Fighting for a say in the fate of the Linnton neighborhood, the Braided River Campaign wants you to know its secrets — the earthquakes, floods, obscure city planning documents, hot air balloons and the KKK
Buried secrets lie beneath Portland’s Northwest Industrial District.
Wander between Northwest St. Helens Road and the Willamette River and you’ll come across asphalt manufacturing, petroleum tank farms, warehouses both active and derelict, weeds buckling empty lots, vacant docks, and if you know where to look, a tiny, decommissioned railroad station. What you won’t see is the 598-acre lake beneath it all.
European-American settlers named it Guild’s Lake after themselves when they took it from Chinookan and Kalapuyan people. They threw a big party there in 1905, with fanfare including a “bridge of nations” stretching to a human-made island, an old-timey airship and a hot air balloon, racist exhibits, and the unveiling of the Sacagawea statue that now stands in Washington Park. It was the first World’s Fair on the West Coast: the four-month-long Lewis and Clark Exposition.
When the party was over, Portland leaders zoned the Guild’s Lake area for industrial use, eventually filling in the lakes (there were actually three), paving them over, and turning them into what is now an Environmental Protection Agency-designated Superfund site, one of the most heavily polluted stretches of riverfront in the entire country. In doing so, Portland also managed to displace and dispossess a working-class African American neighborhood that paralleled Albina and Vanport.
Today, the industrial neighborhood built on a lake features hundreds of towering gas tanks owned by Chevron and other multinational fossil fuel corporations. Some of these tanks are dangerously old. They’re all built in a flood zone, atop a fault line that could quake any time.
Despite these hazards, the area is pressed by the creep of “upzoning,” the process by which developers gentrify dilapidated city blocks into luxury condominiums. And at the north end is Linnton, a once-working-class town that’s now a Portland neighborhood fighting for a say in its own fate.
The Braided River Campaign wants Portland residents to know about this. And founder Sarah Taylor wants city leaders to do something about it. The future of her Linnton neighborhood is at stake, and she says the history has been buried for far too long.
The Green Working Waterfront: a ‘different economic paradigm’
Taylor was the principal of Sunnyside Environmental School from its founding in 1994 until she retired in 2019. Since then, what started as a pet project has grown into the Braided River Campaign, a small but outspoken movement to influence city zoning and development along Portland’s north waterfront.
Originally a one-woman climate-change tour for high school kids, Braided River was soon giving tours to the public, and even to government officials. She recently hosted a tour for representatives from the Governor’s Office, the Port of Portland, Oregon Metro and the city of Portland.
Waterfront tours
For information about the Braided River Campaign’s tours of the Northwest waterfront, contact the group through its website.
“They partly came because I’d gotten mad,” Taylor said, laughing. “I think they were trying to be nice to me.” But she said government leaders seemed shocked after seeing and hearing what she had to share. And city planners have been sitting down for regular meetings with her.
Taylor realized she needed to start advocating for community inclusion and zoning changes. Braided River has grown over the past year into a loosely knit coalition including representatives from other local environmental groups such as the Portland Audubon Society and Willamette River Cleanup.
Its goal is to turn Portland’s northwest bank between the Broadway Bridge and Sauvie Island into what Taylor calls a “green working waterfront.”
“We’re advocating for a mixed-use harbor,” Taylor explained. “You can have places for people to fish, you can have clean jobs, you can have adequate housing, and we don’t need to pick one or another.”
She described her vision as a working-class neighborhood with amenities such as child care and clinics, supported by environmentally sustainable jobs, all rooted in the principles of equity and environmental justice, offering ample riverfront access to residents and resting stops every quarter-mile for salmon.
“We’re definitely about not having it be the South Waterfront,” Taylor emphasized. “We’re not trying to just have this be where millionaires live one day. We want it to stay a working waterfront.”
“We’re advocating for a mixed-use harbor. You can have places for people to fish, you can have clean jobs, you can have adequate housing, and we don’t need to pick one or another.”
Through the Braided River Campaign, Taylor is applying pressure to city planners and “trying to get them to create a different economic paradigm,” she said.
Tom Armstrong, supervising planner at Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, said he’s been meeting with Taylor monthly since September.
“The city shares those goals of a green working waterfront,” Armstrong told Street Roots, “but it’s going to be very difficult to implement.” He said the primary obstacle is financing. Cleaning and restoring the river is expensive.
“The challenge is to figure out who pays for that,” Armstrong said. “What is that mechanism? And what is that impact on development opportunity, and how significant is that?”
Armstrong acknowledged that the city’s current development pattern carries its own costs. “The community currently pays for poor water quality. We suffer from the consequences of harbor contamination.”
A century and a half of contamination
Portland’s harbor contamination began with the arrival of European settlers. While malaria, brought in by white people, killed an estimated 10,000 Chinookan and Kalapuyan people in the Willamette Valley and Lower Columbia during the 1830s and 1840s, European-Americans took the opportunity to snatch up land.
In 1847, Peter and Elizabeth Guild (pronounced “guile”) claimed ownership of the wetland that would bear their name, Guild’s Lake. This claim was legitimized by the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Law, which allowed white men and their wives — specifically excluding Black and Hawaiian people — to receive 320 acres each of land stripped of Indian title. Over the next half-century, the crescent of shoreline now echoed by the curve of Northwest St. Helens Road was dotted with farms and dairies leased out to Chinese and Vietnamese farmers.
Wetlands are complex ecosystems, and Guild’s Lake supplied Native foodways with camas, wapato, waterfowl and many kinds of fish. But wetlands have little capital value, Portland’s white residents considered Guild’s Lake an unhealthy and chaotic eyesore. As such, it was populated only by those who society considered undesirable. On a March day in 1883, soon after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, 30 Ku Klux Klan members rampaged around Guild’s Lake, burning down Asian workers’ farmhouses and tearing up their crops.
In 1905, Portland wanted to position itself as an economically desirable West Coast city. It transformed the wetland into a lake by pumping in water from the Willamette. City bigshots built Spanish colonial buildings and a bridge, printed dazzling posters advertising the Lewis and Clark Exposition, and drew in more than 1.5 million visitors from around the country.
Soon after the hubbub of the expo had died down, land speculators started eyeballing the lake as a nice place for factories, if only they could do something about all the trash.
The city had built a garbage incinerator on the north end of the lake. For decades, it was the only place for Portlanders to put their trash, and it was woefully inadequate for the job. Landfill piled up around it, sloughing garbage into the lake, which became a festering swamp of rats, putrid food and dead horses spreading bubonic plague — an unhealthy and chaotic eyesore indeed.
Land speculators launched efforts to fill in the lake, terrace the hillsides, and develop the port. Portland City Council adopted a plan in 1920 created by business elites, including Port of Portland executives, for “the development of water ways, public terminals, and industrial sites” in the Guild’s Lake area. The plan was to move the shipping channel from the east side of Swan Island to the west side, opening up the west bank of the Willamette as marine industrial real estate. Portland citizens voted against the plan, but the Port of Portland went ahead with it anyway. It bought Swan Island for $120,577 and started dredging the river for the new shipping channel.
Everything between Portland and Linnton would be marine industry — if it weren’t for those pesky lakes taking up so much real estate. The city of Portland annexed the town of Linnton. The Port of Portland dumped 25 million cubic yards of silt into Guild’s Lake and used more to connect Swan Island to the Willamette’s east bank. The plan to industrialize the wetland was underway.
Filling the wetland blocked natural water runoff from Forest Park, resulting in landslides, floods and drainage problems, so developers rerouted waterways such as Balch’s Creek (the one that runs from Portland Audubon, past the Witch’s Castle and through Macleay Park) into underground storm sewers.
As they created new real estate by filling in the lake, the Port of Portland dispossessed farmers and local families already living around it.
Oregon law grants the Port of Portland the power of eminent domain, allowing it to “acquire, by condemnation or otherwise, private property necessary or convenient in carrying out any power granted the port.”
Taylor said that over the decades, the Port of Portland has used eminent domain to drive “lots and lots” of families from their farmland and homes to develop the Northwest Industrial District. Industrial companies have pressured and coerced people off their land, as well. Today you can still see a few stalwart holdouts, antique Portland Craftsmans surrounded by active steel yards, oil drums, tanker cars and scrap mounds.
“They’re sitting on this whole riverfront property,” Taylor said, gesturing to the Port of Portland’s vacant Terminal 2. “It all belonged to somebody. It was somebody’s farm or somebody’s fishing ground, and they just slowly took it over.” Public and small-business access to the river has been blocked, she said. And today, much of the area’s industrial land isn’t even in use, bearing only static shadows of a once-busy wartime shipbuilding center.
‘Do we believe in sacrificial zoning?’
By the 1940s, the lakeless vision was realized. Portland had become one of the premier shipbuilding centers on the West Coast, and workers flocked to build ships for the wartime effort. Industrial companies in Northwest Portland provided worker amenities, like basketball courts, child care centers and housing. Guild’s Lake Court was home to the first wave of African American families moving to Portland for wartime work. It was second only to Vanport among Portland’s largest wartime housing centers. When Vanport flooded, refugees sought shelter at Guild’s Lake Court, inciting the outrage of industrial kingpins, who motioned to remove public housing altogether.
Women played a key role in wartime shipbuilding, too. The Kaiser Shipyards in particular hired a number of women shipbuilders in Portland.
As manufacturing — tires and auto parts, paper and lumber, aluminum, pharmaceuticals, and coffee — bloomed in Northwest Portland over subsequent decades, families were redlined out, displaced by zoning laws, or driven away by increasingly toxic conditions. Companies splashed creosote, oil, PCB, DDT, arsenic and heavy metals into the sediment. By the 1990s, alarms were sounding at the EPA.
Some spots along the north reaches of Front Avenue look like empty fields of wildflowers, but in fact the soil is so toxic the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has posted signs warning people to stay away. Pregnant people and children especially are advised not to go near certain stretches of waterfront. Taylor said she’s concerned that the lingering pollution might still have an impact on the area’s residents, including today’s youths.
Despite the Northwest’s history of working-class diversity, Linnton today clocks in as both whiter and higher-income than the neighboring Pearl District, according to Niche.com.
In addition to being a Superfund cleanup site, the Northwest Industrial District is now considered a Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub, the crossroads where most of Oregon’s fossil fuels are shipped in for distribution across the state. It features Kinder Morgan’s Olympic Pipeline terminal, which pipes in fossil fuels from refineries in Washington, and Zenith tanker cars moving oil in and out of the railyards, as well as the infamous tank farms.
That a Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub is built on the Portland Hills fault line, which could quake any time, and that the silt ground fill is prone to liquefaction are matters of some local alarm. And that’s not to mention that it all sits in a 100-year Special Flood Hazard Area designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Taylor called this a “sacrifice zone,” a nexus of environmental travesty, economic displacement and social injustice. “Why would the city put every dangerous thing in one person’s neighborhood?” Taylor asked. “Do we believe in sacrificial zoning? Do we really believe that one tiny, tiny community should bear the brunt of all our pollution? Just philosophically, do we think that’s OK? Not to mention the danger if those tanks blow up, the danger to our river and to our economy.”
If the tank farms are damaged by a flood like the one that happened in 1996 or if the Olympic Pipeline explodes like it did in 1999, burning children to death in Bellingham, Washington, it has the potential to devastate the Linnton community, Forest Park, the Willamette River and the Columbia River as far west as the coast.
The obscure document shaping Portland’s future
“This stretch is the most degraded stretch of river in the entire state of Oregon,” said Bob Sallinger, Portland Audubon’s conservation director, who’s working with the Braided River Campaign. He added that river restoration “is important from both an ecological and social perspective.”
Sallinger said there have been efforts to update the waterfront before, but powerful industry representatives have blocked them by invoking something called an economic opportunity analysis. It’s a research process to make sure the city has enough land for the coming years of city growth. The state requires a new economic opportunity analysis from Portland every five to seven years. If city plans don’t fit within the analysis, the state can veto them.
Sallinger told Street Roots the city’s economic opportunity analysis is “one of the more significant and well hidden obstacles to achieving a healthy, equitable green working waterfront.” He said that over the years, “industry has used this obscure and largely invisible process to maintain a stranglehold on the status quo along the river.”
For years, Sallinger worked with city planners on the North Reach River Plan. He said it took the better part of a decade to hammer out, and though the outcome wasn’t perfect, it was an improvement. “It included a greenway trail. It included new river regulations,” he said.
City Council adopted the plan. Sallinger gave a speech. He’d started this journey as a young man, and during the course of this project, he’d had two children, whom he watched learn to walk and talk and go to kindergarten, and he’d put himself through four years of law school at night. It had been a long road. And finally, the reality of a greener waterfront was within reach.
“We finally get this damn plan adopted after this torturous, torturous process,” Sallinger said, but river industry interests had other ideas. Bypassing the city, industry leaders went to Salem and appealed to the Land Use Court of Appeals, claiming that there was a deficit of industrial land. They also said there was no updated economic opportunity analysis verifying the city’s ability to adopt the North Reach River Plan and preserve the existing industrial land base.
And with that, Sallinger’s years of work went out the window. “They threw out the entire plan. That plan never went into effect,” he said. And the city has not tried to implement it again. “So when I say the industry has had a stranglehold on this river, and been able to maintain the status quo through the economic opportunities analysis, it’s very real,” Sallinger said.
“We don’t even believe that there’s a deficit, and I think the facts are bearing that out,” he said. “There’s a lot of vacant land on that river, and you have big industrial landowners like the Port of Portland now divesting themselves of land because they can’t fill it.”
The Port of Portland’s vacant Terminal 2, for example, is the possible future site of a baseball stadium. “So we always felt that eventually the facade would come off, and I think that’s what’s finally happening,” Sallinger said.
He said the economic opportunity analysis is largely shaped by information that comes from industry representatives themselves, usually behind closed doors. But he said that people are beginning to realize the industrial land crisis is a “false crisis” and that the public is starting to call for their voices to be heard alongside industry voices.
He wrote last year that the city needs to make the “wonky and esoteric” economic opportunity analysis process more transparent and inclusive of the public.
The city of Portland is now undergoing a new economic opportunity analysis, and Sallinger stressed the importance of the public having a say in it this time, lest it sabotage future efforts at progress before they start, just as previous analysis sabotaged the North River Reach Plan.
Over at city offices, Armstrong supports Braided River’s overarching aims, at least in theory. “Their vision for a green working waterfront fits with the city’s goals and policies,” he said.
Armstrong said the city doesn’t plan to see luxury condos developing any farther north along Front Avenue than they already have, saying there’s a “hard line” just north of the Fremont Bridge. After the last economic opportunity analysis, conducted in 2016, the city passed zoning code regulations to make it more difficult to convert industrial land into non-industrial uses.
He explained that the city needs to preserve its industrial zones because there’s no room to expand them outward, and they can’t expand upward like commercial and residential zones can.
Armstrong said the finite nature of Portland’s industrial land space drives up competition for it.
“Whether it’s industrial development and employment opportunity or it’s habitat protection for salmon recovery, harbor cleanup, public access to the river, we have a confined, finite space where a lot of uses and functions want to go in there,” Armstrong said. “And we’re trying to sort out the policy decision about how can we accommodate those various (interests).”
Armstrong said the city wants to see “middle wage” jobs for people without college degrees, jobs with better pay and career ladders than, say, retail positions. “Those tend to be industrial jobs,” he said.
“We’re really early on in this process,” Armstrong said of the current economic opportunity analysis. He said they’ll start having more public discussions about these issues in late summer or fall of this year, and plans will go to City Council next year. Those plans will determine the future of the “unhealthy and chaotic eyesore” that was once a bustling wetland ecosystem, and the future of neighborhoods across Portland, including Linnton.
Sallinger said he’s been working on restoring and protecting this stretch of river for about three decades, and he’s excited that Braided River Campaign is bringing community voices into a process that’s previously been mostly obscure. It’s “creating the opportunity for the community to really take back our river,” he said.
Sallinger noted a few components of this multifaceted goal to create a green working waterfront that is “healthy for workers, marginalized communities, river users, surrounding communities and wildlife”:
- Developing a more holistic community vision for the river.
- Cleaning up contaminants in and along the river.
- Protecting and restoring habitat sites.
- Increasing public river access.
- Integrating green infrastructure like trees and green roofs.
- Transitioning fossil fuel tank farms to other uses.
- Creating good jobs with a climate-friendly economy.
Taylor said it’s high time city planners start righting generations of social, environmental and economic wrongs around Guild’s Lake, which now lies beneath the pavement, filled in with garbage, ash and silt.
“We can have jobs without polluting and killing people,” she said. “It’s critical to our lives.”
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