Prospects for The Cannery and north Front Street Lead in 2024: Year in Review

Though they haven't broken ground yet, plans remain conceptual still, and the prospect of tariffs and deportations with anti-immigrant sentiment threaten to make construction more difficult, the biggest development of the year — and it is the obvious one — is literally a development.

Former Truitt Bros. site and boxcars, c.1920s
(Oregon Historical Society)

Between the proposed Cannery project at the former Truitt Bros. site and the RAISE Grant to reshape Front Street north of Union Street, the plan for redeveloping the north downtown riverfront has to be the story of the year.

Aerial view looking eastish from river (The Cannery)

• Notes on The Cannery
• Notes on Front Street
  

Other Development

Other developments were significant stories, too. "Surge" seems too strong a word yet, but it was possible to see growing momentum for housing. The "Rivenwood" apartments at the former Nordstrom site opened as did Mahonia Crossing and Sequoia Crossings, construction started at Bush and Commercial (now called "the Cartwright"), and the City announced developers for the former UGM/Saffron site aka Block 50. Details for the Gussie Belle Brown apartments finally fell into place for construction and the second phase has been announced. Big plans for the former Boys Reform School and Prison Annex site were announced with preliminary approvals. Other projects are not yet formally announced, though they've started files with the City, and they will be stories for next year. Last year's plans for old City Hall site do not seem to have advanced in a public way. (The paper has a good roundup, though they continue to assert that the plans for the old City Hall site include Belluschi crater, but the developer has filed nothing publicly with the City for that corner.)

December

But, headwinds. In the context of tariffs and anti-immigrant actions, a greater proportion of projects may not be able to find the finish line. Impacts on construction will be a large and important story in 2025. It may be the story, as momentum for housing and infill from parking reform and incipient zoning reform strengthens further or withers.

Streets and Roads

Some may see greater progress or significance in the projects, but from here the street improvements were on the edges and did not represent any game-changer or paradigm shift. It was business as usual with tweaks.

In Hit and Run, Driver Kills Person on Murlark just north of Edgewater Street NW

Salem Police today confirm a driver killed a person on foot and fled the scene last week in close-in West Salem.

From Salem PD last week:

At approximately 8:30 p.m. Monday evening, December 23, Salem Police officers responded to the call of an injured man found in the roadway in the area of Murlark AV and Edgewater ST NW.

The man, age 63, was pronounced deceased at the scene by paramedics. The name of the victim is being withheld pending notification to the family.

The Salem Police Traffic Team is investigating the incident as a possible hit-and-run. Anyone who may have information related to this investigation is encouraged to call the Salem Police Tips Line at 5035888477.

An update today (see the separate rewrite at Salem Reporter for a good image from the video):

The preliminary investigation done by the Traffic Team determined the man found in the roadway on the evening of December 23 was struck by a vehicle that left the scene. The victim, identified as Steven Craig Bishop, was pronounced deceased by responding paramedics.

The hit-and-run fatality occurred on Murlark AV just north of Edgewater ST NW at about 8:30 p.m.

Video surveillance near the area where Bishop was found shows a passing motorist minutes before the call to police was received. In the recording, a white vehicle is seen traveling eastbound on Edgewater ST NW as it approaches Murlark AV NW. The vehicle appears to be a Jeep Grand Cherokee, possibly a 2015 or 2016 model year.

Investigators ask for the public’s help in finding this vehicle of interest.

If you are the driver, know the person driving in the video, or if you have information about the case, please call the Traffic Team investigators at 503-588-8477.

While Salem Reporter also has a just-published overview of all the deaths in the area on our roads, "2024 was the deadliest year in at least a decade on Salem’s roads, with 25 fatal crashes," the victim-blaming remains troublesome and misleading:

Some factors considered to drive the increase are growing use of smartphones, substance use and a lack of sidewalks. ...In an email, Hedrick said a majority of those crashes [involving people on foot and on bike] happened due to the victims not being visible and illegally being in the roadway.

Historian Peter Norton has been talking about victim-blaming, the development of the exonerative voice, and sophistry with cooked up stats for autoist propaganda.

The data was cooked up! via bluesky

Speed is the primary cause! At slower speeds many of these crashes are not fatal. 

See also recently here:

• On widespread usage of the exonerative voice, "Jaydriving and Lunacy in our Language" 
• And on blaming clothing choices, "The High-Viz Jacket won't Save You: Vision Zero Plan must focus on Drivers and their Cars."

This post may be updated.

Back-in Parking Falls out of Favor in 1924

When the article earlier this week on changes to downtown parking for 2025 was posted to reddit, the conversation there was not dominated by complaint. Maybe the tide is finally turning! Several commenters were aware of the difference between a parking supply problem, which we don't have, and a parking management problem, which we do have. Our parking discourse is getting better. That's a striking change from a decade ago, when petitioners forced the City to retreat from parking reform.

Front page earlier this week

Our approach to parking is historical. Different times call for different measures; what seems best for one era is backwards in another. Sometimes what seems best is based on an outright error. The discourse is always changing. One theme from 100 years ago was a call for head-in parking. Back-in parking had been the norm.

December 10th, 1924

You could substitute "paid parking" for "back-in parking" in these discussions!

Salem is held old fashioned. Present system of parking automobiles obsolete...."I was formerly in favor of the [free parking] such as we now have in Salem, but after traveling in 30 states and hundreds of cities, I find everywhere the [paid] system of parking."

December 11th, 1924

The SJ piece briefly alluded to a half-century of free parking, but merely implied that we had had paid parking previously. (It might have been worth a longer discussion of the previous eras of parking, as well as data on actual current occupancy rates in the parkades.)

We have had yet other changes too. There is nothing immutable about our parking arrangements!

Pedestrian Victim-blaming Playbook Halts new Stop Signs at Parrish in 1924

Within just a few months of opening Parrish School in 1924, parents were immediately concerned about speeding drivers on Capitol Street, which was the Pacific Highway at that time.

December 12th, 1924

In mid-December the afternoon paper said

Complaints of parents of some of the 860 children now attending the Parrish school that truck and car drivers are speeding past the school house without regard for the safety of the children are chiefly responsible for the agitation for immediate action.

A few days later an ordinance for stop signs was at Council.

December 16th, 1924

Alas, the victim-blaming playbook was already effective and support for the stops ebbed away.

Fad for Radium Quackery prompts Legislature to try out Radium Water in 1925

In the lead up to the 1925 Legislative session, the morning paper published a humorous moment in regional jockeying and health fads.

December 12th, 1924

100 years ago the morning paper announced "radium water will be tried out....This water is said to act as a preventative for goiter, cancer and whatever ails a person." It was a third option besides Salem tapwater from the Willamette and Portland area Bull Run mountain water. Between local pride and likely very real differences in taste, apparently a significant number of people did not like Salem water, which at this time still came from the gravel beds at Minto Island.

October 23rd, 1924

Radium was newly popular as a miracle drug. But it may have achieved quite the opposite. Or, perhaps it is better to say, it could be effective and helped usher people closer to the "door of the great unknown."

Hoover's Conference on Traffic Safety Established Link with Zoning

If you needed any proof of the close relation between traffic safety reform and zoning reform, the very first National Conference on Street and Highway Safety from mid-December 1924 saw a report that asserted, even created, a strong link between traffic safety, city planning, and zoning.

Traffic safety and zoning nexus, Dec. 1924

It's right there at the inception of our autoist paradigm!

Even though the conference was on safety, the primary problem to be solved was congestion and facilitating through-travel. In this report especially "safety" is deceptively understood and mystified.

Flow, not safety, is the main thing

Yet they understood the inefficiency of cars, "uneconomical in [their] use of street space per passenger." They also correctly identified the problem of "day storage space for automobiles" and did not mainly use the term parking, which laundered the notion of storage and absorbed it into the beautification of lawn and curb strip shrubbery.

They understood the geometric inefficiency of cars!

"Traffic movement is the primary consideration in designing streets": Again, not safety, even though that was the primary aim for the conference.

Hoover's Conference on Street and Highway Safety Marked a Pivot to our Autoism

In the lead up to the centenary of Hoover's mid-December Conference on Street and Highway Safety, historian Peter Norton has been posting daily.

Trying to tame cars and drivers - Bluesky

It's clear he sees the conference as a pivot in our autoism, a key moment when the discourse shifted from seeing cars and drivers as a danger and menace, with the primary object to protect people on foot, to seeing cars and drivers as the primary users to oblige, with the objects to redefine safety as the problem of recklessness and to get people on foot out of the way and properly contained.

Across multiple posts, Norton keyed in repeatedly on the changes between the draft of Hoover's opening remarks and the remarks as delivered. Autoist interests asked for changes and they got them.

In announcing the conference, Hoover dropped his plan to call the automobile a “deadly weapon.” He was responding to pressures from motordom. Responding to the same pressures, Hoover also rewrote his opening address to the conference. In his own draft of his speech, he planned to frame the conference’s task as finding ways to rein in motorists so as to protect pedestrians....Hoover had planned to call the moving automobile “a tremendous and deadly instrument of power” with “a capacity for destruction equal to any deadly weapon,” and to say “I approach this subject largely in terms of these pedestrians.”.... Instead, following meetings and memos, Hoover rewrote his speech, recasting motorists as victims of a reckless minority and calling the car “a complete necessity.”

The speech, delivered December 15, 1924, was widely covered in the press....

This address...is an origin point of a national approach to traffic safety that deters walking (and thereby also deters transit), that promotes ever-more driving, and that still strives in vain to safely accommodate and prioritize fast driving nearly everywhere.

Interestingly, the Conference did not receive much attention here. Norton has all these great clips with headlines and illustrations (like at top, but note the "reckless speeder" and not ordinary driver), but here in Salem comment was muted. This is the primary article.

December 15th, 1924

It's possible that the developing snow storm and freeze, as well as other local matters, was more pressing. But it is interesting that the conference was framed as "solving [the] problem of traffic regulations," and not centrally about safety. The tone from a couple of weeks earlier was gone.

• "'The Deadly Auto': 1924 Editorial Compares Road and War Fatalities"

If you are interested in Norton's discussion in the full national context, check out his feed!

Something else and related that he has posted on are ways that many of our current traffic safety countermeasures, as well as ones yet to be adopted very widely, are not anything new, and not anything mainly developed in Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Stockholm in the late 20th century, but instead are revivals of things we knew much earlier in the 1920s.

In our mid-century mania for speed, flow, and capacity, we "forgot" about them by design.

They don't Make Freezes like they Used to: Christmas Freeze of 1924

100 years ago the Christmas Freeze of 1924 started. It started with snow.

December 15th, 1924

It lasted two weeks and featured lows below ten degrees.

December 19th, 1924

Parts of the river were completely covered in ice.

Disconnects between Present and Future Needs in Budget and VMT

The City budget crunch is on the front page today.

Front page today

In the packet for the meeting of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for tomorrow, Thursday the 12th, members can read a timely and thoughtful letter Planning Commissioner Slater writes, in his personal capacity as Salemite, about the disconnect between capital investments and operations budgets.

excerpt from letter in Dec. SPRAB packet

Slater writes

When the City follows the 2013 parks master plan and adds developed park acreage to our system, we do not have a discussion with SPRAB, the City Council, or the general public about impact to the general fund.

Slater is particularly focused on parks acquisition, parks operations, and parks programming.

Jaydriving and Lunacy in our Language

In today's paper is another story of jaydriving, but the story erases the driver, ascribing agency to the truck: "the truck did not obey road signs and was too tall...."

Today's paper

The headline on photos and video online and not yet accompanied by a story also erases the driver in talk about a "truck that drove into south Salem house."

Online only today

And last week in Salem Reporter about the sign, "frequently wrecked by car crashes," recently removed at the border with Keizer, the language is about a problematic sign well off the roadway and not anything about jaydriving or drivers who keep hitting the sign:

Now, Salem officials plan to replace the sign with a new one that is more financially sustainable for the city and easier for its Public Works Department to replace, according to Kathleen Swarm, the city’s recreation program manager.

“This sign has been causing problems for years and years, and is a huge burden for this city to keep up,” Swarm said at a Salem Public Arts Commission meeting on Nov. 13.

The sign was most recently hit around April and then sat dented for seven months, with the brick wall behind it broken into pieces. This time, fixing it would have cost around $40,000....

The frequent damage to the sign began a year after it was built.

There are two big problems here in the way we talk about these crashes.

First, in every instance of a crash there is a person operating and in charge of a motor vehicle. There is a driver with primary agency. We are not yet talking about robot cars.

Second, whether it's a bridge with prominent warning signs, a house set back from the street, or a welcome sign also well recessed from the street, drivers zoom along too fast on our streets and cause great damage.

Not the solution! via the former Twitter

Did we fail to put high-viz safety gear on the bridge, house, and welcome sign? If bridges aren't safe, and houses aren't safe, and brick welcome signs aren't safe, why do we keep insisting that people on foot or on bike are primarily responsible for safety? And why do we keep talking around the agency of drivers?

It's the cars and their drivers. We have a car problem and driving problem. As we move to a "safe system" approach, we still need to center motor vehicles, their operators, and speed.

Previously:

• Notes on Erasing the Driver here
  
• Notes on Vision Zero here
  
• Notes on the recent Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan
  

Update on Center Street Bridge Seismic

On the front page today is an important update on the Center Street Bridge seismic project. It's behind and running over budget. Readers here will already know most of the information.

Front page today

There's been a steady drip of delay and overrun especially at MWACT.

SRC Geological Addendum, Sept. 2016
(inset detail added)

But two points deserve more emphasis.

• ODOT failed "to conduct a geotechnical analysis before the cost was estimated." But the unstable soils were known during the whole SRC process. The same failure on the Center Street Bridge would also have affected the SRC and raised its costs. ODOT's ploy, not some inadvertent failure, is to look away from complications early in projects so they can lowball the public with underestimates.
  
• ODOT has a very large funding gap and shifting funds to the contested I-5 Rose Quarter (over)widening means taking funds for "smaller" project like this. The Portland widening mania means less funding for life-critical seismic, preservation, and smaller road safety work. ODOT could right-size the Rose Quarter and Interstate Bridge replacement projects and have more money for seismic work and other safety projects. At last week's Oregon Transportation Commission meeting they discussed a suite of cancellations, which will have a cascading effect.
  

Finding funding for I-5 Rose Quarter overrun (Dec. OTC)

ODOT's own decision making and priorities led us to this, and it's not just some unfortunate accident of fate.

See previous notes on the Center Street Bridge retrofit here.

City Council, December 9th - CAP Annual Report

On Monday Council will receive an annual report on the Climate Action Plan. On the one hand, maybe we should take an extra moment to appreciate it, as this seems like the kind of thing, and the manager the kind of position, the Budget Committee will find reason to cut as we face our budget crisis.

On the other hand, overall there is too much managing to process and procedure, to box checking, and not enough managing to and reporting on actual emissions reduction or on metrics for things that directly contribute to emissions. (This problem precedes the CAP manager, and is not something she is primarily responsible for starting, it should be noted, but is hopefully something she pushes against.)

CAP Annual Report

It was good finally to see some numbers on the Get There Challenge, but the numbers are not properly contextualized. The participation rate, which is very small, should be mentioned. Every number should also be expressed as a proportion of a total, even an estimated one, not merely a count. (The City should also have promoted it externally, publicly to the whole city. They were silent on it.)

It should also report on participation rate

One thing that looks a little odd is "the average one-way commute distance," 6.5 miles. Isn't that pretty much outside of city limits since city facilities are in the center? That's a whole topic! What's going on there?

Scenario Planning Project Publishes Outline of 2050 Baseline Assumptions

The Scenario Planning project has published a summary of the baseline assumptions and projections for 2050, a "Reference Scenario Documentation."

Our default assumptions won't cut it (we already know this)

You will not be surprised to find that even with ODOT-friendly modeling and assumptions, our current plans are not enough. (See image header at top of blog from 2020's "preferred scenario" in Our Salem!) We are ostensibly on track for a 10% reduction in VMT and we need a 30% reduction.

The analysis is a little odd, though. The zones in the analysis are very coarse with Salem having five zones. Far out South Salem is included in the same zone as the close-in, streetcar-era grid of the area around Bush Park. It would be good to see more discussion of methods. Maybe this is wholly defensible. But it looks like it's not fine-grained enough for truly useful modeling.

Very coarse areas for analysis

But you may recall what an informed critic said nearly a year ago:

it is so high level ("strategic") that it largely tells us what we already know: our existing plans will fall far short of meeting GHG and VMT goals, and if we do lots of things differently (pricing, land use, investing in transportation options, driving cleaner cars, etc.) we can get at least close to those goals.   This is pretty much what we learned more than a decade ago from the STS, Metro's "Climate Smart" plan and efforts by a couple of other MPOs. What scenario planning leaves unanswered - and puts off to some future process - is proposing and evaluating ways that we might actually double or triple non-auto mode share or actually plan for 30% of all housing in climate friendly areas.

This current document is merely the baseline, and further scenarios will be published that suggest greater change, but the level of specificity here in this baseline document suggests the later refinements will be equally coarse and will not meet the critique that "this is pretty much what we [already] learned more than a decade ago."

St. Joseph's to Redevelop former May-McCully House Site

You might recall the shabby rental at 757 Center Street. It was demolished this summer and sold to St. Joseph's parish.

They've initiated a file with the City for a small apartment block, a seven-plex. They call it a "priest residence," but it must be more than merely a parsonage.

Proposed seven-plex

It looks like a terrific addition to Center Street and good infill replacement for an undervalued building that was more historic than we realized, though again it had declined and may not have been worth saving.

• "Fate of 757 Center Street Italianate a little Careless"
• "A Crooked Secretary of State, a Steamboat Magnate, and a House Move: 757 Center Street's Early Story"

The brick cladding immediately calls to mind the Robert Lindsey tower by SAIF as well as the arches on the bank building across from the old City Hall site.

• "Mid-Century Brick Arches Embody Spirit of Old City Hall"
  

Even with three garage bays on the alley, it fits on a residential lot. Seven homes! This is more like the streetcar era main street development in the Historic District downtown. It would not be possible with mandated parking minimums.

When the file is complete and there is more of a narrative for the approvals process there might be more to say. But at first glance, this looks neat. More of this, please!

Three Building Centenaries: Security Building, Ike Box, Crystal Gardens

Some of the lesser buildings downtown are celebrating 100th anniversaries this year, two of them even this week. I'm not sure there's any great significance to squeeze from them, they're just very ordinary buildings, so here are some scattered notes.

Hughes Building today aka "Security Building,"
(Legacy Real Estate)

The building today known as the "Security Building" was first known as the Hughes Building. On its second floor the New Salem Hotel opened the first week in December of 1924. It was on the site of a cluster of wood-framed buildings representing a later phase for our "Chinatown" and represents some level of displacement and gentrification. Additionally, in 1924 it was adjacent to the Oregon Electric Depot, whose tracks ran up High Street at this time. But it was a little late to take full advantage of the proximity to rail!

December 9th, 1924

Frank Bligh owned the hotel, and his father T. G. Bligh had died a month earlier in a crash near Grand Ronde on the way back from the coast, where Bligh was building a summer cottage. (Blighs highlighted in yellow on the clips.)