KOIN Center - History

History

The building was originally named Fountain Plaza, but it quickly came to be known as the KOIN Center, or KOIN Tower, reflecting the name of its highest-profile occupant, KOIN television, the CBS affiliate in Portland. The building was controversial while being constructed because its location blocked the view of Mount Hood that had long been seen by drivers emerging from the Vista Ridge Tunnel under Portland's West Hills going eastbound on U.S. Route 26.

The KOIN Center was the first building completed in a projected three-block development sponsored by the Portland Development Commission (PDC) that also included the city blocks immediately to the north and east. The latter was the long-time location of the KOIN broadcast studios and offices, which relocated to the KOIN Center upon its completion. Of the additional projected buildings, only the Essex House apartments, occupying half of the northern block facing SW Third Avenue were completed, in 1992. A 15-story office building on the eastern block, 100 Columbia, was proposed but construction never commenced. This building has now been cancelled.

The PDC had a number of goals in sponsoring the Fountain Plaza project. One was to provide a link between the government and central business core of downtown and the nearly completed South Auditorium redevelopment district immediately to the south. This redevelopment project, initiated in 1960, had been the first for the PDC and, though controversial at the time, has been considered by some to be one of the nation's few successful such projects from that era. Reflecting that goal, the southwest entrance to the KOIN Center faces its own street-corner plaza diagonally across the intersection from the Ira C. Keller Fountain, making a visual and pedestrian connection that important public space. The Keller Fountain, built in 1970 and originally named the Forecourt Fountain in reference to the adjacent Municipal (now Keller) Auditorium, was described by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable as maybe "one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance." It is this fountain that gave the name to the KOIN Center project. A second goal of the PDC in proposing this mixed-use building was to promote the type of condominium apartment living common in the central business districts of large cities such as New York and Chicago but not in Portland at the time.

The firm of Olympia & York of Oregon, a joint venture of Olympia & York Properties of Toronto and Arnon Development, both Canadian-owned, won the PDC competition for the Fountain Plaza project and completed the building in 1984. Between 1992 and 1995, the real estate holdings of Olympia & York of Toronto were auctioned off in bankruptcy court, with the KOIN Center going to an ownership group headed by the Louis Dreyfus Property Group (LDPG) in 1993. The LDPG owned the building until it was sold on July 3, 2007 to a group of California investors for US$109 million, a purchase that included the two remaining building sites for potential high-rise office and residential development. In August 2009, these investors, including the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and CommonWealth partners, surrendered control of the KOIN Center after defaulting on their mortgage of US$70 million from the New York Life Insurance Company. The condos on the upper floors are owned separately and were unaffected by the default. In December 2009, Portland-based American Pacific International Capital purchased the office portion of the building for between $50 and $60 million, approximately half the US$109 million paid by CalPERS in 2007.