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timberline lodge could have been a glass skyscraper
Calling the plan a "profit-making eyesore," a Forest Service manager nixed 1920s plan for a modern steel-and-glass structure with an aerial tramway. You can read about it right here.
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Timberline Lodge could have been a 9-story skyscraper
Calling the plan a "profit-making eyesore," Forest Service manager nixed 1920s plan for a modern steel-and-glass structure with an aerial tramway.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A revised, updated and expanded version of this story was published in 2020 and is recommended in preference to this older one. To read it, click here.
This postcard image, from a note mailed in 1909, shows the tiny Cloud
Cap Inn on Mount Hood, with the peak behind. Built in 1889, the Cloud
Cap was the only hotel onthe mountain until Timberline was built, and
after guests started arriving in cars rather than on horses, it proved
woefully inadequate to serve the demand for lodgings there. For a
larger image, click here.
By Finn J.D. John — January 3, 2010
Timberline Lodge on the side of Mount Hood is almost an icon of the Portland area. Its rustic, WPA-financed design and construction strike most visitors as a good fit for the state’s general reputation for woodsy civility.
But had it not been for a particularly persnickety U.S. Forest Service manager, Timberline might have looked a lot different.
How different? Think “Bauhaus school of architectural design.” With nine stories of concrete and glass and a cable-car tramway.
Big mountain, tiny hotel
The whole thing had its roots in the early 1920s when cars started bringing large numbers of people out to the mountain on the freshly built Mount Hood Scenic Loop.
There was a hotel on the mountain – the tiny Cloud Cap Inn, built in 1889 – but it was woefully inadequate to the demand.
A gold mine for tourism? Yes, say some ...
The copyright notice on this romantic landscape rendition of a sunset
on Mount Hood is 1904. The postcard it's on was a promotional tool
for marketing one of William R. Hearst's publications on the East Coast.
For a larger image, click here.
Business people in Portland started seeing the potential in having a mountain so close – by developing it, they could generate a bunch of money from tourism.
... not so fast, say others
But to a group of locals who had the requisite magic combination of money, health and leisure to enjoy the mountain, this was not a welcome development. They preferred to keep the place as it was – a quiet, magical place of solitude and wildness. They worried that it would be turned into a sort of alpine Coney Island – fears that, as they soon learned, were not entirely groundless.
Hah, the businessmen retorted. You just want to keep it as your own personal rich-person playground.
Skyscraper on the ski slopes?
This postcard, showing Timberline Lodge on a sunny winter day, was
postmarked in 1950. [Larger image: 1800 x 1148 px]
This debate got more heated as the 1920s wore on, until a businessman named L.L. Wyler – as part of a committee – came forward with an $800,000 plan to develop the mountain with a hotel, resort, gas station and cable tram car.
Absolutely not, says Forest Service
The Mazama Club – a local mountaineers’ organization open only to those who had been on Mount Hood’s summit – geared up for battle. But it was over before they knew it. To the surprise of most people on both sides, Forest Service District Forester W.B. Greeley turned the project down flat, calling it a “profit-making eyesore.”
Wyler’s outfit refined the plan into that nine-story skyscraper mentioned above, still involving a tram, and went over Greeley’s head with it. This time, the plan was turned down specifically because of the design, which was deemed inappropriate by the Coolidge Administration's Forest Service planners.
This image is from a photo postcard made just after World War II. It
shows the view of the mountain from the highway at Timberline Lodge.
[Larger image: 1200 x 772 px]
By the time the Forest Service green-lighted a more rustic plan for the lodge, it was 1929; the country was sliding into the Depression, and the Portland businessmen had become unwilling to take on the financial obligation. But some important issues had been settled: Yes, development on the mountain could go forward. But it would have to respect the mountain.
Enter the W.P.A. ...
And there matters stood until 1935, when the WPA approved the Mount Hood Development Association’s application for a 300-bed hotel, to the tune of $275,513 in 1935 dollars, and got construction started the following year.
When the place was finished, the government invited the king of Norway to come demonstrate this wild new sport called “skiing.” They needn’t have bothered. Plenty of Oregonians of Scandinavian and Swiss descent were able and eager to show the way.
... with a Camp Fire Girls handbook
This image is from a postcard showing one of the rustic but comfortable
rooms at Timberline Lodge; it dates from roughly 1950. [Larger image:
1200 x 723 px]
Perhaps the most enduring symbol of Timberline is the 750-pound bronze weathervane, crafted in a sort of abstract primitive design suggesting a bird. Most people assume it’s a Native American design, and perhaps it is – but the workers who built it cribbed the design from a Camp Fire Girls handbook.
(Sources: Rose, Judith. Timberline Lodge: A Love Story. Portland: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1986; Sullivan, William L. Hiking Oregon’s History. Eugene: Navillus Press, 2006)
Note: More images of Mount Hood are with the story on its 1859 eruption (click here).
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