Monday, March 18, 2024

Grocery Outlet Looks to Open Store in South Salem

While lots of us hope for a new grocery store in the heart of downtown some day soon, an area that has seemed relatively well supplied with grocery stores, an area Safeway abandoned not too many years ago, and whose store was replaced by a Wilco, looks to get a new Grocery Outlet soon.

Grocery Outlet has initiated with City planning a "tenant build out of existing 17,366 sqft building into Grocery Outlet."

The building at 3975 Commercial St SE is next door to Northern Lights Theater Pub.

November 5th, 1964

The shopping center dates from the mid-60s, and unsurprisingly this part started out as a grocery store. Piggly Wiggly opened in 1964.

Approvals had been contested and took several months. (By our standards today it was not so long, but by theirs it was slow.)

October 11th, 1963

Within a few years ownership churned and a grocery store there operated in the 1970s under several different names.

Then it stopped being a grocery store, and now looks to return to that.

Nearby major grocery stores

Major stores nearby are Lifesource, Roths, Fred Meyer, Natural Grocers, Trader Joe's, and WinCo. Some of these are more niche, specialty grocers, but they are much larger than a corner store.

This would be the third Grocery Outlet in Salem, joining the downtown-ish one on D and Commercial and one on Lancaster Drive.

This is an interesting move and there might be more to say later.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Meeting Bits: Parks & Rec, SCAN, Highland

The Parks and Recreation Advisory Board meets Thursday the 14th, and in the February minutes and March agenda are many interesting items to note briefly.

From the February minutes, mostly sentiment was very supportive of the concept for a West Coast League team and associated ballfield improvements at Bush Park, but one person was wary of it and expressed concern. (At SCAN also is a tidbit that organizers might seek funding from the Legislature, as on a larger scale the Hillsboro Hops successfully did for their new stadium. If more detail comes out on that, there may be more to say, as economists generally are skeptical of stadium subsidies.)

Beaver Board and Qing Ming Shrine

There was interesting news on the Beaver Board across Broadway/High from Boon's. Do we need two of them? Marking the Mission site seems like it remains appropriate, even if it also needs some new contextualization. Totally removing that marker might be a mistake, however. A new marker at Riverfront Park also seems appropriate to mark an original indigenous village site. That's an interesting conversation to watch.

A renovated Qing Ming shrine also sounds very interesting.

Battery chain saws and trimmers?

In new information reports for March, there is talk about converting at least some gas-powered tools to electric. (Previously on Quiet & Clean Salem.)

ODOT wants to hog space for Center St. Seismic

Unsurprisingly, ODOT wants to take over a lot of parking lot area for staging on the Center Street Bridge Seismic retrofit. They also want to take out a bunch of trees and other riparian plants.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Will Scenario Planning just Restate the Obvious? At the MPO

The technical committee for our Metropolitan Planning Organization meets on Tuesday the 12th, and while there's no specific action item to comment on here, a broader and freer "project roundtable" discussion is a good hook for a couple of comments.

A couple of "roundtable" items

The Scenario Planning project has already garnered some informed concern about its methods and work products, chiefly that as it is currently organized here, it's not going to tell us anything we don't already know. A person with long experience generally and specific knowledge of the modeling package writes:

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.

For example, instead of just assuming a particular amount of mixed use development (an input to the VisionEval model), the city should identify specific areas, including the proposed CFAs as areas that are planned for walkable, mixed use development. Similarly, instead of just assuming an increase in revenue hours of transit service (another VisionEval model input) identify specific routes where high levels of service would be provided - such as 10 minute peak hour service on several of the core transit network routes. And, for bike and pedestrian travel identify a set of actions that could reasonably be expected to support doubling or tripling the share of bike and pedestrian trips made throughout the city.   (Again, in VisionEval this is an input assumption.)  In short, the city should translate the VisionEval assumptions about levels of effort into specific proposals for changes to land use and transportation plans, policies and programs that could be expected to achieve these outcomes. [italics added]

Will the Scenario Planning be much more than wishcasting?

Saturday, March 9, 2024

City Council, March 11th - Ambulances and Trees

On Monday Council will consider a report on bringing ambulance service back into the Fire Department and ending the contract with a private business.

Reports arrive by magic!

Here what has seemed striking is how if we want a pedestrian safety study downtown, if we want a Vision Zero plan, if we want a Twenty is Plenty plan, a Councilor has to make a motion and Council has to approve it and approve an appropriation for it or approve a grant application.

But many of these Police and Fire studies and plans are apparently covered under an administrative purchase and approval process that doesn't even seem to hit the Council "administrative purchases" report. They just appear!

A search for the authors of the latest Fire Department report, "triton," turns up nothing, and a search for "ambulance" turns up several recent items, which crucially do not mention studying the prospect of bringing service in house.

There should be more public process, transparency, and Council oversight of these reports and studies.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Punch some Holes in the Wall! New Owners Should Open Mall to Sidewalks

In the news about the sale of the downtown mall to a consortium of Oregonians the main entries and skybridges were featured.

The dead blankness on Chemeketa Street

But as we've argued here several times over the years, a major problem with the mall is the way it moons the sidewalks, showing a blank backside only. Draining even more sidewalk activity, the skybridges only make that worse.

The corner is not characteristic

In Salem Reporter's story, one small bit is suggestive.

It’s early in the process, he said, but options for vacancies could include a grocery store, local food and beverage options with openings to the street, and entertainment.

“Our focus is going to be on determining what fits best with the needs of the community, and downtown specifically, as it goes through this incredible transformation,” he said.

Openings to the street! Yes, punch some holes in that facade and make it connect with sidewalk life and also give the building edge some visual interest for foot traffic. And demolish the rest of the skybridges!

The whole thing needs to be reoriented to downtown residents who will walk, and away from more distant visitors who will drive. Main street, not mall!

There's lots of promise here, and hopefully they can realize it.

Walter Huss lived in Salem in the late 1950s

It's been fascinating to read Seth Cotlar's ongoing research briefs as he develops a history of Walter Huss and his relation to Oregon mainstream conservatism and to reactionary expressions.

His latest is "'Silver Shirts for Reagan!': Walter Huss and the American 'conservative' tradition with roots in 1930s-era fascism."

Throughout his career as a public figure in Oregon (1960-2000), almost no one in the state’s media or politics used the “f-word” to describe Huss. He was usually categorized as “an ultraconservative,” “a charismatic preacher with traditionalist social views,” “a kook,” or, on a few occasions, “hate-monger.” In 1978, when former President Gerald Ford inquired with a Republican friend in Oregon as to whether they’d managed to oust Huss from the GOP chairmanship yet, Ford referred to Huss as “that nut.” Soon after being elected chair of the OR GOP in 1978, Huss gave an interview in which he made an off-hand reference to Portland’s “Jewish-controlled press.” That fascistic phrase raised a few eyebrows, but still, no media outlet at the time explicitly said “that’s how Hitler used to talk about the press!”....

To be sure, there were and are good reasons to be parsimonious with the use of the noun “fascist” or the adjective “fascistic” to describe our fellow citizens. But in this case, I feel quite confident saying that Walter Huss’s world view was “fascistic,” even if he always kept some plausibly deniable distance between himself and the more overt “fascists” in the Pacific Northwest, many of whom were Huss’s longtime friends, who plotted and engaged in acts of violence intended to bring about political change.

And it turns out Huss lived here in Salem for a while in the late 1950s. One of his projects was setting up schools. He knit himself into Salem society in other ways also.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Hayesville Interchange Prompts Hayesville School to Move: More I-5 History

Another substantial impact from what became the I-5 alignment was at the Hayesville Interchange, where Portland Road, the old highway, intersected with the Salem Bypass and Salem-Portland Expressway, which together were absorbed into I-5 few years later.

Hayesville School, looking NE along Portland Rd.
(Salem Library Historic Photos, 1917)

Though its building and land were not directly required for the Interchange, a newly constructed onramp from Portland Road to the Expressway encroached on the front of the schoolyard and required children to cross a road where a new expectation for highway speed and flow was fundamentally incompatible with walking safety.

Looking SE at new Interchange, February 8th, 1961

In this 1961 photo, you can see a crosswalk striped across Portland Road and the start to the slip lanes and onramp. (I'm pretty sure that's right at the modern intersection of Astoria/Ward and Portland Road. In aerial views you can still see the outline of older ramps in compressed, less fertile soil and growth.)