Transit mall MAX: Perk or poison for downtown?

More than a spruce-up, TriMet and PDC try to remake NW blocks

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Oct 9, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (12 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / Portland Tribune

As construction continues on bus mall improvements north of West Burnside Street on Fifth and Sixth avenues, the question remains: How do you make the area more appealing to businesses and pedestrians?

There’s more than a spring in Tad Savinar’s step as he walks up Northwest Sixth Avenue.

This is the transit mall north of West Burnside Street, where for 20 years buses heading downtown from all over the city have dominated the street. And for those 20 years and longer, Sixth Avenue and parallel Fifth Avenue have presented pedestrians with the least inviting stretch in the downtown core.

The two streets have been ghost town avenues where people sped through as quickly as possible on buses, and walked through only if they had to, or were in search of a quick fix from one of the many dealers who have made the north transit mall the epicenter of the city’s cocaine trade.

But as he walks, Savinar sees a streetscape different from the one visible to the few passing pedestrians.

He sees change. Some of that already has occurred, subtly and under Savinar’s below-the-radar orchestration. New galleries have moved in on Sixth, and offices have settled in on Fifth. Portland police say street crime in the entire Old Town neighborhood is down this year.

Artist, playwright and developer Savinar is being paid by TriMet to help create a new street environment on Northwest Fifth and Sixth avenues.

But some of the changes, the big ones, are still to come.

A year from now, MAX trains will join the buses running through this transit mall, both north and south of Burnside. There are many who believe the trains will make Northwest Fifth and Sixth even more uninviting, and lead to further decay.

Rick Potestio, a local architect who has advised the city on transportation projects, calls the trains “a continuously moving steel wall,” that will cut off the streets and overwhelm any attempts to enliven them.

“Businesses tend to move their doorways away from the mall,” says Rudy Barton, a Portland State University architecture professor, who says trains north of Burnside will only make the street problems worse, that transit malls and pedestrian shopping streets rarely work well together.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” says Sam Galbreath, local development consultant and one-time staff member of the Portland Development Commission, about street level activity once cars, buses and trains start sharing the road. Galbreath says the interweaving cars, buses and trains will make the transit mall streets south and north of Burnside decidedly unfriendly for pedestrians.

But Savinar says these two long-neglected avenues will come alive.

“In urban settings you add trains, you add activity,” Savinar says.

Cash helps propel vision

TriMet and the Portland Development Commission have put up the money, more than $1 million combined, for Savinar to pursue his block-by-block improvement program over the past two years.

Savinar has made an inventory of every storefront along the transit mall, both north and south of West Burnside. He has worked with property owners to re-make their shops or businesses in a way that will make the transit mall more pedestrian-friendly.

Savinar has been given some unusual tools to work with. It’s one thing to try to talk a shop owner into making changes. Savinar has money to come up with ideas and pay architects to sketch them out.

When Savinar wanted the Roseland Theater on Northwest Sixth Avenue to make its Sixth Street frontage more engaged with the street, he used TriMet money to pay architect Jeremy Cogdill $900 to envision something better.

He took the designs showing glass panels to the Roseland’s owners and told them he could get a $64,000 PDC grant to help pay for the project.

Savinar has worked out a deal with the city’s planning department to get city planners to provide upfront help to his projects, so the city’s design review process becomes less of an obstacle.

Convinced, the Roseland’s owners put up more than $250,000 of their own money to remake their front along Sixth Avenue with new awnings, lighting and signs.

Shop by shop, Savinar can show the changes his program has instituted or encouraged, and others he is hoping property owners take up.

Two new art galleries have taken root on Northwest Sixth, a hotbed of activity because of the proliferating ground floor artists’ spaces at nearby Everett Street Lofts. New office space has been developed on both Fifth and Sixth, though Savinar says in the long run, the streets are going to need more retail shops, not just offices.

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