Demolishing Memorial Coliseum -- a bad idea inside a bad plan

Postcard view of Memorial Coliseum

Given the lay of the political land, Portland Arts Watch considered taking a pass on the whole Memorial Coliseum demolition issue. Last night's

perfunctory public meeting

had "pro forma" written all over it. The City has to move fast because of forces outside its control (a Major League Soccer deadline), and it has decided to kill the Coliseum, "with all due respect," as Mayor Sam Adams said last night. This is assuming Commissioner Dan Saltzman sides with Adams and Commissioner Randy Leonard and assuming that Adams can still count to three.

Things are moving so fast that planning chief Joe Zender only had two days to whip up the charts for the Rose Quarter with a baseball stadium. He could have spent two months on them, though, and still met a hostile crowd, which was avidly against the destruction of the Coliseum on various grounds.
We would defend Memorial Coliseum against the wrecking ball in any case, of course. Built by Skidmore Owings Merrill and completed in 1960, it's a Modernist masterpiece - deceptively simple, with its curving arena shell visible inside the glass and aluminum cube, which is just a "curtain" really because it's not load bearing at all, it's SOM at its best, channeling the best impulses of Mies van der Rohe. Whether you actually like it or not, there's no arguing its historical importance, and not just in Portland, either. But to me, it's sweetly sublime -- I even love the rippling roof of the ticket booth outside the main structure itself.

But to destroy it in order to rush into place the mayor's dubious plan for the Rose Quarter as a whole and to replace it with a minor league baseball park? Surely, we can take more than couple of days to come to our sense about that.

The mayor has fallen for the Blazers' plan (the entity that owns the Rose Garden and the team, not the team itself - go Blazers!) to create an "entertainment district" in the area, a suburban-like development with a 2,500-seat theater, a large open-air performance space and lots of restaurants and clubs. Who would actually attend events in this district? The patrons who flock to Doug Fir, Berbati's, the White Eagle, the Someday Lounge, etc.? Hardly likely, the young and the restless rarely go for the some corporation's idea of a good time. Neighborhood people in Irvington or Eliot? Fat chance. Folks trucking in from the farthest reaches of the metro area? Maybe for a major event or two. In fact, the only likely patrons for such a district that I can think of are conventioneers, who don't know how much better the White Eagle would be. We should be educating them to the best of Portland, not taking advantage of them.

Another problem: the 2,500-seat theater duplicates the size of Keller Auditorium and Schnitzer Hall. (A 1500-1800 seat hall for ballet and opera, makes some sense, at least.)

A sports facility isn't an attractor, though. If it were, the Rose Garden would be surrounded by development. And adding a baseball stadium won't help, either - it just adds another dead zone to the area most of the year (which is why, I suspect, the Blazers weren't doing cartwheels when they found out about the idea, though if the city is willing to go along with the "entertainment district," they're apparently willing to go along with a new Beaver Stadium). Lots of studies have been done nationally that prove the point. ("Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy," wrote professors Humphreys and Dennis Coates wrote in a 2004 study, for example).

So, what do we do?

1. Don't pour more capital into an already capital-intensive area. That was the smartest thing that was said at the public meeting last night to my mind. Just because the city has some large private companies willing to partner up and put money into projects in the Rose Quarter doesn't make those projects good ideas. Or justify the public investment of money and planning resources.

2. Accept the Rose Garden for what it is
- and plan around it. My thought: surround it with low-cost, live-work spaces to serve our young entrepreneurs and artists. The Portland Public Schools' Blanchard site is perfect for long-term redevelopment north of Broadway, and the city should put its energy there as well as the area east of I-5.

3. Keep Memorial Coliseum as it is
- just spend some money renovating it and put it under new management. There are tons of new uses and tenants possible for the coliseum, especially if it sparkles agains and if it has managers actively seeking business for it. I would make it an historic building and maybe make it a non-profit, so it could get tax deductible contributions for upkeep. But really, I think it hasn't been run well by the Blazers, who have a far greater stake in the success of the Rose Garden than that of Memorial Coliseum. This is just conjecture on my part - I haven't seen their books, attended their meetings, gone on sales calls with them to prospective tenants. Allowing the Blazers to manage the coliseum was one of the mistakes of the original agreement.

4. The baseball stadium:
Go back to the Lents idea, which wasn't such a bad one in some ways. Or consider other sites in the metro area. I'm thinking Hillsboro Stadium or something like it, for example. For the past 30 years (the time I've been in the city), the Beavers haven't been central to the conversation here (except the season Luis Tiant was whirling on the mound and smoking big cigars and when slugger Willie Stargell planted one in the MAC club seats). We just aren't a minor league city anymore.

5. We haven't even mentioned
the objections of veterans to the proposal or the fate of the Winterhawks hockey team (and other coliseum tenants). But at this point, that would just be piling on.

At the end of the meeting, a rather intense fellow whom the mayor identified as "Terry" hollered out that we should take a straw poll of the people in the audience. The mayor told him to calm down, but you know, I liked his democratic impulses. It doesn't feel right to have this deal brokered by major financial players and the City without significant public discussion. And as much as I support an MLS team for Portland (go Timbers!), I would have to say that democracy is more important that a quick deal, even if it weren't so obviously a bad deal.