Portals

A few photos of Portals, near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge at SE Water Avenue & Clay St. (Not to be confused with Portal, singular, the hammer-arch thingy on Southwest 1st.) The RACC description of it:

Using slabs of concrete cut from the original Holman Transfer Building, Portals acknowledges the industrial history of the Eastbank and creates continually changing views of the city and the Willamette River. Concrete is made from the earth...gravel, sand and rock from the river. The materials embody geology and time while the swale looks to the future.

Portals is part of the same Green Street project as Eye River, and was created by the same sculptor. As the above blurb mentions, it's basically a collection of recycled concrete chunks left over from the rehab of the adjacent Holman Transfer Building, now known as the RiverEast Center. Former city commissioner Randy Leonard hated the RiverEast project for some reason, but it seems to have gone ahead anyway without his approval.

A PDC PR piece about the project mentions that the building "... was built in 1951, serving as a product distribution hub for Quaker Oats, Coca Cola and C&H Sugar for many years.". It was actually the second Holman Transfer building on this site; the National Register of Historic Places nomination for downtown's Roosevelt Hotel building mentions that its architects also designed the "utilitarian" and "now demolished" 1912 Holman Transfer Building. A sketch of that building appears in a short history/PR video from the current Holman Distribution Co. They seem proud of having been founded here in 1864, but they must've pulled up stakes and left town at some point, because their narrator can't seem to pronounce "Oregon" correctly. (Hint: Ore-e-GONE is wrong. Very, very wrong.) So, go figure.