Paul Falsetto of Carleton Hart Architecture says an updated inventory of historic Portland buildings is vital for city planning efforts. Historic structures like the U.S. Custom House will attract more attention for redevelopment if an inventory effort is performed, Falsetto said. (Photo by Dan Carter/DJC)
Portland lags on historic inventory
POSTED: Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 05:15 PM PT
BY: Nathalie Weinstein
In a city where public outcry has saved historic structures like Memorial Coliseum from the wrecking ball, it’s clear that many Portlanders are passionate about preservation.
However, Portland has not performed a comprehensive update of its inventory of historic properties since the 1980s. As a result, city planning efforts lack information, and potentially historic buildings face risk of demolition.
Meanwhile, West Coast cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles are ramping up their efforts to catalog their historic properties, and may offer models for Portland to follow.
Though Portland in the next six months will launch an online database to track its cataloged historic resources, preservationists such as Paul Falsetto of Carleton Hart Architecture are concerned about a lack of funding and city leadership for inventory efforts.
“It is critical that the city understand and track its historic properties,” Falsetto said. “Every year, more properties reach that 50-year benchmark. A post-war building that wasn’t of interest in 1980 could be of great interest today.”
One building that has Falsetto’s attention is the U.S. Custom House. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it has sat empty for some time. Falsetto said a citywide effort to survey more properties like the U.S. Custom House could generate more attention to efforts to redevelop the historic structure.
“We need to keep structures like the U.S. Customs House at the forefront of our minds,” Falsetto said. “With an updated ranking, we could have a more earnest dialogue about how to plan for these structures in the future.”
City planner Liza Mickle for the past couple years has been working with staff to create an online database of the city’s historic properties, such as the U.S. Custom House. She hopes the database will serve as a tool for property owners, city planners and others.
Creating a database was one of the first steps the city of Seattle took when it began updating its historic inventory in 2000.
“It was a challenge because at the time, Chicago and Toronto were some of the only cities with online databases,” said Karen Gordon, supervisor and historic preservation officer for the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. “Before our Web site, we had paper files with pictures and folders.”
Neighborhoods in Seattle kicked off inventory efforts by expressing interest in performing their own historic surveys. This captured the attention of Seattle City Council, which allocated money from its general fund to support the efforts. Many neighborhoods also have taken advantage of a city matching grant program. Seventeen neighborhoods, including four segments of downtown, have been inventoried so far.
“We have a robust neighborhood planning process,” Gordon said. “We started by inventorying our city-owned buildings to ensure that when we are planning for our capital projects, we are aware of how our planning affects these properties.”
But inventories aren’t cheap. Gordon said one neighborhood spent between $30,000 and $50,000 to inventory all of its structures.
According to Historic Landmarks Commission chairman Art DeMuro, the Irvington Community Association is completing a historic inventory so it can nominate itself as a historic district. A contract for a professional surveyor to look at 2,800 structures cost $21,000.
City planner Nicholas Starin said there is neither money nor staff for the city to conduct such an effort.
“There are no plans right now to do a brand new inventory,” Starin said. “That would be a multiyear effort costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s not a funded city project.”
Los Angeles didn’t have any city money available either. But in 2005, the Getty Foundation and the city entered into an agreement in which the foundation would provide $2.5 million in matching grants for a multiyear historic resource survey project called Survey LA. It will kick off this spring, said Janet Hansen, deputy manager of the LA Office of Historic Resources.
“There’s never been a systematic survey done in LA before,” Hansen said. “Our topmost purpose for this is to use the information as a tool to inform our planning decisions. We hope that this model will be used by other cities.”
Hansen warned that cities shouldn’t jump into an inventory effort without doing research on best practices for surveying. Her department spent three years developing tools and performing pilot surveys for its Survey LA program, which will team professional surveyors with volunteers to catalog 800,000 legal parcels of land within the city.
Portland isn’t nearly as large as LA, but it still has a growing number of properties that need to be inventoried, said Val Ballestrem, education manager with the Bosco-Milligan Foundation. The 1984 inventory included mostly buildings built before 1935. Today, mid-century modern commercial structures and residential post-war housing would be considered contributing historic resources. But there is no way to protect them if they haven’t been identified.
“It should be noted that the 1984 inventory was never completed,” Ballestrem said. “We’ve also annexed a bunch of new land into the city since then. We’re losing things and we don’t know what we’re losing.”
“The Rosefriend Apartments were ranked low in the 1984 inventory,” Falsetto said. “Those were demolished. Today, I think it would (have) ranked higher and that could have saved the building.”
There are some efforts under way in Portland. Starin said the city has been working to survey properties in East Portland that were not included in the 1984 historic inventory. And according to DeMuro, several neighborhood associations, including Buckman, Brooklyn and Irvington are looking at surveying their properties so they can be listed as historic districts.
But until the city allocates money for inventory efforts, like Seattle, or receives private money to kick off the process, like Los Angeles, Portland’s inventory efforts likely will continue to be fragmented.
“This effort deserves more and greater thought,” Falsetto said. “Effort equates to cost. But we should still get boots on the ground and look at what’s out there. It’s the only way to protect these resources.”
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