among our different “frontier” regions.

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admin, July 17th 2010 | Posted in In Progress

The Iron Heel

Suburbia and the Dual City in The Iron Heel

Mention Jack London and most of us think about adventures stories with large-than-life figures contending with the forces of nature. We all remember Buck, the Saint Bernard who is forced to confront the wilderness of the Far North in The Call of the Wild. We may think about White Fang, the wolf from the Yukon, or the human “sea-wolf” Wolf Larsen, captain of the seal-hunting ship Ghost.

Poke further into London’s massive output, however, and we find him anticipating something that looks a lot like the twenty-first century American city—perhaps even the American city California style, appropriate for the imagination of a native Californian.

The book is The Iron Heel, a painfully unreadable novel about the rise of American fascism. Published in 1908, it takes the form of a memoir/history written by eye-witness Avis Everhard, composed after the political disasters of the early twentieth century and rediscovered hundreds of years into the future. London’s dystopian story of his near future recounts how corporate capitalism seizes control of the state and presses its “Iron Heel” upon the working class. Much of the book is clunky set-piece dialogues in which labor leader Ernest Everhard (Avis’s husband) lectures the powerful about their iniquities and argues for socialist revolution, although it does end with a fast-paced description of the bloody suppression of the Chicago Commune after workers rise prematurely against the Oligarchy and are ground to dust.

What does London think that Chicago and other American cities will look like under corporate capitalism? The answer is abject poverty in the core and happily isolated suburbanites on the fringe.

The worker slaves, the people of the abyss, are confined to miserable lives in the “great ghetto” of old neighborhoods that compound the worst of lower Manhattan, East London, and immigrant Chicago. The workers live “like beasts in great squalid labour-ghettos, festering in misery and degradation.” Writing a decade before the large-scale migration of African Americans to northern cities, London was anticipating a white ghetto rather than a black ghetto, but the impacts of spatial confinement are the same.

If the surplus labor army is confined to big city ghettos, corporate prosperity now satisfies and buys off the more skilled workers. The book describes their new suburban communities in language that anticipates the great labor-management bargain of post-World War II America that created what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called the “consumer’s republic” and made possible the housing revolution that turned Ozzie and Harriet Nelson from traveling musicians to suburban householders.

Here is Jack London’s version, as channeled through Avis Everhard: “The members of the great labour castes were contented and worked on merrily. For the first time in their life they knew industrial peace. . . . They lived in more comfortable homes and in delightful cities of their own—delightful compared to the slums and ghettos in which they had formerly dwelt. They had better food to eat, less hours of labour, more holidays.”

The elite has also suburbanized in gated and protected communities. In the paroxysm of the Chicago Commune, the rebels can attack downtown office towers but “never once did they succeed in reaching the city of the oligarchs on the westside. The oligarchs had protected themselves well. No matter what destruction was wreaked in the heart of the city, they, and their womenkind and children, were to escape, unhurt. I am told [writes Avis Everhard] that their children played in the parks during those terrible days, and that their favorite game was an imitation of their elders stamping upon the proletariat.”

There are suburban new towns as well, the specialized homes of the Mercenaries, who are the enforcers when force is needed (a cross between a Praetorian guard and company goons). They live in “cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they were granted many privileges.” Although there is luckily nothing quite like these towns today, there is an echo of both survivalist enclaves and politically independent suburbs that turn their cold shoulder to big city problems.

There will be, finally, two entirely new “wonder cities” built after the failure of proletarian revolution—Ardis, finished twenty years afterward in 1942, and Asgard, complete in 1984. These are throw-ins to the plot, so London doesn’t provide much detail, but with the timing, I’m envisioning the San Fernando Valley for Ardis and Las Vegas for Asgard—both wonder cities in my book.

A final point is London’s version of hegemony. Living in comfort, the oligarchy and their middle class minions accept the rightness of the bifurcated city. The oligarchy, “as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. . . . Without them anarchy would reign . . . . I cannot lay too great stress upon the high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This had been the strength of the Iron Heel.” So too, a critic might say, suburban Americans have internalized the premises that success justifies privilege and that suburban comfort is a natural manifestation of civilized order.

The Iron Heel is a political tract that is steeped in Jack London’s ardent socialism. It is not an exercise in urban theory, and the passages about the urban future are secondary to the plot. This said, their depiction of a horizontal metropolis is a homegrown vision. Contrast, for example, the sort of dual city that Fritz Lang (raised in Vienna and working in Berlin) imagined in Metropolis—vertically rather than horizontally divided. As a West Coast boy who already thought of Oakland and San Francisco as a single community. London anticipated a future metropolis with strikingly American characteristics.

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admin, July 16th 2010 | Posted in Commentary

The Social Hinterlands of Washington, D.C.: A Regional Framework for City History

Editor’s Note: This is an article length piece. What appears below is an extended abstract. For the full article, use the link to the Word document immediately below.

MS Word file: “The Social Hinterlands of Washington, D.C.: A Regional Framework for City History”

From its beginnings in the 1790s, Washington, D.C. has been a border city–famously described by John F. Kennedy as a place of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” The new American nation carefully chose a site for a new capital that balanced regional interests. The members of the first Congress under the new Constitution understood the federal city as poised balanced between the northern and southern states and also between the Atlantic seaboard and the continental interior.

Washington has also been a southern city from its origins to the present. Additional roles have been overlaid on its southern character, making it also a “northern” city (especially from 1861 to the 1880s), a national city (especially in the twentieth century), and a global city (especially since 1940). Nevertheless, it has continued to maintain a distinctive regional character that reciprocally supports the distinctiveness of the South Atlantic region.

In this paper, I explore what I call the “social hinterland” of Washington, as distinguished from an economic or commercial hinterland. In effect, I propose to use Washington to show the possibilities of emphasizing a social and cultural dimension to city-regional history. Washington has never had wide-ranging commercial influence comparable to a Chicago or Montreal. But it has been a focus for interregional migration, a draw for regional elites, and symbolic prize among rival regions.

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admin, July 14th 2010 | Posted in In Progress

Competing Cascadias: Imagining a Region over Four Decades

Editor’s Note: This is a footnoted, article length piece. Below is a brief introduction of the work. To download the full article, use the link to the PDF Document below.

PDF: “Competing Cascadias: Imagining a Region over Four Decades”

In 1997, the distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes offered the suggestion that “Cascadia” would be the “shock city” of the twenty-first century, following in the pattern set by in earlier eras by Manchester and Chicago, Los Angeles and Calcutta. Come again? Cascadia? Where’s that, and why might it be more interesting to twenty-first century scholars than Shanghai or Mumbai or Sao Paolo?

For Geddes, as for Ethan Seltzer, Anne Moudon, and Alan Artibise, the trio of urban scholars who contributed “Cascadia: An Emerging Regional Model” to Geddes’s edited volume Cities in Our Future, Cascadia is a bi-national megaregion consisting of the Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver metro areas and the farms and forests in between.


The Cascadia Megaregion is the newest in a series of recent efforts to reimagine a regional identity for the northwestern coast of North America.

For a century and a half—beginning with the intrusion of Russian, British, and American fur traders, extending through imperial contests and boundary marking, through Anglophone settlement, and on through the dam-building and timber booms of the mid-twentieth century—the greater Northwest had a stable identity as region rich in natural resources and driven by their exploitation and development. Whether as the pre-national Oregon Country in the early nineteenth century or the U.S. Pacific Northwest and idiosyncratic British Columbia of the twentieth century, this was a remarkably constant region of the mind.

The vast territory has had subregions to be sure—an Empire of the Columbia, the inland sea from Olympia, Washington north to Campbell River, British Columbia, an Inland Empire (that’s the big one around Spokane, not the little one around Riverside). However, Wilbur Zelinsky’s now classic study of vernacular regions found the Northwest firmly in place in the 1970s. His study compiled and tallied the regional adjectives that appeared in business and organizational names in the phone books of the 276 of the largest U.S. and Canadian cities. “Northwest” was the dominant regional marker in Boise, Spokane, Eugene, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma, and made a strong 2nd or 3rd place showing in Missoula, Billings, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and Anchorage (as Canada’s windows to Asia, Victoria and Vancouver gave first place to “Pacific”). The regional core along Puget Sound and the lower Columbia River also joined the Canadian Maritime Provinces and the heart of Dixie in having the greatest regional self-consciousness as measured by the percentage of regional terms relative to all terms.

Beginning in the same decade as Zelinsky’s study, however, that identity began to come unstuck. For the last generation it has been up for grabs with competing metaphors and definitions that suggest very different planning and policy responses. Journalists, boosters, advocates, and scholars have tried out a series of ways to conceptualize and shape a regional identity for the northern Pacific coast—as Ecotopia, as bioregional Cascadia, as boosterish Mainstreet Cascadia and as the Cascadia Megaregion. Think of the change this way: The old identity was like a reliable older automobile with lots of miles but well maintained and still perking along. Suddenly, however, it is too boring, too unfashionable, inadequately trendy, causing us to shop for an alternative—perhaps a Prius? A Smart Car? A Ford F-350 pickup? A Lexus? All have their strong points, but none seems to satisfy every need and expectation. Stepping back from the simile, the goal of this paper is to interrogate these changing ways for thinking about the regional identity of the old Oregon Country.

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admin, July 14th 2010 | Posted in In Progress

The Changing Approaches to Portland: The Stranger’s Path

Photo: Historic sign at the Crown Motel, Portland, OR

This post formerly appeared in the “Hindsight” column, Portland Spaces magazine (July/August 2008)

The Crown Motel sign, a landmark on North Interstate Avenue since 1959, has recently been removed to allow REACH Community Development to redevelop the site as affordable housing. The Atomic Age Alliance, a small group devoted to the popular culture and artifacts of the 1950s and 1960s, is hoping find it a new home for the whole assembly–the big crown that reads “CROWN” and the electrified sword that thrusts through the O in MOTEL.

The sign is an emblem of the golden age of the family vacation. In three decades from the end of World War II to the oil shocks of the 1970, Americans took to the road. “Drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America’s the greatest land of all!” sang Dinah Shore at the close of her TV variety hour from 1956 to 1963. Millions of Americans did just that. Parents packed the kids into the family Plymouth or Studebaker and hit the highways for two week road trips to visit distant relatives and check out national parks.

On the way, they stayed in motels. Before the Interstate Highway system revolutionized driving, motels lined the major highways leading into every city. Americans perfected the breed in the 1950s, replacing funky tourist cabins with shiny, low-slung motels that competed for business with special features–direct dial telephones! free television!–and exuberant signs.

If you were a first-time visitor to a city, the motel strip was like your first date with the city. You entered Denver on Colfax Avenue, Columbus on Broad Street, Seattle on Aurora Avenue. Portland’s motel rows included Southwest Barbur (Route 99W), Southeast McLoughlin (Route 99E), and Northeast Sandy (US 30). On North Interstate the Crown Motel competed for customers with the Monticello, the Westerner, the Viking, the Palms, and many others–most built on the west side of the street for the convenience of travelers driving south from Puget Sound.

North Interstate was Portland’s front entrance in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s an example of what landscape critic J. B. Jackson has called “the stranger’s path,” the routes and gateways that are the a newcomer’s first intro to a new community. These pathways change with time and technology. In the early twentieth century, foreign visitors to New York arrived by ocean liner with the fast-growing skyline of Manhattan filling their view. In the early twenty-first century, they arrive by air at JFK, struggle through baggage claim, customs, and immigration to be greeted by a cacophony of cabs, shuttles, and limousines.

In Portland’s first generation–say 1858–the stranger’s path was the Willamette River. At the end of a wave-tossed voyage from San Francisco, visitors traveled up the Columbia and then into the Willamette past an inhospitable riverscape of sloughs and marshes choked with willow, alder and vine maple and backed by dense forests on the first solid land. Then, finally, the new town came into view as a straggling settlement scarcely two blocks deep on dry stretch on the west bank. The ship tied up somewhere between the foot of Stark Street and Captain John Couch’s wharf north of Burnside. You grabbed your carpetbag and walked off onto muddy streets lined by two-story frame buildings with “Stoves,” and “Bakery” and “Livery” painted on their fronts and merchants ready to take your business.

Fifty years later–say 1908–strangers arrived by train. They stepped out of their Pullman sleeping car or unwound from hard, uncomfortable coach seats, crossed the waiting room of Union Station (opened in 1896), and walked out into the North End (now we call it “Old Town”). This was the bustling, gritty city, filled with affordable hotels for middle class tourists and business travelers intermixed with saloons and brothels for some of the same temporary Portlanders. The experience here was no different than Seattle, where newcomers who detrained at King Street and Union stations found themselves at the edge of Skid Road, or Chicago, where half a dozen railroad stations led visitors into the whirling activity of the Loop.

Today the stranger’s path is far more tame. Portland visitors to fly into PDX, getting a good but often disorienting view of the Columbia as the plane descends and circles for a landing. They’re off the plane, through the terminal, behind the wheel of a rental car and they see . . . what? Mount Hood, if the clouds part, and a huge IKEA sign in cheerful Swedish blue and yellow no matter what the weather.

Fifty years from now, will the nostalgic Petroleum Age Alliance be trying to save the IKEA sign and its big box neighbors? Will every community and shopping street have a hologram hovering in its airspace displaying its enticements? Will a great, silvery-cream, translucent orb float enticingly over the Pearl? Will holographic herons flap gracefully through the air above Sellwood? Or will the post-petroleum age allow us to travel at all? Maybe we’ll visit virtual Portland through on-line avatars, . an option that would allow us an infinite choice of entry routes . . . down an electronically restored Interstate Avenue, by canoe with a recreated William Clark, by virtual rocket glider direct from Shanghai. In the meanwhile, let’s keep our fingers crossed for atomic age architecture.

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admin, July 7th 2010 | Posted in Portland

Robert Moses in Portland

Photo: Robert MosesRobert Moses, the New York planner, builder, and bureaucratic entrepreneur who reshaped the nation’s largest city spent only a handful of days in Portland, but he helped to set Portland planning agenda for the quarter century from 1945 to 1970.

The wartime boom and postwar planning

Portland was a World War II boom city. After 1 percent growth in 1930s, Portland grew almost 20 percent in the next three years (1940-43). War industries in the four-county employed 140,000 people—that’s the rough equivalent of ten Intels (the metro area’s largest private employer in 2010).

The boom of World War I had been followed by a severe nationwide depression, and everyone worried that the same thing was going to happen when World War II came to its close.

Cities all over the country engaged in postwar planning to reduce the feared impacts.

Here the initiative lay with the Portland Area Postwar Development Committee, an organization of business leaders and public officials. A key figure was Edgar Kaiser, who oversaw 100,000 workers in three huge Kaiser shipyards. He admired the park, parkway, and bridge projects that Robert Moses had directed in New York and decided that Portland needed his advice about infrastructure needs.

Here’s how Commissioner William Bowes remembered it: “Mr. Kaiser called the postwar planning group and others into the Arlington Club and laid out the whole program before them. It was just one, two, three with him! I was amazed at the energy and push of that man.” . . . “Don’t be surprised if Moses comes with staff of about forty people,” Bowes told the planning commission. “What they will do is give us a shot in the arm. He is bringing his port engineer and six attorneys. These are the people who know the larger ones in Washington. They know where the money is available.”

The City of Portland, Multnomah County, Port of Portland, and School District together came up with $100,000.

Moses in Portland

Moses arrived in Portland in September 1943 with a team of highway, bridge, and infrastructure engineers. They set up shop in the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites on Southwest Pine). Moses cold-shouldered Mayor Earl Riley, telling him that he’d send for the mayor if he needed him.

Robert Moses went back to New York after a week and left his team to draft a report on “Portland Improvement,” which he returned to present in November 9.

Portland Improvement

“Portland Improvement” was an infrastructure plan and an early version of a public works stimulus package.

As in New York, Moses did not force anything on an unwilling city. Rather, he gave the leadership of Portland exactly what it wanted—a blueprint for keeping the city economically competitive in the postwar world. It proposed a $60 million construction program to employ as many s 20,000 workers. It included $20 for a freeway loop around downtown, $20 for improvements to sewers, schools, public buildings, and airport, $12 million to upgrade existing parks and streets, and $8 million for highways outside the city. Newspapers and business leaders embraced the plan. So did public works commissioner William Bowes (who viewed himself as a local Moses disciple and equivalent).

We might note that Portland, all by itself, had already pushed an expressway—Harbor Drive—through the downtown. We didn’t necessarily need lessons from Robert Moses, but he legitimized a public works agenda.

Proposals and Results of Portland Improvement

We’ve done most of what Moses and his team proposed:

- An inner freeway loop around the downtown.
- A high bridge across the Willamette north of downtown (the Fremont Bridge opened in 1973) . . . although he hoped to expand the Ross Island Bridge for the southern part of the loop.
- An improved highway across the hills into Washington County (the Vista Ridge tunnels open in 1969-70)
- A river-level highway from Portland to Cascade Locks (i.e., I-84)
- Improvements to existing bridges (e.g., new Morrison Bridge and access ramps in 1958)
- Forest Park (we dedicated it in 1948)
- A civic center incorporating the City Hall and Courthouse (we’ve done this piecemeal with two federal buildings, Multnomah County Justice Center, and Portland Building)
- Sewer improvements
- New schools
- New neighborhood parks and playgrounds
- Beautification of the downtown riverfront with trees and landscaping
- A new transportation center with a new bus station and new train station (he thought Union Station was old and obsolete) . . . the new bus station opened in 1985 and MAX just started running there
- Even the East Burnside/Sandy Boulevard intersection was on his project list, now modified by the Burnside-Couch one-way couplet opened in 2010

The Moses legacy in Portland

I can’t emphasize enough that Robert Moses gave Portland’s leaders what they wanted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The city was a happy accomplice, and it would be hard to imagine how we would function without the Sunset Highway/Vista Ridge Tunnels, the I-405/I-5 loop with its high bridges, without the schools, parks, and playgrounds developed during the postwar generation.

At the same time, Moses and his Portland disciples like Bill Bowes had no patience with dissenters and they did some drastic things in the name of progress (the Morrison Bridge ramps, for example, which required clearance of several blocks of the historic downtown waterfront).

Moses vs. the Jane Jacobs legacy

Jane Jacobs was both a political and intellectual nemesis for Robert Moses from her initial community activism in New York in the 1950s, through her great polemic The Death and Life and Great American Cities in 1961, and in New York planning battles that followed. Portlanders began to emulate Jane Jacobs about a decade after her own forays into grassroots organizing and resistance, and most Portlanders today would say that we live in a Jacobean city, not a Mosaic metropolis.

The equivalent of Jane Jacobs’s battle for Washington Square Park in the mid-1950s was the fight to remove Harbor Drive for what’s now Tom McCall Waterfront Park, begun by Waterfront for People with a picnic in the median strip in August 19, 1969.

The equivalent of the battle against the Lower Manhattan Expressway was the successful fight to block construction of the Mount Hood Freeway through Southeast Portland along the Division Street corridor.

The generation of young activists and politicians who took charge of Portland in the early 1970s had read Jane Jacobs (at least some of them had, as well as reading Herbert Gans and other critics of urban renewal).

The city’s neighborhood association system—a product of the early 1970s—owes something, indirectly, to Jane Jacobs.

When she visited Portland toward the end of her life, she mostly liked what she saw, for central Portland is—if not like lower Manhattan—awfully Canadian for a U.S. city.

The irony is that much of what we like about Portland was facilitated by the Moses vision, especially as applied to parks and to the close-in freeway loop that has kept the central core central. A tip of the hat to Robert Moses may be too much, but he deserves at least a historical nod.

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admin, July 7th 2010 | Posted in Portland

Renewal and Removal: North/Northeast Portland in the 1950s and 1960s

This presentation was part of a “History Pub” night at McMenamin’s Kennedy School, a brewpub and community center in northeast Portland, February 21, 2010. The audience were knowledgeable local activists and residents, so it assumes some familiarity with Portland neighborhoods.

Two forces converged on American cities in the mid-1950s and radically changed their cityscape over the next two decades. Each had its own “logic” and momentum that did not have a place for old neighborhoods.

The first was Interstate Highways. In the 1950s, the United States was in the midst of an 80-year project to adapt cities to automobiles. The Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956 was the keystone of the whole effort, funding 41,000 miles of new limited access highways.

System design was controlled by state highway engineers, whose main interest was moving traffic rapidly between cities. They applied the same standards for the short stretches within cities as for the long extensions across the countryside—wide lanes, sweeping curves, long access ramps, frontage roads, wide rights of way. Because the city segments required lots of land, strong engineering pressure to pick routes through industrial areas or low income areas.

Portland got off relatively easy.

I-84 and Banfield and I-5 south were routed through relatively undeveloped land.

I-5 north was placed on the on the east bank of the Willamette and not in the river itself (which was the initial design)!

The city escaped the Mount Hood freeway, the Prescott freeway, the 50th avenue freeway and several other proposed routes.

Interstate 5 disrupted African American Albina (removing 125 residences and businesses) but interstates were never used as racial barricades as in a city like Miami.

The second factor was Urban Renewal, a program created with Congress amended the Housing Act of 1949 in 1954 and 1959 to favor business development. The assumption was that downtowns were still viable business centers, but that they needed help to compete with brand new suburban shopping center.

Everybody did it: Cities acquired and assembled tracts of land in areas surrounding the CBD, cleared “blighted” or low-density uses, put in new infrastructure, and made the land available for private development (offices, apartments) or public facilities.

Denver did it, San Francisco did it, Los Angeles did it, Philadelphia did it, Tulsa did it, Nashville did it, Tuscon did it, Tacoma did it . . . Only a handful of southwestern cities opted out because they didn’t want federal money.

The end of “South Albina”

These two forces converged in Portland at the east end of the Steel and Broadway bridges at the end of the 1950s. . . . but they weren’t supposed to!

The new freeway was supposed to go where it did (logically splitting the geographical difference between Interstate Avenue and Union Avenue (the future Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.), which were the main north-south arterials that aimed at the Columbia River bridge to Vancouver, Washington. Essentially it was the straight-shot, shortest distance, lowest cost option

The Memorial Coliseum, however, was supposed to go somewhere else.

When the Portland Development Commission was created in 1958, its first goal was the South Portland/Auditorium project. The idea was that the area just south of the central business district on the west side would be ideal for the planned Memorial Coliseum.

The problem was an initiative petition and vote organized by east side business interests. In May 1956, Portlanders voted by a margin of 303 votes out of 128,423 cast to restrict any coliseum to the east side. City Council couldn’t believe it, so they sent the issue back to the voters in November, who rebuffed the downtown establishment and reaffirmed the May vote.

On the east side, there were two alternatives. One was the Expo Center area near the Columbia River. It would have had lots of parking, cheap land, and freeway access, but wouldn’t help downtown real estate. The other was between the east ends of the Steel and Broadway bridges.

So the lower end of Albina, south of Broadway, got hammered by an uncoordinated sequence of events. The result was the disruption of an area that had absorbed a substantial African American population during World War II and after (including after the Vanport flood) and also had businesses serving that community. The Coliseum project razed 476 housing units, 46 percent of them occupied by African Americans.

Further erasure of that part of Albina came from the private sector as developers replaced walkup apartments and single family houses with motels, a high rise for the elderly, and other redevelopment that slowly bridged the blocks between Lloyd Center (1960) and the Coliseum.

Emanuel Hospital and the Eliot Neighborhood

The fate of the Eliot neighborhood involved a set of bad assumptions and historical accidents.

The Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project, launched in the early 1960s, was PDC’s effort to balance its South Auditorium land clearance project (which had disrupted the remnants of the old Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood south of downtown) with a housing rehabilitation project.

Both PDC executive director John Kenward and chair Ira Keller believed sincerely in the effort, but it was top down. Keller and his wife spent Sunday afternoons knocking on doors to recruit participants in the target area which was bounded by Fremont on the south, Vancouver on the east, Skidmore on the north, and Mississippi on the west. The area was chosen because the population ratio was 50/50 black and white, and because the housing was in relatively good condition. Nevertheless, PDC demolished two blocks of housing in the center of the area for what became Unthank Park.

The program was popular, but when more than a thousand residents petitioned to have the program extended south of Fremont, PDC refused. It cited the Planning Commission’s recent Central Albina Study which described the area as a “disordered collection of mixed land uses and deteriorated and dilapidated buildings” suffering an “advanced stage of urban blight.”

Was “blight” a code word for “black”? Yes, but it was also a code word for low-cost land with redevelopment possibilities. South Portland had been defined as blighted even though it was largely white.

In effect, city plans in the 1960s wrote off the Eliot neighborhood as destined for transition from housing to industrial and commercial uses (of which there were already plenty) or ideas like a community college (in effect, an alternative location for what became the Cascade Campus of Portland Community College).

The planners applied the understanding of how cities grew that dated back to University of Chicago sociologists who analyzed that city in the 1920s and came up with a model of concentric rings that expand like ripples in a pond (it’s in every sociology and geography textbook). Central functions, like the Coliseum, pushed the edges of the centrtal business district outward into industrial and warehouse areas. In turn, these displaced economic functions pushed into working class housing areas like Eliot, whose displaced residents would move into newer housing a little further out . . . etc. . . . In effect, it assumed that everyone wanted to be suburban and would get there by tiny steps.

What happened instead was a slow demand for new industrial space and a mounting community resistance, both by African American residents and by white newcomers who liked the houses and the convenience. They organized first through the Model Cities program (after 1967) and then through the Eliot Neighborhood Association.

Waiting in the wings was Emanuel Hospital. Universities and hospitals have a hard time being good neighbors. They each know that they serve the public good – which is quite true – but that knowledge tends to make them insensitive to their neighbors, or even at times arrogant.

This was especially true in the 1950s and 1960s. The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and many other campuses in urban locations plunged into deep conflicts over expansion plans and efforts to maintain the “quality” of their surrounding neighborhoods.

In Portland, our own university was too small to get into big trouble in the same period, although it did clear the some remnants of South Portland, ,but hospitals were not.

The Northwest District Association got its start fighting expansion plans of Good Samaritan Hospital, for example.

In the early 1970s, PDC created an urban renewal district to clear land north of Russell Street for Emanuel Hospital expansion. The land was cleared (188 homes and the Williams/Russell business center) but nothing happened for decades! The reason is an irony: When the project started, PDC and the hospital were counting in federal funds to allow quick redevelopment, but the $$ went away in 1973 So those vacant blocks that are finally being filled are the responsibility of Emanuel, of PDC, and of Richard Nixon.

Convergence, not Conspiracy

So why did Albina get hammered between the late 1950s and early 1970s?

There was not a systematic anti-Albina plan that coordinated thirty years of action.

What there was were a set of independent factors and forces that kept finding that Albina was in the way:

  • It was in the way of I-5.

  • It was in the way for civic leaders who wanted the Coliseum as close of downtown as possible.

  • It was seen as being in the way of needed industrial expansion (I’d suggest that this was a bad prediction because the expansion of industry and warehousing on Swan Island and Mocks Bottom was the alternative for industrializing Eliot).

It had lower income residents with limited political clout. Race was secondary (unlike Miami, Birmingham, or Chicago). The Clinton Street neighborhood in very white southeast Portland almost got the same treatment, saved in part because people saw what had happened in Albina.

The PDC leaders were acting within the assumptions they had available. They thought they were serving the public good, even if they blinded by their own point of view. They were shocked—and outraged—to discover that African American Portlanders saw them as heavy handed racists—which they were. It wasn’t a message that they wanted to hear, for example, from Model Cities activists and planners (they tried to get people at PSU’s Center for Urban Studies fired for their role in Model Cities planning).

We look back and wonder “What could they have been thinking!? How could they think they were innocent!?” Forty years from now, an audience is going to gather in the newest McMenamin’s for a history program that asks exactly the same questions about us.

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admin, July 7th 2010 | Posted in Portland

Portland’s Rivers in Perspective

Photo by --b-- Barge on the Willamette RiverRivers made Portland. They were the avenues of exploration, pathways for settlement, and arteries of commerce that made–and still make–Portland a commercial gateway to the American Northwest.

The “original” riverscape

Both Native Americans and the first European American visitors traveled by river and judged the landscape from the water. At the site of Portland they found low, sandy islands, separated by shallow channels from tangled bottomlands and backed by rising hills or bluffs, such as Ross Island–Oaks Bottom and Swan Island–Mock’s Bottom. Marshes fronted the banks where streams reached the Willamette through Sullivan’s Gulch, Marquam Gulch, and the creeks the flowed through what are now the Brooklyn and Hawthorne/Buckman neighborhoods. Shores were tangles of willow and vine maple..

There were two large sets of seasonally flooded lakes that dominated larger shelves of low-lying riverfront land. One was along the west shore of the Willamette starting with Couch’s Lake and continuing through Guild’s Lake, Kittredges’s Lake, and Doane’s Lake. The second along the south shore of the Columbia between the river and the slough, where Smith and Bybee lakes were multiplied 6 or 8 times.

When the Europeans arrived, thousands of Chinook speaking villagers had concentrated where it was easiest to harvest fish and waterfowl–especially Sauvie Island, the adjacent Multnomah Channel, and the mouth of the Clackamas River.

For Lewis and Clark, the riverscape was low enough and tangled enough that they missed the mouth of the Willamette on their way to the Pacific. On the way back, they got as far as the Quicksand River before Clark doubled back past Image Canoe Island and found the channel to follow upstream to roughly the site of the University of Portland.

Picking the dry land

Initial European-American settlement had to squeeze onto places where firm land sloped down to the rivers (neither the marshes nor high bluffs).

The future heart of Portland, for example, had already been picked out as Oregon’s first highway rest area. Native Americans and fur trappers had cleared a dry, sloping bank on the west side of the Willamette roughly halfway between Fort Vancouver and Oregon City. It was a good spot to cook a meal or repair equipment. Jesse Applegate later remembered that “We landed on the west shore, and we went into camp on the high bank where there was little underbrush . . . No one lived there and the place had no name; there was nothing to show that the place had ever been visited except for a small log hut near the river, and a broken mast of a ship . . . there was no prophet to tell of the beautiful city that was to take the place of the gloomy forest.”

The commercial/industrial landscape

As the California gold rush created a booming San Francisco market for Oregon wheat and lumber in the 1850s, newly settled Portland struggled to establish itself as the head of ocean-going navigation on the Willamette River, beating out the rival claims of Milwaukee and St. Helens. In particular, it benefited from the Ross Island sand bar that restricted access to Milwaukee and Oregon City.

In the rest of the nineteenth century, commerce paralleled the Willamette. Ocean-going vessels connected Portland to the world. Smaller river steamers ranged upstream to Corvallis and Harrisburg. Riverboats even reached up the saffron-colored Yamhill River to Lafayette and McMinnville. Columbia River steamers and railroads made the young city the bustling entrepot for the vast Columbia Basin. Lumber and grain schooners crowded the banks of the Willamette to take on cargos for California markets. Lumber mills, flour mills, furniture factories, and packing plants soon followed.

There were major factory nodes at Fulton (now the Johns Landing/Macadam area), at the Poulson lumber mill in what’s now the Brooklyn neighborhood, in Albina around the developing railyards, and in northwest (again between rail and river).

Then as now, seasonal floods reminded Portlanders of the power of the natural environment. They built the city’s wharves in two levels–one for low water and one for high–and the great flood of 1894 helped to push downtown way uphill to 4th, 5th and 6th streets.

Landscape manipulation

The Northern Pacific Railroad filled Couch’s Lake for rail yards, and now for the housing of the River District.

Guild’s Lake was utilized for the Lewis and Clark Exposition, then filled for industrial use, adapted for WWII housing, and then returned to industrial development. .

Dredging and fill also extended the Willamette River shoreline on the east side and turned wetlands into real estate. Southeast Union Avenue (MLK) originally ran on pilings over mud flats, leaving Grand the first dry business street. That’s why the warehouses of the Central East Side Industrial District date from the early 20th century rather than the 19th c.

The Port of Portland straightened the Willamette River at Swan Island in the 1920s, shifting the channel from the east side of the island to the west and attaching the island itself to the east bank.

In turn, Rivergate was raised into dry land with the filling of Ramsey Lake..

The shipbuilding eras

World War I brought a large shipbuilding industry, 12,000 workers building steel-hulled ships and 17,000 building wooden-hulled cargo carriers. The Grant-Smith-Porter yard at the foot of Baltimore Street in St. Johns, with 6000 workers, was the largest of nearly a score of shipyards that specialized in wooden vessels, buying their material from booming Portland sawmills and drawing workers from the large pool of men with woodworking skills

In World War II, Tycoon Henry Kaiser, fresh from helping to build Boulder and Grand Coulee dams, opened the huge shipyards at St. Johns, Swan Island, and Vancouver. At the peak in 1943-44, metropolitan Portland counted 140,000 defense workers who built more than 1000 ocean going combat craft and Liberty ships.

The renewal of Portland as an international port since the 1970s has continued land use trends first identified in the 1910s. Modern ports are great consumers of land for container yards and automobile processing, while larger and larger ships require deeper channels. As a result, the marine terminals and docks of river ports have tended to move steadily downstream. We can see this with London, Antwerp, and Hamburg . . . and also with Portland.

The grain elevators at the east ends of the Steel and Broadway bridges are the last remnants of the old “downtown” harbor (there’s also a plaque on the East Bank Esplanade marking the site of Municipal Terminal Two that stretched between Washington and Oak). Terminal One has given way to redevelopment, so the action is now around Terminal 4 and the Rivergate complex at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers with Terminal 5 and Terminal 6.

The shipyards are largely gone, but the river remains our economic focus. Portland is still the regional transportation hub and trading post for Oregon and much of Idaho and Washington. Downtown Portland is part of a vast riverside employment corridor. Within one mile of the Willamette River in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties are rough 200,000 jobs.

There are two key questions for the next decade. First, how will the deepening of the Columbia River channel to 43 feet affect Portland and other Columbia ports (Longview, Kalama, and Vancouver, Washington) as the global economy recovers? Second, will the recovery of Port of Portland commerce be enough to trigger terminal expansion on the west end of Hayden Island, opposite Terminal 6?

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admin, July 7th 2010 | Posted in Portland
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