Nob Hill Fun Fact #19: Why is there an elk on the Mackenzie House?
Photo Credit Tanya Lyn March: “I took this during the rummage sale last Saturday.” July 2015
The bust of a white stag centered below a framing arch of slate shingles is a symbol from the MacKenzie family coat of arms—denoting the doctor’s strong connection to the family’s Scottish roots. I would have loved to have been in the room when the client asked the architects of the 1887 Annex to the Portland Armory (now the Gerding Theater) “to stick an Elk on it”.
A curiously rich and balanced blend of Richardsonian Romanesque and Shingle styles sets this important historic landmark apart from many homes in the neighborhood, through the dark slate shingles used as a dominant material in the exterior cladding. The building is rich with architectural detailing on both exterior and interior, and is constructed of quality materials throughout, including sandstone, slate, ornamental woodwork, and plaster. The use of rusticated Tenino stone is eye-catching. The light hue of the tower and chimney’s sandstone makes a striking contrast to the dark slate shingles. The elegant stones were imported from Tenino, Washington; when these stones were ordered in 1890 the quarry had just started to expand operations that led to a sandstone “boom town” that petered out between 1915 and 1920 as concrete replaced the use of sandstone in construction projects. The only more highly acclaimed house built in this style and material palette was the Julius Loewenberg House, constructed in the same year and demolished in 1960.
Update September 2018: MacKenzie in Gaelic is “Caberfeidh” which translates as “Deer Antlers”. I have learned that in Scotland there are Red Stages that are similar to our American Elk. It is possible that that is not an elk at all.
Update April 1, 2020: Go watch some Outlander and get back to me with more information on the clan. With Covid-19 out and about we are not leading any tours. It is still a joy to know that William Temple House sold the building but is able to rent it back and is helping feed people at this challenging time.
Answer: Eric Ladd was born Leslie Carter Hansen on July 29, 1920.
Not only did he acquire amazing homes and meld together various elements. His friends “borrowed” some iron fencing from Mark Twain’s house in Missouri and put the fencing around his grave. Courtesy Lone Fir
Leslie Carter Hansen attended Ainsworth Elementary School and Lincoln High School. Eric Ladd was the name he adopted in 1941 when he studied acting presumedly had an acting career in Hollywood until 1943. He returned to the area to become a shipyard worker in 1943. He was handsome, debonair, and a connoisseur of elegant old buildings-predating-a formalized system of preservation, he was winging it.
There is a wonderful article in the Northwest Sunday Magazine on March 21, 1971 that details a number of the buildings that Eric attempted to save. Eric Ladd faced rampant demolition of historic structures not unlike the threats historic buildings see today in Portland as we face an increasing demand for multi-unit residential rental houses. Once the demand for parking drove demolitions – currently the demand for housing is driving the wave of demolitions.
The early days of the “Ladd Colony” Kamm on the left Lincoln House replica constructed for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Fair. (Image copyright is owned by the University of Oregon) Eric Ladd NW Magazine 1971
In the 1960s Ladd collected a number of historic buildings the way some elite collect antique cars. The collection of homes, fondly called “the colony” stood on a two acre tract of land at SW 21st and Jefferson. He operated a restaurant out of the Kamm House from 1955 to 1959. The structures were moved there and all but one had been condemned by the City of Portland. His home will be open to the public for twenty-five dollars on June 21st, 2015.
Eric was openly gay this OHS image is from a high society event.
Eric Ladd was one of the leaders in saving cast iron components of buildings being demolished during the 1960s Urban Renewal Era. He was also instrumental in saving the Pittock Mansion.
Eric Ladd received the Northwest Examiner historic preservation award in 1994 and the Bosco-Milligan Foundation award in 1999.
Wait who is trying to shut down Besaw’s? Petition to Shut Besaw’s Saloon!
Yes 3,144 Portlander’s signed a petition to close Besaw’s in May 1905. Voters wanted all bars closed that were near the 1905 Fair Grounds. It was this movement that led to prohibition. This fun fact was more relevant when there was a fight to save the building.
Besaws c. 1938 Note the second level & tower was still intact- well now sadly the entire building is gone.
My favorite detail about this image is the drain along the bar so you never need to leave your drink alone to empty your bladder.
1880 According to Portland Maps the building on the northwest corner of N.W. 23rd Ave. and Savier St. was built.
1903 Besaw/ The Oaks (Saloon) 755 North Savier (this is now part of Tavern and Pool northeast corner of N.W. 23rd Ave. and Savier St.
1904 – Besaw & Liberty (George Besaw Jr. and Patrick Liberty) 761 Savier (saloon)
1905 – Besaw & Liberty (George Besaw Jr. and Patrick Liberty) 761 Savier (saloon) 765 Savier (restaurant)
1906-9 Besaw & Liberty (George Besaw Jr. and Patrick Liberty) 761 (saloon) Savier 761.5 (restaurant)
1910 Besaw & Liberty 761 Savier
1911-15 Besaw & Liberty (George D. Besaw & Medrick Liberty) 761 Savier (alteration permit in 1912)
1916 –closed/vacant
1917-18 – Besaw & Liberty Soft Drinks 761 Savier
…
1921-22 – Besaws (Confectionary)
1925-1930 – Solo Club Restaurant
1931-1933 – George Besaw Jr. Restaurant
1932 – Building permit for a card room approved
1967-1972 Besaw’s Restaurant 2301 NW Savier St. Clyde Besaw
1973- 1987 Vacant
1988-May 2015 Besaw’s Café 2301 Savier
Jan. 2016 Besaw’s restaurant managed by Cana Flug reopens at NW 21st and Raleigh
Jan. 2017 CE John demolishes historic structure at NW23rd and Savier
National Impacting Events
Lewis & Clark Centennial 1905
Oregon Prohibition Period 1914 -1933
National Prohibition 1919-1933
Great Depression 1929
Polk Research
1901-02 none white or restaurants or saloons
1903- Saloon Besaw George 755 Savier
1904- Besaw & Liberty 761 Savier saloon
George Besaw and Patrick Liberty
1905 Besaw & Liberty 761 Savior saloon
Besaw and Liberty rest. 765 Savier saloon 761 Savier
1906 Besaw George (Besaw & Liberty) re. 761.5 Savier
Besaw & Liberty (saloon 761)
1907-08 saloon Besaw & Liberty 761 Savier (no rest)
1909 Besaw George (Besaw & Liberty) rest 761.5 Savier
Besaw and liberty saloon 761 Savier
1910 – none rs. None rest. Saloon Besaw & Liberty 761 Savier
1911 –Besaw George D b. 761.5 Savier
Besaw Geo E (Besaw & Liberty) h. 761.5 Savier
Besaw & Liberty (Geo E Bewsaw Medrick Liberty saloon 761 Savier
1912-Besaw & Liberty 761 Savier
1913- Besaw Geo lab b 366 21st N
Besaw Geo D (Besaw & Liberty) h 366 21st N
Besaw & Liberty (Geo D Besaw Medrick Liberty) saloon 761 savier
1914 Besaw Geo D (Emma) (Besaw & Liberty) h. 366 21st N
Besaw & Liberty (Geo D. Besaw Merdrick Liberty) Saloon 761 Savier
Liberty, Medrick (Olive) h 815 Savier
1915 – Bewsaw Geo D (Emma F) (Besaw & Liberty) h. 366 22nd N
Besaw & Liberty saloon 761 Savier
[Oregon Prohibition starts 4 years earlier than national both last until 1933]
1916 – Besaw Geo D (Emma F) h 366 21st n
No Saloon
No Rest
No Soft Drink
1917
No Saloon
No Rest
Besaw & Liberty Soft Drinks 761 Savier
Besaw still at 366 21st n
1918
Besaw & Liberty Soft Drinks 761 Savier (366 N 21st)
1919 (no directory that year)
1920 –No listing soft drinks
Liberty Merdrick (Olive) carmn h 815 Savier
1921-22
no rest
no soft drink
Besaw Geo (Emma) conf 761 Savior Home 366 21st N
(Stands for Confectioners-Retail)
1923
Besaw Geo soft drinks 761 Savior
1924
Besaw Geo (Emma) soft drinks 761 Savier h 366 21st n
Can you name all five historic names for this former Thurman Street movie theater?
The Ideal Theater Building 2405 NW Thurman. (TLM April 2015) How Many Names Did This Theater have while operating as a theater? Answer is: FIVE names.
Test your skill…
1912: Ideal Theater was Designed by Emil Schacht and Son (silent movie theater)
owner: Conrad LeBlanc
1927: The Senate (facade remodel)
1929: The Bluebird
1944(45): Elmo (Fire c. 1949)
1951: The Crown
Closed December 1953 was used as a warehouse for years.
Emil Schacht practiced architecture in Oregon for decades and is attributed for introducing the residential English Arts & Crafts style to Portland (Ritz p. 347). His fifteen residential buildings in Willamette Heights neighborhood (1905-1909) are worthy of a Multiple Properties National Register Nomination. The advocates fort the Irvington Historic District have documented and preserved many of his notable residences. He designed Astoria City Hall in 1904 which is still standing and had been adaptively reused as a hotel. The Lewis and Clark Exposition Building (1905) was one of his more famous designs. My person favorite building for its cultural significance to Portland’s Black History and pleasing design is the Golden West Hotel.
The architectural firm Emil Schacht and Son lasted from 1910-1916.
Letter Preserved at the Portland City Archives and Records Office Every secondary source states that the theater had 300 seats. This document leads me to believe there were four hundred in the peek period of significance.
All historic sources state the theater seated between 300-330 patrons looking at the letter below I’m inclined to think that the theater in the WWII years seated 400 plus. Glad that James Lommasson and Stewart Harvey remodeled this building in 2004. I am often distracted by articles around Portland, OR and censorship in the late teens. Oddly enough in 1920 C.E. Yeager proprietor of the Ideal Theater was fined for having a girl under the age of 18 working in his theater-it must have been a sting because six theater owners were charged.
The freeway “chad”/ghost ramp is just north of St. Patrick’s Church. This was once going to connect the Fremont Bridge to I505. (Image TLM March 2015)
PDC Slide City of Portland Archives I-505 Vision Couch School was still sharing space with MLC at the time this image was created.
Neighbors were alarmed when they noticed surveyors planning to clear away homes along the proposed route for I-505. The initial environment impact statement was four pages. In November 13, 1970, the Oregonian reported in “Road Route Plan Aired” that J.H. Versed construction engineer for the State Highway Department’s metropolitan division estimated that the construction would start in 1973 after homes along Thurman and Vaughn Street could be acquired and demolished. He estimated that the interstate would be completed in 1976. A few months later in September 1971 neighborhood groups filed a class action suit seeking to prevent further acquisition of right-of-way for I-505 and I-405 that were displacing residents.
Road Map assumed I-505 a 3.17 spur was going to be built. The section is from a Portland City map above was published in 1979 by Gousha.
Memories of Portland Development Commission’s(1) proposed Vaughn Street Urban Renewal plan were still in the recent past I-405 and I-505 would eliminate the blight that Housing Authority of Portland(2) and others had failed to eliminate. Thurman Street homes were being purchased to facilitate clearing a path for the 1.44-mile Portland spur. The city planning staff estimated that 400 people and some 200 of units of housing would be impacted by the I-505 alone. Our Historic Slabtown Tour would not be possible today had this freeway been built because what little that would be left to view would be so close to a freeway that the car noise would cancel out my tour guide vocal cords. The I-505 was conceived of as a junction was conceived to run between St. Helens Road (Highway 30) to Interstate 405. Puzzlingly one of the adverse impacts cited in the blocking of the construction of this interstate was that it would trigger an increase in land values.
Fun Fact #14 Where did Slabtown Kids Learn to Swim?
New Couch School Pool PPS Files at MLC
Answer at School. In 1914 Portland Public Schools District was making every effort to replace Portland’s wooden school structures with new fire proof school buildings. The Old Couch School (built in 1882) was at 17th and Kerny and had a dire reputation post Small Pox (Think COVID-19 this was even prior to the Spanish Influenza). The New Couch School in 1914, at NW 20th and Glisan was one of the early efforts to replace a wooden structure. The excavated this property went deep enough to provide for a basement swimming pool at the time they called it a swim tank.
Empty Pool 2012 TLM
There was not really a shallow end tables we dropped into the water so that non-swimmers could learn to swim (2012 TLM)
According to the Oregonian article dated November 25, 1917, the state of Oregon wasn’t always in agreement with the rest of country as to when Thanksgiving should be celebrated. The newspaper reported that in 1894, then Governor Sylvester Pennoyer wrote a handwritten proclamation on an ordinary sheet of note paper from his Salem office. It read: “I hereby appoint the last Thursday of this month a Thanksgiving holiday.” This caused confusion because 1894 had five Thursdays in November, and the rest of the nation was observing the holiday on the fourth as it is today. The article claimed some Oregonian’s celebrated one day and some of them observed the other. Even back then, they must have been thinking about how many shopping days we could get in before Christmas.
Governor Sylvester Pennoyer agrees Walking Tours Gift Certificates make great stocking stuffers. Order Online.
He may not have been a regular customer, but many shoppers were very “faithful” to this 23rd Avenue business. Image Credit Mike Ryerson
Would Jesus have shopped here?
When Jon Heil opened his Better Beef & Bible store in the summer of 1976, rents for prime retail spaces on the not-yet-Trendy-Third Avenue were still very inexpensive. The sharp young marketing graduate took a chance and opened a small shop in the former Arrow Ambulance office at the corner of NW 23rd & Hoyt Street to specialized in what he loved best. Good quality beef,and the good book.Heil, who was a Christian, had been a sales-man for Attilla Meat Company, so he knew his merchandise well. His unique business served the neighborhood until the early 1980s . . . mostly with beef.
Image courtesy Mike Ryerson Photographer Fred DeWolfe
The late Myrtle Casper was a longtime resident of the Slabtown neighborhood in Northwest Portland. Her husband, Ben Casper, owned the Saw Shop, which is now the site of the Northwest Portland Library parking lot. Myrtle enjoyed spending her time shooting pool with the men at the Northwest Tavern & Pool (now McMenamins) on NW 23rd Avenue. After all, what else was there for a lady to do when her husband spent his days sharpening saws?
Myrtle Clara Casper was born in Kansas in 1890. She was married three times and spent much of her early years working as a housekeeper. She passed away in 1974 at the age of 83 in an apartment above her favorite pool hall. Ben died four years later at the age of 93.
A large copy of this photograph of Myrtle is displayed on the wall of McMenamins Tavern & Pool. If the tour group is small your tour guide will take you into the bar that was Myrtle’s home away from home.
Slabtown had a hometown hero, because of his own struggles with class and the status quo in Portland. His “quest” and notoriety (transformation from freaky tall to starlight), which was followed by residents even after they were relocated, was to succeed at a sport—basketball—with which he had had no previous experience. Harvey Wade “Swede” Halbrook, who had an important career in the National Basketball Association in the 1950s. I met pro-baseball player Milo Meskel’s sister for the first time at the third Guild’s Lake Courts reunion in 2009.
Beverly Meskel: We all had fun down there. Everybody was friends—didn’t matter where you came from, you were all broke. We didn’t have anywhere to go…. We came from Minnesota where my dad made a dollar a day. If we didn’t live on a farm, we all would have starved to death…. Swede Halbrook, well, if you lived in Guild’s Lake [Courts], everyone knew Swede Halbrook. Well, in the fifth grade I stood about this high [motioning short] and Swede stood about this high [motioning tall]. And my brother-in-law’s dad used to say you two should get married so your kids would be the right size. He was quite a guy. I think there were…four guys [brothers]—Joe, Dan, and Jim and him, I think.
Joe: They were all tall.
Beverly Meskel: They were all tall, but Swede also had a gland problem. We almost lost him in sixth grade; he was up at Oregon Health Science for a long time.
Joe: Halbrook was in my class at Chapman.
Beverly Meskel: Was he? So, like I said, he was not that well of a person. Plus he tried so much to have friends that he did not know who his friends were and who were the users. He got himself in quite a bit of trouble… He was a neat kid, really.
Swede Holbrook at Guilds Lake Courts Courtesy Guilds Lake History Project
Swede, pictured sitting down with his long legs and enormous shoes, became a man of mythical proportions, who, at 7’3”, was the tallest player ever to play for Oregon State College. He was even larger than life when he lived at Guild’s Lake Courts, but he never played basketball there because there was only one hoop in the entire development, and that was inside a mixed-use room in the Guild’s Lake School.
A curiously rich and balanced blend of Richardsonian Romanesque and Shingle styles sets this important historic landmark apart from many homes in the neighborhood, through the dark slate shingles used as a dominant material in the exterior cladding. The building is rich with architectural detailing on both exterior and interior, and is constructed of quality materials throughout, including sandstone, slate, ornamental woodwork, and plaster. The use of rusticated Tenino stone is eye-catching. The light hue of the tower and chimney’s sandstone makes a striking contrast to the dark slate shingles. The elegant stones were imported from Tenino, Washington; when these stones were ordered in 1890 the quarry had just started to expand operations that led to a sandstone “boom town” that petered out between 1915 and 1920 as concrete replaced the use of sandstone in construction projects. The only more highly acclaimed house built in this style and material palette was the Julius Loewenberg House, constructed in the same year and demolished in 1960.
According to the Oregonian article dated November 25, 1917, the state of Oregon wasn’t always in agreement with the rest of country as to when Thanksgiving should be celebrated. 
