BooHoo...I've highlighted some of the better "stop SoWa and protect our views" quotes!
The price of a high-rise city
As South Waterfront towers rise, nearby residents lose cherished view
By JOSEPH GALLIVAN Issue date: Tue, Jan 17, 2006
The Tribune Few things are as sacred to Portlanders as their view of Mount Hood.
It tells the time on a seasonal scale: If it’s brown it must be late summer. It tells the weather: Fifty miles of clarity is a dramatic break in the rain. It drives home sales and leisure plans, provides bragging rights and an object of contemplation.
So as city planners, developers and home buyers embrace the idea of building up rather than out, someone’s going to lose out.
The residents of one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, Lair Hill, have been able to count their losses on a daily basis lately. First the brown skeletons of the three new towers at the South Waterfront District went up. (Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Health and Healing, formerly known as Building One, and the Meriwether Condominium Towers.)
In the last month, glass has sheathed the buildings almost as rapidly as in a time-lapse movie, blocking the remaining glimpses of the snowcapped mountain for certain residents.
“I hate it,” says Emily Scranton, 20, of the 16-story Center for Health and Healing, which rose slap-bang between her bedroom and Mount Hood. Recalling last summer, she says: “I went on vacation, and the tower was real low. I came back, and the mountain was covered.”
Scranton moved here from the flatlands of Indiana to study massage, and rents the top-floor apartment in a triplex at Southwest Corbett Avenue and Gibbs Street.
“You could see Mount Hood from the shower and from the porch,” she says. “I used to sit up on the roof for hours talking with my friend Heather. We had 360-degree views. We’d see the mountain glowing.”
She gives practice massages on her porch: “People loved it. It was very peaceful.”
Scranton’s landlady, Kathleen Root, lives on the first floor of the 1893 Victorian. She’s still upset about the new towers.
“I had a peekaboo view of Mount Hood if I stood at certain place on tippy-toe,” she says. “That was a whole lot better than that massive building.
What I’m really losing is the open sky. That bugs the heck out of me.”
She went to the public meetings about the tram, which will run above Gibbs Street from OHSU’s new tower, but didn’t feel she was heard. (She predicts the tram will be “a scar on the hill.”) She stopped going and missed the discussion of the view.
Justin Auld owns an 1880 house at 3325 S.W. Kelly Ave. that lost its view to the apartment building opposite in the 1960s.
“On a clear day I can see the tip,” says the Vermont native, 33, who moved here six years ago. “I always look at it for a few seconds at the corner of Whitaker and Kelly.”
As a teacher at the Art Institute of Portland, he has an aesthetic appreciation of the form, and has driven up to Council Crest to draw it. He’s also a hiker and has been on the mountain many times.
“It’s always been cool to watch it in the rain and see the snow cover it, then get patchy in the summer. It’s kind of like insurance, telling us how much water we’re going to get.”
View comes to some
Dennis Wilde is one of those people who will gain a view of Mount Hood: In April he and his wife move into a brand-new 2,000-square-foot condo in the east tower of the Meriwether condos.
The empty nesters downsized and moved out of their Terwilliger home last year and into an apartment in the Pearl District, to get used to the urban lifestyle. The roads through the South Waterfront District are as muddy as Stumptown in its founding days, but by April he is confident there will be asphalt and coffee shops.
Wilde is putting his money where his mouth is: He’s the project manager for Gerding/Edlen Development Co., which is jointly developing South Waterfront with Williams & Dame.
Standing on the bare concrete 24 stories up in the west tower, hard hat on, he points through the driving rain at various future points of interest: the streetcar turnaround, the bioswales and the two-block area that will eventually become Central Park.
“These buildings have been designed with views in mind,” he explains. The towers are narrow and are aligned to maximize the view eastward. “I’ll have a pretty nice view of the Willamette looking south,” he adds.
Troy Doss is a senior planner at the city Bureau of Planning and a project manager for the South Waterfront. (His department comes up with the rules about height, design, architecture and types of land use that the developers have to follow.)
“The street plan was laid out in part to provide extra sight corridors, with 200-by-200-foot square blocks, like the downtown grid pattern,” he says.
Doss says the bureau also considered the view from the east, from the Brooklyn neighborhood to the West Hills. There are limits, though.
“The building heights were capped to protect views of Mount Hood from Terwilliger Parkway,” which was built as a greenway with scenic viewpoints for drivers, bikers and pedestrians, he says.
“Obviously the people farther down the hill were more affected because of the elevation. We can protect public views, but it’s almost impossible to protect private views. It’s a matter of virtual impossibility to do development in that district without affecting someone.”
Planning makes a difference
Doss says that with the buildings going up according to a grand plan, rather than willy-nilly as usually happens, it’s easier to insist on things like views and create a “dynamic district with a light and airy pedestrian environment.”
The Meriwether’s two towers will have 243 condos. Mount Hood views start around the 10th floor, where you can see over the trees on Ross Island.
Around half of the owners will have be able to see the mountain — which is a lot more than the number of views the towers will obliterate.
Looking back at the West Hills, the Corbett-Terwilliger and Lair Hill neighborhoods seem small and sparsely populated.
And with the standard line about the $2 billion redevelopment of the South Waterfront, the 3,000 new residences and potential 10,000 new jobs, the concerns of residents of these few homes have little hope of making a difference.
(They’ve been tossed a few bones: a pedestrian bridge across the freeway, sunken power lines and a new Ross Island Bridge onramp.)
Mary Guenther and Jim Wallace have lived at the corner of Southwest Corbett Avenue and Curry Street for 25 years. It’s that busy spot where traffic turns to get onto Hood Avenue and then Interstate 5. Every time they step out of their side entrance they glance eastward, where the Meriwether towers now loom large.
“The river’s what I’m going to miss,” Wallace says. “I’ve been looking at Mount Hood for 25 years.
Now someone else gets to look at it.”