Piedmont. Portland's Emerald.

>we received the following from the City of Portland…
(apologies in advance for the formatting. It gets messed up when I copy and paste)

We are pleased to inform you that we are ready to move forward with the long-awaited modification of two of the six stairs at Peninsula Park Rose Garden in order to provide access for people with disabilities, families with strollers and our own maintenance carts. As you may recall this upgrade was requested of Parks by the neighborhood association over ten years ago and more recently reinforced by the Mayor. As you may also recall, we participated in several – at times, intense – workshops about this topic during the fall of 2007. The workshops were spirited and productive and resulted in excellent ideas about how best to achieve these modifications with the least detriment to the existing beauty of the Rose Garden. Based on those agreed-upon designs the consultant team of Nevue Ngan Associates, landscape architects, prepared drawings that can be seen at the following “Web Gallery” site: http://gallery.mac.com/richardbosch#100123
The railings depicted in the drawings were evaluated in the fall workshops and deemed the most appropriate from those commercially available. But we are excited to imagine a more locally responsive solution. Therefore we are working with a local sculptor to custom-design the handrails as an alternative to manufactured railings. We would like to thank Brian Borrello for steering us in the right direction on that possibility. During the Fall workshops Parks presented a slide show that best conveyed the Bureau philosophy of integrated accessible design and how the modification of the Rose Garden stairs has historic precedent. I encourage anyone wishing to see that presentation to visit: http://gallery.mac.com/richardbosch#100052 Earlier this year, we had informed the neighborhood that the next step would be for historic design review; in fact, during February, we had submitted an application to initiate that process. Instead, and much to our surprise, just last week we received the following interpretation from Bureau of Planning: “…the case was created in error. It happened because the map shows a historic resource dot, which normally applies to the entire property. It would have taken extraordinary diligence on the part of the intake person to figure out it only applied to the bandstand… since I believe it’s a unique instance in the whole City.” For additional good news, the appeal we were required to process to allow for a steeper slope than “code” was approved by Bureau of Development Services [BDS]. But, this was to be expected, since Parks, in its vast portfolio of properties, has had many circumstances where site infeasibility – existing conditions – could not be altered to provide an ideal ramp slope. The point is, the building permit is about to be issued. All that remains, therefore, is the bidding process and Bureau of Purchases currently is working on setting dates and getting the bid process underway. Based on where we are we anticipate construction work to start in mid-May and to be completed by mid to late June. We want to thank everybody from the Piedmont neighborhood that sacrificed so many of their precious evenings to participate in these workshops. As a result, we have a truly great design. We realize that not everyone in the neighborhood shares our enthusiasm to the same extent. But everyone does share the goal of inclusion for all users, and that is to be commended. I think the Piedmont neighborhood can be proud to have been a participant in this process. Finally, you should be proud to know, the Portland Disability Advisory Committee [DAC], during its annual awards ceremony last fall, has already presented two achievement awards for this project. Congratulations! Richard R. Bosch, Architect, Project Manager Architectural Projects Team Portland Parks and Recreation 1120 SW 5th Avenue, #1302 503.823.5591 pkbosch@ci.portland.or.us