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Lee Perlman
The Mid-county Memo
The Portland Design Commission held a design advisory hearing on the proposed redevelopment of the Gateway Transit Center last month - and informed developers that they have work to do.
Oregon Clinic and the Gerding/Edlen Development Company, in cooperation with the Portland Development Commission, propose to build a three-story, 100,000 square foot medical office building, and a three-story, 680-space parking garage, on the 5.2-acre transit center. Future phases call for building either housing or office space on top of the office building, up to a height of 140 feet, and adding to the parking garage. The garage will be located on the north end of the transit center, while the office building will be in the middle, rather than the south end as originally planned. This will leave 267 spaces of surface parking.
The development team, which went before the design commission last month prior to submitting a formal application, contemplated asking for modifications to code-required ground floor window and retail space, at least in the first phase. This aspect of their design drew sharp criticism from the commission.
Commission member Jeffrey Stuhr said of the parking garage, “You’ve done a good job of dressing it up, but it’s still a concrete box” like those at Portland State University. He compared the design to that of the Rose Quarter, which is physically cut off from lower Northeast Broadway and Weidler streets and makes them an inactive “no man’s land.” He added that in the proposed Phase I, “We’ll be building something that will be someone else’s problem in the future.”
Commission Chairman Mike McCulluch compared the development and its surroundings to another inner northeast feature, the Oregon Convention Center and the land around it. Of the structures there he said, “Some are good, some not so good, all isolated. We need a livelier pedestrian streetscape. I understand the market isn’t there for retail now, but we don’t want to preclude it in this stage.”
Commission member Tim Eddy called the design “very suburban,” and “a dressed-up Kruse Way.
“If we’re to be serious about this (area) being a regional center,” Eddy said, “we need to think of its use. I can’t think of this scenario ever experiencing large scale success.”
Commission member Paul Schlesinger agreed, saying, “This isn’t downtown Portland, but it isn’t suburbia either. This comes across as suburbia, and that’s not what we have in mind for this area.”
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