The Burnside Blog
Recycling Ross Island
As Mike mentioned below in “This Week in Design,” the ad hoc, self-appointed Ross Island Vision Team gathered on Wednesday in the Portland Building to share their evolving vision for the “reclamation” of Ross Island with a small crowd of planners, city officials, and concerned Portlanders.
For those of you in the dark on Ross Island’s mired history, you can read up here.
One enjoyable historical nugget revealed at the presentation was that half of Portland’s downtown core (buildings, sidewalks, bridges, etc.) was built from sand and gravel extracted from Ross Island. What is left is really a shell of an island—what the Vision Team now affectionately calls a four-island archipelago. But that shell is still 390 acres of land—an urban habitat teeming with river otter, beaver, osprey, bald eagles, and migrating salmon.
Ross Island’s future, and any imagining of it, is still entirely hypothetical. Media and gravel tycoon Robert Pamplin, Jr. (owner of Ross Island Sand & Gravel) donated 45 acres this past September, but only after a series of painfully drawn-out negotiations with city officials. And at this point, nobody has any idea when Pamplin will relinquish the remaining 390 acres.
So the purpose of this meeting, as Urban Greenspaces director Mike Houck put it, was “to get the conversation going, and give an idea of the thinking process” about Ross Island’s future. One real challenge, it seems, is figuring out ways for people to experience Ross Island without loving it to death. Top priority is to preserve and restore the island’s wildlife habitat and ecology, but another factor is acknowledging the significant cultural and industrial history of Ross Island as it is reclaimed. Public art on the island, or “eco-revelatory design,” was brought up as a way to celebrate the environment while also acting as a sort of buffer zone between people and animals. Combining this idea with adaptive reuse of materials from the island’s “boneyard” of mining relics could make for some interesting (or shocking) sights.
We’re in the imagining phase—gathering ideas and creating a vision so that when the ball starts rolling, we’re not caught on our heels. Should Ross Island be entirely off limits to humans? If not, will we care about it enough to protect it? And most importantly, how the heck do we speed up the wheels of this “reclamation process”? Let’s dig in get this conversation going. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the PDF version of a handy pamphlet assembled by the Vision Team called “Envisioning Ross Island” to show up here.
