City & Suburban Railway SW Third & Yamhill Streets OrHi 13267

Just as the railroad network expanded the scale of Portland’s economy, new technologies for moving people around the city, for spanning rivers, and for pushing buildings into the air expanded the scale of urban living. Electrified street railways extended the distance people could travel in half an hour from two to ten miles or more. New structural steel enabled engineers to build longer, higher, and lighter spans across rivers. Steel girders and elevators allowed the construction of buildings ten times the height — and more — of masonry structures. People could now live much farther from where they worked and shopped and the density of land use intensified.  

Within seven years, from 1887 to 1894, private investment in new technologies led to permanent changes in the boundaries, the government, and very concept of Portland. In 1887, the first drawbridge was built across the Willamette at Morrison Street and the next year the Union Pacific Railroad spanned the river north of Burnside Street with the first steel bridge on the Pacific Coast. The street railway franchises started to convert their horse car lines to electricity in 1889, because a new company, later renamed Portland General Electric, completed transmission wires to Portland from Willamette Falls, fourteen miles away. This was the first time an American generating facility had transmitted electric power for such a long distance. By 1896, the Union Pacific, whose freight and car repair yards were in East Portland, opened a Union Station on the West Side above Burnside. The Southern Pacific and other railroads connected to it. By the early twentieth century James J. Hill, whose Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad had built a line down the north bank of the Columbia and planned a bridge across it, built a deep cut through northeast Portland to gain access to the Union Station. As more bridges were completed, civic leaders sought to unify control of roadbeds by having the state legislature create the Portland Bridge Commission.

To acknowledge the frequent and integral connections between activities on both sides of the Willamette, in 1891 voters in Albina, East Portland, and Portland overwhelmingly voted to consolidate into one city, and Portland’s land area increased to twenty-six square miles. The Oregonian was especially impressed both by the large voter turnout, and by the importance that downtown businessmen placed in the measure. In the same year the state expedited the modernization of Portland’s economy but added another layer to its government by creating the Port of Portland Commission to improve ship passage along the Willamette and Columbia rivers. So crucial to the city’s economy was waterfront traffic that when the legislature appointed members of the commission they chose only representatives of the city’s key industries: railroads, grain, and timber. The Port of Portland, like the school district, could raise revenue by asking voters to pass bond issues.

Electric trolley lines, at first franchised to different local entrepreneurs, appeared along First, Fifth, Morrison, and Washington streets. They then radiated from the downtown to various western, eastern, and southern suburbs. Entrepreneurs applied for franchises to run electric cars through the countryside to St. Johns, Mt. Tabor, or Gresham. Several lines went to parks, which families visited on weekends for picnics. But electric streetcar lines were extended into the countryside primarily to raise the value of suburban real estate by making it accessible to downtown stores and offices. The car lines in most cities rarely made a profit, but the owners made fortunes by selling their real estate adjacent to the lines. A car line built by local bankers to extend to Riverview Cemetery was eventually acquired by James J. Hill and extended by 1912 through Salem to Eugene.

© William Toll, 2003

Themes: Social Relations,Transportation,Towns and Cities

Regions: Willamette Valley,Columbia River,Portland Metropolitan Area

Date: 1880 - 1914

Author: William Toll

Summary:
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, private investment and new technologies altered the way people lived within Portland and connected to its surrounding areas.