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Location: The south end of Tom McCall Waterfront Park, 98 SW Naito Parkway
Amenities now: Grass, geese
Amenities later: A marketplace, entertainment plaza, beach, maybe an artist residency
Champions: A board comprising developers, university professors and community leaders
For nearly two decades, people have bandied about an idea to transform “The Bowl” along the Southwest Waterfront—the natural amphitheater shaped like a half-moon facing the Willamette River and Hawthorne Bridge—into a vibrant marketplace, performance space, beach and play space. For just as long, the idea has failed to launch.
So the status quo remains: Every summer, the Bowl fills with Blues Festival patrons. During the rest of the year, guests at the waterfront Marriott watch the Canada geese fill the Bowl with poop.
Peter Johnson, managing director of the advocacy group Portland Waterfront Alliance, thinks that’s about to change.
Johnson and his fellow board members have persistently sought public and private support to transform the Bowl into a privately maintained public asset that’s filled with tiered lawns, a marketplace and live music. (Early renderings suggest Disney’s Tomorrowland watching some kind of rock concert on a barge.) They first got the ear of former City Commissioner Sam Adams in the early 2000s when the arts were in his portfolio, but lost momentum when Adams became mayor. The project gained a second wind when Mayor Ted Wheeler took office in 2016; the new mayor took interest, and project backers commissioned ECOnorthwest to conduct an analysis of the site.
The timing was unlucky. “Right when that was completed, COVID hit,” Johnson tells WW. “We never got the opportunity to go in and present it. And so we just kept at it, and I kept building our board.” (Members now include real estate developers Jim Mark and Lauren Noecker Robert, the latter of whom owns the stagnant RiverPlace development just south.)
Finally, just last year, the project scored its first real win. Portland Parks & Recreation, with input from the Portland Waterfront Alliance and the Human Access Project (another river advocacy group), was awarded a $750,000 Metro planning grant. With that money, the city will hire a creative director to plan a national design competition to solicit renderings of a new Bowl, with the help of a yet-to-be-formed project advisory committee.
Even if all that succeeds, the alliance and the city still face their biggest, most important hurdle: raising the political support and the potentially tens of millions of dollars needed to actually build the thing.
This is all to say that while the vision for the Bowl is closer than ever to budding, the board has moved the goalposts to imagine something bigger and grander: a transformation of the entire Tom McCall Waterfront Park promenade, stretching from the Bowl to the Steel Bridge.
“When we went into this, we thought maybe $20 or $30 million for the Bowl piece. But then if you phase it down to the Steel Bridge, maybe $80 million, $100 million?” Johnson says. “In the environment we’re all dealing with, it’s probably unrealistic to think that the city can put forth money.”
The original vision of 20 years ago has changed a lot. Johnson will be the first to say that. But he’s still hopeful. “I think it’s feasible. As long as it doesn’t go off the rails with too much overthinking and overspending.”
Chance this will ever happen: 4
The scope of the project has somehow grown larger, yet the money likely available to actually create it has shrunk, making the mismatch even more of a delta than it was two decades ago.
