Portland’s long-brewing plan to turn the area surrounding the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry into a bustling neighborhood is coming into focus.

At a Portland City Council meeting Wednesday, commissioners unanimously advanced an agreement that solidifies the path forward in the nearly decade-old plan to bring more housing, people and activity to the south end of Portland’s Central Eastside. They agreed to spend more than $15 million in public dollars to kick off the plan.

“This is a significant day for Portland,” said Commissioner Mingus Mapps. “The legislation before us today is about more than infrastructure. It’s about transforming the OMSI district into a vibrant hub for education, innovation and community life.”

The plan, funded by a combination of private and public funds, is expected to cost around $90 million. Construction is expected to begin by early 2026.

The plan includes 24-acres public and privately-owned property surrounding OMSI in the Central Eastside. It promises a new waterfront park with science programming and partnerships with Indigenous communities, habitat restoration, outdoor plazas and up to 1,200 new housing units. At least a third of these units will be affordable to lower-income tenants.

The plan was first put into motion by OMSI in 2017, who proposed redeveloping the area around the museum as part of the city’s 20-year land use plan for the city’s urban core. The idea was to turn the industrial district into an “innovation district” with commercial and residential buildings and new outdoor public spaces, all centered around OMSI.

The city incorporated this proposal into its new land use plan in 2020, sending both OMSI and Prosper Portland – the city’s development bureau – into planning mode. In the years since, both parties have floated ideas for the new district. But the exact details of the plan have remained relatively hazy – until now.

The plan, or “term sheet,” agreed on by council, breaks the project into three phases.

The first includes building a new street, which planners are calling “new” Southeast Water Avenue, that will focus on expediting traffic – ranging from heavier freight from nearby industrial businesses to bicycle traffic. This will be built alongside the current Southeast Water Avenue, which will still be an active street. The city will pitch in $11 million from area tax-increment finance revenue and is seeking $6 million in state grants to fund the street project. This construction is anticipated to wrap by June 2027. During this phase, which the city says may last up to a decade, OMSI will also begin developing new housing in the district with private money.

Phase two brings in the Portland House Bureau to build more affordable housing. In total, the plan aims to ensure that at least 300 of its 1,200 planned residential units are affordable to people making below 80% of the region’s median income, which is $94,000 annually for a family of four. The parties will also begin construction on a new waterfront park, and start planning for educational programming and signage for that area. OMSI will partner with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission to design this new park.

“It’ll be centered in Indigenous culture and offer free learning opportunities related to ecological and cultural knowledge,” said Aja DeCoteau, the executive director of Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. “This includes native plants, invasive species, river health and culture, placemaking opportunities that foster a sense of place for people such as demonstration of traditional native fishing practices.

The third phase will focus on construction and tying up loose ends – like adding more affordable housing, infrastructure, parking or other private investments in the region.

In all, OMSI estimates the project will create 11,000 jobs – both temporary construction positions and long-term jobs at anticipated new businesses. OMSI Director Erin Graham said analysts have also projected the project generating more than $1 billion in private investment over the next two decades.

“It is important because it helps to guarantee the growth and sustainability of our city and really important because it also helps to sustain OMSI and the critical mission-based work that we do,” she said.

With the council vote, the city pledged nearly $16 million in public dollars to fund the first phase of the project, including an additional $500,000 from the Portland Bureau of Transportation and $4 million from Portland Parks and Recreation.

The project has tapped into other public dollars. Metro regional government has already given $7 million to help establish the new waterfront park, and $750,000 to support Indigenous leaders tasked with advising OMSI on waterfront development. The state has also forked over $11 million to help with the street redesign.

The parties need to identify more financing before any work begins. With the agreement, both OMSI and the city committed to pursue new funding streams, like federal or state grants.

If they can land more funds, construction could start in early 2026. As Mayor Ted Wheeler pointed out, the total project will take more than a decade to fully fund and complete.

“But I think you’ll find that this city council and the next and the one after that…and it sounds like two or three after that…will continue to be supportive of this vision,” he said.

 

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Errol Heights has an epic slide, a mini skate area, and trails through beaver habitat.

ON AN IDYLLIC FRIDAY MORNING, southeast Portland’s Errol Heights Park hums with activity. Toddlers pull themselves on all fours up a gentle turf slope. An older kid dangles upside down from a rope bridge as another hop-hop-hops up a series of log steps. At the mini skate area by the community garden, two neighborhood teenagers taking a break from carving turns gush when landscape architect Carol Mayer-Reed, whose firm helped design the park, asks how they like it.

“This is awesome,” says Solomon Dolinar, 17. “We were really hoping a skate park would come up around here. It’s perfect.”

Michael Milch, meanwhile, is visiting with his wife and two grandsons, 7 and 5, from Gladstone. Milch is mayor of the nearby city and learned about this park from a constituent: a second grader unimpressed with the slides in his own community. But the newly installed slide at Errol Heights—a German-made steel twister that towers 24 feet in the air—was, he told Milch, “the best.”

Word, it seems, is getting out about the recent $12 million glow-up at Errol Heights, which sits on the southern fringes of Portland, just across Johnson Creek from Milwaukie. And this part of the park is lovely indeed, with grassy expanses, play areas tucked between trees, 11 picnic tables (five of them ADA-accessible), and a small splash pad. A striking bronze-and-steel sculpture by Portland artists Terresa White and Mike Suri features, among other birds, a peacock: the neighborhood is home to a semi-feral muster whose screams regularly split the air.

But there’s more. Wend your way west, and you’ll reach an elevated steel walkway that switchbacks, in an appealingly irregular fashion, down a steep grassy hillside. As you follow its 337 feet—it, too, is ADA-accessible—a large pond comes into view. Ringed by cottonwoods, bigleaf maples, and Doug firs, on this spring day it’s as busy as the playground above. Ducklings skitter across the surface as geese flap overhead. Swallows swoop low, and warblers trill from the canopies. Pacific tree frogs ribbit in a steady chorus.

Things down here feel a world away from the scene above, the calm interrupted only by the occasional car gunning up SE 45th Avenue. That’s because this part of Errol Heights owes its existence not to humans but to another builder, the OG landscape architect: the assiduous, semiaquatic rodent that is our state animal.

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THERE WAS NOT ALWAYS A VAST POND AT ERROL HEIGHTS. For decades, this spring-fed creek was dotted with man-made dams, which created a trio of small pools amid thickets of trees. But in 2007, the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) began removing these dams—and another dam builder began to move in. This was by design: in a 2016 blog post about a restoration project in the area, BES proudly noted that it was “letting local beavers engineer and build it.”

And build it they have. The beavers at Errol Heights—city employees estimate it’s a family of four to six—have constructed a sprawling complex of dams, taking out hundreds of trees and flooding the area in the process. As some of the dams have aged, they’ve become fixtures of the landscape, sprouting vegetation where waterfowl build nests. It’s among the best places in the city to witness the work of the industrious rodent: their log-and-mud dams, the chew marks they leave on trees, the profusion of wood chips they produce.

“Anybody in Portland can walk through Errol Heights and see active beaver habitat,” says Ali Young, a capital project manager with BES. “That’s a cool, unique thing. Not a lot of other cities have that.” What you’re unlikely to see is the animal itself. Beavers, especially in cities, are most active at night. But you might hear the thwack of a tail against water, their trademark warning call.

Accordingly, the work in this part of the park has been about facilitating immersion in the natural environment. Trails are wide, in places cantilevering over the water—with sufficient clearance should beaver activity cause levels to rise. Scenic overlooks invite lingering. Much was designed with school classes in mind: a rock-lined cove just off the trail can serve as a de facto classroom, while a dock allows students to scoop water samples for testing.

There’s never any doubt you’re in the city. The pond laps against a retaining wall along SE Harney Street, and an industrial fabrication facility sits opposite. It’s easy to rue this sort of human impact, to wonder how this area might have looked even 100 years ago. But there’s also something enchanting about this unlikely urban oasis.

“We’ve destroyed so much habitat, and [wildlife] pathways have been disrupted,” says Christian Haaning, a natural resources ecologist with Portland Parks and Recreation. “So once they get here, they hang out here. You could walk in the forest for hours—days!—and see half the species in that pristine wilderness that you would see in an hour in this park.”

Once, as in so many wetlands, people dumped trash here; Haaning tells me crews had to remove an entire school bus from the site. Invasive weeds remain a challenge. But as he and I tour the park, we’re startled by a western tanager, its plumage a lick of flame, alighting on a branch a few feet from us (“hello, handsome,” croons Haaning). On a later visit, I listen to a red-breasted sapsucker hammer against a tree as a pair of deer amble leisurely by. Haaning says he’s seen minks, muskrats, and river otters.

For Mayer-Reed, this part of the park is where “the person becomes secondary to nature.” Here, she says, we learn to see a world outside ourselves: “Sometimes being in a park, especially a park like this, can round off some of the rough edges we have as human beings.”

Some of those edges gnawed off, no doubt, by a bucktoothed rodent.

 

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The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland returns for another season starting on Tuesday. With new leadership and stable financial footing after the COVID-19 pandemic, the theater is ready to welcome back audiences for a full 10-show season.

On a recent day at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, crews prepared for the 2024 season. Large sections of a castle that resemble black stone were tied into the rigging and lifted into the rafters above.

Actor Kevin Kenerly is playing the namesake role in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” the first show opening this season.

Kenerly has performed in every theater at OSF, and knows all of the quirks that actors have to take into consideration when working there. One of those involves making sure actors move around the stage so that everyone is able to see them.

“There’s also a space right about where that little cone is in the center of the stage,” he said, pointing from a small room above the audience seating. “That sounds like a really lovely spot. You stand on it and you speak into the space, but it’s dead. It literally sounds like you’re whispering if you speak from that space.”

Kenerly has been an actor at OSF for 29 years. He stayed because it was easy to learn stagecraft by working with other actors, some of whom had been performing for twice that long.

“We are a unique institution. We are in the middle of nowhere and people fly across the world to come and visit us and buy tickets to the seven to 11 shows we are doing,” he said.

Another OSF veteran returned to Ashland for the 2024 season. Artistic director Tim Bond was the associate artistic director at OSF under Libby Appel until 2007. He said the festival’s productions are a balancing act between performing Shakespeare and introducing new plays to the stage.

“It was a company really committed to classics and doing Shakespeare, obviously, and a few new plays,” he said. “But then we really started working on bringing more diverse playwrights, more diverse actors into the company and designers as well.”

Back then, Bond said, the company worked hard to bring in new voices to the theater space. Twenty years ago, he started a successful career development program.

“That brought us many, many administrators, artists and artisans, many of whom are still with us actually on staff, and then many who I’ve met all over the country,” he said.

Bond is hoping to restart that program in 2025, as well as other programs and initiatives that took a backseat during the pandemic. One of those is improving OSF’s community engagement.

The organization’s rocky recovery has threatened Ashland’s tourism economy. Katharine Cato from Travel Ashland said her organization has shifted toward promoting other reasons to visit, including wineries and outdoor recreation. According to a 2021 survey of visitors, more people listed restaurants or outdoor activities as a motivator to visit than OSF.

“It isn’t necessarily healthy to have all our eggs in one basket,” Cato said. “And that, at one time, was OSF. But things broke open during the pandemic.”

OSF is bringing back its business alliance to collaborate on events. It’s also restarting its volunteer programs. Bond said he understands the city and the theater rely on each other to thrive, and that means making sure everyone is involved.

“I have a lot of friends here and a lot of old associates from all the years I was here that I’m reconnecting with,” Bond said. “All of us on staff are very keenly aware of how we can connect and collaborate more with the community.”

In 2023, OSF held emergency fundraisers to raise around $10 million to keep the theater running. Bond said the company is now on more stable financial footing.

It’s had to work on convincing people to return to the theater after being gone for so long. So far, that’s been successful, he said.

“We’re projecting that we’ll be 33% larger in our audiences this season than last year. So far, we’re on track, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

Bond is excited for this season to bring the theater back to what it once was. He said this is the first year that OSF feels like it was back in 2019.

“It’s really important for people to know that coming in community with others has been taken away from us through the pandemic,” he said. “And the theater is one of the great ways to get that back. And when you get it back, you will realize how much you’ve been missing it.”

 

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