Veterans Memorial Coliseum’s Restoration

After 15 years of grassroots effort to save Veterans Memorial Coliseum, this June, construction began on a two-year, $40 million restoration from a design by renowned Chicago firm Perkins + Will with Portland’s Scott Edwards Architecture. For me, the restoration means it’s time to celebrate.

I co-founded the Friends of Memorial Coliseum with architect Stuart Emmons in 2009 when the arena was first threatened with demolition. Then-mayor Sam Adams and Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson had conspired to build a minor-league baseball stadium on the Coliseum site after the Timbers’ move to Major League Soccer necessitated conversion of Providence Park to a soccer-only facility, booting out the Portland Beavers. I particularly remember a public forum at North Portland’s Leftbank building, just across Broadway from the Coliseum, when the mayor, expecting enthusiastic support for the minor-league ballpark, instead met a wave of opposition. Acclaimed Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale, an Adams campaign supporter, confronted the mayor outside the building afterward, and a Blazer fan affixed flyers to a nearby telephone pole exclaiming, “SAVE WALTON’S HOUSE.”

It wasn’t just that Memorial Coliseum was the arena where our beloved Portland Trail Blazers won the 1977 NBA championship, perhaps the greatest moment of collective civic joy in our city’s history. It wasn’t just that my mom had seen The Beatles play there in 1965 or that nearly every great rock and pop act of the mid-to-late 20th century had also performed at the Coliseum, from the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac. (Which is to say nothing of sold-out speeches by the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama.) It was that the Coliseum is a one-of-a-kind work of modernist architecture: seemingly the only arena in the world offering a 360-degree view from its seats to the outside — a building equivalent in size to over two city blocks that’s standing on just four columns.

We won that initial David-and-Goliath political struggle in 2009, convincing Mayor Adams and City Council to abandon demolition plans, largely thanks to lobbying and Council testimony from local veteran leaders including former governor Victor Atiyeh, and from the late City Council member Nick Fish, who compared the Coliseum’s preservation-moment to that of New York’s original Penn Station (which had galvanized America’s historic preservation movement). Coliseum demolition plans were abandoned, yet we knew the game would not truly be won until the arena was restored. And to borrow from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “ay, there’s the rub!”

Though Adams and subsequent mayors offered varying levels of support for a Coliseum renovation, over a decade of fits and starts ensued. A 2012 renovation plan under Adams failed to come to a City Council vote. Then in 2014, the Coliseum was again threatened with demolition in a campaign by then-City Council member Steve Novick. After we lobbied the National Trust for Historic Preservation for help, the organization declared the Coliseum a National Treasure in 2016, but it offered no additional legal protections. Mayor Charlie Hales commissioned a third-party economic study which determined the Coliseum had a viable role to play as the city’s only mid-sized venue between large downtown concert halls like Arlene Schnitzer (at about 3,000 seats) and the 20,000-seat Moda Center. A new renovation plan emerged in 2019. But because funds were based on a hotel tax, the 2020 pandemic derailed that plan. 

As an Oregon Ducks football fan, who grew up watching a losing team turn into a contender, I know that the longer you suffer and wait for victory, the sweeter it feels when you get there. No wonder after 15 years, Stuart and I, along with early Memorial Coliseum supporters like architects Rick Potestio, Joseph Readdy and Randy Higgins and supporting organizations like Restore Oregon, the American Institute of Architects and the Architectural Heritage Center, are ready to pop the champagne cork.

That said, it’s worth noting that back in the sixties, Memorial Coliseum wrongly displaced hundreds of residents of Albina, principally Black. It should have been built somewhere else. Yet the Coliseum’s restoration has been supported by Albina Vision, the wonderful organization successfully working to rebuild the neighborhood. Hopefully, the restored arena can serve its 21st century Albina neighborhood as an ongoing positive gesture to the community.

$40 million is a heck of a lot of money, but honestly it’s just a step — a big step. By comparison, the proposed budget for restoring or rebuilding another city-owned performance venue, Keller Auditorium, is about $300 million, and if City Council chooses a new build, it could be considerably more. 

And I don’t believe the current restoration will refurbish the operable curtain blocking the view from Memorial Coliseum’s seating bowl to the outside, which due to mechanical concerns, is traditionally only opened for the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade (which passes through the building) each June, or for the occasional Portland Winterhawks hockey matinee. We always hoped the open-curtain configuration could become the default. During a Blazers exhibition game at the Coliseum, I once watched the sun set over the entire downtown skyline. I want all of you to experience that wonder.

Even so, like that June afternoon when the Blazers captured the NBA title, this is a moment to savor and celebrate. Victory at last!