Activating Downtown Portland

The Performing Arts + Culture Center will spark year-round vitality, with more performances, conferences, PSU activity, and visitors who support businesses across downtown.

We already know the economic benefits of constructing a new Performing Arts + Culture Center in downtown Portland. It will put cranes in the sky over our city at a time when large-scale investments can send a powerful message to the market. Not to mention the estimated 2,000 construction jobs, followed by 400 permanent jobs that a project of this scale would deliver.

But the true power of the Center comes in the form of night-after-night activation. A state-of-the-art Broadway theater on a site four times larger than the current Keller Auditorium means that blockbuster shows—the ones everyone wants to see—won’t skip Portland. The community theater will bring additional performance days. The conference center will attract regional and national organizations who want to bring their members to Portland—especially during our city’s epic summers. Pairing cultural and conference activity is key to year-round vitality because the performance season peaks in fall and winter, and the conference season peaks in spring and summer.

Nearby businesses, restaurants, parking garages and transit lines would all benefit from thousands more pairs of feet on our streets. We envision a transformed Halprin Sequence — one of the undervalued walkable architectural gems of our city. A short stroll takes visitors from the Center to the beloved Keller fountain in one direction and to the leafy South Park Blocks in another.

Adjacent blocks are ready for redevelopment, just waiting for the signal that downtown Portland is back.