What will become of Portland?

The answer lies at the foundation of the city-its people.

In Portland’s downtown, a Ritz Carlton is going up. A few mornings a week, I stop across the street before going into my office to look up, note the height and the new additions, and snap a photo on my phone. The photographic evidence shows the Ritz is going up quick.

Last week some of the food carts that used to sit where the Ritz Carlton rises re-opened a couple of blocks to the north after a suspended shuttered period and a good deal of uncertainty about the future. Not all the food carts that were displaced have re-opened, but some have, along with a few new ones. The people that run them seem hungry for whatever business comes in, and they also seem happy to see familiar customers return. Speaking for myself, I can say that Portland’s downtown hasn’t felt like itself for a while now, but the return of the food carts and especially the people who make them what they are has started to restore what downtown used to—and might again—feel like.

Between the Ritz Carlton and the new location for the food carts, O’Bryant Square—a brick and pavement city park—remains fenced in and closed, as it has been for a few years. This full city block, there in the middle of Portland’s downtown, has been empty save the occasional band of skateboarders who find their way beneath the barbed wire fence to ride on the Square’s waterless fountain and empty brick and cement deck and seat-level walls. The story behind the park’s long closure is that its foundations—due to a questionably engineered or maintained underground parking lot—are unsound.

As I watch the Ritz go up, foundations are mostly what I’m thinking about: What downtown Portland rests on, what it’s built on, what it grows out of. The question about foundations could be asked of any city or town, but Portland is the city I live in and know best, and it’s by far Oregon’s biggest city, and it has a level of national significance and visibility that means a lot to Oregon and those of us who live here.

All three of these places—the place where the food carts have popped up, the place that used to be O’Bryant Square, and the place where the Ritz Carlton rises—matter enormously to each other, and to Portland, and to Oregon. Can and should post-pandemic Portland host a Ritz? Can and should a Portland that commits to a Ritz also host food carts? And what about a gritty downtown park? Corporate space, small business space, completely public space. What is Portland built on, by, and for?  

Asking about Portland’s foundations is also a way of asking about its people. Not just what, but especially who: Who is Portland for, and who gets to weigh in on that?

I remember the people who populated O’Bryant Square before it was fenced off—the mix of lunch breakers, tourists, competing buskers, competing trash pickers, homeless travelers, and lots more. I also remember the people in the food carts who made burritos and potato soup and kimchi and drunken noodles and sambusas and falafel gyros. I don’t yet know what people the Ritz will hold or what relationships those people will develop. But I believe strongly that Portland isn’t Portland without the people of O’Bryant Square or the people who run food carts and the people who mass at them both. These places matter, mostly because these people matter.

It’s hard to know what the Ritz and other big money projects will mean for Portland. It’s a little scary—and a little awesome—to watch this building rise and to guess at the daily burn rate that makes its growth possible. So much money to dig the hole and build up out of it with steel and concrete and glass and who knows what else. So much hope that more money will follow. So much fear, at the same time, that it will displace the projects and people that make Portland Portland.

I like to look up at the top of the Ritz when I stop on the corner before heading into my office. That’s usually where I point my phone camera, too. But it’s down below—below the street and on the street, there in the literal foundations and the human foundations—that the city really becomes what it is. I wonder who Portland will become.

Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.