Central Eastside railway (photo by Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In Tuesday's New York Times, Lisa Foderado reports on an initiative underway in the Queens borough of New York City to replicate the success of Manhattan's High Line park with one of its own.
"It has been abandoned for five decades, a railway relic that once served Queens passengers on the old Rockaway Beach branch of the Long Island Rail Road," Foderado writes. "For all those years, no one paid much notice to the ghostly tracks, long overgrown with trees and vines...That is, until the High Line expanded the possibilities of a public park. Now, the three-and-a-half-mile stretch of rusty train track in central Queens is being reconceived as the 'QueensWay,' a would-be linear park for walkers and bicyclists in an area desperate for more parkland and, with the potential for art installations, performances and adjacent restaurants, a draw for tourists interested in sampling the famously diverse borough."
The High Line in Manhattan has not only proven a successful transformation of unused former raised subway platforms, but also had a kind of miniature "Bilbao effect" for green spaces. All the people flocking to the High Line to stroll or hang out or smell the flowers have helped continue the transformation of the Meat Packing District and Chelsea and act as an economic as much as a natural or cultural resource.
The High Line also had a previous inspiration, the Promenade Plantée in Paris, which in 1993 opened as a parkway in the 12th Arrondissement created from a former rail line.
Here in the United States as well as in many other countries around the world, the consolidation of rail lines has seen numerous abandoned tracks converted into rail trails, be it the Elroy-Sparta State Trail in Wisconsin, which in 1965 became the first abandoned rail corridor in the United States converted into a recreational trail, or the more recently completed Saucon Rail Trail in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which I have walked through numerous times while visiting in-laws there.
In the Saucon Rail Trail's case, it has had a powerful effect: an area in decline for over a generation, with the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant towering over the city, saw the trail as a symbol of the city's rebirth.
Saucon Rail Trail, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (photo by Brian Libby)
In some respects we're talking about different things here: parks made from rails in high-density urban areas and ones stretching across small towns and rural areas; ones built on elevated train tracks and those on the ground. Depending on the project, the cost range could be enormous. But they all involve converting land once used for trains into park and green space. As a result, I started thinking about one rail line in Portland that, if it could go away, would provide a compelling opportunity to re-imagine the center of the city.
Today the rail line running through the Central Eastside is one of its most emblematic presences. This industrial district was originally located along the river as ships coming down the Columbia and Willamette rivers came to port with goods and food, some of which immediately left on trains or trucks, and some of which wound up in the neighborhood's countless warehouses. Though no current plans exist to change the Central Eastside's zoning, it has already been transformed over the past decade as a generation of creative-class companies, small-scale artisans and restaurants have moved in alongside the traditional manufacturers and produce distributors.
Today they all seem to coexist well, these old and new Portland businesses. But given how centrally located the (aptly named) Central Eastside is, one can't help but imagine its untapped potential in the long as a higher-density, mixed-use neighborhood.
Usually when we imagine a game-changer for the Central Eastside, it is either a re-zoning to allow housing and mixed-use architecture or a removal of the riverfront I-5 freeway overpass. Just this year, for example, Mayor Sam Adams had the city again study the viability of burying a portion of I-5 in order to free the freeway from its stranglehold on the riverfront . But there exists a third game changer, costly as it would be: burying the railroad underground too.
Today every visit to the Central Eastside is a roll of the dice: if there's a freight train going by, which is several times a day, one is likely to be stuck in place anywhere from two to maybe 15 minutes. Waiting a few seconds at any one time is no big deal, but collectively it adds up: in lost time for hundreds or thousands of people at once, in wasted carbon monoxide from all those idling cars, and in noise pollution from train horns. If we're going to look in the future to the Central Eastside as a kind of second downtown, as it has the potential to be, burying the railroad - even as much of a multimillion dollar project as it would inevitably be - would have to be part of that discussion. What's more, burying the railroad would ultimately pay for itself in the economic activity resulting from the ensuing transformation of all those scores of real estate blocks. Overnight they would become more valuable, and subject to investment and transformation.
Although we already have the East Bank Esplanade along the Willamette just a few blocks away, a green strip along the rail tracks a few blocks to the south could act in tandem with the Esplanade to introduce more of nature to this overwhelmingly prick and concrete enclave. It reminds me of the plans across the river for the Zidell Yards, where a master plan by ZGF Architects has focused, in part, on not just having greenery along the riverbank, but bringing it blocks inward, both as a beautifier of urban space and as a practical means of filtering stormwater.
"There is a potential where this greenway path...can start weaving into the urban realm, so they stitch together hand in hand," ZGF's Gene Sandoval said of the Zidell Yards in a story I wrote for Atlantic Cities. "We think you can have a really incredible public realm with them coming together."
What's more, if the railroad were buried underground, there would no longer be any need for the Hawthorne and Morrison bridge overpasses, so not only would the opportunity exist on the ground, where the rail was, but also for a High Line-style park on either or both of those. Imagine if the Central Eastside were crisscrossed by three parks!
Hawthorne Bridge ramp (photo by Brian Libby)
Portland may have already committed itself to a major public works project with the Columbia Crossing bridge, and there are already MAX and streetcar lines to pay for. And it would be an extra tall order to have the double-whammy of removing the I-5 freeway overpass from the Central Eastside while burying both that and the railroad.
Yet it's worth at least dreaming about, because it's very difficult to deny how much these moves would transform the most centrally located and under-utilized parcel in the city. The Central Eastside, even if it takes another generation or two, is destined to be for Portland what the Left Bank once became for Paris, what the South Bank did for London or Brooklyn is today for New York: a splitting of the urban atom that allows the city to fulfill its potential and then some.
Portland is enjoying a kind of moment in popular culture today, prized for its quirkiness and innovation. One of our city's best qualities is that we don't just grow tall and wide for its own sake. Yet the reinvention of former industrial space, especially along riverfronts, is arguably the dominant urban phenomenon of our time.
If Portland wants to continue being progressive about how we create imagine urban space, the Central Eastside is the biggest and best canvas we have. That two major infrastructure projects (burying the freeway and the railroad) inevitably come with that is both our big challenge and our monumental opportunity.