Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Historic Preservation Practices and the Lived Experiences of Black Communities in Oregon

The Albina Preservation Initiative Focuses on Researching, Celebrating, and Educating Oregonians about Black History and Preservation in Oregon

In effort to tell an inclusive story of Oregon's past, Restore Oregon, Oregon’s only statewide nonprofit historic preservation organization is launching the Albina Preservation Initiative—a collaborative program dedicated to researching, celebrating and educating people about Black history and preservation in Oregon.

Decades of exclusion have led to an egregious lack of recognition and preservation of Oregon’s physical and cultural heritage. Both are vital ingredients to building a successful, dynamic society, particularly among Oregon's Black residents. Partnering with the University of Oregon (UO) Just Futures Institute, Oregon Black Pioneers, Moreland Resource Consulting, Clatsop Community College Historic Preservation Program, and the Architectural Heritage Center,  The Albina Preservation Initiative is a step forward in making preservation work better for Black communities and will be a transformative shift for Oregon. “This three part project helps to document and share Black preservation methods and stories with the public, create a safe space for difficult discussions regarding Oregon’s racist past, and establish a path forward for inclusive preservation statewide.” said Nicole Possert, executive director for Restore Oregon.

The Albina Preservation Initiative includes three major components: 

1. Urban Racial Justice Field School: Hosted by Clatsop Community College’s (CCC) Historic Preservation & Restoration Program, the demonstration site is the historic Mayo House in Northeast Portland.  Albina community members and CCC students will learn hands-on preservation techniques focused on wood window repair, energy efficiency upgrades for existing windows, and general wood repair for historic materials. “Our Historic Preservation program at Clatsop Community College is proud to partner with Restore Oregon to help give new life to the Mayo House." said Ryan Prochaska, Program Manager/Faculty Instructor of Historic Preservation at Clatsop Community College. Scheduled for June 24-29, a limited number of scholarships are available for Albina residents, making it free for attendees. Learn more and sign up on our website.
2. Tools and Resources Focused on Oregon’s Black Community: The Albina Preservation Initiative will develop tools and conduct research focused on Oregon's black community, including:
   • Preservation Research of Places in Albina: Includes deep-dive research into historically and culturally significant resources in Albina by consultant Kimberly Moreland of Moreland Resource Consulting. This research will be presented at the Future of Oregon’s Black Preservation Movement Symposium (see below).
   • A StoryMap to deliver untold histories and stories via a digital exhibit hosted by Oregon Black Pioneers. “It is critical that we document and preserve the historic places within Portland's historically-Black neighborhoods.” said Zachary Stocks, Oregon Black Pioneers executive director. “Albina in particular has seen some of the most dramatic transformations in the city over the past fifty years, as displacement and demolition have erased evidence of the Black community that once called the area home. By recognizing the homes and social hubs of Black Albina which still remain, we can ensure that the neighborhood's African American heritage is not forgotten.”
   • A workshop series covering “How to Research your House History.” Using the latest online sources, local archives, and libraries, Architectural Heritage Center’s educator and historian, Val Ballestrem, will teach attendees about some of the steps necessary to uncover the history of a house or Portland area building. This two-part event series is free to Albina community members. Date: Saturday, August 12, 10 am - 3 pm; details at restoreoregon.org.
3. Sharing & Celebration: Restore Oregon and the Just Futures Institute will co-host the Future of Oregon’s Black Preservation Movement symposium in early 2024 to share the work of the Albina Preservation Initiative, celebrate Black historic preservation, build relationships, facilitate dialogue, discover and preserve Black stories and places, recognize culturally-defined preservation efforts, and deepen partnerships.

“Oregon has a dark history of racial discrimination,” said John Arroyo, professor of planning, public policy and management and director of the Just Futures Institute. “The Albina Preservation Initiative, under leadership from Restore Oregon and our educational and community-based partners will further expand cultural heritage in Oregon to co-create deep and meaningful equity work that will envision–and realize–what a just future looks like for the Pacific Northwest.”

Unknown numbers of historic places and homes have been demolished or lost to neglect due to poor public policy, misallocation of resources and intentional discrimination. To bridge the gap between traditional historic preservation practices and the lived experiences of BIPOC communities, Restore Oregon will work with Oregon Black Pioneers and Moreland Resource Consulting to publish data, create access, develop tools, and amplify their voices. “This project is important because it advances Black historic preservation, identifies Black historic resources vulnerable to redevelopment, and it helps to reverse the damages of displacement and gentrification in Portland’s historic Black community,” said Kim Moreland of Moreland Research Consulting.  

For more information regarding The Albina Preservation Project, please visit https://restoreoregon.org/the-albina-preservation-initiative/.

New Virtual Tour Celebrates Portland’s Japanese American Community

The recent demolition of the former Yamaguchi Hotel is a poignant reminder of the persistent erasure of the Japanese American community’s history and impact on our region. Restore Oregon applauds the efforts of our friends and colleagues at The Architectural Heritage Center and the Japanese American Museum of Oregon to tell Oregon’s full story in the face of these challenges with the recent release of A Forgotten Community: A Tour of Portland's Lost Japanese American Community, a digital storytelling map. The interactive story map, publicly accessible to all online, highlights 20 different locations that were core to the establishment of Portland’s Japanese American community, especially in the area of Northwest Portland known as Japantown—Nihonmachi, in Japanese—in the early 1900s.

CACO’s 2023 Policy Agenda 

Securing $50M in additional recovery funding for arts, culture, heritage, and humanities, distributed similarly to the CARES allocation of last cycle. CACO advocated for this in 2022 and was not successful, largely because previous ARPA funds had not yet been distributed to the field. Some of Oregon’s major venues are seeing ticket sales at 18 percent of what they were pre-pandemic. The need is great. Oregon has more in its general fund than it has in a while, so this is a top priority.

Allocation of $11.9M in Cultural Resource Economic Funds for 17 projects across the state, ranging from $72,000 to $3 million. Large and small, urban and rural, for a variety of art forms, these funds will complete capital projects preserving cultural offerings across Oregon.

Directing $200M to Oregon Cultural Trust, spinning off $10-20M per year for operations grants for 1,400 eligible Oregon nonprofits. CACO is asking lawmakers to make good on the original $200M commitment they made to fund the Oregon Cultural Trust by asking for revenue from lottery bonds and will work with county and tribal coalitions to distribute these funds, which will go into an account separately from current grant programs. This is a long-term vision for supporting the sector and will move Oregon into the top rankings for state funding.

Increasing funding by $10M to grow grant funding at the Oregon Arts Commission.

Replacing Oregon Cultural Trust administrative cap with a percentage of earnings.

See all of CACO's funding.

This is an exciting time, and we will need everyone’s help.

Please continue to read our advocacy updates, and consider actively participating when we issue an action alert requesting letters, calls, testimony or collaborative action in the months ahead.

Tell Portland City Commissioners that Our Historic Places Matter!

Take Action: Testify on the Historic Resources Code Project at Portland City Council on November 3, 2021, at 2pm

The Historic Resources Code Project (HRCP) is the biggest rewrite of policies governing the management and protection of Portland’s historic resources in over a generation, and the Recommended Draft is scheduled for a public hearing at City Council on November 3rd at 2pm.

This regulatory update will pave the way for how the City will govern older properties.

Properties that should and can play a role in Portland’s future to help advance equity and social justice, meet carbon reduction goals, and address housing stability and affordability. Yes, historic preservation does have a positive role to play in all those issues! For far too long, the City has been hampered and unable to undertake the basic preservation steps, such as conducting an inventory of older resources or diversifying recognition and designation of landmarks to reflect the incredibly diverse histories of Portland’s communities. This code update is the first step. Implementation and funding for much-needed work will come next.

Code and regulation are the bases upon which to build from, and much is at stake. It is imperative that the City Council hears loud and clear that Portland’s historic and cultural heritage is important to you, to us, and to the entire City. Now is not the time to weaken protections that open the door to more demolitions. As we learned with our recent advocacy efforts to save the Yamaguchi Hotel, our elected officials need more education about why history and cultural heritage are important, and support in understanding how vital historic preservation is citywide.

Historic resources are a vibrant part of the solution to our most pressing challenges. Let’s all work together on:

Racial Equity: Let’s push to recognize, celebrate and protect a wider variety of places and spaces that reflect the diverse communities of Portland.

Climate Action: Let’s preserve and reuse existing older neighborhoods all over Portland to reduce our carbon footprint. The embodied carbon of our existing buildings is an underutilized resource. Re-use is Climate Action!

Housing Affordability and Anti-displacement: Let’s continue to encourage the City toward a more equitable model for funding historic preservation efforts for all older housing, regardless of designation.

Cultural Heritage: Let’s tell the full and complete story of the people and places of Portland.

How Can You Help?

Get Informed

Learn more about the process, how to participate, and where to find information to educate yourself about this important issue.

Make YOUR Voice Heard to Portland City Council on Nov 3, 2021

There are two types of advocates/supporters that City Council most needs to hear from:

Advocate 1:  You care about preserving important pieces of Portland’s history in our built environment but you are NOT an expert on the HRCP, and may not have time to dive deep.

Action:  Write and submit your support for historic resources (any older properties that might be important to you and your neighborhood). This does not need to take more than 15 minutes. Perhaps you might also sign up to “testify” on Nov 3. All that really means is sharing your comments out loud via Zoom. Let’s work together to remind Portland City Council that PEOPLE, PLACES AND HERITAGE MATTER. 

Advocate 2:  You care about Portland’s historic resources and like to read regulations and/or have been participating in the HRCP process over the past few years.

Action:  You’ll want to read the Recommended Draft, review the positions of the local Portland preservation community, and then get ready to submit written and oral testimony. Restore Oregon is currently preparing our own testimony and will send out more information regarding our position in advance of Nov 3rd. Overall, we support the HRCP Draft as presented by staff, with some recommendations.

On July 28^th, the Portland City Council voted unanimously to approve the demolition of the historic Yamaguchi Hotel (former Blanchet House), a rare and very significant building to the Japanese American/AAPI community and a contributing building in the New Chinatown-Japantown Historic District.  Restore Oregon opposed the demolition request because other options had not been fully explored and because it sets a very bad precedent in this small and fragile district.  

We initiated a coalition of preservation and legal experts to join in support of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon and 14 other Japanese American organizations to propose an alternate win-win solution , but the Council’s vote demonstrated an unwillingness to invest any resources to pursue it.

Chisao Hata, Board member of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, said “this feels like yet another slap in the face to our community that has endured successive waves of prejudice, loss, and erasure over many decades.”

The importance of this building lies not in its architecture, but in its rarity and deep connection to the Japanese American community.

Only three historic resources are associated with AAPI cultural heritage in all of Oregon: the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site, the Salem Pioneer Cemetery, and Portland’s New Chinatown-Japantown Historic District where the Yamaguchi Hotel is located. The hotel was operated by Shigezo and Masaye Yamaguchi and is one of only a handful of buildings still standing in the district that was operated by Japanese Americans at a time when people of Asian heritage were ostracized and afforded limited rights, and then lost virtually everything when interned during WWII.

Also, according to the National Register of Historic Places district nomination, Masaye Yamaguchi served as the midwife for the Asian community, and is said to have delivered babies as far away as Hood River. This untold and under-appreciated chapter of Oregon women's history has deep cultural significance.

The City Council did vote to create a "stakeholder" committee to recommend ways to document and incorporate the Japanese American history of the site into the future development.  But no provisions were made to ensure those recommendations would be carried out.

With their ruling, the City also set aside its own policy that a historic building cannot be demolished without first approving the replacement structure.  The intent of this policy is to provide a means to assess that the public benefit of the proposed new development is greater than the public benefit of preserving and reusing the historic structure.  In this case, the owners claimed economic hardship and liability due to the deteriorated condition of the building - which occurred under their ownership - and asked the City to grant demolition with no proposal for what would replace it other than a vacant lot.

The owner, the Blanchet House, stated their hope is to create a low-income nursing facility.  The community benefit might well outweigh the historic value of the building, and provide some comfort to the Japanese American community that the loss of their cultural heritage had achieved some other good.  However, no plans for such a facility have been presented and no provision made in the conditions set for demolition to ensure that such a community benefit would be created on the site in exchange for this great loss. 

Further, no consideration or mitigation was made for the loss of this contributing building on the historic district as a whole.  Portland’s New Chinatown-Japantown Historic district is only 2 blocks wide and 5 blocks long.  Nearly half of its historic buildings are already lost, so losing another one has a major impact that should be mitigated to some degree by investing in the rehabilitation of other historic buildings or other district improvements.

The City of Portland bears significant responsibility for this sad state of affairs. The current “new” Blanchet House was built on land occupied by the historic Kiernan Building (also known as the Dirty Duck Tavern) in a deal orchestrated by the Portland Development Commission (now Prosper Portland). The Kiernan Building was demolished to make way for the new Blanchet facility and the important social services it would provide.  It did not have cultural ties to the AAPI community and demolition was not allowed until the new Blanchet House design was approved. The city agency arranged a “land swap” of the new site for the old, giving Blanchet House the new site with a provision that the PDC could exercise an option to take ownership of the old Blanchet House/Yamaguchi Hotel when the new Blanchet House was completed.  The understanding was that the PDC would assume responsibility for stewarding the Yamaguchi Hotel building along with redevelopment of the rest of the block.  But when the PDC/Prosper Portland walked away from this commitment, the Blanchet House was left to deal with the now-empty historic building. 

Restore Oregon remains gravely concerned that Portland City Council has now set a precedent that other property owners in the historic district who have been engaged in demolition-by-neglect may try to seize upon: let your building deteriorate, then claim economic hardship and seek demolition approval. Recent zoning changes that allow increased heights in the district provide further incentive. We are concerned about the entire district and its vulnerability to be de-listed from the National Register of Historic Places. 

The willingness of Portland’s City Council to permit the demolition the Yamaguchi Hotel exposes an alarming shift on City Council away from the Comprehensive Plan's goal of stewarding historic resources, a disconnect on “walking the talk” of respecting the cultural heritage of minority 

communities, and a willingness to set aside its own policies on demolition of historic buildings.  We will continue to support the Japanese American and AAPI community and are exploring potential next steps, including further appeal.