The theme of Portland’s civility and ascendancy from wilderness would emerge as it prepared to host its first World’s Fair in 1905. At this time, Portland had become established as one of the wealthiest cities in the American West. However, Seattle was quickly approaching it in population, and the business elite of Portland sought a means to draw their city back into the spotlight. The Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition would provide immense opportunities for local businesses, for tourism, and for city development.
Portland’s amenities, at this time, appear to have been a mixed bag. Ray Stan- nard Baker, an influential journalist, commented in 1903 that “Portland is noted for the solidity of its financial institutions, its fine clubs and hotels, its good schools and libraries.” Only two years earlier, however, banker Abbot L. Mills observed in a public speech that Portland “was lagging behind [other cities] in public kindergartens and municipal libraries,” that it “was ill-protected by a police force that was totally inadequate,” and that it “needed much greater revenue for municipal services.” He did also note that the city “was well-lighted” and “well-served by a water system that was one of the healthiest and purest in the nation.” The discrepancy between their observations likely indicates the divide between the amenities available to Portland’s elite and those available to its lower classes. Mills concluded this same speech observing that Portland’s elite had been “riding first class on a steerage ticket”; that is, they had enhanced the quality of their private experiences, while creating few services of public value.
One of the Exposition’s major attractions used the monumentalism of the City Beautiful movement to display a particular attitude toward trees—that of forestry. The Forestry Building displayed Oregon’s wealth in the form of timber resources—the building itself was constructed from a million board feet of lumber, including 52 uncut six-foot-wide trunks, and displayed features of the northwest’s sylvan landscape. This treatment of trees imbued them with value in contrast with the treatment of trees planted in the city.
Parks and open space, such as Centennial Park, beautified the clean and orderly spaces they occupied. The external forests, by contrast, were an untamed and bountiful resource suitable for harvest. By turning these forests into parks, however, the city could symbolically bring them into the societal, tamed sphere, and, in practical terms, open them up to use by its residents. In this case, the relationship between form and function starts to become less dichotomous and more nuanced. It may be most appropriate, in this case, to say that the treatment of trees followed their location, where neither of these aspects are totally in the realm of form or the realm of function.