The Building at Work
A post office in the lobby, a courthouse above it, and sixty-four years of federal life — including some of the most consequential cases in Northwest history.
The 1933 directory reads like a map of the federal government itself. The U.S. Post Office filled the basement and first floor, its marble lobby lined with bronze writing desks and lockboxes. Above it stacked the military recruiters, Coast Guard, Public Health Service, and Secret Service; the IRS and immigration offices; the U.S. Forest Service; the U.S. Marshal, federal prosecutors, and grand jury; the District Court's two great courtrooms on the sixth floor; and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the seventh.
The Yasui trial
The building's most historically significant case came early. On March 28, 1942, Portland attorney Minoru Yasui — the first Japanese American member of the Oregon bar — deliberately walked the streets after curfew to create a test case against the wartime orders confining Japanese Americans. His trial opened before Judge James Alger Fee on June 12, 1942, the first judicial test of the curfew anywhere in the country. Fee reached a tortured result: the curfew was unconstitutional as applied to citizens, he ruled, but Yasui had forfeited his citizenship by having worked for the Japanese consulate. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1943 alongside Hirabayashi; a federal court finally vacated it in 1986.
There is a poignant thread here: at the very moment of the trial, the Portland lawyer most publicly opposed to internment — the lone Jewish attorney in the city willing to chair the Oregon Committee to Aid Relocation despite threats — was Gus J. Solomon, whose name the building now bears.
Landmark decisions
In 1969, Judge Robert C. Belloni issued the "fair share" ruling in Sohappy v. Smith, holding that Oregon had violated the treaty fishing rights of Columbia River tribes and ordering the state to guarantee them a fair share of the salmon harvest. The decision laid the foundation for the Boldt decision five years later and endures as one of the longest-running federal cases in American history.
The docket had its spectacles too. On November 14, 1985, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — arrested weeks earlier after fleeing the Rajneeshee commune at Rancho Rajneesh — pleaded guilty in Portland's federal court to immigration fraud built on hundreds of sham marriages, paid a $400,000 penalty, and left the country before the day was out.
Comings and goings
The building changed with the government it housed. A new courtroom was added on the seventh floor in 1957; air conditioning arrived in 1968, at the cost of roofing over the postal workroom's skylight. In 1973 the Ninth Circuit decamped to the restored Pioneer Courthouse — returning, after forty years, to the building the courts had left in 1933. The Post Office departed in 1984, and its grand first-floor spaces were renovated for the district court. In 1984, Judge Solomon sat down in the building with an Oregon Historical Society interviewer and recorded more than twelve hours of oral history.
The end of the era came on November 13, 1997, when the district court moved to the new Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse — sixty-four years, nearly to the month, after Judge McNary opened the courtrooms on Main Street.