His fee was $100,000, and this was in 1943, but Multnomah County leaders thought they had scored a great deal.
They described Robert Moses, New York City's parks commissioner, as "one of the nation's outstanding city development experts" and the ideal man "to blueprint the Portland area's future." In the Big Apple, The Oregonian reported, Moses was known as "The Man Who Gets Things Done." New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called him, supposedly in all seriousness, "His Grace."
Portlanders expected Moses to live up to those honorifics with his plan for the Rose City. They believed he would put 20,000 returning-from-war Oregonians to work and turn Portland into "a permanent industrial empire." The politicians who hired him hailed the 54-year-old planner as a man who wasn't afraid to tell politicians "to go to hell."
Today, Moses, who died in 1981, is best known for the opposition he engendered in New York. Neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs became an urban-planning heroine in the 1960s for successfully resisting Moses' efforts to build a massive highway through the center of Manhattan. A new documentary about her fight with the powerful planner, "Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City," has received raves. Britain's The Guardian, reviewing the film, sneeringly dismissed Moses as "Bulldozer Bob."
Moses' vision for Portland was more or less the same one he had for New York: an industrial metropolis developed around massive highways, with residents thrown into shadow underneath the throughways or, better yet, pushed out to the city's periphery.
His 1943 proposal for Oregon's biggest burgh -- commissioned by the Portland city council, the port authority and the Multnomah County commissioners -- included widening the Ross Island Bridge and the construction of a Skidmore Street bridge, an interstate bridge, a "foothill throughway" linking the Ross Island and Skidmore bridges, another highway connecting McLoughlin Boulevard with the Skidmore bridge, seven new schools and an 11-block Union Station/bus-depot plaza. The estimated cost started at $75,000,000.
He also proposed a "24-block civic center between S.W. Salmon and Columbia streets, extending from Front [Naito] avenue to 6th avenue, with a connection to the south Park blocks," The Oregonian reported. To top off his proposal, Moses recommended construction of a $10 million, state-of-the-art sewage system.
Collier's magazine called the Portland plan "a masterpiece," insisting it was "one of the wisest, most foresighted pieces of postwar planning we've yet heard of. It insures Portland, if the plan is adopted, against a lot of haphazard, wasteful leaf-raking projects dreamed up in a hurry as the boys come piling home. It means local control and financing of the assorted projects, with a horde of carpetbagger bureaucrats from Washington ruled off the scene."
That local financing, however, ended up being the problem. Portland leaders expressed as much enthusiasm for the plan as Collier's, but, unlike the national magazine, they had to find a way to pay for it.
Commissioner William Bowes, who had led the effort to hire the New York planner, declared there was "the utmost desire among the [region's leaders] to put in the Moses program." (The young Oregonian reporter who wrote down those words as they came out of Bowes' mouth: future Oregon governor Tom McCall.)
Portland voters in 1945 ultimately balked at the cost, putting the region-wide plan on the shelf. But some pieces of Moses' 85-page proposal would be implemented piecemeal over the next few decades -- notably the Interstate 405/I-5 loop around downtown. "The ideas [Moses] presented for a new freeway system in Portland were not new, but his stature helped provide the momentum to move forward on building Portland's freeway system," the city's Transportation Office wrote in a 2005 report.
Other major pieces from the plan and subsequent plans were blocked, with none more significant than the Mt. Hood Freeway, an ill-conceived adjustment to Moses' original vision. The eight-lane highway would have obliterated some long-established Southeast Portland neighborhoods and cut others off from the rest of the city. The freeway plan finally died in the mid-1970s.
By this time -- thanks to Gov. McCall, among other political leaders and activists -- the Portland metro region was easing away from the car-centric planning model Moses advocated. The Harbor Drive freeway was removed and an urban growth boundary enacted. In 1986, some three decades after Portland had begun paving over the extensive 19th- and early 20th century streetcar tracks in the city, TriMet's light rail launched. A new Portland identity began to take shape.
-- Douglas Perry