Soon to be memories....

 

135 NW Park Ave. 

The handwriting is on the wall – er, in the windows – for two old brick buildings at 105 and 135 NW Park Ave. on the western edge of the North Park Blocks.  The bureaucratic wording on the public notices posted in the windows can be translated thusly:  “Adios.”

 It doesn’t take an expert to look at gentrification of nearby blocks to see what’s coming next even though there has been no public disclosure yet:  More stories, more housing, and ground-floor retail on a full block frontage along Park between Couch and Davis Streets.

 Separate owners of 105 N.W. Park, erected in 1921, and the taller 135 N.W. Park, built in 1911, have asked the city to remove those buildings from the city’s historic resource inventory.  The inventory, made by the city in 1984 and never since updated, suggested that these two buildings would be eligible for some category of landmark status that would encourage preservation.  No such designations were ever achieved.

 

                                                                    105 NW Park Ave

Removal from the inventory at the owners’ requests are essentially automatic.  After 120 days of public notice, a decision is made without any public comment by the director of the city’s Bureau of Development Services.   The 120 days expire in mid-October. 

 Neither building amounts to great historic architecture.  However, both represent solid, carefully-constructed commercial buildings of the early 20th Century.  Architects might call them “fabric” buildings --  structures that reflected the early North Park Blocks neighborhood with its mixed commercial and light industrial uses. 

The taller building was designed by the firm of Bennes and Herzog in what the historical inventory describes as "brick utiltarian" style.  John Virginius Bennes was a prolific architect best remembered today for several buildings he designed at Oregon State University.  OSU has been doing an excellent job restoring several of them, which are included in a National Historic District on campus.  Bennes'  firm also did the ornate Hollywood Theater in Northeast Portland and some Art-Deco themed apartment buildings.  

No demolition applications for these two buildings have been submitted yet.  But the strategy is obvious.  All tenants have departed. Had the buildings remained on the historic inventory, a demolition application would have required a 120-day delay to consider renovation, relocation or salvage of materials.  No such consideration is needed once the historic inventory status is removed.  Voila!

 It is highly probable that removal from the historic inventory is a condition of sale of these two properties to a third party with development in mind.  Identity of the prospective new owner is not yet known, but likely will be after the 120 days expire. 

 What one could call gentrification of the North Park Blocks is in some ways a “tale of two cities” in Portland.  All the blocks ostensibly were donated to the city by early-day pioneers as a single, continuous stretch.  However, disputes over land deeds allowed several intervening blocks in downtown to be sold for buildings, rather than used as parks, thus creating the separate South Park Blocks and North Park Blocks. 

 The South Park Blocks early on attracted a few elegant mansions and several churches as immediate neighbors, followed later by cultural institutions and what became Portland State University.  Some high-rise apartments dating from the 1920s and later also chose the South Park Blocks as “home.”

 The development pattern was much different in the North Park Blocks.  The area was populated with small, working-class residences toward the end of the 19th Century, followed by commercial and light industrial buildings in the 20th Century.  For decades, the park found itself sandwiched between rail yards to the west and the “north end” drug and vice realm north of Burnside Street into the 1950s. 

New buildings to the south

New Hampton Inn at NW Everett 

But now the rail yards have been transformed into the Pearl.  You find an eight-story new hotel at Everett Streetthat regrettably puts its back door facing the park.  The old "north end" isn't the vice haven it once was.  Walking the North Park Blocks today and seeing new buildings erected in the designated central commercial zone makes it clear that the 21st Century will be different in the North Park Blocks. 

 Will the overall result be better?  That will an interesting conversation.  Not in dispute: It will be different.