I was back in Portland a few weeks ago for my annual transportation-and-land-use lecture. With a few spare hours I took the opportunity to rediscover a part of PDX’s heritage that should be more widely known – especially relevant for Vancouver in our search for new, denser, acceptable urban development in established neighbourhoods.
I was in search of the small of apartment buildings of Frederick Bowman.
Portland has a wonderful heritage of streetcar suburbs, rather like Vancouver, only more extensive. Imagine West Point Grey and Grandview just about surrounding the CBD on all sides. Portland’s streetcar network did just that.
One of the earliest sreetcar suburbs was Irvington, in the northeast quandrant east of the Willamette River. Laid out in 1887, the same year the CPR arrived in Vancouver, Irvington prospered as “a self-contained middle-to-upper-class residential district in which commercial activity was to be prohibited, so as to maintain property values.”
It certainly did.
Into this graciousness, Frederick Bowman, an architect-builder, found a way to sensitively insert small apartment buildings of less than a dozen units. He used a variety of styles popular at the time, particularly tudor and arts-and-crafts, mixed together in a way that so suited the cities of the Pacific Northwest.
His best known work is one of the largest: the eight-unit (plus basement suite) F.E. Bowman Apartments at 1624 Tillamook.
How good is it? Distinguished enough to make it to the National Register:
Tomorrow: More Bowmans
Thanks for sharing. A good model for sensible densification for Vancouver to follow rather than expensive 6-20 story buildings.
Wonderful story, if only here.
One goal of the ‘missing middle’ is to coax aging people living with just one or two people in large single family lots to move into apartments in the neighbourhood. The buildings above seem quite inaccessible for people who are facing mobility challenges which makes them inappropriate for this goal. The Suburbanists consider it a virtue to make buildings as squat as possible and therefore fill up the lots with inaccessible units. This is also a problem with Cambie Street. One of the most financially inefficient building forms is the five to ten storey building which is why many of these buildings have only one elevator, making them functionally inaccessible to those with mobility difficulties. Perhaps it is time to not let Suburbanism and the anti-height fetish drive the agenda.