RiverEast Center - From Demo Building to Demonstration Building

By Kimberly Schneider

Sam and I took a tour yesterday of the new RiverEast Center. Just off the East bank of the Willamette River, the building is the workplace to 250 employees from seven businesses and two non-profit organizations.

Jay Haladay, CEO of Coaxis, and Jeffery Reaves, President of Group Mackenzie, showed us the building's beautiful new design as well as some of the building's many environmentally-friendly features. These features include the reuse of the building's concrete for unique art features, on-site storm water management, and an innovative solar heating system.

We also saw an on-site fitness gym and learned about the public boat house on the building's bottom floor. The Center's close proximity to the Eastbank Esplanade makes for an inviting building open to all forms of transit.

With its former life as an art deco warehouse for C&H Sugar and Quaker Oats, the building was once slated for demolition to the proposed Mt. Hood Freeway. After the freeway failed to be built, however, the building sat vacant for 40 years.

Tucked partly underneath Interstate 5, the radically revamped building now sits as a gem of promise for an industrial area poised for future redevelopment and restoration.

In addition to the promising environmental features of the new RiverEast Center, the recent development of a once-vacant building emphasizes innovative efforts to support successful, sustainable development within the city core.

Coaxis provides unique vertical-market software development and management services throughout the country. You can learn more about their company as well as their new headquarters on their website.

Group Mackenzie is a firm that specializes in creating sustainable, cost effective and innovative designs through architectural, engineering, and planning services. Visit their website.

Be sure to take a trip to the new RiverEast Center. You will be amazed by what you see!

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Posted Wed, 08/08/2007 - 4:44pm.

Construction

Submitted by Bryan on Thu, 08/09/2007 - 11:17am.

Way to go Howard S. Wright Constructors on revamping such an amazing building!

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That's not hard to do when

Submitted by Roger on Thu, 08/09/2007 - 5:22pm.

That's not hard to do when the taxpayers chip in a couple million.
No telling what the tally of public monies subsidizing this building or the conflict of intertests.
What was the Holman Building was purchased by the PDC.
Witht he purchase price and other monies spent on the building the public paid out somehwere between $2 million and $3 million.

The PDC sold the building to Group Mackenzie for $400K.
Other public monies followed with a 10 year tax abatement coming soon for that old building in the eastside Urban Renewal District.

Groupd Mackenzie, a fine company with their former heaquarters and property in SoWa.
SoWa where an owner of Group Mackenzie chairs the North Macadam (South Waterfront) Urban Renewal Cititens Advisory Committee.
Oh it's good to be connected.

Indeed, city government, way to go!

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