Timeline

The Pioneer Courthouse rises

Portland's first federal building — courthouse, post office, and customs offices in one — is built at Fifth and Morrison. It will house Oregon's federal courts for more than half a century, and the city will outgrow it.

Congress funds a new courthouse

Congress allocates $500,000 to buy a site and begin a new U.S. Courthouse for Portland, with construction estimated at $1.5 million — on the condition that the old Pioneer Courthouse be sold for at least $1.75 million. That December the estimate is raised to $1.95 million; the press will call it Portland's "two million dollar Federal Building."

Assembling Block 183

The government buys the full block bounded by SW Main, Madison, Sixth, and Broadway — partly by purchase, partly by condemnation. Sellers include the Ladd Estate Company and the estate of pioneer developer John Yeon; the parcels together cost over $660,000.

Morris H. Whitehouse chosen as architect

The Oregonian's Washington correspondent breaks the news that Portland's Morris H. Whitehouse — MIT-trained, a Rome scholarship winner, designer of Temple Beth Israel and the University Club — will design the courthouse, with associates A. Glenn Stanton and Walter E. Church. Fellow Portland architects greet the choice with widespread approval.

A judge helps design his courtroom

Writing on U.S. District Court letterhead, Judge Robert S. Bean sends Whitehouse detailed suggestions for the new building: put the judges' chambers and library to the north, the courtrooms to the south "for sunshine," and a door from the corridor into each courtroom for attorneys. Whitehouse writes back four days later agreeing to study the ideas — a rare glimpse of the bench shaping its own building.

Source: Bean–Whitehouse correspondence, OHS (Whitehouse & Associates records)

The design unveiled

Whitehouse shows the Oregonian a rendering of the approved design — a dignified classical block developed with consulting architect Jules Henri de Sibour of Washington, D.C., under the Treasury's Acting Supervising Architect, James A. Wetmore.

"Save the elms"

Major J. D. Guthrie writes Whitehouse urging him to preserve the elm trees on the block — an early plea for the mature trees that would nonetheless be felled before a crowd of onlookers when excavation began the next winter.

Source: Guthrie letter, OHS (Whitehouse & Associates records)

Landmarks fall on the federal building site

The Muckle Wrecking Company clears Block 183, demolishing the old Whitehall Hotel — once one of the city's finer small hostelries — and two garages to make way for the courthouse.

The wood-versus-steel window fight is settled

Oregon's lumber interests, hungry for Depression-era orders, pressed the architects and the Treasury to specify wood window sash instead of steel. The Treasury's compromise, issued this day: metal sash on the exterior elevations, wood sash on the interior light courts. The controversy would flare again in Congress the next summer.

Source: Treasury decision letter, OHS (Whitehouse & Associates records)

An all-sandstone building for $1,156,000

Murch Construction Company of St. Louis wins the contract, its all-sandstone bid beating cheaper options that would have switched to terra cotta on the upper floors. The grey Wilkeson sandstone comes from the Walker Cut Stone Company of Tacoma, putting 150 quarry workers on the job; 92 percent of contract money goes to Portland- and Seattle-area firms.

Excavation begins — and draws a crowd

With commercial construction nearly dead in Depression-era Portland, a large crowd of onlookers gathers just to watch the site's elm trees toppled and excavation begin.

A proposal for murals — politely declined

Consultant Carl Arthur Beck writes Whitehouse pitching a program of murals for the new building, enclosing a roster of muralists to choose from. The architects reply a week later that the decoration allowance is already spent — which is why the finished courthouse leans on marble, bronze, and carved stone rather than painted walls.

Source: Beck–Whitehouse correspondence, OHS (Whitehouse & Associates records)

The cornerstone — and a swimming photo — laid

Architect Whitehouse and U.S. Attorney George Neuner lay the cornerstone at 10 a.m. Sealed inside: five Portland daily newspapers, historic documents, and a snapshot of architects Whitehouse, Stanton, and Church swimming in Oswego Lake.

Ninety percent done — and out of money

With the building nearly complete, Representative Charles H. Martin reports that the Treasury's budget has been cut "away below the water line," and Acting Supervising Architect James A. Wetmore wires that the courthouse is "ninety percent completed." The architects rally Oregon's congressional delegation to fund the finishing work.

Source: May 1933 telegrams, OHS (Whitehouse & Associates records)

The new federal courtrooms open

Federal judges John H. McNary and James Alger Fee preside over the opening. McNary, admiring the rich surroundings, jokes that no one should expect "the standard of judicial utterances to improve proportionately."

"Most handsome of all"

Surveying Portland's five federal buildings, the Oregonian pronounces the new courthouse the most handsome of them all.

A federal city under one roof

The original roster fills every floor: the U.S. Post Office on the first floor, military recruiters and the Secret Service on the second, the IRS and immigration offices on the third, the Forest Service on the fourth, the U.S. Marshal and prosecutors on the fifth, the District Court on the sixth, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the seventh.

The bankruptcy referee sets up on the third floor

Estes Snedecor takes a small office, a small hearing room and a secretary's front room on the third floor — the beginning of a bankruptcy court that will sit in this building for thirty-seven years. His first assistant, hired that year, is Neva Elliott, a 1935 law graduate. There are no rules to work from; Snedecor invents forms and local practice as cases arrive, and referees are paid per petition until Congress puts them on salary in 1946.

The Minoru Yasui curfew trial

Portland attorney Minoru Yasui, who deliberately violated the WWII curfew imposed on Japanese Americans to create a test case, stands trial before Judge James Alger Fee — the first judicial test of the wartime orders, and among the most consequential cases ever heard in the building. Yasui's conviction, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1943, was finally vacated in 1984.

Gus J. Solomon joins the bench

President Truman gives Portland lawyer Gus J. Solomon a recess appointment to the U.S. District Court. A bruising confirmation fight follows — opponents red-baited Solomon and openly argued that Oregonians didn't want a Jewish federal judge — before the Senate confirms him on June 27, 1950.

The first man on the Ten Most Wanted list is captured

The FBI's Portland division, working from room 403 of this building since 1948, tracks Thomas James Holden to a house near Beaverton and arrests him. Holden was the first fugitive ever named to the Bureau's Ten Most Wanted list, published the year before.

The Vanport claims are dismissed

Judge James Alger Fee rules for the government in the consolidated litigation over the 1948 Vanport flood — more than seven hundred suits and some three thousand claims, the largest civil docket the building ever carried. The plaintiffs, many of them Black shipyard families displaced when Oregon's second-largest city was destroyed in an afternoon, recover nothing.

The Portland Four

The House Un-American Activities Committee sits in Portland and hears fifty-three Oregonians named, nearly half connected to Reed College. Four World War II veterans who refuse to answer are prosecuted for contempt of Congress in this building; three are sent to prison. The Ninth Circuit reverses the convictions in 1957.

Chief Judge Solomon

As chief judge, Solomon becomes famous for speeding up the docket and modernizing the district's practice — and, off the bench, for pressuring Portland's law firms and private clubs to end discrimination against Jews and women.

A wiretap case from this courthouse rewrites the Fourth Amendment

The Supreme Court reverses the conviction of the Portland vice figure James B. Elkins, tried in this building for wiretapping, and abolishes the “silver platter” doctrine — the rule that had allowed federal prosecutors to use evidence unlawfully seized by state officers. According to the court's historical society, Robert F. Kennedy testified at the trial.

Sidney Lezak takes room 506 — as the acting U.S. Attorney

Lezak begins twenty-one years as the federal prosecutor for Oregon, the longest tenure in the country by the time he retires. For his first three years he holds the office only in an acting capacity, because Senator Maurine Neuberger blocks his confirmation from her own Portland office in room 326 of the same building.

Jerry Harris is hired as an official court reporter

Multnomah County had declined to send out its only Black court reporter for fear of losing accounts. Judge Solomon sends for him and tells him to come and be among his friends. Harris reports this court for thirty-two years and retires in 1997, the year it leaves the building.

A "fair share" for Columbia River tribes

In Sohappy v. Smith, Judge Robert C. Belloni rules that Oregon violated the treaty fishing rights of Columbia River tribes and orders the state to guarantee them a fair share of the harvest — a foundation for the landmark Boldt decision and one of the longest-running federal cases in American history.

The FBI moves out; the first federal magistrate moves in

The Bureau leaves the fourth floor after twenty-three years, taking sixty agents and thirty-six support staff to a building on SW First Avenue. The same year George Juba is appointed Oregon's first United States magistrate. He will persuade parties to consent to have him try their cases outright, years before consent jurisdiction exists in federal law — a practice later written into the national rules.

The Ninth Circuit moves out

After forty years on the seventh floor, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit relocates to the newly restored Pioneer Courthouse — the building its predecessors had abandoned in 1933.

A federal grand jury here indicts D. B. Cooper

With the statute of limitations about to expire five years after the hijacking, the grand jury sitting in this building returns an indictment for air piracy against “John Doe, aka Dan Cooper” — a man no one has identified, in absentia. The FBI closed the investigation in 2016 without naming him.

Helen Frye becomes Oregon's first woman federal district judge

A former schoolteacher who had been required to resign when she became pregnant, and who entered law school at thirty-two, Frye is commissioned to the district court and takes chambers in this building, where she sits until the court moves in 1997.

The post office departs

After a half-century, the Post Office leaves the first floor; extensive renovations convert the postal spaces for the growing District Court. (A retail branch would return from 2004 to 2011.)

The Bhagwan pleads guilty

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh pleads guilty in Portland's federal court to two felony immigration-fraud charges stemming from the Rajneeshee commune scandal, pays a $400,000 penalty, and leaves the United States that same night.

Sheela pleads guilty

Ma Anand Sheela and Ma Anand Puja plead guilty in this building to wiretapping and to the product tampering behind the 1984 salad-bar poisonings in The Dalles — still the largest bioterrorism attack in American history. Sheela serves about twenty-nine months and is deported.

Judge Solomon dies

Solomon dies in Portland after 37 years on the federal bench — still hearing cases in senior status, in the building that would soon carry his name.

Listed in the National Register

The building enters the National Register of Historic Places (reference no. 79002142) under its historic name, "United States Court House (New)" — recognized for its eclectic Renaissance Revival, Neo-Classical, and Art Deco design.

Renamed for Gus J. Solomon

Public Law 100-543 designates the building the Gus J. Solomon United States Courthouse. The dedication ceremony followed in 1989 — the same year Manuel Neri's Carrara marble sculpture Ventana al Pacifico was installed beside the main entrance.

Congress funds a courthouse annex that will never be built

The Treasury and Postal appropriations bill carries a line item — “Oregon: Portland, Courthouse Annex, $33,320,000” — for a twelve-storey addition across the street, to be joined to this building by a skybridge or tunnel. That autumn the judges conclude the annex cannot meet newly issued federal courtroom standards and abandon it. Senator Mark Hatfield's response settles the matter: do it right the first time, even if it means starting from square one.

Judge Frye halts old-growth logging

Holding that the Bureau of Land Management had ignored new evidence about the northern spotted owl, Frye enjoins federal timber sales across western Oregon from this building — among the most economically consequential orders ever issued by an Oregon federal court, and a turning point in the Timber Wars.

The plot to kill the U.S. Attorney comes to trial

Sally-Anne Croft and Susan Hagan, extradited from Britain, are convicted before Judge Malcolm Marsh of conspiring to murder Charles H. Turner, the United States Attorney who had prosecuted the Rajneeshee cases from room 506 of this building.

The last trials

On October 17 a jury returns a $4.5 million punitive verdict for Leatherman Tool Group against Cooper Industries before Judge Marsh — a judgment the Supreme Court will use in 2001 to change how punitive damages are reviewed. Four days later, Greene v. Manufacturers' Life is tried before Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart: the last trial of any kind held in the building.

The district court moves out

The U.S. District Court leaves for the new Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse after 64 years, ending the building's run as Oregon's federal judicial center. Federal agencies — the Forest Service among them, back where it started in 1933 — remain as tenants.

A Hollywood turn

The courthouse appears in William Friedkin's thriller The Hunted, with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro — one of several films to use its marble lobby and courtrooms.

“Not suitable for occupation as a courthouse”

Testifying to a House subcommittee considering a split of the Ninth Circuit, Chief Judge Mary Schroeder reports that the Solomon Courthouse “needs major seismic repair work and is not suitable for occupation as a courthouse now.” Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain notes it is filled with commercial tenants and still carried on the books as a federal courthouse, with no federal judges in it.

The building goes empty

The last federal tenants leave. By the General Services Administration's own later account, the courthouse stands vacant from this year until its sale — three years of an empty full-block building in the centre of downtown Portland.

GSA puts the courthouse up for sale

With all federal tenants relocated and more than $76 million in deferred modernization looming, the General Services Administration announces the building's public sale — with a historic preservation covenant to be written into the deed.

A new owner, a new chapter

Portland real-estate firm ScanlanKemperBard (SKB) acquires the courthouse, announcing plans to rehabilitate, restore, and adaptively reuse it. The preservation covenant protects the building — and Neri's sculpture stays.

The first tenant arrives

Portland Civic Lab — a Portland organization that builds free public dashboards and tools to help residents make sense of the city's housing, budgets, and civic life — becomes the first tenant to move into the courthouse under its new ownership. It is the beginning of the building's next chapter of active use, after years standing vacant since its federal tenants departed.

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