One of the great acts of civic reclamation in American urban history lies under your feet. For forty years a four-lane elevated expressway called Harbor Drive ran along the west bank of the Willamette River, separating downtown Portland from its waterfront as effectively as a wall. In 1974, Governor Tom McCall — one of the most consequential environmental governors in American history — led the campaign to tear out the highway and return the riverbank to public use.
The park that replaced it, stretching nearly two miles along the Willamette from the Steel Bridge to the Marquam Bridge, opened in 1978 and was named for McCall in 1984. What you see now — the esplanade, the festival grounds, the Japanese American Historical Plaza with its basalt stones and haiku poetry commemorating the incarceration of Portland's Japanese American community during World War II — was asphalt and concrete until fifty years ago. The river itself, once heavily polluted by industrial discharge and raw sewage, has been dramatically cleaned under the Clean Water Act; salmon now return to the Willamette.
The Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, and Broadway bridges march north in a line from where you stand, a procession of Portland's engineering history.