Portlandia in Pictures: Sellwood Bridge and Mela Building

During the 1920s, Portlandia was in the middle of a bridge-building boom. Several of Portland’s iconic bridges were built in this period, including the Sellwood Bridge. Since it was several miles south of downtown, the bridge was built with only two narrow lanes, which quickly became inadequate as Portland’s (and Milwaukie’s) population grew. Additionally, the site chosen for the bridge turned out to be a poor one, resulting in the west side being anchored into unstable land. The result is a bridge that desperately needs replacing, and luckily the process has already begun. However, before all the construction (and deconstruction) begins, we wanted to get some pictures of how the bridge looks 85 years after it first carried traffic over the Willamette.

Possibly due all of the bridge building going on, the county did not have the money to buy the land the bridge was built on. Consequently, the land underneath the east side of the bridge was, and is, heavily developed by private industry. Formerly the site of the Eastside Lumber Company, one of the main results of the inability to buy the land is that the bridge was built over (and actually through) the lumber company’s Mela Building. The remaining land since has been developed into riverside condominiums, while the Mela Building has been remodeled into office space.