Tag Archives: real estate

A Few Fine Portland Buildings

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Drive into a large city for the first time, without the benefit of some GPS box advising you, and with few exceptions, it’ll be confusing for a while. The way the streets are connected seems to make little sense. They don’t match your maps, or rather, what you think you remember from looking at your maps. Signage isn’t what it should be (often just an impression, but objectively true in Boston). The route you want to go is under construction. There’s always someone right behind you when you need to make a critical decision about turning, but you’re never in the lane you need to be anyway.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but not really. Once the worst of the drive is over — because you do get where you’re going, usually — you’ve had the satisfaction of navigating through a strange place. You’ve also seen, even fleetingly, some things you wouldn’t have otherwise. GPS is fine if you have a meeting to attend or a plane to catch, but otherwise it obviates the need to guide yourself through new territory with maps, landmarks you know ahead of time, and your own sense of direction.

I plowed through parts all three cities — Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle — on different occasions last week, each causing me temporary location frustration. Each time when it was over, it was worth it. When I found a parking garage in downtown Portland early on the afternoon of August 22 and set out on foot, it was wonderful not to be in that car anymore, and taking in what the streets of Portland had to offer.

The first thing I took in was the air. A light haze and the smell of a not-too-distant fire hung everywhere. It wasn’t a choking haze, or even one that made me cough, but it carried a distinct odor. Smelled like one’s clothes after grilling, especially the burned wood. The source was the vast complex of forest fires then raging in eastern Washington — still raging — and which only a few days before had killed three U.S. Forest Service firefighters near Twisp, Wash., all young men.

Portland is known for a number of things, such as trying to rival Austin for urban weird. More on that later. I want to point out that downtown Portland, and the nearby Pearl District, have some exceptionally fine buildings a century or more old that aren’t remotely weird. Such as the New Market Block (1872).

New Market, PortlandThe Blagen Block (1888).

Blagan Block, PortlandBlagan Block, PortlandThe Postal Building (1900).
Postal Building, PortlandAnd the Pittock Block (1914). Among a good many others, including more modern structures.
Pittock Block, PortlandI have a fondness for buildings with visible fire escapes.

Also worth noting: Portland’s a sizable industrial town. Not something you hear about much either. I spent the night at some distance from the city center at a motel on U.S. 30 near the Willametta River, a major tributary to the Columbia, both of which are working rivers. The motel was in an industrial zone, both for manufacturing and distribution, and I know there are other areas similarly industrial in greater Portland. It isn’t the largest industrial market even in the Northwest, but it’s large enough to have current and projected development of nearly 2 million square feet.

Honolulu 1979

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Something I spotted at one of the large strip centers near us: a new barber shop, Mad Men Barbershop. I’m not quite sure what they’re suggesting. Come here to look like Don Draper? He was the only male character whose hairstyle didn’t change much during the internal chronology of the show from 1960 to 1970. If short and oily for men is coming back, I want no part of oily. I’m glad that died off in the 1960s and has stayed dead. Grease is not the word.

Slides are an inconvenient medium in our time. I wonder how many billions of slide images are languishing in boxes, never to be seen. Ah, well. I’m doing my little part to bring a few of those to a wider audience here (four or five readers, at least).

Thirty-six years ago this month I visited five of the Hawaiian islands. I had a 35mm camera with me, one that belonged to my brother Jay. I took good care of it and came home with four boxes of images. Many are of lovely, picturesque Hawaii. Green hills, waterfalls, flowers, ocean vistas, volcanoes, lava tubes, black sand beaches, that kind of thing.

But not the following pics. They are urban Hawaii. Views of Honolulu in 1979, that is.
The first one is arguably picturesque. It’s Diamond Head, after all. But hotels and other development seem to be creeping up on it. Not that I object to development of that kind per se. I took this shot from a hotel room balcony. One of the higher floors of the Sheraton Waikiki.
HonoluluDiamondHeadFun fact about that hotel, developed in the early ’70s, I think: it had no 13th floor. Or none with that number. If they’d known how inundated the islands would soon be with Japanese tourists — and there must have been a fair number even 40 years ago — they probably would have not used the number 4 in their floors.

Speaking of hotels, this one only looks a little like the Ilikai, famed in one of the best TV intros ever. I’m not sure what property it is, and while there’s probably an app to find out, never mind. The image comes complete with ugly breakwater in the foreground.
Honolulu79.2Another balcony view, this time of Waikiki Beach. Two young lovers strolling the sands of Waikiki couldn’t be lost in each other’s charms for long without stepping on another beachgoer.
Honolulu79Finally, Honolulu at night.
HonoluluatnightA little fuzzy, but representative of the way the lights — which is to say, development — attached itself to the foothills near Honolulu, looking for every square foot. Even then, Honolulu was the most expensive real estate market in the country.

The High Line

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As a public, linear park in Manhattan, and driver of real estate values in its vicinity, the High Line is so new that it didn’t exist in its current form the last time I was in town in the mid-2000s. It was a derelict elevated railroad line then, but the movement to make it a park was well under way, mostly the efforts of citizens inspired by the similar park in Paris with its suitable French name, Promenade Plantée. (There’s also a linear park in development in Chicago, the Bloomingdale Line, and other places; the idea is catching on.)

More about the effort to transform the old line into the High Line is here. I didn’t know, until I read about it, that construction of the original elevated rail line was done as a safety measure, approved in 1929. It replaced a previous ground-level rail line that had been chugging through the West Side of Manhattan for decades. Turns out that running a freight train at ground level through a crowded metropolis isn’t a very good idea. The train’s path was nicknamed Death Avenue.

On the afternoon of October 10, after visiting the September 11 Memorial and Museum, I was fairly tired, but still determined to walk at least some of the High Line. I made my way to the 14th St. entrance and as soon as I was up on the line, I got my second wind. Walking most of the route, to the 30th St. entrance, didn’t tire me further. I went as far as the work on the Hudson Yards Redevelopment project, which the brand-new section of the High Line curves around beginning at 30th, but it was getting dark by then, and I decided not to go any further. The High Line is best seen in the light, better yet in the twilight.

This is the view near the 14th St. entrance, looking north.

High Line, Oct 2014Note the amenities. A plank walkway, plantings on either side, and — sometimes most importantly — places to rest. Not a lot of backless benches, either, but wooden chairs with their backs at a permanently comfortable angle. Not so comfortable you’re likely to fall asleep, but a great place to rest. Sometimes I did. Just a little further north, the High Line passes through the Chelsea Market, where various food vendors are arrayed.

The line also offers some good views of the city below. This is 15th St., looking west.

High Line, Oct 2014This is Tenth Ave., looking north.

High Line, Oct 2014On a pleasant fall afternoon, the High Line is a popular place.

High Line, Oct 2014Further north, there’s even a green tunnel, at least during the warm months.

High Line, Oct 2014At this point, rail lines are embedded in the planks. Must be left over from when the train tracks ran this way. They appear at your feet fairly often, but not always. Sometimes they course through the plantings.

New buildings have sprouted along the line.

High Line, Oct 2014I was amused to see just how many advertisements for nearby buildings bragged about being near the High Line. Once upon a time, property owners in the area wanted the elevated tracks dismantled, never imaging that they’d drive value growth for nearby properties someday.

Tuesday Orts

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I hadn’t heard that Jonathan Winters had died until this evening. I hadn’t known he was still alive, but then again his most recent roles seemed to involve voicing Grandpa Smurf, something I would never have known without reading his obit. When I was young, though, he seemed to pop up on TV a lot without warning.

But that’s understandable. A gig is a gig. As funnymen of my parents’ generation go, he aged a lot better than most.

The MIT Center for Real Estate is a big deal in real estate education. It educates real estate pros and generates some interesting real estate data. Also, MIT is also not known to be short on its endowment. So how is it that the latest thing on center’s web site, under the “News and Events” section, is dated November 30, 2011? How it is that the newsletters produced by the center stop around the same time? Did the person who was maintaining it leave, and the organization couldn’t be bothered with it afterwards? I can see that for a small organization on a shoestring — in which case the site shouldn’t promise “news” — but MIT?

More than 30 years ago, I spent a few days camped out in a dorm room at MIT. I noticed a few things while there, such as that everyone on the hall went to the common room to watch an afternoon showing of Star Trek, and everyone knew the lines. (The original series; because this was 1982, the only series. Patrick Stewart was still just a Shakespearean actor who’d played Sejanus for the BBC.)

I discovered that there’s a major collection of samurai armor and art in Dallas, of all places. At the newly opened Ann & Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Museum: The Samurai Collection. I mentioned that to Ed, who’s familiar with the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Switzerland, and he said, ” If it came out of the Barbier, odds are, it’s better than anything you saw in Japan.”

Another thing to see. But at least it’s easier to go to Dallas than, say, Geneva.

SubTropolis

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Early April 1999.

Just returned from Kansas City, which has its interests, but I was too occupied to see much of it, except for a “tour” given by an office developer. He knew the market well, and as you’d imagine, liked to talk.

We visited SubTropolis at one point, which is an underground warehouse and distribution complex, created from a former limestone mine, which was dug straight into the side of a KC hill. The former mine space now houses all kinds of goods, plus some thousands of people who work there. One of their big tenants is the post office, which stores millions of stamps there.

Postscript 2013: I toured a fair amount of commercial real estate in 1999, so this description sounds blase, but actually I was taken with SubTropolis, as I often am with places I’ve never seen before.

More recently, Steve Nadis wrote in The Atlantic: “With 5 million square feet of leased warehouse, light-industry, and office space, and a network of more than two miles of rail lines and six miles of roads, SubTropolis is the world’s largest underground business complex… [and not the only one in KC]. More than 10 percent of the industrial space in greater Kansas City is located ‘down under,’ covering about 25 million square feet—an area bigger than the downtown business district. Mining limestone for use in roadway construction and agriculture continues, with additional acreage carved out each year.”

South Loop Lights

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I went to a real estate event in the South Loop yesterday, at a mixed-use property started in 2007 but delayed, as so many were—and still are—by the Panic of 2008. But there’s been some recovery since then. These days, the property’s in reasonably good shape, with its apartments leased and retail tenants committing for space.

It has a U-shaped layout, with the residential floors on either side of a drive that runs the length of property, and an upscale movie theater at the end of the U, which is open for business.

It’s one of those places that has a fancy bar upstairs from the lobby of the theater, which is where the event was held. I didn’t drink there, but the bar food was pretty good. Fine views of the city from that vantage. The room had interesting lighting, too, which allowed me to take pictures like this one of the small crowd.

Outside the theater, not far from the Seward Johnson statue, shines this array of lights.

Nice to see a spot that isn’t all decked out for Christmas yet. Unless this is Christmas décor that’s trying to smash the prevailing red-green-gold-silver paradigm.