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A restaurant may be coming to the former Rose Festival headquarters in Tom McCall Waterfront Park.
Last week, Dan Yates, president and co-founder of the local cruise line Portland Spirit, filed an early assistance application to convert the park’s only commercial building—a onetime visitor center designed by famed local architect John Yeon—“from current use to a full-service restaurant.”
Reached by phone, Mandy Morgan, the Spirit’s director of marketing, cautioned that the project is in preliminary planning stages, saying there are “big steps” to take before breaking ground.
The Rose Building sits just south of the Salmon Street Springs splash fountain at Southwest Naito Parkway and Salmon Street. It’s a glassy, modernist structure, structure with a sizable patio. The Portland Spirit’s main dock is in the same area of the park, and expanding its presence is a logical move—especialy in a moment when a public design competition to renovate the park’s grassy bowl is underway and a number of entities are working to revive the city’s waterfront.
Morgan says the Portland Spirit’s ambition for the building is a family-style, casual restaurant space that can also host pre- and post-cruise events. In addition to the restaurant plan, she says the proposal outlines $2 million in renovations. It lists making over a smaller walk-up structure to serve food directly off of Salmon Springs Plaza and to renovate “approximately 5,000 square feet of outdoor seating and gathering space within the existing courtyard, pergola, and river-facing patio areas.”
The application was opened June 5 and is estimated to be reviewed by June 9. Portland Parks & Recreation, which owns the building, declined to comment for this story. The Spirit’s application stipulates that occupancy and operation by spring of 2027 is “critical to the project schedule.”
For the past 15 years, the building has served as the headquarters for the Rose Festival Foundation, which puts on the annual festival and parade. The foundation pays a sweetheart $1 monthly rent plus maintenance fees. In 2023, Willamette Week included the building in its Chasing Ghosts series on unoccupied buildings, because even though it wasn’t empty, the foundation’s eight-member staff took up precious little space in the 4,000-square-foot building.
Morgan says the Portland Spirit was first approached with the prospect in the fall of 2025, and adds that the building is currently in need of $100,000 in maintenance. Suffice it to say, with a public-facing, year-round restaurant as a tenant, the city might be able to squeeze more out of the waterfront building, a landmark on the National Register of Historic Places and the only commercially viable building in the park. (In 2009, The Oregonian reported that, since 1989, at least three investment groups had tried to run restaurants in what was then referred to as the former home of McCall’s restaurant; the most recent closed in 2005.)
The Rose Festival Foundation has reported hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses in recent, consecutive years and combined its 2026 Starlight and Grand Floral parades as a cost-saving measure. News that it may soon be on the hunt for a new office does not bode well for the beloved festival as it heads into its 120th year. (The foundation declined to comment for this story.)
A silver lining: It signed a 25-year lease in 2010, suggesting the city may be on the hook to provide new office space elsewhere. In fact, Morgan says the Spirit’s plans are contingent on just that.
