The Portland of Robert Moses

Robert Moses's name is writ large on New York in freeways, parks, parkways, dams and miles of squalid landscapes of failed urban renewal.
On a national scope, his methods and teachings also inspired the generation of highway planners that built the Interstate Highway System.

“The greatest secret was how to remove people from the expressways’ paths- and Robert Moses taught them his method of dealing with people. This method became one of the trademarks of building of America’s urban highways, a Moses trademark impressed on all urban America.”
From "The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro.

“The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert Caro tells the story of Robert Moses, of his transformation from earnest idealist to hardened pragmatist, of his accumulation of power acquired entirely without democratic process and of the impact of that power on New York City and the rest of the country.

In 1943 Robert Moses came to Portland.

As the end of World War II came into view, the political and business leadership of Portland (one and the same really) were concerned about the impact of the wars end on Portland’s economy. Torn between hopes of sustained economic growth and fears of a hard landing as wartime industrial activity shut down, they hired Robert Moses and his group of “Moses Men” as consultants to plan a postwar Portland.

For two months, starting in September 1943, the “Moses Men” worked out of their headquarters in the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites Downtown Portland).

Portland City Commissioner William Bowes, an admirer of Robert Moses, strikes a Moses-esque pose.

The Prototype.

The report, titled “Portland Improvement” covered many aspects of civic enhancement. New parks, school and water system improvements, a civic center and new railroad station were proposed in the reports 85 pages, as well as an arterial freeway system that incoporated prior plans with a freeway loop surrounding downtown.

A few years ago, I acquired a copy of Portland Improvement.

What follows is a view of the Portland of tomorrow, circa 1943.

(Click on photos to expand). The plan emphasized freeway development. Transit was not addressed, it wasn’t even mentioned. One of the striking features of the map of proposed freeways is how familiar it looks, containing early versions of the I-5 routing through downtown ( further east) I-405 and I-205 (closer in).

The plan called for a version of the Fremont Bridge with an express way that would intersect with Interstate Avenue and continue to a north - south expressway to be built over Vancouver and Williams Avenue. The expressway would have split the Overlook Addition in half, displacing hundreds of people, while avoiding a nearby little populated route up the Going Street gulch.

The corner of North Shaver and North Overlook, where the Moses version of the Fremont Bridge’s east approaches would have been located. Perhaps the plan would have amended to avoid the neighborhood, but a reading of the Power Broker leaves no doubt the residential homes would have been of small importance to Robert Moses.

“The canvas on which Moses had drawn the Gowanus (parkway) creation was a neighborhood known as Sunset Park. It residents had pleaded with Moses to build the parkway not along Third Avenue, but along Second, one block to the west…”
From “The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro.

The 1943 version of the Fremont Bridge (seen in this mock-up photograph from the report) was a suspension bridge, a style used by Moses for his Throgs Neck and Verrazano-Narrows bridges. Note that Harbor Drive (torn down to make Tom McCall Waterfront Park) is expanded north of the Steel Bridge.

Harbor Drive was an important part of the highway plan. The proposed ramp system to the Steel Bridge is shown here. Union Station is nowhere to be seen.

The eventual configuration of Harbor drive at the Steel Bridge was similar to the Moses plan.

“Portland Improvement” called for a parkway on Harbor Drive and Front Avenue. In hindsight, it combines the past and present uses of the waterfront. Like many of Robert Moses later landscapes, the “park strips” and “promenade” surrounded by multiple lanes of traffic were not particularly human friendly.

Robert Moses found Union Station “unsatisfactory” and recommended it be replaced by a new station with an “attractive approach” of 10 blocks of parks, built over what was then called the North End (Old Town, Chinatown).

“The expense involved in resituating the station would be prohibitive as it would necessitate an enormous amount of trackage relocation. It is therefore not recommended”
From “Portland Improvement.”

Robert Moses would have approved of much in this picture, but even he would not have placed the east side freeway on the riverbank.

The east bank of the Willamette in “Portland Improvement.” Note the placement of the freeway, away from the river between SE Seventh and Eighth.

The plan called for a “Civic Center” of twenty square blocks. Funding for the idea was voted down in the election of 1946.

The Civic Center, rejected in 1946. Note the “Canyon Blvd Expressway” on a “relocated Hawthorne Bridge” absent in the original plan.
From “Portland, Politics Planning, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City by Carl Abbot.

For all of Robert Moses’ reputation as a builder of parks, “Portland Improvement” offered little in new parks (shown in light green). Nothing along the lines the future Forest Park appears in the plan, although a “parkway” along the ridge of the West Hills, essentially leading to nowhere (see first map in series) was proposed.

Much of “Portland Improvement” ran afoul for funding in a series of postwar elections. Still, the plan existed as a template for much of Portland’s future development into the 1960s, especially the highway portion which was built by the state and federal governments. Even much of the Civic Center was eventually built, one building at a time.

Robert Moses mark on Portland is also found with the infamous South Auditorium urban renewal project which slicked off 83.5 acres of downtown, essentially the old South Portland, for high rise apartments and the inner freeway ring. The South Auditorium project utilized urban renewal methods, theories and justifications developed and refined by Robert Moses to a much larger scale in New York City in the 1950s.

The Portland of tomorrow, circa 1962. The South Auditorium project is prominent as is the future #405, which jogs west to a version of Fremont Bridge that connects with Going in North Portland, thus sparing the Overlook Addition (the eventual Fremont Bridge would be much higher and intersect with I-5 to the south. Note the smaller, straighter version of the Marquam Bridge, from which branches out the unbuilt Mount Hood Freeway aimed at South East Portland.

The consequences of Robert Moses’s influence is still felt in Portland.

His belief in freeways and disdain for transit influenced a generation of Portland leadership.
Commissioner William Bowes decision to allow the removal of the Portland Traction interurban lines downtown loop to ease the construction of the new Morrison Bridge approach ramps in 1956 (and the removal of the tracks on the Hawthorne Bridge) was very much in line with Moses’s thinking. Thus a rail rapid transit system, discussed as early 1966, would have to start from scratch, decades and millions of dollars later.
The old South Portland, lost in the South Auditorium urban renewal project, another Moses influenced idea, can never be recovered.
Portland's and the nations reliance on freeways will be around for long time to come.

“To build his highways, Moses through out of their homes 250,000 persons- more people that lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital part of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city- destroying dimensions. By making sure the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that the flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be- perhaps forever –an area in which transportation –getting from one place to another- would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.”

From "The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert A. Caro.

Or, closer to home…

“Even if the state can find the extra billion dollars a year it says it needs just to maintain current roads and keep up with growth, drivers who used to ride the bus or take surface streets would quickly consume new freeway space."
The Oregonian, February 11, 2007 “Car-chocked highways certain to get worse” by James Mayer.

It's Robert Moses’s world, we just live in it.

The Bridge Diner

“They were talking about old days and old ways and all the changes that have come on London in the last weary years; a little party of three of them, gathered for a rare meeting in Perrott’s rooms.
One man, the youngest of the three, a lad of fifty-five or so, had began to say:
“I know every inch of that neighborhood, and I tell you there is no such place.”

From “N”, by Arthur Machen (1863-1947), collected in “Machen’s Tales of Horror and the Supernatural”.

My favorite Arthur Machen story, the enigmatically named “N” describes an otherworldly portion of London, visible only from the upper floor of a single building. It touches on what today would be called a multi-dimensional universe. Like many Machen stories the narrative is convoluted, it never treads a straight path when a roundabout route is available. Also typical to Machen is his unerring ability to set a mood that draws upon the antiquarian and cosmic dread.
H.P. Lovecraft would draw more than a little influence from his stories.

What I like most about “N” is the notion of a hidden city, just outside common view. I have pictured such a place, perhaps on Vine Street downtown, a gateway to another Portland.

Yesterday afternoon, after a week in sun drenched Arizona, I was jogging down Front in a downpour, reflecting on how Phoenix had its good points, even with its mile upon Walgreen & Safeway punctuated miles of sprawl.
Soaked to the skin, I ran under the overhang of McCormick Piers parking structure, where I took small advantage against the rain. Then, under the Broadway Bridge I came across the Bridge Diner.
With an incongruity that Arthur Machen would appreciate, even though I had passed by there hundreds of times, I had never seen it before.

The Bridge Diner, unchanged after years of feeding workers from the Albers Mill and the Ainsworth docks, as well as porters and conductors off duty from nearby Union Station, with its menu of steaks, chops, seafood and breakfast. It has survived more than a few Willamette River floods. Despite inroads from the likes of Dennys and McDonalds, an American Express sticker on the door and the price of Honey Roasted Chicken ($6.95) hints that it had been open at least into the early 1990s.

Except it never was.

Like Dorothy’s house atop the Wicked Witch of the East, the Bridge Diner has appeared, apparently out of nowhere.

I returned there today with a camera. The fact that it could be photographed does not bode well for a Machenian explanation which leads me to a more cinematic theory.

Still, with so much of Portland lost without regards to history, it is refreshing to see something somewhat historic added without regard for the present.

Next week, a larger post…

Lost and Found

A survey of Portland’s venerable and storied parking lots could start here, at the corner of First and Stark Streets.

The lot covers nearly two thirds of Block #38 (Lots #1 through #6 specifically). In land use parlance it is a “converted commercial segment.” The lot has approximately 100 spaces. It is operated by City Center Parking.
Besides parking revenue, its low profile allows the side and rear walls of the Governor Building (1906) to be used as five story high billboards.

It dates, like many of its kind, from the early 1950s.

As often is the case, there was once something else there.

From 1868 to 1954 the north east corner of Block #38 (Lot #1) was the location of the Ladd & Tilton Bank building.

“Few buildings more fully captured the essence of the cast-iron era in Portland than the richly decorated Ladd & Tilton Bank, built in 1868.”

“The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland” by William John Hawkins III.

The building was designed by John Nestor, inspired by the Libreria Veccchia (1536) in Venice.

The Libreria Vecchia, Venice.

It was elaborate, even in an elaborate age.

Crowning the front entrance was a parapet featuring Neptune and Mercury guarding two urns. Originally the buildings cast iron facade, built by Portland’s Willamette Iron Works, was painted white to approximate marble. According to William John Hawkins III excellent and exhaustively researched book, the finials above the roofline served as chimney caps for fire place flues leading up from the building.

The banks founder, William Sargent Ladd arrived in Portland from New England in 1851 with only a small consignment of liquor to sell. He set up business on Front Street, soon adding produce, tobacco, farm tools and other wares. In 1853 he built the first brick building in Portland at #105 Front Street, on the corner of Front and Stark, opposite the Stark Street ferry landing.

W.S, Ladd was elected Mayor of Portland in 1854. By that time he was already established as a local source of credit, loaning money at a 1% interest rate (standard for the era). If not repaid when due, he would accept payment in goods and property. He was not averse to foreclosure. From this business evolved the Ladd and Tilton Bank, established in 1859 with fellow New Englander Charles E. Tilton, of San Francisco.

The original Ladd & Tilton bank operated out of the second floor (added in 1857) of W.S. Ladd’s store on the corner of Front and Stark streets. A third story would be later added in the 1860’s. The Ladd and Tilton Bank soon outgrew the space and moved in 1864 to a temporary location before the the Ladd & Tilton Bank Building was completed in 1869. The original W.S. Ladd building was torn down in 1940.
Picture from “60 Milestones of Progress, 1859 to 1919” by the Ladd and Tilton Bank.

Portland in the early 1880s. Front Street, with warehouses backed up to the river, is on the left. Mercantile First Street is to the right. The Ladd and Tilton Bank can be seen on the corner of Stark and First, one block up from the right hand corner of the picture. (click on pictures to enlarge)

W.S. Ladd’s later career can be read as a chronicle of Portland’s development in the later nineteenth century. As an owner, an investor or a benefactor, he was deeply involved in interests as varied as Oregon Steam Navigation Company and its successor the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company, the Oregon Telegraph Company, the Oregon Iron & Steel Company at Oswego, the Portland Flouring Mills, the Hotel Portland, the Portland and Willamette Valley Railroad, the Portland Art Museum and the Portland Library Association (which was allowed to occupy, rent free, the second story of the Ladd & Tilton Bank from 1873 to 1893) and many others. He served on the Water Committee that decided to bring Bull Run water to Portland. He also owned three large farms on the east side of town, which were later developed as Laurelhurst, Eastmoreland and, of course, Ladd’s Addition.

When William Sargent. Ladd died in 1893 his estate was worth in excess of ten million dollars.

The Ladd and Tilton Bank at First and Stark. Note the street railway track, Portland’s first horse car line built in 1872. Max now runs on the same right of way.
From “The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland” by William John Hawkins III.

The bank occupied the location at First and Stark until 1911 when it moved to larger quarters in the Spaulding Building (still existent) at Third and Washington.

The Ladd & Tilton Bank was acquired by U.S. National Bank in 1925 after being crippled by series of bad loans and investments.

The banks former home on First and Stark went through a series of devolving uses until being demolished to create a parking lot in 1954. Contractor / preservationist Eric Ladd (no relation to W.S. Ladd) was able to save the buildings cast iron ornamentation, which was warehoused.

Thus one of Portland’s more extravagant buildings was consigned to memories, books and imagination.

But not quite.

Some lost treasures are less lost than others.

In 1869, at the same time the Ladd and Tilton Building was being built in Portland, W.S. Ladd and Asahel Bush established a new bank in Salem; Ladd and Bush Bankers.

The building, on the corner of State and Commercial Streets, used identical cast iron façade pieces as the Ladd and Tilton bank in Portland, struck from the same molds at Willamette Iron Works. It was smaller than the Portland bank and lacked the elaborate front parapet and roof finials.

Over the years the bank was enlarged and altered at least two times. In the picture above, circa 1939, there are eight bays on Commercial Street (two more than in 1869) and seven on State Street (5 more than in 1869) plus a non-matching addition at the south end of the building.

In 1940, after 71 years of successful banking, Ladd and Bush was merged into the Salem Branch of the United States National Bank of Portland.

In the mid nineteen sixties, US Bank decided to expand the Salem Oregon branch. In a stunning deviation from the near standard practice of the time, US Bank chose to maintain the historic character of the Ladd and Bush bank. In 1967 the building was “radically remodeled,” according to the “Commercial Street Historic District Narrative” (this may be a euphemism) with the interior gutted and new concrete walls constructed. The original cast iron façade was then re-applied. In the expansion, the bays on Commercial Street were increased from eight to eighteen and on State Street from seven to ten.

The expansion was made possible by augmenting the original cast iron facade of the Salem bank with the identical ironwork from the Ladd and Tilton Building in Portland, saved by Eric Ladd, thirteen years prior.

What can be seen today on Commercial and State is a strong echo of what once stood at First and Stark. It is a hybrid of two closely related buildings that would not likely exist today without each other. The vision of US Bank and the foresight of Eric Ladd allowed Portland’s loss to be Salem’s gain.

The Ladd banks had a tendency to publish books before disappearing. “Sixty Milestones of Progress” was published in 1919, six years before Ladd and Tilton was acquired by U.S. National Bank. “70 Years” was published in 1939, a year before Ladd and Bush was merged into U.S. National Bank.

Mysteries:

In “The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland” William John Hawkins III mentions that a near twin to the Ladd & Tilton Building was also built in 1868, the Ironclad Bank of Brooklyn New York. Does this building still exist?

Eric Ladd’s salvaged cast iron pieces adorn the Ladd & Bush building in Salem. But what happened to the parapet with Mercury and Neptune?

A copy of “The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland” is good to have around.

Attention Portland Historians!

David Schargel of Portland Walking Tours has announced that there are now openings for tour guides. For details see:

http://www.portlandwalkingtours.com/index.htm