Arts + Culture

"Closed Quarters"

By Lucy Burningham

Published in Portland Monthly, June 2007

At the Library of Congress in Fort Meade, Md., the nation’s most precious (and flammable) historical documents are stored beneath sprinklers connected to a tank across the street containing 5,000 gallons of water, a measure of insurance should fire ever find fuel. But in the land of the Tillamook Burn and the Astoria street fire (never mind the 1873 Stumptown blaze that consumed 20 city blocks) we Portlanders take a slightly less vigilant approach: We store our combustible valuables inside an incinerator.

Of course, North Portland’s Stanley Parr Archives & Record Center—which houses everything from Portland’s first city ordinances, limiting swine and other animals wander at large, to police documents pointing fingers at cohabitating unmarried couples (a crime at one time)—isn’t actually belching smoke. (It stopped turning the trash into ashes decades ago.) But its belly is stuffed beyond capacity with more than 500 tons of paperwork. Unless the city decides to put the incinerator back in service, the vault doesn’t have room for even one more file.

Currently Portland’s paper trial occupies 8,779 square feet, an area roughly the size of the Rose Room at Powell’s on Burnside. Because the city expects that within 20 years it will need more than three times that space, city auditor Gary Blackmer has asked City Council to construct a new archives inside a planned Portland State University building (the university has already agreed). Construction begins this summer on the academic hall, which will house a recreation center, offices, classrooms and—if Blackmer gets his way—30,000 square feet (one floor and part of the basement) devoted to the incinerator’s stockpile.

The central location would make it easier for PSU history professors, students and city officials to access, say, Margaret Sanger’s criminal record (by saving them the effort of trekking 11 miles to the current site), but it comes with a $9.1 million price tag. That’s $4.5 less than it would cost to build an entirely new building, but $400,000 more than it would cost to simply expand the current archive. Of course, that expansion wouldn’t include luxuries like an indoor climate-control system, which the proposed PSU site would offer. (Ideally, old papers should be stored at a constant 63 degrees in 40 percent humidity.)

If the commissioners agree to the proposal as expected in July, the new archives would be ready by 2010. And while the new site won’t come with its own 5,000-gallon fire extinguisher, the university’s lap pool will be just a few floors away.