This week, it’s a budget death match at city hall, featuring
three-hour fiscal bloodbaths—I mean,
“discussions”—scheduled Tuesday through Friday where massive cuts
to every single city bureau will be decided. With no one quite sure how
catastrophically low the city’s revenues are going to be, it’s fair to
say that the very fabric of our city hangs in the balance. Firing
police officers, even? Well… it’s not entirely out of the
question.
To prepare himself for this week’s challenges, City Commissioner
Randy Leonard has been devoting much of his energy to bringing Major
League Soccer to Portland at a potential public cost of $85 million.
It’s an odd priority, most certainly—but it gets even more
surreal when one considers the project Leonard is most excited about:
Restoring what used to be McCall’s restaurant in Waterfront Park, and
leasing it to the Rose Festival as office space for $1 a year.
Famed modernist architect John Yeon designed the building in 1949 as
a visitors’ information center. Since then it’s slipped into disrepair,
but Leonard’s imagination has been captured. Working with an informal
group of friends of the building—including Thomas Lauderdale of
the band Pink Martini, and Portland Spaces Editor Randy
Gragg—Leonard has matched the building’s original paint color
using a spectrometer, and plans to use water bureau maintenance workers
to restore it in their “downtime,” for a big reopening on May 22, to
kick start the Rose Festival.
There’ll be a new world-quality rose garden planted around the
building, too, and on the roof, a 10-foot-tall red and green neon rose
donated by Ramsay Signs.
“I believe this will become as iconic to Portland as the White Stag
[“Made in Oregon”] sign,” says Leonard, although it’s not yet quite
clear how the addition of the roses fits in with renovating the
building to its original 1949 condition.
“An elegant rose that is not a major detraction from the beauty of
the building is possible,” says Gragg. “Are we there yet? No.” But he’s
happy to leverage Leonard’s “great get-it-done spirit toward some goals
that would hopefully preserve the historic integrity of the
building.”
I asked Gragg whether there might be better uses for city money in
the current budget pinch than involving the water bureau in
architectural restoration projects.
“Given the need for optimism right now,” he said, “optimism comes in
many forms. And I totally understand what they’re doing.”
Would somebody pass the Kool-Aid? I seem to have missed my sip.