Welcome to Jumptown!

On the other side of the tracks, in a neighborhood we call "Blogtown," Sarah Mirk of the Portland Mirkury recently posted two stories about the Blazers' vision for the Rose Quarter. The first describes (and provides links to) a proposed Memorandum of Understanding defining how the City Council, the Portland Development Commission and Portland Arena Management (a.k.a. Paul Allen) will work together to redevelop the district.

The second provides an excerpt of the Blazers's vision to transform the Rose Quarter into “Jumptown” -- a sports and entertainment district:

Jumptown: Portland's Rec Room will be a world-class mixed-use sports and entertainment district in one of Portland's most vibrant neighborhoods. We envision a community gathering place at the intersection of sports, music and entertainment, one that pays homage to the rich musical heritage of Portland's eastside... It will embody the best of Portland's cultural past, present and future through live music events, a variety of residential, hotel and office space, diverse retail and restaurant amenities and a one-of-a-kind Nike interactive experience.”

We’ll get to a serious discussion of what all this means in future posts. While you're holding your breath for that, here are my "top of the head" reactions:

(1) Excuse me, but I don't see anything about "sustainability" in that statement. And this is supposed to reflect Portland values?

(2) As I've been writing this post, I keep typing "Jumpstreet" instead of "Jumptown." What's that about?

(3) I swear to God that I just realized that "Jumptown" rhymes with "Stumptown."

(4) And now I’ve discovered that “Jumptown” was the nickname for a neighborhood in N.E. Portland that was bulldozed as part of urban revitalization efforts such as building the Memorial Coliseum.

In his book “Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz 1942-1957,” Robert Dietsche writes about “The Dude Ranch” – a club located in what is now called the Leftbank Building. While “Dude Ranch” may sound totally gay today, Dietsch describes it as one of the hottest jazz clubs in Portland, and one of many such clubs in the Williams Avenue District, the center of African-American business in Portland. He writes that the neighborhood was a place one could find jazz twenty-four hours a day. One could look up Williams Avenue "past the chili parlors, past the barbecue joints, the beauty salons, all the way to Broadway, and see hundreds of people dressed up as if they were going to a fashion show. It could be four in the morning. It didn’t matter; this was one of those streets that never slept.”

So that's pretty interesting, though I don't believe that one could hear jazz being played (or "blown" at the cats would say) twenty-four hours a day. People always say that kind of thing, but it's rarely true. Imagine a rainy Tuesday morning in the winter of 1953 between 7:30 a.m. and, let's say 10:00 a.m.. You think anyone was blowing a sax then? If so, I'll bet someone else was walking out of a chili parlor shouting, "Give it a rest Jazzbo! Some of us have day jobs!" I'm just saying that historical accuracy is important.

Sometime in the near future, Culture Shock will analyze the political and business implications of this issue. We'll thoroughly examine the history of the neighborhood. After that, we'll dissect the urban design implications. Until then, let's poke fun at the Blazers' vision statement by reimagining it as a press conference:

Q: Can you describe what class of place Jumptown will be?

A: It will be world-class, of course.

Q: World-class like Amsterdam? Or more like Pyong Yang?

A: We're thinking more like Amsterdam, Paris or Barcelona.

Q: Maybe a little bit of St. Louis?

A: Maybe.

Q: What kind of use will Jumptown get?

A: If we’re successful, it will be multi-use.

Q: Can you tell us more about the neighborhood?

A: As it is, or as it will be?

Q: As it will be.

A: It will be vibrant.

Q: By "vibrant," do you mean "dangerous?"

A: Not at all.

Q: Where will Jumptown be located?

A: At the intersection of sports, music and entertainment.

Q: What about arts? Do the arts intersect at Jumptown?

A: I don't know what you're talking about.

Q: What will happen at that intersection?

A: It will be a gathering place.

Q: Can you clarify?

A: It will be a community gathering place.

Q: You mentioned an homage?

A: Yes, we’ll be paying homage to Portland’s musical heritage.

Q: Can you tell us more about that heritage?

A: It’s a rich heritage.

Q: How will you pay homage to that rich heritage?

A: By embodying the best of Portland’s culture.

Q: Like Portland’s culture today?

A: Yes, but also Portland’s cultural past.

Q: Future too?

A: Yes, Jumptown will also embody Portland’s cultural future.

Q: Once you embody the cultural future, doesn’t that make it the cultural present?

A: I hadn't thought about it that way.

Q: I just blew your mind didn't I?

A: Not really.

Q: You sure?

A: Okay. Maybe a little. Can we move on?

Q: Am I asking the questions, or are you?

A: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Q: Apology accepted. So what kind of music will Jumptown have?

A: Jumptown will have live music.

Q: Will it have live music as well as live music events?

A: I imagine you’ll see both.

Q: Is there a difference? Or is a "music event" like a "weather event?"

A: You should refer to the press release.

Q: How would you describe the other spaces in Jumptown?

A: What do you mean?

Q: Like residential, hotels and offices.

A: Oh. There will be a variety of them.

Q: Would you call them diverse?

A: Well, the restaurant and retail amenities will be diverse.

Q: Is a "retail amenity" similar to a store?

A: Yes, it’s the same thing.

Q: Can you tell us how Nike might be involved in Jumptown?

A: We hope that Jumptown will offer a Nike experience.

Q: Will that involve jumping?

A: You'll have to ask Mr. Knight about that, but I imagine jumping will be part of the experience.

Q: Can you tell us if the Nike experience will be interactive?

A: Yes.

Q: One-of-a-kind?

A: I suppose.

Q: You suppose?

A: What do you want me to say?

Q: Once again, who's asking the questions here?

A: I'm sorry. Can we wrap this up?

Q: Again with the questions?

Oregon Arts Summit: Mighty Toy Cannon Report #1

Culture Jock took the bold step of live blogging during the Oregon Arts Summit at Nike's Tiger Woods Center today. While he was being all tweety and Web 2.0, I was madly scribbling notes on an old-fashioned pad of paper. I took a lot of notes, so it may take me awhile to absorb what I learned about "The Art of Collaboration" -- the theme of the day.

While you're waiting for my thoughtful commentary and analysis, I'll warm up by sharing my shallowest and most irrelevant observation:

Nike's Tiger Woods Center has someone on its catering staff who looks a lot like Phil Knight. During one of the breaks between sessions (they were called "movement breaks," which I suppose could mean either stretching or running to the bathroom), I was chatting with a colleague when out of the corner of my eye I thought I spotted Phil Knight! Except that he was carrying a tray loaded with dirty coffee cups.

A short time later, I met White Bird's new general manager, Phil Busse, for the first time. He asked, "Did you see that catering guy who looks like Phil Knight?" so I knew I wasn't crazy. We agreed that pretending to be a catering guy would be a cool thing to do if you owned a mega-billion dollar multinational corporation.

I'll write more about Phil Knight later. Just to warn you, it's going to be an argument for convincing Mr. Knight to invest $100 million to turn Memorial Coliseum into a sports and recreation complex with a Nike museum.

Memorial Coliseum is about more than Architectural Preservation

I understand if you're fatigued by the Memorial Coliseum story. Perhaps you're one of the many who think it's an ugly, obsolete behemoth that threatens to stifle progress and waste taxpayer dollars. In the end, this post isn't about that story, though it was triggered by it. It's really about who's running the show in this goddamned town, and who's reporting the story.

The front page of Monday’s Oregonian was splashed with two beautiful photographs of Memorial Coliseum (exterior and interior), accompanying a hatchet job of a story about the building’s financial viability. A smidgeon of snideness crept into a headline that read, “Save Portland’s Memorial Coliseum, but for what?”

The O’s editorial position has been staunchly anti-Coliseum from the get-go, parroting the talking points of the proponents of its demolition, and implying that the only folks who want to preserve the building are a few elitist architects with their heads up their asses. On Monday morning, that editorial posture crept onto the front page--or was journalistic laziness to blame?

Asking questions about how Memorial Coliseum will be managed and to what purpose is a legitimate exercise. That’s a task Portland’s mainstream newspaper ought to take seriously. Instead, the paper ran a half-baked recap of talking points with faulty and incomplete analysis. Is editorial bias intruding on journalistic independence, or is this what happens when a newspaper’s resources are stripped bare, leaving no capacity for real investigative reporting?

In her front page article, Helen Jung writes, “The Save Memorial Coliseum campaign, spearheaded by a few architects passionate about the arena, worked.” (Note the emphasis on a "few architects").

Let me turn that statement on its head: “The Raze Memorial Coliseum campaign, spearheaded by a few private sector developers and rich sports team owners passionate about making money, worked.” Is that what you would rather be reading? Because it came close to that and still might.

Jung takes as an article of faith the argument that nobody knows how to manage the Coliseum successfully: “Architects who love Memorial Coliseum would show you the massive glass walls that allow natural light to stream into the seating bowl. They would show you the clever engineering of the roof -- the size of four city blocks -- resting on just four concrete pillars. But it's a little bit harder for them to show the outlines of a good business when looking at the 49-year-old coliseum's financial bones.”

The article states that Memorial Coliseum “has struggled for more than a decade to just break even.” The print version includes a bar chart to support that argument. Unfortunately, it appears to do just the opposite: Over the six year period reported, the chart shows that the City of Portland received close to $2.8 million in revenue from parking and user fees while spending just under $2.4 million running the garage and making some capital improvements. That’s a net gain of $400k (14%) over that period. (Under the management deal for the venue, the Blazers collect all other revenue, such as rentals and concessions, pay the Coliseum’s operating costs, and then split any remaining profit with the city).

Sure, the chart shows that the city has “lost” money over the most recent three years; but that is because it spent money on capital improvements in those years. If there were surpluses from previous years, doesn’t it make business sense to reinvest them in improvements and deferred maintenance? What happened to those surpluses anyway? The article doesn’t explore that question, nor does it report on what the Blazers earned or lost by operating the facility. (A year or two ago, a brief report said that the Blazers broke even operating the venue after years of losing money).

The article correctly notes that “the coliseum needs millions of dollars in fixes, from overhauling its half-century-old electrical system to replacing the roof. Its egalitarian seating arrangement, with no luxury boxes or club seats, makes the coliseum feel more like a high school gym than a venue out to make a profit.”

Why doesn't the article mention that the Blazers recently invested $13 million to upgrade the Rose Garden Arena after less than a decade of use? What makes that a legitimate investment, while maintaining Memorial Coliseum is portrayed as pouring money down a rat hole? By the way, $13 million is exactly what a 2002 study said would need to be invested in upgrades to the Coliseum.

The article briefly describes the management deal struck between the City of Portland and the Blazers. It mentions the “Portland Arena Management” as the Blazers's sister company responsible for managing the venues. It does not mention that Portland Arena Management signed a five year deal with AEG Facilities a few years ago to run the Rose Quarter. It doesn’t mention that Los Angeles-based AEG Facilities is a huge entertainment and venue management conglomerate with a world wide base of operations. (You might call AEG the Halliburton of sports and entertainment management). When the Blazers signed the deal in 2007, its chief operating officer at the time, Mike Golub, described AEG as “the fastest-growing facility management group and one of the most dynamic sports and entertainment companies in the world." Oh boy!

Reports in the Oregonian and other media outlets at the time read like they were transcribed from the Blazers/AEG press release. “The AEG team wants to attract a Rose Garden naming rights partner, coax more development of the Rose Quarter campus, add new events and generate more revenue for Vulcan Ventures, which owns the arena for Blazers owner Paul Allen.” AEG is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company, a sports entertainment outfit that operates the Staples Center in Los Angeles and many other venues and sports teams around the world. Part of its reputation is its ability to sell naming rights for venues, and its development of entertainment centers such as “L.A. Live” – a $2.5 billion district of residences, offices, hotel rooms and event venues which Blazers execs reportedly cite as a model for developing the Rose Quarter.

According to reports, AEG ranks as the nation's second-largest concert promoter behind Live Nation. That's what business folks call "integrated" but you may know it better as a "monopoly." They control the product, the content and the delivery systems. I thought it was interesting that my search of Oregon Live and the Oregonian's archives (thank you Multnomah County Libraries) turned up no further mention of AEG since the 2007 article about the Blazers handing over venue management.

The Blazers are now talking with another mega-developer, the Cordish Co., about creating the entertainment district, so it's not clear what AEG's role is in all this. What seems beyond dispute is that the Blazers and Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures have been hankering for better profits and that Memorial Coliseum is sitting there as a huge obstacle. The connections between AEG, Cordish and Vulcan certainly make discussions about the proposed “entertainment district” more interesting. I won't be surprised if I learn that the Convention Center hotel project, for which Mayor Sam Adams has a powerful itch, gets integrated into this whole development deal. And here's another interesting connection: Mike Golub either quit or was fired by Vulcan recently, and reports are that Merritt Paulson wants to hire him as general manager for that new Major League Soccer team Portland is getting. It is a Small World after all!

As long as we're constructing a house of cards, when AEG took over management of the Rose Quarter, it was reported to have a “strong interest in developing and managing a 2,500-seat arena" on the site. At that seating capacity, such a venue would compete directly with the Schnitzer Auditorium (2,800 seats) and Keller Auditorium (3,000 seats) for commercial concerts, sucking away some of the revenue potential for those venues and destabilizing their financial underpinnings. Guess who gets hurt if that happens? The nonprofit performing companies that use those city-owned facilities at reduced rates thanks to commercial rentals that offset operating costs, that's who. Top on that list are the Oregon Symphony, the Oregon Ballet and the Portland Opera, all of which are struggling under current economic conditions. Oy!
So here's what has me riled up: This is all starting to feel Bush league. By that, I mean it's looking like the kind of private sector deal-making that we saw flourishing over the past eight years.

It's Enron and Halliburton rolled together into one flaming clusterf**k.

It's a strategy of belittling and marginalizing opponents, treating them as if they're idiots for not understanding the complexities of the deal.

It's the media rolling over and reporting from press releases and talking points rather than doing its investigative job.

It's spreadsheets with variables jiggered so that the future looks rosy and risk free until it all turns to shit and then what's the next brilliant plan?

It's rich fat cats sucking at the public teat while pocketing all the upside of the deal and walking away from the risks.

It's elected officials wanting to appear decisive and action-oriented, hellbent on creating a legacy greater than scandal.

It's about whatever happened to Portland being a town that knows how to plan?

Okay, I’m not a reporter and I have other work to do and many miles to go before I sleep. All of my investigation of this post was done on a laptop while watching the season finale of "House." If I got facts wrong, tell me and I'll fix them. I'll try to add links and give proper citations later. I didn't even take the time to add a photo to brighten things up.

Go read Bob Hick’s excellent analysis of this story at Art Scatter, which he's titled,"Memorial Coliseum: The Empire Strikes Back." It's brilliant and passionate, and Bob is more articulate about it. I particularly like the questions he raises about the place of profit in managing public facilities that were built for the public good.

Sparing Memorial Coliseum (for now)

Let's start with a confession: I have never been inside Memorial Coliseum.

I had not yet been born when Portland voters approved the $8 million bond to finance its construction in 1954. I wasn't there when the neighborhood was bulldozed and the big glass box began to emerge on the eastside skyline.

I was not quite four years old when the "Glass Palace" was dedicated to the "advancement of cultural opportunities for the community and to the memory of our veterans of all wars who made the supreme sacrifice."

I did not attend either of the two Beatles shows at the Coliseum in 1965 (ticket price $6.00). I did not see Led Zeppelin perform there in either 1970 or 1972. I didn’t witness Evel Knievel jumping his motorcycle over a row of 17 vans and trucks in 1973.



I wasn't there when the Portland Trailblazers won the Championship in 1977. I didn't hear Bruce Springsteen sing an impromptu version of “On Top of Old Smoky” in honor of the Mount St. Helens eruption when he played the Coliseum in 1980. I've never watched floats in the Grand Floral Parade roll out its big doors, which were designed to accommodate that purpose.

I never rolled around the concourse level on rented inline skates (which was a possibility when I arrived in Portland 15 years ago). I've never been to a hockey game in Portland (or anywhere else for that matter). My daughter's graduation from PSU was held in the Rose Garden, not the Coliseum, and I had to explain to her grandparents that the ceremony was not actually at the Rose Garden.

My dirty little secret is that up until a few years ago, I never paid much attention to Memorial Coliseum. It was just a big box in a confusing jumble of streets and parking lots–-a neighborhood of jammed traffic when my cross-town timing was bad.

In 2001, I read an article by Randy Gragg, who was then the Oregonian's architecture critic (and one of the paper's best and most prolific writers). After reading the building described as "a teacup in a glass box," I began to see it anew, and to appreciate its simple beauty. Since then, I've gained more appreciation of its place in Portland's architectural history.

With that more enlightened perspective, I became alarmed (along with many others), when Mayor Sam Adams decreed that Memorial Coliseum must be razed to make room for the new Triple A baseball stadium--all part of a complex development and public/private financing deal tied to bringing Major League Soccer to town. My dismay grew when Commissioner Leonard flatly declared that Memorial Coliseum was "ugly" and a building "only a mother could love." The proponents of tearing the building down repeated the same litany of faults: (1) It's an ugly box; (2) It's never used; (3) It would be impossible to fix; (4) It's a money pit; (5) Only a tiny group of elitists architecture geeks want to save it; and (6) We've been looking for solutions for years and nothing ever happens.

The Coliseum's destruction seemed inevitable. But then a remarkable thing happened: People started to squawk about the plan, and a real grassroots campaign arose, not only with protests but offering alternatives worthy of consideration. It was enough that the Mayor decided that precipitous action was not such a good idea--that it might be worth taking the time to actually think this one through.

As reported by Mark Larabee in this morning's Oregonian, the razing of Memorial Coliseum has been taken off the table for the moment. We're back to considering the Lents neighborhood as a site for the baseball part. That seemed like a sensible plan in the first place, so let's see if it can happen.

Of course, that's not the end of this issue. There is still much work and thinking to be done. What happens to Memorial Coliseum now? The building suffers from a backlog of deferred maintenance and there are legitimate questions about its financial viability in its current use. (There are good explanations about how the Rose Quarter's management structure creates incentives for the Blazers to minimize capital investments in the building, along with disincentives to book events there instead of the Rose Garden).

Do you remember the brilliant plan floating about in 2003? The city's star developers, Gerding/Edlen, had the idea of turning Memorial Coliseum into a big box retail outlet that would attract 4 million people a year. With the stadium bowl torn out, there would be plenty of room for a Costco or Home Depot store stuffed in the space, with parking on the middle floor. Of course, big box stores don't have much need for big windows and city views, and proximity to light rail isn't helpful when you're hauling building materials home. That was one solution I'm glad we didn't pursue, though there were some that were convinced it was brilliant thinking.

Now the Blazers are talking about creating an "entertainment district" in the Rose Quarter. It's a plan that may cost upwards of $100 million and will certainly require no small amount of public financing. Keep an eye on this one folks! It's going to get ugly ... I mean that literally.

If you're late to this game, lots of smart people have been covering it over the past six weeks:

One of the most vocal and smartest leaders of the movement to save Memorial Coliseum was Brian Libby, who pressed the argument with fervor on his Portland Architecture site. Brian was also kept busy responding doggedly to Memorial Coliseum critics on various blog comment strings, which must have been wearing. Congratulations Brian, and keep up the good fight.

Barry Johnson has done a great job covering the story at Portland Art Watch--both reporting and posing good questions. Tim DuRoche's commentary on his Burnside Blog was also insightful. The Portland Mercury's coverage of the proposed entertainment district has been especially good.