The Five Lives of the Building

The original floor plan reads like an organizational chart of the New Deal state. You could buy a stamp on the first floor, enlist in the Marines on the second, be examined by the Public Health Service on the same floor, argue a tax question on the third, be indicted on the fifth, tried on the sixth, and lose your appeal on the seventh, without ever leaving the block.

The post office in the marble lobby was not Portland's main office — that was at 511 NW Broadway. This was Federal Station, the downtown retail and financial branch, inheriting the walk-in trade the Pioneer Courthouse had handled since the 1870s. Its workroom ran the width of the building, and postal inspectors watched it from a concealed gallery floored in cork so their footsteps would not carry.

The war filled every floor. The FBI moved its Portland division into room 403, where it stayed for twenty-three years, running one of the Bureau's key radio stations and, later, the surveillance that led to the capture of the first man ever named to the Ten Most Wanted list. On the sixth floor in June 1942, Minoru Yasui stood trial for breaking the curfew imposed on Japanese Americans. On the third floor the bankruptcy referee's caseload rose, of all things, because the shipyards were hiring: people who had been broke since 1929 could finally afford a fresh start.

After the war came the building's largest civil docket ever. The Vanport flood of May 1948 destroyed Oregon's second-largest city in an afternoon, and more than seven hundred lawsuits carrying some three thousand claims were filed against the United States. In October 1952, Judge Fee ruled for the government. The plaintiffs recovered nothing.

And underneath all of it, the drain had already started. By the 1957 city directory the Forest Service had gone to NE Oregon Street, most of the Internal Revenue Service had gone to the Lloyd district, the Army, Navy and Air Force recruiters had scattered to storefronts on Taylor and Morrison, and Selective Service had left entirely. What replaced them were smaller offices: seven agricultural marketing and statistics divisions, a mediation service, a dental clinic. The prestige tenants were being replaced by the ones that took less space.

Congress had given Oregon a third district judgeship in 1949, the seat Gus Solomon took. By 1957 three judges were working out of two courtrooms, and a third courtroom was carved into the seventh floor, displacing the jury room to the attic storey. The exterior was cleaned and repointed in 1962. Air conditioning arrived in 1968, at the cost of roofing over the postal workroom's skylight — the first time the building traded a piece of its architecture for a system it needed.

Then 1973 emptied two courts at once. The Ninth Circuit left for the restored Pioneer Courthouse, and so did the bankruptcy court, which had sat on the third floor since 1936. The move was deliberate: Judge John Kilkenny had saved the Pioneer from being demolished for a department-store parking lot, and a working court had to occupy it to justify the restoration. Two years later the Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt Federal Building opened with room for sixteen agencies, and absorbed most of what was left of scattered federal Portland.

The post office held on until 1984, when Federal Station closed and moved to a new University Station a few blocks away. Its grand first-floor rooms were renovated for the district court. For the first time in fifty-one years, the building belonged to the judiciary alone.

The building was renamed for Gus Solomon by act of Congress in October 1988, a year and a half after his death, and dedicated the following spring with Manuel Neri's marble figure installed beside the entrance. It was, by then, entirely a courthouse, and it lasted thirteen more years in that condition.

The court's first plan was to stay. Congress appropriated the money for a twelve-storey annex across the street — $4.1 million for the site, $4.71 million for design, and $33.32 million for construction, the last of which appears by name in the Congressional Record for July 1990. The annex was to be joined to this building by a skybridge or a tunnel.

In the late fall of 1990 the judges killed their own project. New federal courthouse design standards had just been issued, and the annex would not meet the court's minimum requirements under them. Judge James Redden flew to Washington to tell Senator Mark Hatfield, the annex's sponsor, that the plan they had funded would not work. Hatfield's answer settled it: do it right the first time, even if it means starting from square one.

The last district-judge jury trial in the building was Leatherman Tool Group's suit against Cooper Industries, a $4.5 million punitive verdict returned before Judge Malcolm Marsh on October 17, 1997 — a judgment that went on to the Supreme Court and changed how punitive damages are reviewed. The last trial of any kind, four days later, was a case tried before Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart. The new courthouse was dedicated on November 13; the movers worked through the weekend, and on Monday the seventeenth the phones rang in the new building.

After the courts left, the building became a federal miscellany. A 2014 inventory lists the Forest Service, the Public Buildings Service, the Federal Protective Service and the U.S. Trustees as its principal tenants, with the Small Business Administration, three Labor Department agencies, the Federal Mediation Service, the Veterans Affairs inspector general and the National Indian Gaming Commission besides. The Trustees worked out of suite 213; the Labor Department's wage and hour division sat in room 423, the same room a photographer had documented for the Historic American Buildings Survey decades earlier.

The courtrooms did not go dark. They became sets and stages — for a Tommy Lee Jones thriller in 2003, for two episodes of Grimm, for a Federal Trade Commission conference held in Courtroom 61 in 2010, and for classes of schoolchildren brought in by the Classroom Law Project. Naturalization ceremonies continued, the one judicial function that never left. In 2020 the building was among five federal buildings damaged during the protests; someone took the flag from its pole and burned it, and was ordered to pay $218.50.

Congress had also considered giving it a second judicial life. In 1999, when the splitting of the Ninth Circuit was under debate, the Solomon was proposed as ready-made headquarters for a new circuit, “available at no cost except minimal remodeling.” By 2002 the Ninth Circuit's chief judge told a House committee flatly that the building “needs major seismic repair work and is not suitable for occupation as a courthouse now.”

The General Services Administration listed it for disposal in December 2024, announced the public sale in May 2025 against a modernization bill it put above $76 million, and sold it that December. The deed records the price as $1.8 million — for a full downtown block whose land alone had been assessed at roughly nine times that, in a quarter when downtown office vacancy hit a record 34.6 percent. By the government's own account the building had been empty since 2022.

Portland Civic Lab moved into the third floor in August 2026, the first tenant of the building's sixth life.