PSU Magazine Spring 2001

gardens adorned a lovely view site, where today the Montgomery Park office building stands. But after the fair, city elders had little interest in preserv– ing the gardens or even the site, so far from the city center. By contrast, Seattle preserved the grounds of the Yukon Exhibition five years later, and today the University of Washington campus stands on the spot. What opportunity did Portland lose, asks Barton, by not doing the same? On the heels of the Lewis and Clark fair, though, city elders did call in planning experts to develop a com– prehensive vision for the city's future. The 1912 Greater Portland Plan, by Edward Bennett, featured ideas then nationally in vogue called the "City Beautiful." The basic concept was to remake American cities in the mode of the grand European capitals-razing buildings to allow broad boulevards to bisect a city. To transform Portland, say, into a Paris. Only two of Bennett's proposed grand avenues were built, however, becoming today's Sandy and Foster boulevards. P erhaps the "missing" roadways affected later designer Robert Moses' thinking, but more likely it was the times. The 1930s ushered in the automobile era. Moses, a self– professed "rubber-tire man," aimed to ensure that no household would sit more than three-fourths of a mile from the convenience of a freeway. Between the Willamette River and what is now 1-205, Moses proposed four more multilane expressways. Oregonians today might cringe at the thought of those rivers of concrete, but one of Moses' rejected recommendations haunts Stumptowners still. Moses advocated an eastbank free– way to be built below grade about seven blocks east of the Willamette River. A sort of 1-405 for the inner southeast. At $9 million, the plan was snickered off the table for being too costly. "That's a decision we're still paying for today," says Barton, who, like many Portland city planners, sees the immense advantages today of hav– ing 1-5 off the riverbank and placed farther east. Such unbuilt projects may be cause for quiet regret by later generations. But built projects can provoke a