Guild's Lake Industrial Sanctuary Plan

Peter Guild was one of the first white settlers in the Northwest Portland area. His 1848 donation land claim of 598 acres covered much of today’s GLIS [Guild's Lake Industrial Sanctuary]. Guild’s property included the shallow lake that bore his name, pasture land and a popular tavern and "resort.”

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Following the exposition, Guild’s Lake and surrounding lowlands were filled with soil sluiced from residential development in the West Hills and sediment dredged from the Willamette. Edward Bennett’s 1912 Greater Portland Plan recognized the suitability of the area for industrial development and recommended its expansion for industrial, warehousing and freight-moving land uses. In 1913, the Oregon Journal noted that “Guild’s Lake has been transformed from a muddy and unattractive sheet of water into a modern up-to-date industrial center…which is rapidly filling up with the manufacturing and industrial plants that have been operating for years in other parts of the city.” The lake was completely filled by the mid 1920s and industrial operations proliferated in the southern sections of the Guild’s Lake Industrial Sanctuary.

Laura O. Foster, Portland Hill Walks: Twenty Explorations in Parks and Neighborhoods

A century after the world's fair took place, its location, Guilds Lake, is a bit of a mystery to many Portlanders. This is understandable, since the lake that the fair was built around no longer exists.

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When New York City's Olmstead Brothers came to town in 1903 to help develop a system of parks, they recommended that Guilds Lake, with its backdrop of scenic mountains, be the site of the upcoming world's fair. One distinct advantage of the site over others was that the fair could be served by existing streetcar lines.

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At the time of the fair, Guilds Lake was a large, shallow (less than 3-foot-deep) bottomland adjacent to the Willamette River, just downslope of Willamette Heights. It was originally a meander of the Willamette River and became a swampy wetland when the river changed its course to the east. The swamp became a bona fide lake in 1888 when a rail line went in, impounding the water. It was named for Peter and Eliza Guild, who settled there in 1847.

Once the fair was over, the Olmstead Brothers proposed that the site be converted to a public open space, with a park linking Macleay Park to the riverfront; but the fate of the fair site was sealed, literally, beginning around 1905, when Lafe Pence, a peripatetic lawyer, miner, and entrepreneur, breezed into town.

Pence, who was in Portland for the world's fair, allegedly hiked up into the hills above the fair site. Sitting on Scot's Nubbin, he envisioned the money he could make filling the swampy fair site with silt from the hillside and developing the land for industry. No matter that he owned neither the hillside nor the bottomland: after the fair was over, he commenced work on his scheme.

High up in the Balch Creek drainage, he cut trees to construct miles of wooden flumes to carry rocks and soil downhill. He milled logs at a mill that he built in the woods, and obtained water from Balch Creek and streams in the Tualatin River watershed (on the western side of these hills). Once all the elements were in place, Pence began to sluice down the hill into Guilds Lake.

Incensed at Pence's temerity, city fathers brought their axes up into the hills in 1906 and personally demolished the flume. In 1960 Thornton Munger noted in his History of Portland's Forest Park that part of the flume, which ran along the western side of Balch Creek, was still visible under the Thurman Street Bridge. Today, it is no longer visible there, but a revised edition (1998) of Munger's book notes that remains can be seen in the form of a ditch alongside the Wildwood Trail, between the Birch and Wild Cherry trails.

Because of the sluicing of the hillside into Guild's lake, "when the highway opened in 1915, the view to the north was of unstable mud flats."

Guild Lake Industrial Sanctuary

"...Guild's Lake, a cutoff meander of the Willamette River around which the fairgrounds were built, was slowly filled in by industrial developers (and the Port of Portland) in the years after the fair; by the 1920s the lake had vanished entirely. Over the years, the grounds have been used for a garbage incinerator, a landfill, a rail switching yard, wartime housing, and warehouses. Today the ground formerly occupied by the lake (and the fairgrounds itself) is still used for primarily industrial purposes, and has been designated an Industrial Sanctuary by the City of Portland."

Guild's Lake Industrial Sanctuary Plan

One of the area’s first industrial uses was a sawmill constructed in the early 1880s by Nicholas Versteg. Located relatively far from downtown, the northern sections of the GLIS remained largely undeveloped until after the turn of the century, while in the southern portions and along the waterfront, early industrial uses included lumber mills, grain storage, railroads and docks. The Guild’s Lake Rail Yard, constructed by the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1880s, served as a major switching facility for a number of the city’s railroads.

The deepening of the Willamette River Channel from the 1890s through the 1930s helped to ensure Portland’s role as a preeminent West Coast deep water port. The completion of Municipal Dock No. 1 (later Terminal 1, operated by the Port of Portland) in 1914 provided the Guild’s Lake area and the city with up-to-date marine facilities and facilitated shipping connections to foreign and domestic ports.

The interface of marine and rail facilities in the Guild’s Lake area, combined with its proximity to the downtown, helped to make it the preeminent industrial district within the city. The construction of NW Yeon Avenue in 1930 provided improved access and facilitated the increasingly important role of trucking as an industrial transportation mode. Following World War II, large-scale industrial businesses expanded in the Guild’s Lake area, particularly in the northern sections, where chemical and petroleum processing and storage facilities located. An agglomeration of metals manufacturing and processing companies emerged as an important component of the local economy. Today, industrial operations in the Guild’s Lake Industrial Sanctuary include manufacturing, fabrication and processing, warehousing, transportation and industrial services.

The Guild's Lake Industrial Sanctuary area forms an important part of Portland's overall "Industrial Sanctuary," where land is preserved for long-term industrial use. Manufacturing, distribution and other industrial activities have occurred in the GLIS since the late nineteenth century. Over many decades, public and private investments in infrastructure such as marine, rail and highway facilities, as well as investments in industrial physical plants, have made it one of the premier heavy industrial districts in the Pacific Northwest. Industrial businesses continue to thrive in the district, providing well-paying jobs and contributing to the region's economy. However, because of its proximity to mixed-use and residential neighborhoods and the central city, the Guild’s Lake Industrial Sanctuary is particularly vulnerable to pressure for redevelopment to nonindustrial uses.

Through the GLIS, US 30 follows I-505, NW Yeon and St. Helens Road. It is an important recreational, commuter and commercial traffic corridor and is designated as a Statewide Highway and Freight Route in the Oregon Highway Plan. The state-adopted corridor plan for US 30 recommends system improvements that will accommodate expected growth in the corridor, as well as improvements to local street networks to reduce local trips on US 30. The plan recommends improvements such as the construction of additional turning lanes, which could help trucks accessing the GLIS from the highway. The corridor plan also recommends that the two offset intersections at NW Saltzman Road and NW Balboa Street be realigned to reduce turning conflicts and congestion.

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