Portland Hits a High Point

By Amy Rose Davis

The City of Roses is in full bloom this

spring with construction projects in and around the downtown core area. Beyond the boom in new and remodeled commercial buildings, Portland is getting a facelift on its infrastructure as well with TriMet projects and Portland’s Eastside Combined Sewer Overflow project.

TriMet Portland Mall Project

Possibly the most visible project in the core downtown area is the addition of TriMet’s MAX light rail to the bus mall on Fifth and Sixth avenues. The bus mall project adds light rail to the downtown bus mall starting at Union Station in the north and proceeding to Portland State University Station in the south. The Portland Mall project is one half of TriMet’s South Corridor Project; the other half of the project will bring a north/south light-rail route to the Interstate 205 corridor from downtown Portland to Clackamas, Ore. Rob Barnard, director of mall design and construction, says the city is seeing results from the Portland Mall project even before construction is complete. “One goal is to revitalize the downtown area,” he says. “In addition to our project, you see a lot of construction going on downtown, and we have to work together with all of that.” He says that projects such as a new building at Portland State University and the renovation of the former Meier & Frank online when we started staging. We’ve had to figure out how we’re all going to do our work and keep downtown moving. It’s a good problem to have.”

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Barnard says that a critical component of the success of the project so far has been breaking the project into segments with each segment functioning with separate teams. The project is broken up into North, Central and South Mall segments and within each segment. Team project leads communicate closely with businesses in advance to clarify when their businesses will be affected by street closures, construction and other factors.

The project has had the typical issues facing any project with heavy underground work. “You never know what you’re going to get,” Barnard says of opening up the ground. “Some of these lines are over 100 years old and aren’t exactly where they said they were.”

Barnard says that despite the problems, all of the heavy civil work is scheduled to be finished on time by the middle of July. The project is scheduled to be open for revenue in September 2009.

The budget for the Portland Mall portion of the South Corridor Project is just less than $207 million. The project is a CM/GC project and is a joint venture between Stacy and Witbeck of Alameda, Calif., and Kiewit Pacific of Vancouver, Wash.

The Nines Luxury Hotel

One of the most loved buildings in downtown Portland is getting a new purpose with the addition of a luxury hotel in its upper floors. The Meier & Frank building will soon house The Nines, a luxury hotel owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts as part of its Luxury Collection.

The Nines will occupy nine floors atop the existing Macy’s Department Store on the lower five floors of the building. “The building is actually three separate buildings,” says Dick Burnham, operations director at Hoffman. “The first was built in 1908, then there was an addition in 1914 and a third addition in 1932 that Hoffman built.”

At a project cost of $133 million, the finished hotel will include 331 guest rooms, a 7,000 sq ft ballroom, 7,000 sq ft of additional meeting space, an atrium restaurant on the lobby level and a rooftop lounge.The architect is SERA Architects. KPFF, Portland, is providing structural engineering services, and PAE Consulting Engineers Portland, is providing mechanical and electrical engineering services The developer is Sage Hospitality Resources, Denver, Colo. An important piece of the project is the approach to creating a hollow square design out of the former department store space. Designers created an atrium approach that will provide natural light to both exterior and interior rooms. The design essentially hollows out the center of the building all the way down to the eighthfloor lobby. Interior rooms will have a view of the glass-roofed lobby.

The building is aiming for LEED silver certification with the use of water-conservation plumbing and energy-efficient mechanical systems. Burnham adds that Hoffman has recycled over 25 million lbs of demolition debris.

Kelly McCourt of Sage Hospitality Resources says the hotel will bring “increased energy” to the downtown area, especially since it’s located right next to Pioneer Square – Portland’s “living room.” The hotel is scheduled to have a soft opening in September with a grand opening in October.

Deschutes Brewery

The buzz among Portland beer blogs has been growing with excitement for months now with the news that Deschutes Brewery would open a second brewpub in Portland. Bend based Deschutes Brewery plans to open its Portland Pub in the heart of the Pearl District with a series of preopening events in late April and a grand opening in early May.

“Portland is a market we’ve very much wanted to get into,” says Craig Mavis of Deschutes Brewery. The brewery looked at several buildings before deciding to develop a former auto body shop at 11th Avenue and NW Davis. “It really suits our focus,” Mavis adds.

The Portland Pub project will be a fullservice restaurant and brewery with seating Portland is the general contractor with contracts of approximately $3.8 million between two owner entities. Portland development firm Gerding Edlen, is part owner of the core shell and represents the other owners for that portion of the project; the remainder of the project is owned by Deschutes Brewery.

Emmons Architects of Portland is providing design services. EC Co. of Portland; NW Structural Components of Hillsboro, Ore., and Glumac Engineering of Portland provided electric, ornamental steel and engineering services, respectively.

Mavis says some of the masonry needed to be rebuilt and there was some steel reinforcing to do in the building, but the bigger challenge was in configuring what was essentially a large open space. “In a business like this, you have to work off how many tables you need, how much revenue you need, how much kitchen space and for us, how much space for brewing,” he adds. A unique feature of the project also required some special coordination. Deschutes Brewery purchased 100 old timbers from the former Meier & Frank warehouse just up the street from the brewpub location. However, the timbers had to be sent to a milling company in Sherwood, Ore., for cleaning and removing spikes, nails and other debris before cutting into specified dimensions.

“We’ve reused almost all of those timbers inside the space,” said Jerry Korsmo, R&H project manager. “Some were cut up for paneling, some are being used for furniture and the largest is being used for the main bar.” Included in the brewery’s design are original carvings by Northwest chainsaw artist Skip Armstrong. The interior of the restaurant includes a square dining space that the construction team is calling “the Cube.” At the top of each side of the cube is a beam with a separate carving by Armstrong. Planned themes include otters, elk and cougars.

Making Portland More Livable

A vital part of Portland city life is the Willamette River, and the city of Portland is working hard to revitalize it.

Historically, the Willamette River suffers from sewage overflow almost every time it rains in the city. In 1992, Portland embarked on a 20-year plan to reduce overflows to the Willamette by expanding sewage treatment facilities and building a new pipeline system to reduce storm runoffs to the river by 94%.

Paul Gribbon, program manager with the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, says the latest piece of the 20-year plan the Eastside Big Pipe project is the culmination of the overall project. The first three phases included a stormwater sump and downspout disconnection program, outflow control on the Columbia Slough and installation of a new pipeline on the west side of Portland.

The Eastside Big Pipe project is the biggest project of the overall plan. The new pipe will extend from SE McLoughlin Blvd and 17th Avenue in the south for 6 mi to the Swan Island Pump Station. The tunnel will be 22 ft in diameter and will be accessible through a series of seven shafts along the route. Contracting services are being provided by Kiewit-Bilfinger Berger joint venture of Portland. The design engineer is Parsons Brinckerhoff, Portland office. Jacobs Associates of San Francisco is providing construction management support. Gribbon said the cost estimate is tough to calculate given that the project started in the early 90s. “The original estimates were done in 1993 dollars, so you have a combination of past and future dollars,” he says. The combined project estimate for the 20-year period is $1.4 billion.

Gribbon says the geology of Portland has been the project’s biggest obstacle. “We had to make sure we had the right type of machine, the right contractor to get through the geology,” he adds. “We had a lot of surface work to do and had to work around businesses, making sure they all have access to their loading docks. We’re working underground in a confined space with concrete tunnel segments and a lot of people involved.”

The project is scheduled for completion no later than Dec. 1, 2011.