Industry once ran this stretch of the Willamette riverfront, and the zone you have entered in inner southeast Portland, anchored by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, has been in continuous transformation since the last of the heavy industrial users left in the 1980s. OMSI, as it is universally called, relocated to this riverside site in 1992, occupying a building that was previously a Portland Gas and Coke Company facility, and brought with it a submarine — a decommissioned USS Blueback that is now permanently docked and open for tours — and a planetarium. The museum has been one of Portland's primary science education institutions since its founding in 1944, when it occupied a different building in the West Hills.
The Buckman neighborhood behind you is one of Portland's oldest residential districts, named for Cyrus Buckman, an early settler who platted the land in 1872. Buckman has historically been a working-class neighborhood and retains more housing diversity — in terms of building type and income level — than the adjacent Sunnyside and Belmont districts. The industrial waterfront south of OMSI is being gradually converted to the South Waterfront district, Portland's most ambitious recent urban development project, which has transformed former Zidell marine barge-building facilities into high-density mixed-use development with a tram connection to OHSU on Marquam Hill.