Popular Press
PGE Park Should Honor Goose Hollow Neighborhood's History (Tanner Creek and Chinese Vegetable Farms)
The Oregonian
(2010)
Abstract
Plans for remodeling PGE Park to accommodate Major League Soccer recently came before Portland's Design Review Commission. The commission staff's assessment of the plans suggested closer attention to preserving the "community's history" and "local identity." Indeed.
The Goose Hollow neighborhood and the now-buried Tanner Creek occupy a unique niche in Portland's history, one that any new development in the area should recognize.
As the design commission staff acknowledged, the small plaque currently at PGE Park is inadequate to the task, and the stadium's remodel is an opportunity to make the neighborhood's history explicit in a public space.
In 1845 Daniel Lownsdale took up a land claim at the far west of the city. Lownsdale started a tannery on the current site of the Multnomah Athletic Club and PGE Park, near a dense forest of hemlock trees. According to Joseph Gaston's 1911 history of Portland, Lownsdale's was the only tannery north of Mexico and west of the Rockies, and it played a significant role in boosting commerce for the young frontier town. Lownsdale chose the location because it was next to a creek that meandered in a deep gulch near what is now 18th Avenue.
Tanner Creek was once an important part of Portland. In a column in The Oregonian from the 1920s called "Do You Remember?" readers recalled catching trout in the creek and splashing in its swimming holes. One person remembered when he and his friends caught 60 trout "one fine afternoon ... between Sixteenth and Washington streets and the Willamette River" (March 21, 1922). Another recalled the days when he caught crawfish "in the springs along the bottoms" (July 29, 1921). And still another remembered it as "the beautiful trout stream up what is now Jefferson street, ran through what is now Multnomah field, crossed [Burnside] ... and reached the river at about what is now Quimby street" (Aug. 26, 1921).
Tanner Creek meandered through Goose Hollow and Northwest Portland and flowed into Couch Lake, which covered parts of the current neighborhoods of Old Town and the Pearl District, which were largely wetlands at the time. Weinhard Brewery was once on the banks of Tanner Creek. An article in The Oregonian claimed that the best place to catch catfish was in the lake where Union Station now stands (July 14, 1921).
Tanner Creek Gulch owns parts of Portland's history that are now largely forgotten. Stories from The Oregonian mention Native Americans living in the west end of Portland in the early days of the city, specifically around Southwest Alder Street (July 2 and Oct. 11, 1921). Stories referred to them selling kindling and wild berries to households in the city.
Chinese vegetable gardens also are mostly forgotten in Portland's collective memory, although in the 1890s truck farms covered 21 acres in Tanner Creek Gulch from Burnside to Southwest Jefferson and up Alder streets. At a time of exclusions and abuse of Chinese inhabitants, they were allowed to farm this "undesirable" land. A 1901 map shows Chinese vegetable gardens and shanties as far as the south side of Jefferson between Southwest 18th and 20th (the current site of the Methodist church), at Southwest 20th and Salmon (the current site of the Multnomah Athletic Club's parking structure) all the way down the slope of the gulch to what is now the football field for Lincoln High School.
Tanner Creek, diverted underground -- buried from 1887 to 1894 -- now runs to the Willamette River in an unglamorous pipe. Many of the gullies, cuts, gulches and swampy lowlands created by the creek over time have long since been filled in. The most notable example is the infill that occurred around Southwest 18th, Alder and Burnside -- land where PGE Park now stands but where once stood two large trestles for crossing Tanner Creek Gulch. But the creek's physical presence is still felt in the hollow it carved out of the West Hills and in Goose Hollow's identity.
Since 1996, when the City Council adopted the Goose Hollow District Design Guidelines, the city has called for developments to "recognize the course of the historic Tanner Creek and emphasize the district's connection with the creek on site developments ... including and immediately adjacent to the historic course of the creek."
Now is the time to seize the opportunity, expressed in the guidelines for 14 years, to make recalling Tanner Creek explicit.
PGE Park's redesign could easily -- and should be required to -- recall this important neighborhood and city history through creative design features, a water feature, use of historic photos or through public art designed to reference Goose Hollow's history.
Tracy Prince, a Goose Hollow resident, is a scholar in residence at Portland State University's Center for Public Humanities and is writing a book on Goose Hollow's history.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/04/pge_park_should_honor_goose_ho.html
Keywords
- history,
- Goose Hollow,
- Tanner Creek,
- Chinese vegetable gardens,
- historical hydrology,
- Portland
Disciplines
Publication Date
April 10, 2010
Citation Information
Tracy J. Prince. "PGE Park Should Honor Goose Hollow Neighborhood's History (Tanner Creek and Chinese Vegetable Farms)" The Oregonian (2010) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tracy-prince/25/