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COURTING
CHANGE The federal government has landed a glittering curvaceous courthouse in Eugene on a muddy, industrial island wrapped in highways.
The silvery courthouse's grand opening celebration is Dec. 1, but it could take the city of Eugene up to two years to extend 8th Avenue with a pedestrian crosswalk to make it easily accessible. Redeveloping the warehouses, vacant lots and highway strip development surrounding the courthouse could take years more. "I think redevelopment is a ways off there," said local real estate appraiser John Brown. But from his window high in the floating steel ribbons of the building, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan sees a bright future. "I'm going to have fun watching this area redevelop," Hogan said, envisioning the new courthouse providing the "fulcrum" to leverage a lively neighborhood mix of offices, apartments and shops around the new building. But before that vision materializes, the city will have to resolve a lot of outstanding issues about the courthouse neighborhood: • Island. Current city designs for the courthouse neighborhood place it on an isolated traffic island wrapped by a highway that splits to go around it. The freeway now passes to the south, but the city plans to also build another highway along the railway tracks. City planners argue that splitting the huge traffic flow will make it easier for pedestrians, bikes and cars to cross at a new 8th Avenue intersection. But the plan is controversial, with critics arguing that adding another highway will just increase traffic and also split the courthouse from plans for a redeveloped riverfront and or riverfront park. "We don't connect to the river by having the state highway in two places instead of one," said Kevin Matthews, president of the Friends of Eugene (FoE) citizen group. Hogan said that the city should reconsider the idea of a pedestrian overpass if the crosswalk doesn't work. The architect for the courthouse designed one but dropped it for lack of funding. Brown said the city should have had the pedestrian crossing in place in time for the courthouse opening. With such a big attractor across the busy highway, "you know somebody's going to get killed trying to cross." • Riverfront. City plans hope to connect the neighborhood to the riverfront after EWEB moves its industrial operations from the site. But the courthouse itself turns its back on the river, facing south with a loading dock/prisoner entrance on the river side. The new highway and railway tracks also form a wide barrier to the river. • Railroad. The railroad makes for a formidable barrier and a noisy neighbor that could scare away residential or hotel redevelopment. Burying the rail line would be very expensive. Underpasses would be cheaper but also pricey at more than $10 million each. Early plans for road underpasses slashed the neighborhood with long deep trenches that only added new barriers. • Millrace. A few years ago the City Council directed staff to pursue daylighting the historic millrace through the district, a long-held community dream. But the millrace vision remains mired in uncertainty. City staff appear reluctant to actually pursue the project, which they say will be costly and reduce space for development. At a recent council meeting, planning staff suggested reducing the millrace from a wide, boatable linear park with pedestrian paths to a symbolic gutter trickle in a sidewalk. Jerry Diethelm, a retired UO landscape architect who's been pushing for a millrace for three decades, said that would be a big disappointment. "It can't just be sort of decorative," he said. "They need to do a millrace restoration and treat it as a part of the urban watershed." Hogan said he likes the bolder vision for the waterway. "I think a millrace would be wonderful. To me the big ideas are usually the best ideas." • Parks. Conceptual city plans for the area include the possibility of a new "Cannery Square" across from the courthouse. UO architect Mark Gillem has proposed a more ambitious plan, calling for extending the downtown park blocks through the neighborhood to the river. Whether the actual riverfront should be developed in urban concrete or a wide, natural park or something in between remains a contentious community debate. City staff and the business community have opposed adding parkland that will take away from space for development and parking garages. • Parking. City staff and the business community are pushing more for parking than parks in the area. But parking garages are ugly dead zones that can cost $20,000 a space and promote traffic while making an area less pedestrian friendly, critics argue. • History. City plans envision the neighborhood having a historic character. The neighborhood includes a house owned by one of Eugene's first judges and an old cider mill, cannery office, iron foundry and worker houses that are among the few historical buildings left that the city hasn't already destroyed. But the historic "cannery district" flair of the area clashes with the ultramodern steel of the new courthouse, and it's uncertain if it will survive. • Money. Redeveloping the courthouse neighborhood will be expensive. Already city taxpayers have subsidized the federal courthouse with more than $1 million. Some federal money may be available for improvements, particularly with Democrats now in control of Congress. Urban Renewal could provide some funding, but that funding takes money from schools and other government services. The city will have to prioritize where it wants to spend its limited money. Are parks more important than parking garages? Is a millrace a higher priority than more car race highways along the river? Should the city subsidize private developers or public open space? Perhaps the biggest unresolved issue is whether developers will have much interest in actually investing in the area. The silvered courthouse may attract gawkers, but at its heart it's a tin man in terms of foot traffic. For their size, federal courthouses have relatively few people working in them or visiting them on a regular basis. The courthouse neighborhood will also have to compete for city and developer attention and funding with a number of other urban redevelopment projects: on Broadway, at PeaceHealth's clinic site on Willamette Street, at EWEB, along Franklin Boulevard near the UO and in Glenwood. All of these urban projects are in turn competing with suburban sprawl which the city, state and federal governments plan to continue to subsidize here with hundreds of millions of dollars in freeways and interchanges. Even with all the hurdles, most remain optimistic that the new courthouse's glitter will rub off on the drab area and spur redevelopment. "Things are going to grow up around the courthouse," Diethelm said. "The courthouse is going to be a stimulus." "It's not going to be overnight, but it will happen, hopefully in my lifetime," Brown said. The architect who designed the building, Thom Mayne, told The Oregonian that he envisions Eugene in two to four decades even removing or burying the railway and freeway viaduct as larger cities have done in their downtowns. More immediately, Judge Hogan said he's talked to developers interested in big and small projects in the courthouse neighborhood, although he declined to discuss details of the tentative proposals. FoE President Matthews said he hopes such proposals will be openly discussed and follow a citizen-involved, detailed planning process for the neighborhood that focuses on the public interest. Past city planning efforts have been too dominated by developer interests, he said. "Eugene is really ripe for a really effective community-based design process."
Courthouse Dedication A dedication ceremony for the new Wayne Lyman Morse U.S. Courthouse located at 405 E. 8th Ave. in Eugene will begin at 10:30 am Friday Dec. 1. Speakers will include U.S. General Services Administrator Lorita Doan, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen McNamee, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan, Sen. Gordon Smith, Congressman Peter DeFazio, Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy and architect Thom Mayne. GSA Regional Administrator Jon Kvistad will serve as master of ceremonies. Parking for the ceremony will be available two blocks away at the UO "pole yard" just over the railroad tracks on Hilyard Street. The new courthouse will be open for self guided tours following the ceremony until 5 pm. Visitors will be required to show valid government issued photo identification, such as a driver's license, to enter the building. A second public open house will be held from noon to 4 pm Saturday, Dec. 2. These open houses will allow the public to visit some of the offices that would not normally be accessible.
Compact
Turbulence "Progress within a democracy doesn't happen in a linear fashion," says Seattle sculptor Cris Bruch. His piece Shortest Distance, one of four works of fine art commissioned for the Wayne Lyman Morse Courthouse, represents the turbulence of that progress.
The 3,600 pound stainless steel piece, which stands on the plaza, resembles some of Bruch's smaller pieces at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, but this one is simply massive. On Nov. 21, Bruch and a small crew left Seattle with two flatbed trucks, one to carry Shortest Distance and one to carry the tools necessary to install the sculpture. The day of installation dawned gray and dreary, with driving rain and wind so strong it knocked over trees. "We had to hide under tarps," Bruch says, "and when we finished, it was 7 at night." He hasn't seen it in the daylight yet, and won't until he starts finishing it (sanding, touch-up work, or cleaning, he says) on Nov. 30 for the dedication on Dec. 1. But nothing about the process of getting his piece into the most public of the art sites for the new courthouse was easy, so perhaps the installation ran about the way Bruch would have expected. Actually making the models and the final piece was "the fun part," he says, "the payoff for the four years of presentations and meetings and the whole administrative thing you have to do to get to the point where they finally say you can build it." After he proposed several pieces ("The whole process was Byzantine and circuitous and fraught with various kinds of politicking and negotiating and compromising," he says), the committee representing architect Thom Mayne chose Shortest Distance. Then Bruch used a set of blueprints for the courthouse to build a 1:15 scale foam-core model of a portion of the façade and the plaza "so I could put my different models up there and photograph them," he says, although he wasn't necessarily interested in the interplay between building and sculpture. "I imagined how people would approach the building, how they would move around the sculpture. I projected how the entryway would be used." And of course, he had to meet special governmental requirements. The sculpture had to be approved by "blasting specialists to make sure that in the event of an explosion, it wouldn't create a blast hazard," Bruch says, a requirement in effect post-Oklahoma City and 9/11. Bruch misses the "pockets of slightly decayed industry" that formerly sat on the site of the new courthouse; the building, he says, "is lonely, like an ice queen over there." He's looking forward to some solutions to connect the courthouse to downtown, like the proposed pedestrian bridge. In Shortest Distance as in a democracy, Bruch explains, "Everything is curved; there are lots of curved reversals and orientations, but there's a lot of movement. Not much of it happens in a straight line."
ROCKY
RUNNINGS In the iconic 1976 boxing film, Rocky, Rocky Balboa makes his way triumphantly up the flight of stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, signifying all that was great about urban exercise, civic architecture and the triumph of the American spirit. My goal was to recreate this picturesque run in Eugene, only using our brand-spanking-new federal courthouse as the backdrop. I didn't expect it would be so hard to get there or that I'd leave the courthouse with a head-over-heels face plant.
I left my south Eugene apartment on a typical Sunday with intermittent bursts of fog, rain and 40 mph winds. Despite my out-of-shape-Rocky physique, I felt pretty good. Loose muscles, easy breathing, no spasms in the calves. I took a couple of loops around Hayward Field, crossed over to Oak Street and ran north. I wanted to hit some downtown landmarks, make this something epic. I sailed up the steps of the former federal courthouse on East 7th Avenue, taking two or three strides and then a step up, repeat, repeat, until I was at the top. A great place for congregating, I thought, as I looked across the street at Eugene City Hall. It makes a damn fine statement to be on federal grounds with a banner. As I trotted east, towards the new courthouse, I immediately saw a huge, ugly obstacle: the Coburg Road/Ferry Street Bridge interchange. I veered towards 6th, but only found a dark underpass without a sidewalk. So I backtracked back to 7th Avenue, jay-sprinted across, followed an alley to 8th and Mill and, with no crosswalk in sight, played chicken with oncoming traffic as I dashed across six lanes. I defied bodily injury, but there I was, standing in front of Eugene's latest and best use of concrete, glass and the color gray. With its sexy curves, large window panels and an obvious nod to Frank Gehry's titanium sheet metal era, the building is certified Steven Spielberg sci-fi flick slick; it screams "THE FUTURE!" Now it was time to "Adrian!" my way to the top. Rocky's view from the art museum included the Washington Monument, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia City Hall. When I reached the top and turned around, all I saw was a glass overhang, the dizzying drop of stairs below me and, across the street, an abandoned warehouse and gravel wasteland. Beyond that: the gentle roar of traffic. My quads burned nicely from the steep steps, so I made a note to use them for future stair climb workouts. But, as I took one last look around and made my clumsy, tired way down the steps, I miscalculated the height of the bottom step, and suddenly I was rolling arm over shoulder over back, landing with a thud on the wet pavement at the bottom. I stood up, shook myself off, checked for injuries (just a sore wrist) and cursed my foolish descent. (The irony of the situation was not lost on me.) Well, anyway, WWRD: What Would Rocky Do? Take the wheelchair ramp with its zigzag design and half-a-mile switchback? Not this Rocky. Coming off my pavement-kissing runner's buzz, I pondered the deeper questions. First off, where in the heck is the crosswalk, traffic signal, or overpass connecting downtown with the new courthouse? While I stood out front, three pedestrians and a bicyclist darted across the six-lane interchange. I wondered where the judges would go for lunch, if they'd be part of this jay-sprinting club, too. Café Zenon, after all, is not going to start delivering anytime soon … or will it? But then I did some more wandering … and wondering. The revitalized-but-downtrodden Broadway District, the glitzy 5th Street Public Market, the Park Blocks, the old federal courthouse grounds and now the new courthouse district. With all these civic squares spread out across downtown with large holes lingering in between them, we need a new word for this uniquely Eugene urban design. Let's call it "downtown sprawl." Let's hope it's not the hot new trend. For now, the new courthouse is still an island, a question mark on Eugene's newest downtown frontier: its waterfront. Will it unravel more headaches or a renewed sense of civic identity? I pondered these questions as I jogged home in a driving fall rainstorm.
'Other than that … it's shiny' Art (or architecture) never comes without its critics. Archinect, a website connecting architects, design students, educators and fans, recently hosted an online forum about the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse. Posts described the building as everything from "nice," "shiny," a "restrained piece" to "very mediocre" and "a tremendous effort, but for what?" Some posts were enthusiastic that so much thought went into the project. One comment argues, "If 50 percent of our federal projects were designed even at 50 percent of the intelligence put into this building we would be 500 percent better off for it." One post exclaimed, "I heart [architect] Thom Mayne." Others were not as enthusiastic. "An unfortunate site," said one post, "isolated from the city by a busy road. As a result it is very uncivic/unurban." Another poster asked, "Did it feel like the law is looming over you and has the ability to remove your freedom?" Countering the site location complaint, a post explained, "The idea was to build [the courthouse] on the opposite side from downtown, and really use the river frontage in the back to connect to the rest of the city via pedestrian pathways and greenspace out back." Ease of accessibility seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on, but not how to accomplish that goal. One post decried the lack of a crosswalk, "I did have a hell of a time walking from the courthouse back to 5th via Franklin," but later lamented, "I hope to god they never put in a light at 8th." For more comments, go to www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=47554_0_42_0_C‹ Chuck Adams
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