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Problem: The Rose Quarter is a scar on the city.
Idea: Phil Knight remakes a razed neighborhood.
What one titan ravaged, another could repair.
The Rose Quarter is a deserted, concrete disaster with a racist legacy in large part because of one man: Robert Moses, the powerful New York City urban planner who came to town in the 1940s and recommended ramming Interstate 5 right through Albina, then a thriving Black neighborhood.
Moses loved highways and, in New York, he laid vast ribbons of pavement through neighborhoods just like Albina.
“When you’re operating in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax,” Moses said in 1954, according to a 2021 article on CityObservatory.org by Joe Cortright.
I-5 was indeed cut as if with a meat ax through Portland. It separates the eastside from the Willamette River. After the expansion of 99W, it’s the original sin in the Rose Quarter, and many followed. There’s Moda Center, an aging hulk surrounded by parking garages. Across the windswept, empty plaza stands Veterans Memorial Coliseum, another outdated venue that also happens to be on the National Register of Historic Places. And a half-dozen blocks to the east is the bankrupt Lloyd Center.
All these failures are direct legacies of Moses, once the most powerful planner in the country, and they could be undone by another big man: Phil Knight.
Knight has offered to buy the Portland Trail Blazers from Jody Allen, sister of late billionaire Paul Allen, and trustee of his estate, which owns the team.
Word is that Allen wants more than the $2 billion Knight offered back in June and the sale has stalled. We’re not terribly interested in two billionaires haggling over the price of the Blazers. But we do believe Knight, who’s worth $44 billion, according to Bloomberg News, should get the team—then spend more of his billions to work with the Albina Vision Trust to revitalize the Rose Quarter.
“Every city needs a place to put big stuff,” says David Knowles, former director of planning for the city who served two terms on the Metro Council, which sets policy for the regional government. “This is in the heart of the city, and it has good transportation. There is a design solution for every problem, but it takes money.”
It would be a fitting legacy for Knight, 84, who grew up on the eastside and graduated from Cleveland High School (where he wrote for the school newspaper). Knight has already given billions to the University of Oregon and Oregon Health & Science University, making him a hero to students and cancer patients, but he’s also tried to bigfoot democracy by giving millions to candidates who have proven to be out of step with nonbillionaire Oregonians.
Knight has an opportunity to create a legacy project, with a new arena for the Blazers, and housing, shops, or even a community sports complex like Chelsea Piers in New York, where kids and adults play soccer, basketball, hockey and tennis, and learn how to rock climb and putt.
Planners have tried this at least twice before, inside the Coliseum, but it didn’t work. The solution might be new construction on the site of the Coliseum Thunderbird hotel, now just a parking lot along the river. And just south of that is the old Louis Dreyfus grain elevator, now a shredded-tire export terminal, whose trucks scatter fist-sized chunks of rubber along Interstate Avenue.
There’s even more opportunity north of the Coliseum. Knight could buy the huge Soviet-style Portland Public Schools administration building, paying enough to let the district rebuild elsewhere, and get almost 10 acres to build a needle-moving supply of desperately needed housing. Such construction could accelerate the city’s policy of returning Black families to neighborhoods from which they were displaced.
If Knight wanted to go really big, he could join forces with Albina Vision and help cover I-5 through the Rose Quarter, closing the bleeding wound of Robert Moses’ meat ax in the heart of Portland.
Imagine that legacy, Shoe Dog.