Mt. Hood

Rising like a rocket ship ready to launch, the sleek First Interstate Center (now known as the Wells Fargo Center) signaled Portland’s bold new future upon its completion in 1972. Designed by Los Angeles architect Charles Luckman, it stood 541 feet tall, loftier than any other building in the state.

Yet many Portlanders regarded the mass of white marble not as an iconic addition to a modern big-city skyline, but as a threat to the region’s beloved civic symbol: Mount Hood. As visiting architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable put it in a New York Times column: “Against the suave schlock of California architectural imports, Mount Hood doesn’t stand a chance.”

But coincidentally, a new citizens advisory committee (for the first time made up of more ordinary Joes than downtown power brokers) was at work on a new blueprint for the city, outlining plans for future features like the transit mall and Pioneer Courthouse Square. To their to-do list they added: protect key vistas of Mount Hood.

“People didn’t call it ‘livability,’ and they didn’t worry about ‘the nature deficit’ back then,” says Valerie Hope, then a half-time city staffer serving on the committee. “They just wanted to preserve the quality of life and things that mattered.”

The committee proposed two protected views—from Washington Park’s Rose Garden and from the Sunset Highway’s Vista Tunnel. Along these two corridors, new buildings would be barred from interfering with the sight lines of the mountain.

But in the late ’70s, the desire for postcard views ran headfirst into hopes for new housing, recalls retired city planner Rod O’Hiser. As the Portland City Council was about to vote the corridors into downtown’s zoning laws, a developer proposed a high-rise apartment at SW Broadway and Market Street, squarely in the path of the view from the Vista Tunnel.

The council’s vote? “Aye” to the corridor from Washington Park; “nay” to views near the Vista Tunnel. Luckily, the era’s spiking interest rates killed the original apartment-tower plans, but in 1984 another skyscraper rose to block the view: the 509-foot KOIN Center.

In 1991, the city set aside two more perspectives of Mount Hood—from the Vista Avenue Viaduct near Goose Hollow and from Oregon Health & Science University. And so, today, three invisible wedges of building-free space stretch through the city, forever assuring that Mount Hood remains nestled in—rather than blocked by—the growing skyline. —Randy Gragg