Walk the Building

Twenty-four granite steps rise from the sidewalk to the bronze doors, and above them a stone eagle holds its wings open. This was the look of the federal government in 1933: Wilkeson sandstone over a steel frame, a rank of Doric pilasters, a heavy cornice — the vocabulary of permanence, meant to steady anyone who came to argue with the United States. The courthouse had just opened, its marble still bright and its stone unweathered.

Gus Solomon was twenty-seven that autumn, and no one on Main Street would have marked him. He was a young lawyer with a reputation, in respectable Portland, for trouble: he took labor cases and civil-liberties cases and fought for public power, which in those years was enough to be called a radical, even a Communist. That reputation would nearly keep him off the bench inside. He got there anyway, held it for thirty-seven years, and a year after his death Congress renamed the building for him. The building came first; the man who would define it was still on the sidewalk.

Inside, the floor is Brown Nebo marble, and the gold in its veins is not a figure of speech. A Treasury engineer told the Oregonian in 1932 that the stone held real gold, bound too tightly to be worth pulling out. It was an extravagant thing to lay down in the worst year of the Depression, which was rather the point: the government insisting on permanence at the moment permanence felt least certain.

The end walls carry bas-reliefs for the Oregonians who died in the First World War, and they are a fair place to note one of Solomon's contradictions. He was at once a civil libertarian and a patriot who believed in the draft. As a boy in that war he had watched men shamed in the street for not enlisting, and concluded that a fair, orderly draft was more just than a mob's guesswork about who was a coward. His politics never reduced to for or against the government. They turned on a narrower question: whether public power was being used reasonably, and fairly.

For most of the people who used this building, it was not where the Constitution got argued. It was where the mail went. The whole first floor was a post office, finished with a care that now seems startling — bronze writing desks, wall clocks, signage lettered on black glass, even turquoise ceramic ash receptacles set into the marble.

That doubleness ran deeper than the décor. Upstairs the government was oak and Corinthian columns; down here it sold stamps. Solomon thought of government in much the same register: less an idea to defend or distrust than a machine, to be judged by whether it worked for the person who came through the door.

The building keeps a quiet surprise in its plan. Only the ground floor fills the whole block; above it the courthouse becomes a hollow square wrapped around an interior light court, sixty-five feet by seventy-eight. The higher you go toward the judges, the more the building organizes itself around that shaft of open air.

The floors between held the rest of the federal government — the recruiters and the Coast Guard, the Forest Service, the tax collectors, the marshals — along with the clerks and typists and reporters whose work made a judge's possible. The marble and the plaques went to the judges. The government, day to day, was the people in the offices.

The two original district courtrooms are on this floor, and they were built to be felt: ceilings twenty-four feet high, oak walls, doors sheathed in leather, marble and bronze, paired Corinthian columns rising behind the bench. The room makes a single, physical argument — that the law is older and larger than the person standing before it.

On June 12, 1942, that argument met Minoru Yasui. A twenty-five-year-old lawyer born in Oregon, Yasui had walked downtown Portland after the curfew imposed that spring on everyone of Japanese ancestry, and then turned himself in — a deliberate act, by a trained attorney, to put the curfew on trial. He waived a jury and stood before Judge James Alger Fee, with Earl Bernard beside him and the United States, in the person of Carl Donaugh, across the aisle.

Among the lawyers Fee invited to brief the constitutional questions was Gus Solomon. The national ACLU had declined the case — Yasui, who had once worked at a Japanese consulate, struck its leaders as the wrong man to defend — and Solomon, who had written its director urging otherwise, appeared instead on his own, the only friend of the court to argue that the curfew was unconstitutional. Arguing the other way, also as a friend of the court, was Earl Warren, then the attorney general of California and later the chief justice who would write Brown v. Board of Education.

Fee's decision managed to be both principled and cruel. The curfew, he held, could not lawfully bind a citizen; but Yasui, he ruled, had forfeited his citizenship through his consulate work, and so was guilty as a foreign national. Yasui spent nine months in a windowless cell before the Supreme Court restored his citizenship, upheld the curfew, and returned the case for resentencing. The conviction stood until 1984.

It is the sharpest thing the building can tell you about Solomon. Before his name was on it, he stood inside it as a minor lawyer, telling the more important men in the room that the government of the United States was wrong.

Which of the two courtrooms? The record we have does not say. Both original district courtrooms are on this floor, and Yasui was almost certainly tried in one of them, but nothing we found names it. Better to leave the gap open than to fill it with a guess.

Behind the courtroom is a door the public rarely crosses, and behind that door is where the work was done.

Solomon reached this court in 1950, the first Jewish federal judge in Oregon, after a confirmation fight in which opponents red-baited him and said, without embarrassment, that the state did not want a Jew on its bench. His welcome was thin. For a year he had no courtroom of his own; he worked from a commissioner's room with his secretary at the same table, and was refused a law clerk on the reasoning that the chief judge had once done without one. It took visiting appellate judges, who found the arrangement indefensible, to fix it.

By the end he was here, in Room 615, and he had made the room formidable. On Fridays he carried home the files for Monday's calendar — a hundred cases, sometimes half again as many — and read every one by Sunday night. A lawyer who rose on Monday to ask for more time to find a witness might be told, evenly, that this was not what his own file said. It got around that Solomon knew the cases better than the men trying them.

It was not all austerity. His assistant remembered lunches in these rooms for the other judges, Libby Solomon bringing matzo-ball soup from home while the clerks set the table and washed up after. Both scenes belong to the same office: a man alone on a Sunday evening with the hundredth file, and, on a weekday, the federal bench of Oregon eating his wife's cooking in his chambers. The boy from South Portland who had been called a Christ-killer on his way to Hebrew school was, by then, the host.

His first law clerk sat in this room too, a young man named Jerome Kohlberg. He went east, and helped invent the leveraged buyout. The first initial in KKR learned the law here.

Between the chambers and the courtroom is a small room the judge crossed on his way to the bench. A friend on the New York bench once told Solomon that before a hard sentence he would prick himself with a pin, to remember that he bled like the man in the dock. Solomon kept the idea and dropped the pin.

He hung a painting here instead: a Gandy Brodie, a candelabrum worked almost entirely in black, the painter's image of death. On the mornings he was to sentence someone, he made a point of looking at it, he said, to remember that he was human too, and on his way to send another human being to prison.

He was not sentimental about the work. He thought some men belonged in prison, and accepted the duty of putting them there; his was not the humanism that finds no one at fault. It was the harder kind, which asks only that you never lose sight of what you are doing to someone else.

This is Brodie's “Candelabra with Wine” (1960), the candelabrum in shades of black that matches the painting Solomon described. Brodie also painted the judge, and the two men were photographed together, so the friendship is not in doubt. What remains uncertain is whether this exact canvas is the one that hung here, or a near-twin from the same series still held by the family — a question for the estate.

A floor higher, the tone softens: cherry instead of oak, a lower coffered ceiling, a jury box that curves. This was the appeals court's room, and it is the place to meet the other Solomon — not the civil libertarian but the engineer.

What obsessed him was waste, the ten weeks spent on what three days could settle. In Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Combustion Equipment Associates — a suit over a steam plant, built to burn sawmill waste, that never worked — he judged that an ordinary court would need six weeks of trial. Instead he made the parties fix the evidence in advance, in a single 173-page pretrial order that folded in twenty-six depositions and seventy-one written witness statements, so that by the time the trial opened, only the genuine disputes were left to hear. He tried the case, without a jury, in about two and a half days, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed. Other courts took to calling him the fastest gavel in the West.

The building explains the method better than any biography could. The performance happened in the courtroom; the work happened behind the chambers door. Solomon's cases moved quickly in public because he had moved the labor upstream, into the quiet room where no one was watching — the same conviction, in a different key, that made him despise a firm that would not hire a Jew, or a club that shut people out of the lunches where a city's real business got done.

Congress put his name over the door on October 28, 1988, the year after he died. The district court left in 1997 for the newer Hatfield Courthouse, two blocks west, and the great rooms fell quiet.

In 2025 the federal government sold the building. A Portland firm, SKB, bought it that December; the following spring a permit went in to turn the old postal hall into offices; and by that summer Portland Civic Lab had moved in, the first tenant of whatever the building becomes next.

Which leaves it, for now, between lives — no longer a courthouse, not yet fully anything else. The question it puts to you on the way out is the one it put on the way in, and the one Solomon spent a career answering: whether a building like this is built to keep people out, or can be taught to let them in.