The Burnside Blog
Should Memorial Coliseum Be Destroyed?
Fans called it the Glass Palace, and for a short time in the mid-1990s, it was the smallest arena in the NBA. For locals, it was a venue for which it was nearly impossible to obtain tickets to Trailblazer games. For visiting players in basketball’s most recent golden age, guys named Larry Bird, Julius Irving, Magic Johnson and Moses Malone found an unfriendly environment among 12,888 of the loudest, fiercest fans in professional sports. It was the victory site of Portland’s first and only NBA championship in 1977, and it was the first place I and thousands of native Oregon kids attended a big league sporting event.
Since the more spacious Rose Garden Arena was completed and became home to the Blazers in 1995, the Memorial Coliseum hasn’t lived up to its potential. City bureaus have proposed a variety of redevelopment schemes, most notably a clumsy and ill-fated solution called the Memorial Athletic and Recreation Complex. So far, nothing has gelled. Now, the Memorial Coliseum hosts events like political rallies, concerts and a few home games of Portland’s junior-league hockey team, the Portland Winterhawks.
Meantime, Portland the city has gone about reinvesting in its urban neighborhoods. As the creeping northward expansion of the Pearl District has surpassed Lovejoy Street on the Willamette’s western shore, developers and a few city leaders are quietly casting a keen eye on the Eastside landing of the Broadway Bridge, the area surrounding Memorial Coliseum. If Portland’s less successful attempts in urban redevelopment will guide the city’s future progress, one important detail holds true: you need to build a community before you build amenities. This begs the question: Should the Glass Palace be saved, or razed for the sake of neighborhood building?
Having two arenas that collectively choke nearly 10 solid acres of prime waterfront land is detrimental to the larger livability of Portland. With the Glass Palace itself occupying what could be five gridded city blocks, there’s no room to build a neighborhood. And as long as no one lives in Rose Quarter, the area will be absent of the restaurants, cafes, retail and street energy that collectively create livable neighborhoods.
On the upside, the building itself is one of the finest examples of minimalist modern architecture in the city. Designed by the same firm (That’d be Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) responsible for the Sears Tower, Burj Dubai, and New York’s Freedom Tower, the Memorial Coliseum is worth saving. At the same time, the Arena chokes pedestrian traffic, occupying a huge section of land that comprises Portland’s largest urban dead zone. If it’s not game night, the Rose Quarter is about as happening as Downtown Deluth on a Tuesday.
Last week, the Trailblazer management announced it had chosen AEG Facilities to manage the Rose Quarter. As reported by the Oregonian’s Brent Hunsberger, the choice likely signals a push to sell naming rights to the Rose Quarter and spur development in the district. If AEG’s retail theme park LA Live is going to be used as inspiration, as has been suggestion, Portland be scared.
Still, the city, which owns the coliseum, should at least consider razing it in favor a mixed-use neighborhood that would enliven the Rose Quarter and better link close-in Northeast Portland to the Pearl District and Old Town, both five minute walks across the Steel and Broadway bridges, respectively. The economic life of sports facilities is measured in years whereas well-planned neighborhoods endure centuries.
If the Memorial Coliseum is going to stay, what should it be, and how should it be incorporated into surrounding development and the waterfront? I haven’t heard an acceptable scenario yet.
By Toni Magic on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 01:39PM PDT
Instead of tearing down the Coliseum why not tear down the massive Blanchard PPS building north of Broadway. Redeveloping this site would connect the whole Rose Garden area with the neighborhood starting to develop around the Widmer Brewery and Albina Yellow Line station. If the eastside street car extension gets built up Broadway the neighborhood would have excellent transit connections and I think all you would have to do to enliven the area immediately around the stadiums would be to improve pedestrian circulation. Even if the MC were to be torn down you would still have the major hurdle of reconfiguring the convoluted street layout which does as much to kill the street life as the massive buildings.
By billb on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 03:23PM PDT
The Coliseum is the finest work of Modern Design we have. I can think of lots of vacant and underused land around there which can hold needed projects [Paul Allen’s waterfront below it , and the PPS bldg as mentioned above] We must celebrate our Great Buildings , we don’t have many!
By stuart on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 04:05PM PDT
I agree. We shouldn’t even think about razing it. I actually liked the MARC idea. Why was that somehow “clumsy?”
By on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 04:13PM PDT
I guess I’m in the minority in thinking that tearing the MC down would not be a loss, but a huge gain. It’s a huge, hulking eyesore.It’s totally dated and, IMHO, just ugly. There is nothing interesting or noteworthy about the building visually…again, just my opinion, and I seem to be in the minority. For a the first year I lived in PDX I just thought it was a warehouse…the building just has no personality and really ads nothing to the landscape.
Flame away,
Scott
By Mike Thelin on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 04:15PM PDT
Thanks Scott. I know you’re not alone in your sentiments.
By gadds on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 11:05AM PDT
The MC, when in use, is stunning. All large, underutilized buildings seem like warehouses…or…seemingly hold something other than people. MC just needs some love. This one will take vision.
By Mudd on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 05:31PM PDT
The biggest question is what to do with it. I think it’s a great example of modern brutal architecture, but if it doesn’t have a productive use, it shouldn’t be saved. Buildings should not be empty most of the time. They should provide productive spaces that improve the community. Let’s really try to get together and figure out what to do INSIDE this building. It’s just not working today people. Not working at all. It’s a massive physical barrier, redundant space to the Rose Garden and financial drain on the City. If we can’t come up with a real use for it, I say take some really good photos and say goodbye.
By Eves on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 01:24PM PDT
It’s kinda ironic that we are looking to tear down the MC to create a close -in neighborhood community when in the Early 50’s the City razed a close in neighborhood to build the arena.
I am with Toni on the fact that there are several other factors and infrastructure cutting off this waterfront property from the rest of the City. Razing the MC will free up real estate for new development, but not solve the pedestrian connectivity and messy intersections issues plaguing the area.
In my opinion, the MC is a beautiful building, a very nice example of modernism in America and worth the effort to keep. With that said, I have never been a sentimentalist and if there cannot be a worthy adaptive reuse proposal, then we should take a picture and move on. Be wary though. Vision is often trumped by mediocrity in this City and we’ll end up with an Eastside Pearl District if that much property comes online.
By Dweet on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 08:33AM PDT
Eves: I love your pragmatic approach. It’s a refreshing change in Portland, which I find to be an overly sentimental place regarding its built environment.
Who owns the land along the waterfront, and what are the plans? I’m no architect, but I’ve always envisioned the patio surrounding the coliseum extending over Interstate Avenue and somehow connecting to a new mixed-used development along the river, which in turn connect to the East Side Esplanade. What the writer of this blog proposes is a neighborhood, and it seems conceivable that one could be built right along the water next to that giant grain apparatus.
We always talking about moving freeways and burying roads here. I proposed capping them and building around them, sort of like the BQE in Brooklyn or even the section of road that ducks through the Kennedy Center building in DC.
Our solutions aren’t very creative because our leaders aren’t very creative.
By Randy Gragg on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 04:54PM PDT
For whomever is still reading this string, you might enjoy something I wrote a few years ago during the first attempt to take the building down:
A CURTAIN CALL FOR MEMORIAL COLISEUM Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) – February 18, 2001 Author: RANDY GRAGG – The Oregonian
Summary: An argument for bringing a great actor back
Nobody knows for sure when the curtains last dropped inside Memorial Coliseum . But architect David Pugh remembers one of the first times.
Thousands of his peers had just taken their seats in the Coliseum’s circular seating bowl for a morning convocation of an American Institute of Architects’ national conference. A hush suddenly fell across the crowd as the cavernous space went pitch black. A series of black curtains tightly surrounding the bowl slowly and dramatically lowered, showering the interior with the morning sun and views across the river to the city.
The entire crowd, Pugh recalled, erupted in applause.
Not many buildings receive spontaneous ovations for their performances, but in its heyday, Memorial Coliseum could. Completed in 1960 and designed by what was then America’s leading architecture firm, Skidmore Owings Merrill, it was arguably the most advanced multipurpose indoor arena in the country.
But with its magical curtains shut for years and the center as a whole poorly maintained and marketed by its current operator, the Portland Trail Blazers, the coliseum may never enjoy another curtain call.
In the coming weeks, consultants hired by the city will unveil a series of options for the entire Rose Quarter—some with the Colise um, some without. Recently released figures show that the coliseum is losing money, and such adjectives as “obsolete” have begun to stick to it, suggesting its future.
Whether enough events exist to support an arena the size of Memorial Coliseum and sited right next door to the Rose Garden, we don’t know. Whether it can be incorporated in a design that makes sense of the Rose Quarter mess is clearly problematic.
But before we passively stand by or even cheer on the coliseum’s demolition, we need to consider what we’re about to lose. Out with old, in with new Sold to the public in a 1954 bond measure as a memorial to Oregon veterans, the coliseum - and many of the buildings of its era - represented the highest goals and lowest means of modernist-movement architecture. As the city swept away an important African American commercial district, the coliseum represented a bold step onto a national stage.
Skidmore Owings Merrill had completed other projects in the city after buying out Pietro Belluschi’s firm in Portland in 1951. But the coliseum marked the beginning of what would be SOM’s breathtaking makeover of Portland, from the apartment towers of the South Auditorium District to the firm’s final and tallest landmark, the U.S. Bancorp Tower.
But in many ways the coliseum remains the firm’s most innovative building, anticipating today’s generation of buildings that mechanically morph for different uses and times of day. Employing its usual range of partners and designers, as Pugh, the local partner in charge, recalled, SOM designed the center as “a teacup in a glass box.” Made of concrete but looking a bit like hand-thrown porcelain, the seating bowl is surrounded by a perfectly square geometric form. With a clarity arch-modernist Mies van der Rohe would have blessed, two 360-foot steel trusses cantilever over four giant pillars to suspend an elegantly simple glass curtain wall made of glass and laminated-wood mullions.
Typical of most every civic building Portland has ever built, the budget was well shy of the architects’ ambitions. Originally designed to be entirely glass, the box was topped by a 35-foot-high, white band of fascia (made of a plastic-coated plywood newly developed for freeway signs). But that saved enough money to keep, among other things, the operable curtains.
“We wanted it to be open and friendly and, with those views, to be able to see the city,” Pugh said. “There was nothing like it that had ever been done. And there hasn’t been anything like it since.”
The coliseum had unprecedented versatility. It was easily adapted for anywhere from 9,000 to 13,500 seats, for anything from hockey and ice shows to basketball and concerts. It was equipped with exhibit halls below it with room for 350 booths. At the time, project architect Andre Lamoreux described it as “a multipurpose outdoor arena that happens to have a roof.”
Though another project designer, Bill Rouzie, can’t recall the year he last saw the seating bowl’s curtains lowered, he still remembers the day: a Saturday when the ice rink was open for free skating.
“You could see the city and all these people on the ice,” he reminisced. “In the coliseum, you’re never lost in a maze like most of these facilities. With a push of a button, you could open it to the outside world.” Tepid rescuers At age 41, the building hasn’t reached the 50-year mark typical for eligibility on the National Historic Register, and it has no local landmark status. Although most preservationists agree it easily would be eligible for both national and local historic listings, few are rushing to its rescue thus far.
“It’s a category 2 or 3 building, not a 4,” says Alfred Staehli of the Oregon Historic Preservation League, referring to the grading system for historic properties. Unlike other buildings of its era, Staehli says the coliseum “hasn’t aged well.”
Though the only time he’s been in the coliseum was for last fall’s Ralph Nader for President rally, Paul Falsetto, a younger preservationist who specializes in modernist-era architecture, considers its potential demolition “quite shocking.”
“It’s an important example of an era of sports arenas going by the by,” he says, citing recent razings of Seattle’s Kingdome and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. “It’s an excellent example of the international style. Calling it ‘not financially viable’ is always the first step to getting rid of it.”
It’s an issue coming to the fore nationally.
“A lot of very significant architecture may disappear because nobody’s paying attention to it,” Theodore H.M. Prudon, president of the United States chapter of Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement, recently told the New York Times. Prudon and others have successfully lobbied to get 12 midcentury buildings - among them such key modernist masterpieces as the Lever House, Seagram Building and Guggenheim and Whitney museums - on New York’s list of nearly 20,000 protected landmarks in the city.
In all of Oregon, only one modernist-era building is on the National Register: Pietro Belluschi’s 1948 Equitable (now Commonwealth) Building. Premeditated demolition The razing of Memorial Coliseum , of course, really began in 1991, when Blazers’ owner Paul Allen used a front company to surreptitiously buy the final 1.4 acres next door needed to begin the hardball negotiations with the city to build the Rose Garden. With the Blazers’ having battled to the NBA’s 1990 finals, “Blazermania” infected Portland’s leaders. The fast-track “good” deal of Allen’s agreement to pay for building a new arena and locate it on light rail blinded the Portland City Council to the long-term civic damage done by the Rose Garden’s design.
The problems caused by dropping a suburban-style center into an urban area have been well-documented by critics and confirmed by the adjacent business’ financial returns. Meanwhile, the Rose Garden’s arrogant architectural attitude toward Memorial Coliseum has been echoed in the Blazers’ takeover and management of the facility, which is still owned by the city. Rarely rented and poorly maintained, the coliseum is now losing money, a downward spiral that is, in the parlance of public/private partnerships, “incentified” because the Blazers have first development rights on the land beneath it.
In their design, “the Blazers did everything they could to say we’ll get rid of this later,” architect Pugh says. “All of the coliseum’s enhancements have been usurped.”
To fix the Rose Quarter’s multitude of problems, the city recently hired the Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates. In the public meetings these consultants held, those who attended seemed largely unconcerned with the coliseum’s fate. The only public voice for saving the building has come from veteran Gil Frey, a Milwaukie insurance agent.
Maybe losing the building will prove to be the price of progress, or maybe it will be the cost of forgetting history and ignoring a one-time great building’s potential. Maybe the coliseum must go the way of the Kingdome or another soon-to-be demolished tribute to veterans, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Or maybe it could go the way of similar vintage facilities such as Seattle’s Key Arena and Hec Edmundsen Pavilion, which have been retrofitted with new facilities within their historic shells.
The Rose Garden’s lightless, electronically mediated environment may seem more “advanced” than the coliseum—at least for providing the commercially synergistic, sensory bombardment that is indoor professional sports at the turn of this century. But the coliseum, whatever its flaws and age spots, was designed as part of a longer, more enduring architectural lineage. From Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin to Rem Koolhaas’ Congrexpo in Lille, France, these are civic buildings that engage the surrounding city as both stage set and co-star in a longer lasting urban theater.
In short, the coliseum has a civic soul many Portlanders probably have forgotten, but one the Rose Garden will never know.
So here’s a dare to the consultants, the city and the Blazers: Advertise the unveiling of your plans for this critical part of downtown as an event as important as any of those regularly booked in the Rose Garden. (It will, after all, have longer-term consequences than any game or concert.) Present the schemes in Memorial Coliseum on a Saturday morning. Then lower the curtains and let the best plan earn the loudest ovation.
By Lindsey McBride on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 06:27PM PDT
About the Coliseum. Here are my two cents on this very important issue.
I was raised in the great City of Chicago, by an architect who trained at the Institute of Design and who spent his life at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill at the home office, working to create beautiful, important buildings.I was taught that the built environment was as critical as the natural one. I was also taught that what we design and what we look at and what we live with is extremely important. There are things that I love about Portland and the architecture here is not one of them. We have a long way to go before the environments we design and inhabit matches the physical beauty of this place.
I am optimistic about the future based on a couple of buildings developed over the last few years and one or two currently in the works.
In my opinion, the Coliseum is of one of the few worthwhile modern, exceptional buildings we have here. It would be a big mistake to destroy it. It is one of the few examples we have (by SOM no less) of a great modern building in Portland. We must embrace it and challenge ourselves and use our skills to figure out how to use it today and in the future. We shouldn’t destroy it because we can’t address or solve that problem or aren’t willing to do the work it takes to meet that challenge.
What could be better than a glass box? Surely we can see that and let the Coliseum rise again.
Thanks for exploring this issue.
Lindsey McBride
By Mitchell on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 11:47AM PDT
Good questions. I personally would be devastated if the Memorial Coliseum were to be destroyed. It’s probably Portland’s best building in my opinion. However, I also agree with your analysis of the neighborhood. Still, I believe we can have it both ways. The Memorial Coliseum redevelopment could be successful if the surrounding parking lots and structures were buried to make way for a neighborhood that would share space with the aging arena. That still doesn’t answer a the question of what the arena should be. Anyone?