Inheritance

Next up we've got a few photos of Inheritance, a very large mural by Portland artists Alex Chiu and Jeremy Nichols. This is located on the south side of the new-ish (built 2019) 250 Taylor building, in downtown Portland at, yeah, 250 SW Taylor.

Since it's still a recent building, there are still live pages about it from the architects, construction firm., and property management company, if you're interested. The construction link mentions that the building is built to withstand that 9.0 earthquake geologists keep telling us we're overdue for. Which is a nice feature, given that the building's sole tenant is the local natural gas utility, and The Big One is likely to make a huge mess of their infrastructure, with broken pipes spewing fire and spreading chaos across the region. As opposed to merely contributing to the heat death of the planet, which is what natural gas does when the infrastructure is working as designed.

Because this blog has been around for a while, I can point you at a 2006 blog post here featuring the previous building at this location, the eccentric-looking United Workmen Temple building. We were told at the time that unfortunately the weird old building was too far gone to be salvageable. I'm not the kind of engineer to ask whether that was really true or not, but my office was nearby at the time and we had front row seats to the demolition, and workers had a real struggle on their hands trying to take the core of the building apart, and it took them many months to take the site down to bare dirt before they could start building the new one. This is also the same block that used to be home to the late, lamented Lotus Cafe building, although that half of the block remains vacant as of 2023 while developers wait patiently for the Before Times to return.