Railway Palaces of Portland, Oregon: The Architectural Legacy of Henry Villard

By Alexander Benjamin Craghead

In 1883, railroad financier Henry Villard brought Portland and the Pacific Northwest their first transcontinental railroad. Earning a reputation for boldness on Wall Street, the war correspondent turned entrepreneur set out to establish Portland as a bourgeoning metropolis. To realize his vision, he hired architects McKim, Mead & White to design a massive passenger station and a first-class hotel. Despite financial panics, lost fortunes and stalled construction, the Portland Hotel opened in 1890 and remained the social heart of the city for sixty years. While the original station was never built, Villard returned as a pivotal benefactor of Union Station, saving its iconic clock tower in the process. Author Alexander Benjamin Craghead tells the story of this Gilded Age patron and the architecture that helped shape the city's identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781625847942

Alexander Benjamin Craghead

Alexander Benjamin Craghead, MS (architecture), is a historian of design and place, and teaches at UC Berkeley.

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Author

PREFACE

This book both is and is not about architecture.

At one level, it tells the story of several buildings either proposed for or constructed in Portland, Oregon, during the Gilded Age. Three structures in particular are important. The first is the city’s Grand Central Passenger Station (1882), the second is the Portland Hotel (1883–90) and the last is Portland Union Station (1896). The first two were designed by McKim, Mead & White, arguably the most important U.S. architecture firm of the late nineteenth century, and the third was designed by Henry Van Brunt and Frank Howe. All three are important transitional designs. For McKim’s firm, the station and hotel projects are a crucial iteration in the development of their design aesthetic. Union Station, meanwhile, embodies both the end of the Romanesque design language and the new dominance of a Renaissance Revival sensibility.

At another level, however, this is a story that goes far beyond the esoteric succession of anachronistic architectural styles. In many ways, it does not matter whether they were made of stone or brick or even if they were built or remained unrealized. These buildings are a way to understand city making in a time and place where urbanity was both new and rapidly developing. They expose how a new community grasped toward metropolitanism through the construction of public and semipublic architecture. Their story shows how the business elites of Portland, despite the relative youth of their community, defined legitimacy through the artifice of insiders and outsiders. Above this, these structures reveal how the frontier city, despite local boosterism, is only partly a product of local action. Civic rivalries masked civic similarities so that while Portland hoped to be a rival to San Francisco and was rivaled by Seattle, all three cities were dependent on the same capital, politics and ideas emanating from distant centers of power. The West seen in this book is not the successively developing frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner. It is a region where urban development dominates the rural; a place where the landscape is shaped by corporate, not individual interests; and where settlement is directly part of a global network of investment and trade.

The scope of this subject requires a more wide-ranging approach, and much of the narrative hinges on the actions of one man, Henry Villard. Arriving in Portland in the mid-1870s as an impromptu auditor, Villard’s ascent to the highest echelon of U.S. financiers is exemplary of the forces that shaped the West in the Gilded Age. By all practical measures, he was an outsider. Born in Germany, he foregrounded his Europeanism (rather than Americanizing), acted as an envoy for foreign capital and never called the West his home. Conversely, the Portland business elite welcomed him as an insider, and in turn, he became a patron rarely equaled and never exceeded, often treating the advancement of Portland as inseparable from his own. In his European eyes, the city and region were not a space of yeoman culture leading toward an American, agrarian democracy. They were, instead, a second Rhineland in the making, a place of cities, industry and high culture. Villard, then, treated the West not as a Turnerian birthplace of a uniquely American culture but as an extension of European culture. His architectural commissions for Portland embody these ideas, displaying his deeply urban enthusiasm for a great civilization facing the Pacific. While Villard’s unique position of power and unique background might seem to make him an exception, the actions of the mostly American-born Portland business elite mirror his own, showing that Villard differed from his domestic colleagues more in scale than in intent.

The goal of this book is to use the story of Villard’s architectural commissions for Portland to unpack the U.S. West during the Gilded Age, and to do so, I have made particular stylistic choices. While full understanding of the past is impossible, I want to communicate the ambition and the sense of unlimited possibilities that confronted people of the nineteenth century, much as it confronts us in our lives every day. I have thus adopted a literary style, hoping to sneak in through the prose an immersive experience of another time powerful enough to wipe away the 20/20 hindsight of the present, to disorient the reader from what they already know. I have attempted to reconstruct the geographic names of the period, so that D.C. is Washington City, Portland’s Front Avenue is Front Street and so forth. It is my hope to make the ghost of Oscar Lewis proud.

The chain of events that led to the creation of this book is long, intricate and difficult to lay out with clarity, but it is certain that this book would not exist without Dan Haneckow. Many of the conceits and ideas within this text were born from countless lunch conversations and speculations about Portland’s Gilded Age past, and on a more practical level, it was Dan who introduced me to the publisher, setting off the chain of events that ultimately led to the commission of the book. It also grows out of two other projects: the first, a collaboration with photographer Joel E. Jensen that investigated the cultural history of the American railway depot and the second, a public lecture on the history of Portland Union Station for the Architectural Heritage Center. For these, I must thank Joel, as well as Jeff Smith at the National Railway Historical Society, Jeff Brouws and Wendy Burton, Jim Heuer and Robert Mercer, and Val Ballstrem at the AHC.

I must thank several individuals and institutions for their assistance with this work. At the forefront of these are Brian Johnson, Mary Hansen and the entire staff of the incomparable Portland Archives and Records Center. Additionally I want to thank Tim Askin; the Bancroft Library and the Environmental Design Library at the University of California–Berkeley; the Ben Holladay Society; Norm Gholston; Ken Hawkins; the John Wilson Special Collections at the Multnomah County Library; the Library of Congress; the Minnesota Historical Society; National Archives and Records Administration; the Oregon Historical Society; Sheldon Perry, the Portland Development Commission; the Ryerson-Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago; and last, but not least, the University of Oregon Archives. For any omission from this list, I present my sincerest apologies.

ALEXANDER BENJAMIN CRAGHEAD

Berkeley, California, 2016

Introduction

THE NEW MEDICI AT THE FRINGE

Did our Covered Wagon Pioneers know they were pioneers until somebody looked around and noticed there was thick moss on the cabin roofs, then spoke up to say Lo the Pioneers?

—Stewart Holbrook, Seedy Old Press Club a Hotbed of Literature,

Chicago Sunday Tribune, December 1, 1957, Part 4, Page 6.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1874

Portland, Oregon

It was a cool, gray day, not at all unusual for summer in Oregon, the nation’s thirty-third state. The cloud cover was high and silvery gray, like salmon skin, and under it, two outsiders climbed up the side of Marquam Hill. The first of these men—the host of the small party, in fact—was Paul Schulze, a trim, neat man with a slightly pointed beard and pincenez glasses. As an émigré of Germanic blood, Schulze was inescapably a foreigner in this American frontier town. His guest, meanwhile, was a fellow German and journalist named Henry Villard. Their aim that day was not to seek a story for the newspapers. What these two sought was perspective, inspiration and illumination.

Marquam Hill was long a draw for those of artistic sensibility. A part of the Tualatin Mountains, it plunges almost six hundred feet skyward, sitting just south of Portland’s center. Photographers especially loved it, for it offered a grand vantage on the bustling settlement and all of the surrounding scenery for nearly one hundred miles in every direction but west. Carleton Watkins had climbed it in 1867 to make a vast panorama of this community beside the Willamette River, and more recently, local photographer Joseph Buchtel had hauled his camera to the summit. Though Schulze and Villard were not photographers, their aims were similar, for they hoped to capture in person what Watkins and Buchtel both had in silver nitrate on glass: a panorama of progress on the American frontier.

A younger Henry Villard, future railway financier and architectural patron. From the West Shore, January 1881.

This was not a trek in service of idle amusement. Schulze—in the words of Benjamin Holladay, Oregon’s sole railroad adventurer—was a spy. Through several contacts with the old country, Schulze served as informal eyes and ears for several of Holladay’s investors back in Frankfurt-am-Main. Those investors had made Schulze a correspondent, or spy, because they had grown concerned at Holladay’s mounting costs and lack of progress with the Oregon & California Railroad.

Paul Schulze, thought by Holladay to be a spy for German investors, remained a lifelong confidant of Villard. From the Oregon Souvenir, 1892, 127; Portland Archives A2004-002.3298.

Villard was another such spy. The bondholders had persuaded him, after great effort, to become their emissary and travel the 5,212 miles between Weisbaden (where Villard had been taking the waters—he frequently suffered from any number of ailments) and distant Oregon. His goal was to go beyond inspection and report, however, for he had been charged to negotiate with Holladay to stem losses and bring the railroad’s finances into some semblance of order. The bondholders had been drawn to Villard because he was the closest there was to an expert on American affairs and, therefore, the most qualified to be their emissary. He had lived in the United States for twenty years, and his connections in the Republic were astoundingly good. He had been involved with politics and helped to found the antislavery Republican Party. He had known Abraham Lincoln before the latter’s presidency. He had married the daughter of the famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. During the Civil War, he had served as a battlefield correspondent for several prominent newspapers and had gotten to know many Union generals, including Ulysses Grant, who was now president. Villard’s curriculum vitae was, in short, impeccable.

Villard had a penchant for getting to know the terrain, a militaristic habit that he had perhaps gained from his time with Union generals. Thus it was that he and Schulze chose to climb Marquam Hill and get their photographer’s bird’s-eye view. Though it was a region of forests, the pair encountered only stumps and wild grass on their ascent, as the hillsides about the town had been almost denuded for lumber and firewood. This nakedness only enhanced the view that our two outsiders, Schulze and Villard, encountered at the top, as there were no trees to block their 270-degree view. Better still, the cloud cover was high enough that the tallest peaks of the distant Cascade Range remained fully visible. As Villard later wrote, The grand panorama I saw spread out before me from that height with the three snow-clad giants of Mount Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Adams clearly visible in their mighty splendor, seemed to me one of the finest sights I had ever enjoyed.¹

Below Villard and Schulze, between the foot of Marquam Hill and the edge of the muddy Willamette River, lay Portland. What this community actually was—that was harder to tell. Categorizing a frontier community near the edge of the vast and empty Pacific Ocean was a taxonomic task beyond even Linnaeus.

Though this image was made in the mid-1880s, Villard and Schulze would have seen a very similar view on their 1874 trek to the top of Marquam Hill. Photo courtesy Norm Gholston.

First and foremost, Portland was young. Few, if any, grown persons in Portland in 1874 had been born there, for there had been no there until about 1843. In this thirty-one-year-old community, there was as little heritage as there was masonry. Put into perspective, Portland was three times younger than San Francisco, five times younger than Baltimore and eight times younger than Boston. By European standards, it was nothing, being sixty-three times younger than London, to cite but one example. Although native tribes had from time to time inhabited the area for uncounted generations, in European American culture, Portland had no history—no heritage—at all.

Portland was not only a young community; it was a small one. The city’s population hovered between 8,000 and 17,000 people in 1874. Villard thought it higher, guessing at 20,000—unlike many locals, he may have counted the ethnic Chinese community, as well as the many people passing through the town on business. The city’s rival on the coast, San Francisco, stood at more than 150,000, but even it was no real city when compared to the millions in New York, the nearly 2 million in Paris or the nearly 4 million in London. To call Portland a city was a stretch and a metropolis, an absurdity.

Yet Portland could not be dismissed as a provincial town of little consequence. As small and as young as it was, north of San Francisco, it was also the largest settlement between the Rockies in the east and the Pacific Ocean in the west. Moreover, it sat at a geographically strategic spot. To the east of Portland was the Columbia River Gorge, the only water-level route to the vast interior between the Rockies and the Cascades. It also sat along a prime north–south overland trading route from California to Puget Sound, in the Washington Territory. Last but not least, it was about as far up the Willamette River as an oceangoing vessel could reliably go year-round. Portland had thus developed rapidly not only as an entrepôt for colonial-style economic activity but also as a mercantile hub for the entirety of the old Oregon Country.

Critically, several Portlanders had formed a transportation monopoly to literally capitalize on the geographic situation. Their creation, the Oregon Steam Navigation (OSN) company, had almost exclusive control of all steamboat operations on the Columbia River, and it became a cash machine.² The community that Schulze and Villard gazed down on from Marquam Hill might have seemed like a rather large courthouse town of the Midwest, but in fact, it was one of the highest concentrations of millionaires in the West in an era when to be a millionaire really meant something.

The physical shape of the community they saw, however, did not seem to exhibit this. Wood, rather than brick or stone, was the leading method of construction. There were several church spires but few other buildings higher than one or two stories. There were exceptions, of course: down by the trading spaces along the riverfront were buildings like the OSN’s headquarters, the Odd Fellows temple and the St. Charles Hotel (then the city’s largest and finest), all positively soaring at three stories. Despite the modest scale, however, in the commercial core, there were also glimmers of sophistication and pretention. No building better exemplified this than the New Market Theater, then rising in stages along First Street. Its façade was a slightly compressed reproduction of the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, a fifteenth-century palazzo in Venice. Its interior, meanwhile, was set to be only the best and most modern configuration, inspired by the revolutionary Booth Theater in New York, then only a decade old. In a city flowing with easy wealth, controlled by a handful of enterprising men, it is little surprising that the architecture being built more resembled the Italy of the Medici, the Borgia and the Sforza than the rudimentary frontier fringe.³

Yet these discrete displays of entrepreneurial ego should not be mistaken for a sophisticated urbanity. Often—too often—the streets of the city were still dirt and mud, lined by plank sidewalks. It was a city of individualists, a city without a strong state or much in the way of public patronage. Parks were shockingly few and far between, the few public squares were a travesty and the waterfront was regarded as a convenience for private profit rather than a public one for pleasure. Thus, Portland was simultaneously a nondescript town and a plaything of millionaires; a handsome city in the making and an eyesore of messy, greedy bustle; a place without heritage and a place where men of unprecedented wealth sought to position themselves in society through importing the architecture of the merchant princes of another place and age.

Portland’s New Market Theater was built in stages during the early 1870s. Portland Archives.

The New Market Theater’s original was the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi in Venice, Italy. Photo by Domenico Bresolin.

It seems absurd that, in a city so small and so young, there could even be such a thing as an insider or an outsider. Who could claim the right of occupation? The only humans who could—the native tribes of the Calapooya culture—had been turned into servants in their own land, driven off it entirely or died from European diseases for which their immune systems were unprepared. Asa Lovejoy and William Overton founded the community in 1843, and those who arrived after them could claim no patrimoine ancien. There were no titles, no ancestors, no estates, no plantations, no aristocratic heritage, and so in many ways, Portland was a quintessentially American community. In all probability, there was little notion of the insider or outsider in Portland’s early years because it seemed obvious to all that nobody was the former, and everybody was the latter.

Then came wealth, growth and aspiration. After the founding and immense success of the OSN, Portland went from a grasping village to a growing town, and its entrepreneurial class had pretentions of propelling it further to the status of city and metropolis. In a region with little past, it was entirely conceivable that a community as small as Portland might one day rival—or even surpass—San Francisco.

Those who were the city’s insiders were those who believed in such predictions, who held the city’s wealth and consequently its limited political powers and saw no differentiation between