The retail mix fix
Pearl District developers look to the retail success of the
Brewery Blocks for north-end inspiration.
By Brian Libby
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The Fremont Bridge frames the Pearl’s north end.
Photo by Brian Libby.
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As the largest developer in Portland’s burgeoning Pearl
District, Hoyt Street Properties has built a succession of
high-rise condominiums that have helped transform this once
sleepy industrial enclave north of downtown into a national
model for urban renewal: the city reborn. But one look at the
Hoyt Street conference room, where maps and architectural
renderings are pinned to every available wall, and it’s
clear the Pearl’s omnipresent construction cranes
won’t be leaving anytime soon. “Some of the most
important things we do are still to come,” says Hoyt
Street president Tiffany Sweitzer.
The developer is currently planning the blocks that will form
the Pearl District’s northern edge, next to the
picturesque Fremont Bridge and the Willamette River. There are
to be glassy condominiums, a new park and, if all goes
according to plan, a cluster of shops and restaurants that will
make the development a destination for more than just
residents.
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The Henry helps anchor the thriving Brewery Blocks area.
Photo by Brian Libby.
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It’s that last part that is particularly crucial. The
Pearl District largely has been a retail success, with a blend
of art galleries, gourmet restaurants and furniture stores
filling out the neighborhood over the past decade. But there
remain significant challenges. Pearl retailers face
increasingly fierce competition from popular suburban
“lifestyle center” shopping areas such as
Tualatin’s Bridgeport Village and Hillsboro’s
Streets of Tanasbourne (see related story, p. 5). These
suburban shopping areas also point to the Pearl’s
Achilles heel: For all its individual retail successes, the
district lacks a central pedestrian spine that can concentrate
enough shoppers to collectively generate retail synergy.
The Pearl’s greatest retail success has been at the
five-building Brewery Blocks development, where a steady stream
of pedestrians patronize businesses such as grocer Whole Foods,
furniture chain West Elm, and the adjacent Powell’s
Books. But that same critical mass of shoppers hasn’t
been replicated elsewhere in the district.
“The neighborhood needs that bookend,” says
Portland city planning director Gil Kelly. “The Brewery
Blocks lit up the landscape a few years ago, and we need that
same mix of residential, retail and housing at the Fremont
Bridge. And part of the puzzle for us is how you make the
connections between them.” Kelly says Northwest 13th
Street could become the Pearl’s new Main Street if there
were a sense of momentum carrying people from one end to the
other.
Sweitzer and Hoyt Street Properties hope their new development
at the Pearl’s northern edge will create that coveted
Brewery Blocks bookend and help articulate a pedestrian
thoroughfare between them. The developer has been working with
Portland’s BOORA Architects to design not just a cluster
of condos and a park, but something more indefinable, too: a
destination.
“With the park and the river and the connections to the
bridge, this area could be really special,” says BOORA
principal John Meadows. “It’s trying to see if
there are ways to have it clearly still be an economic success
for the developers but to find opportunities to make stronger
public rooms. Even if it’s dense and built out,
it’s sort of like, ‘Why would people go there other
than to sleep?’ You could probably sell housing for a
long time there. Are there ways to make it more of an anchor
here at the Pearl’s north end like the Brewery Blocks is
at the south end?”
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Undeveloped parcels in the North Pearl
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The “public rooms” Meadows speaks of are public
areas where people enjoy congregating. The aforementioned park
planned for near NW 11th and Overton, where the Pearl abuts the
Fremont Bridge, Naito Parkway and the nearby riverfront, will
provide an athletic field for playing Frisbee or tossing your
dog a bone (and also preserves views of the bridge by not
putting more condos there). But that’s just a start.
BOORA envisions a European-style plaza where pedestrians,
diners at outdoor cafés and slow-moving cars share
cobblestone streets together. The architect and Hoyt Street
Properties hope this kind of environment can invigorate retail
investment here that attracts more than residents.
“The ugly truth of this is, if you don’t have
business and things happening during the day, you can’t
have a vital, ground-level retail experience,” says
Patricia Gardner of the Pearl District Neighborhood
Association. “It just cannot be supported by the
residential only.”
For Hoyt Street Properties, this northern terminus for the
Pearl will also represent the culmination of all that the
developer has learned in building nearly 3,000 units of housing
in less than a decade and a half. “I can’t stress
enough that there’s a learning curve of not only the
architecture and how something sits on a block, but everything
that has to fall into place to make it work,” Sweitzer
says. “It’s open spaces, it’s how the transit
works. It’s the differentiation of architecture but also
the unit sizes, and between rental and affordable. When people
walk down there, they say, ‘How did all this come
together?’ Well, it was a series of things. But looking
at the remainder of the property you think about how it all
starts to come together.”
Still, the Pearl remains attractive to retailers, who like the
idea of customers living right above them in the countless
condos that have shot up here over the last decade.
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In 2004, REI took a risk in putting its flagship store in
the Pearl’s north end, below the Edge Lofts.
REI says today it is a huge success. Photo courtesy of GBD
Architects.
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Take REI, the popular retailer of outdoor gear, which moved its
flagship Portland store two years ago from the big-box retail
environment of the Jantzen Beach shopping center to the ground
floor of the new Edge Lofts in the Pearl. The company viewed it
as a substantial risk, says REI operations manager Brian
Bate.
But the risk paid off. “It’s a hugely successful
store,” Bate explains. “Our first year we saw a 30%
increase over what we were doing out at Jantzen Beach.
It’s a demographic bull’s-eye for our members.
People used to have to fight the traffic out on I-5 to get to
REI. We’d be slow from about 3:30 to 7 p.m. every weekday
because of traffic. Now, for a lot of them, we’re at
their doorstep.”
Brian Libby is a Portland
writer whose work on architecture, arts and other topics has
appeared in The New York Times, The Oregonian, Premiere
and Dwell. He also writes the local blog
“Portland Architecture.”
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