EVEN WHEN IT’S SHROUDED in a fine layer of mist, someone is always out enjoying Portland’s waterfront. People are jogging, walking their dogs, looking at the river, or tapping their cigarette ashes into the water below. On sunny days, it’s a riot. Pedestrians, bicyclists, punks, street musicians—a whole panoply of humanity clusters around the Willamette.
“They call Pioneer Courthouse Square the ‘Living Room’ of Portland,” says Doug Kenck-Crispin, the man behind the popular Kick Ass Oregon History podcast. “But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find something more beloved and well known than the waterfront.”
Despite its current adored status, Portland’s waterfront hasn’t always been so beloved. It used to be an avenue of decay, decadence, and literal shit. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did the city actually have a riverfront where a normal human being would want to spend time. For much of Portland’s history, the river was something to be quickly passed over—not gazed into.
The First Wharves
Before Waterfront Park came to be in 1978, before Harbor Drive opened in 1943—before any of that—Portland’s waterfront was seen as a major commercial asset. A port would make the city an actual hub of commerce rather than just another lonely Western town. From Portland’s beginning in 1851, there was a rush to build wharves and docks to foster lucrative maritime trade.
This infrastructure sprint nearly resulted in two Portland mayors coming to blows. Former Mayor George Vaughn attempted to construct a wharf in 1859, and city council ordered him to stop.
“They were fighting over whether the city owned the strip along the river or whether individual organizations did,” says Finn J.D. John, author of Wicked Portland.
“The sitting mayor [Stephen McCormick] didn’t want it and got Vaughn [legally] served to stop working on his pier.” Vaughn refused. “[He] had a huge crew working on this thing, and the mayor went down with a large mob on his heels and together they dismembered the offending wharf,” John says.
Despite this setback, private enterprise would eventually win out when it came to wharf building. But private ownership of the docks meant that maintenance was sporadic, at best.
“You’d build your dock and then you’d maintain it or not,” says John. “The river flooded every year, so they were always in a terrible state of repair. It was a fairly unappealing place.”
And when it rains heavy, the Waterfront is still a shit-filled dump.