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Location: Louis Dreyfus Grain Terminal, 900 N Thunderbird Way
Amenities: A park, basketball courts, gardens
Champions: The 1803 Fund
Where piles of tires once burned, gardens worthy of Babylon may soon hang.
Albina Vision Trust, the nonprofit powerhouse run by Rukaiyah Adams, has always had a vision for reclaiming property that once belonged to Black Portlanders, and now it has the cash.
Three years ago, Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, donated $400 million to set up The 1803 Fund, an Albina Vision affiliate that bought 7 acres of land running along the river west of Moda Center. Included in the purchase was the iconic Louis Dreyfus grain elevator, which looms like a multibarreled missile silo over the Willamette River just north of the Steel Bridge.
If The 1803 Fund, named for the year that York, the enslaved Black explorer, joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, realizes its dream, the grain elevator will be repurposed as the monolithic foundation for a glassed-in observation deck. Terraces planted with trees and spilling vines will march down to the water beside graceful stairways. Garden plots will float on vessels anchored just offshore.
Adams envisions structures that will last millennia. At a press conference late last year, she called them “thousand-year investments,” like the Great Pyramid at Giza or the Pantheon in Rome.
A more recent antecedent might be the waterfront park 7 miles north in Vancouver, Wash., which has drawn the envy of Portlanders. Like that Columbia River walkway, renderings show Albina Riverside will be graced by a hotel—this one 16 stories—and will do the ’Couv one better with public basketball courts shielded from the elements by an enormous mass timber shed.
One complicating factor is that the city of Portland is still negotiating with the new owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, Dallas billionaire Tom Dundon, over what will happen across North Interstate Avenue at Moda Center. If Knight had purchased the Blazers, the development would have been seamless. Still, the Blazers have touted Albina Vision Trust as a partner in arena overhaul plans.
Any change will likely appeal to Portlanders who have seen the old grain terminal get passed among buyers long on vision but short on cash, including Beau Blixseth, son of Oregon timber tycoon Tim Blixseth, who literally saw his vision for the place go up in flames.
Blixseth planned to revive grain shipments but couldn’t because the Union Pacific Railroad deemed a turn in the tracks too tight for today’s safety standards. Instead, Blixseth and a partner piled up shredded tires for shipment to Asia, where they are burned for fuel. More than once, the tires caught fire, sending acrid smoke over the river.
At the press conference, Adams said she wanted to buy the terminal in part because she’d heard stories about Black workers dying at the terminal. With any luck, their suffering will be memorialized by a monument that enlivens a critical stretch of the Willamette.
Chance this will ever happen: 9
Adams, the former chief investment officer at the Meyer Memorial Trust, gets things done, and she’s got the cash to tackle a project that she’s been working toward for years. What kind of neighborhood will extend from the Riverside is another question entirely.
