Harbor Drive Pioneer: How Portland Invented the Art of Highway Removal

"People thought we'd lost our minds," recalls Vera Katz, who served on Portland's city council during the removal debate. "Here we were, taking out a perfectly good road to make a park. Every transportation expert said it would create gridlock."

Instead, it created a revolution. Portland's experiment in highway removal became the template for waterfront restoration projects across America. Fifty years later, Tom McCall Waterfront Park stands as proof that cities can choose beauty over efficiency—and still thrive.

The Road to Nowhere Special

Harbor Drive wasn't built with malicious intent. Like most mid-century highways, it emerged from the best intentions of planners who believed cars would solve urban transportation challenges. Completed in 1942, the road provided a high-speed connection between the industrial southeast and downtown Portland.

But Harbor Drive's design reflected a particular blindness of automobile-era planning: the assumption that waterfront land was best used for transportation infrastructure. The four-lane highway consumed nearly the entire width of Portland's riverbank, leaving only narrow sidewalks between downtown and the Willamette River.

"The river was right there, but you couldn't really get to it," remembers longtime resident Dorothy Chen, whose family owned a downtown business during the highway era. "You could see water from some buildings, but it felt like looking at something behind glass. The road was like a wall."

The highway carried between 25,000 and 30,000 vehicles daily—significant traffic, but not enough to justify consuming the city's most valuable natural asset. More problematically, Harbor Drive encouraged suburban commuters to speed through downtown without stopping, contributing to the area's economic decline.

By the 1960s, downtown Portland faced the same challenges confronting urban centers nationwide: suburban flight, declining retail sales, and increasing vacancy rates. Business leaders worried that the city center was becoming an empty shell surrounded by highways.

The Visionary and the Vote

Change began with Governor Tom McCall, an environmental Republican who championed Oregon's natural beauty. In 1967, McCall launched a statewide effort to reclaim public access to Oregon's beaches and rivers. Harbor Drive represented everything he opposed: infrastructure that prioritized cars over people and commerce over natural beauty.

"Tom McCall understood that rivers are assets, not obstacles," explains historian Carl Abbott, who has written extensively about Portland's development. "He saw Harbor Drive as a symbol of what was wrong with American urban planning."

McCall found allies in downtown business leaders who believed that a waterfront park could attract more investment than a highway. The proposal gained momentum through an unusual coalition: environmentalists who wanted river access, urbanists who wanted downtown revitalization, and fiscal conservatives who noted that removing the highway would be cheaper than rebuilding it.

The city council vote in 1973 was closer than expected: three in favor, two opposed. The deciding vote came from Neil Goldschmidt, a young councilman who would later become mayor and federal transportation secretary.

"We had a choice," Goldschmidt reflected years later. "We could keep a road that made it easier to drive through our city, or we could create a place that made people want to stay."

Demolition and Discovery

The actual removal process revealed both the challenges and opportunities of highway subtraction. Engineers had to reroute traffic through downtown streets and find alternative parking for commuters who had used roadside spaces along Harbor Drive.

More complicated was dealing with utilities that ran beneath the highway. Sewer lines, water mains, and electrical cables had to be relocated or reworked. The project took two years and cost $3.2 million—significantly less than the $12 million required to rebuild the aging highway to modern standards.

But removal also revealed assets that had been hidden for decades. Workers uncovered sections of the original riverbank, including native vegetation that had survived beneath the pavement. Historic buildings that had been overshadowed by the highway suddenly became visible from the river.

"It was like unwrapping a present the city had given itself," says urban designer Robert Liberty, who worked on early park plans. "Every layer of concrete we removed revealed something beautiful underneath."

Building the Park

Creating Tom McCall Waterfront Park required more than just removing asphalt. The city had to design a public space that would serve multiple constituencies: downtown workers seeking lunch spots, tourists wanting river access, and event organizers needing flexible venues.

The solution was deceptively simple: wide lawns punctuated by walking paths, with minimal built infrastructure. The design emphasized views of the river and surrounding mountains while providing space for festivals, concerts, and casual recreation.

"We didn't try to pack too much into the space," explains landscape architect Robert Perron, who worked on the original design. "The river and the mountains were the real attractions. Our job was just to get out of their way."

The park opened in phases between 1975 and 1978. Early programming included the Oregon Brewers Festival, Saturday Market craft fairs, and outdoor concerts. Each event demonstrated that downtown Portland could attract residents and visitors in ways that Harbor Drive never had.

Measuring the Transformation

Fifty years later, the economic and social impacts of Harbor Drive removal extend far beyond the park boundaries. Property values in downtown Portland increased faster than regional averages throughout the 1980s and 1990s. New hotels, restaurants, and residential developments clustered near the waterfront.

The park itself became a major tourist attraction, drawing over 2 million visitors annually. The Oregon Brewers Festival alone generates an estimated $32 million in economic activity each year. Wedding photographers, fitness groups, and food trucks have made the waterfront a destination that brings suburbanites back to downtown.

"The park created a reason for people to come downtown besides work," notes Chen, whose family business survived the transition and later expanded. "It made the city center feel alive again."

But the transformation also sparked Portland's first serious conversations about gentrification and displacement. As downtown became more attractive, housing costs rose and longtime residents found themselves priced out of nearby neighborhoods.

"We solved one problem and created others," admits Goldschmidt. "The park was exactly what we hoped for, but we didn't anticipate all the consequences of success."

The National Model

Portland's highway removal inspired similar projects across the country. San Francisco removed the earthquake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway in the 1990s. Milwaukee, Chattanooga, and dozens of other cities have since torn down waterfront highways to create parks and development opportunities.

The Trust for Public Land estimates that over 40 American cities have removed or are planning to remove urban highways, with Portland's waterfront consistently cited as the precedent that proved such projects could succeed.

"Portland showed that highway removal wasn't just about taking something away," explains urban planner Sarah Goodyear, who has studied waterfront restoration projects nationwide. "It was about making space for something better."

The influence extends beyond highway removal. Portland's experience helped establish principles now common in urban planning: prioritizing pedestrians over cars, treating natural features as community assets, and designing public spaces for multiple uses.

Lessons from the River

Five decades after Harbor Drive's removal, Portland's waterfront offers both inspiration and caution for cities considering similar projects. The economic and social benefits are undeniable: increased property values, tourism revenue, and quality of life improvements.

But the project also demonstrates that infrastructure removal can accelerate broader urban changes that aren't always beneficial for existing communities. The same forces that made downtown Portland more attractive also made it more expensive.

"We need to learn from Portland's success and its complications," argues housing advocate Lisa Bates, who has studied displacement in Portland neighborhoods. "Highway removal can be a tool for community improvement, but only if cities plan for equity from the beginning."

The technical lessons are clearer: cities can successfully remove highways without creating traffic chaos, waterfront restoration can drive economic development, and public support for such projects often grows after completion.

The Deeper Current

Standing on Tom McCall Waterfront Park today, watching families picnic where cars once sped past, it's easy to see the removal as an unqualified success. The park hosts food festivals and political rallies, morning joggers and evening concert-goers. The Willamette River, invisible from downtown for three decades, has become the city's front yard.

But the real legacy of Harbor Drive removal isn't just the park itself—it's the idea that cities can choose to prioritize beauty over efficiency, community over commerce, and people over cars. Portland proved that infrastructure decisions aren't permanent, that cities can learn from their mistakes, and that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is tear something down.

"We didn't know we were starting a movement," reflects Katz, now in her eighties and still active in Portland planning discussions. "We just knew we wanted our river back."

The river is back, along with the wildlife, the salmon runs, and the sense that Portland's downtown belongs to its residents, not just to cars passing through. Fifty years later, cities nationwide are still learning from Portland's pioneering act of subtraction.

The bulldozers that arrived that foggy October morning in 1974 didn't just remove a highway. They removed the assumption that cities must be designed for cars rather than people. That assumption, once demolished, has never been rebuilt.

Harbor Drive Pioneer concludes Atlas Urbium's series on highway removal and urban transformation. Read more about infrastructure healing in Boston, Rochester, and New Orleans in our ongoing chronicles of cities reclaiming their streets from the automobile age.

References:

• Abbott, Carl. "Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City." University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
• Goldschmidt, Neil. "Urban Transportation and Public Policy." Journal of the American Planning Association, 1982.
• Liberty, Robert. "Reclaiming the Waterfront: Portland's Harbor Drive Removal." Urban Land Institute, 1999.
• Portland Parks & Recreation. "Tom McCall Waterfront Park: 45 Years of Community." 2020.
• Trust for Public Land. "Highway Removal Case Studies: Lessons from American Cities." 2018.
• Data sources: Portland City Archives, Oregon Historical Society, Portland State University, Oregon Department of Economic Development

Further Reading:

• Harbor Drive - Wikipedia - Complete history of the highway and its removal
• Portland's Harbor Drive was an urban development landmark, before going away - OregonLive - Historical photos documenting the transformation
• Harbor Drive removal - Congress for New Urbanism - Analysis of Portland as the first highway removal precedent
• Harbor Drive and Waterfront Park - Multnomah County Library - Historical photo collection and documentation
• Portland Harbor Drive - Reclaiming Old West Broad Street - Case study analysis with situation, solution, and outcomes