Skip to main contentWhen workers broke ground on Portland's long-awaited official Holocaust Memorial early this month, the backhoes and hard hats seemed to signal an end to torturous legal battles over the Washington Park monument--a decadelong march all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court.
But it seems memorial supporters and at least one neighborhood opponent will fight a final round. The spat may culminate Friday in the relative obscurity of the state board on historic landmarks.
Robert Butler, a commercial realtor and indefatigable memorial foe, filed paperwork in December aimed at placing Washington Park on the National Register of Historic Places. Butler, who says he represents a still-informal group called the Sacajawea Preservation Association, believes the park deserves recognition for century-old statues of Chief Multnomah, Sacajawea, and Lewis and Clark. Butler says the Holocaust Memorial changes those memorials' historical context.
"The introduction of the Holocaust Memorial diminishes this as a historic area for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial,"says Butler, who was active as a neighborhood spokesman in earlier battles, when Arlington Heights residents objected to memorial plans on a number of grounds. "I'm not shy about standing up for this project on purity, goodness and patriotism."
Memorial proponents characterize Butler's Sacajawea enthusiasm as a last-ditch effort to monkeywrench construction--and one, they add, that's unlikely to work.
"We're going ahead with construction," says Paul Schlesinger, the memorial's project manager. "Our understanding is that the memorial fits within the historic use of the park."
WWeek 2015