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It took only a single visit to Green Anchors, the 7-acre industrial park located next to the Willamette River in North Portland, for Nicholas Harris to fall in love.
“His words to me,” says Josh Pollack, talent buyer for Soul’d Out Productions, the concert promotions firm co-founded by Harris, “were like, ‘I’ve been looking for this place for 20 years.’ He’s been looking for something that’s got that Portland DIY vibe where we can do something kind of different.”
That something is a new series of outdoor concerts that Soul’d Out is kicking off this summer at Green Anchors. The performances, scheduled over three weekends in June and July, perfectly dovetail with Soul’d Out’s mission to bring slightly left-of-center artists whose sounds are rooted in Black American music and Green Anchors’ vision of supporting environmentally conscious businesses and artisans.
For Soul’d Out, this is just the latest venture the organization has undertaken since its founding in 2008. For nine years, the company produced the Soul’d Out Fest, a multinight, multivenue experience that brought artists as varied as Prince, Giorgio Moroder, and Bonnie Raitt to Portland, and nowadays it helps book the PDX Jazz Festival as well as entertainment at The Get Down and Jack London Revue.
With environmental ideals in mind, the artists booked for this new series, like electronic fusion ensemble Beats Antique (June 20–21), self-proclaimed “swamptronica” act Dirtwire (July 26), and folk-rockers Elephant Revival (June 6–7), all needed to be on a similar wavelength.
“It takes a certain type of artist to really wrap their heads around wanting to play somewhere that’s not your typical venue,” Pollack says, “wanting to do something different and something cool in the summer where there’s some cause behind it.”
The cause in question falls somewhere between urban renewal and environmental revolution. Green Anchors lies on a remediated brownfield that, until 2005, was a shipyard that contributed to the pollution of the Willamette River. Cousins Mark Fisher and Matt Stein began leasing the property in 2012 and have been steadily transforming it into a bastion for environmental education and protection, as well as a home for various eco-minded organizations and businesses.
At first glance, it can be challenging to see the bigger picture of Green Anchors, as the scattershot collection of reused shipping containers, hastily constructed sheds, and piles of detritus gives the impression more of a wrecking yard than a cultural center. But even a short tour of the space reveals the logic within.
The tenants are a varied assemblage of artistic disciplines and entrepreneurial imagination. There’s a metal sculptor currently transporting one of their larger creations to a music festival in the Midwest, a gem cutter, a tiny home builder, a company that roasts chiles from New Mexico for salsas and sauces, and Mosquito Fleet, activists who take to the Willamette in kayaks to advocate for environmental justice. And in the corner closest to Cathedral Park is a stunning, well-tended garden teeming with native plants and dotted with large pieces of metal art.
It’s near that garden that Soul’d Out events will go down. Stein, Fisher and their team have constructed a pavilion with a stage built on what looks to be old plastic shipping containers, protected from the elements by a huge domed canopy. It’s a massive step up from the tents used for past live performances and other events at Green Anchors that wound up collapsing during the last ice storm. With this new setup and some additional seating areas they are building into some old shipping containers, Green Anchors will be able to accommodate 1,000 ticketholders for each Soul’d Out show.
Everyone involved is also looking at these concerts as an opportunity to educate people. Nonprofit organizations connected to Green Anchors and those involved with like-minded environmental causes will be on hand to share information. And there will likely be some kind of talks happening from the stage about how this space was so radically transformed.
“In the bigger picture, there’s acres and acres and acres of old industrial land along this river not getting reused,” Stein says. “It’s not getting cleaned up. There’s a model that we’re creating here that can be followed for other properties.”
SEE IT: Elephant Revival at Green Anchors, 8940 N Bradford St., souldoutproductions.com/green-anchors. 7 pm Friday–Saturday, June 6–7. $30, $55 for both nights.