Clackamas Town Center opens on March 6, 1981


You have to understand, in those days, Clackamas wasn’t much more than a collection of blackberry brambles and gravel roads that didn't know where they were going. But Ernest Hahn had a vision, the kind of vision that smells like money and fresh asphalt. On March 6, 1981, that vision finally opened its eyes—a million square feet of retail muscle rising out of the Oregon mud like some prehistoric beast.

They called it the Clackamas Town Center.

The suburbs had been growing teeth out here for years—tract homes sprouting like mushrooms after a hard rain, young families moving in with station wagons full of kids and dreams no bigger than a backyard barbecue. But there'd been nothing to hold them together, no heartbeat. Just the long gray slog between home and whatever passed for downtown. 

Then Ernest Hahn's people showed up, that California developer with the shark's smile and the patience of Job when it came to lawyers and environmental hearings. The land had once been earmarked for a high school, but the voters said no, and the school board sold it cheap. Hahn bought it, fought the zoning wars, the protests, the endless paperwork, and now—after years of mud and machinery and delay—the doors were swinging open.

Land yachts that outlasted the Carter Malaise sailed over a Wide Sargasso Sea of parking spaces, wipers slapping time like a metronome gone wrong. The parking lot was already half full by nine, cars nosing in from Happy Valley and Milwaukie and even farther out, people in raincoats and galoshes clutching coupons from the Oregonian supplement. The air smelled of wet asphalt and fresh paint and something faintly electrical, the way a storm smells right before lightning decides to strike.

Thousands were there, pressed against the glass doors like refugees looking for a sanctuary made of linoleum and neon. When those doors finally hissed open, the smell hit you first—that "new mall" scent. It was a cocktail of floor wax, Orange Julius syrup, and the faint, metallic tang of an ice rink waiting for its first sacrificial skater.

The place was a labyrinth. You had your anchors, the big gods of the era: JCPenney, Nordstrom, Sears, and Montgomery Ward. And then there was Meier & Frank, which had been sitting there since October like an advance scout waiting for the rest of the army to arrive.

Up high, three enormous cedar sculptures watched from their perches—tall, rough-hewn figures carved by an old woodsman named Dudley Carter, who was eighty-eight when they commissioned him. They looked like guardians, or maybe warnings. Ancient faces staring down at the new chrome and tile, as if they knew something the rest of us didn't.

In the center court, an ice rink waited, smooth as glass, already chilled and ready for the first clumsy pirouettes. Kids pressed their noses to the barrier, breath fogging the Plexiglas. Figure skater Tonya Harding would put that rink on the map in the 1990s, partly because she spent hours training on it, but mainly because she was at the center of the storm of controversy ahead of the 1994 Olympics after her teammate Nancy Kerrigan was wacked in the leg with a metal baton while practicing at Cobo Arena in Detroit. That brush with international fame wouldn't stop the bastards from tearing the rink down in 2003.

Somewhere a five-screen movie theater was firing up its projectors, and a branch of the county library sat quietly in one corner, as if it had always been there. Books and Orange Julius—it felt like the future had finally caught up with us.

Years later, folks would talk about what came after. The ice rink gone, the anchors shifting names like ghosts changing clothes—Macy's swallowing Meier & Frank, Sears closing its eyes for good, Nordstrom slipping away. The cedar sculptures moved, the big expansions in 2005 and beyond turning the place into something shinier, more outdoor, more like every other mall that tried to pretend it wasn't dying. But on March 6, 1981, none of that had happened yet.

On that day, Clackamas Town Center opened its doors wide, and for a little while it was the brightest thing in southeast Portland. A million square feet of light and warmth against the endless rain.

And if you listened close—really close—you might have heard the building sigh, the way an old thing sighs when it finally gets what it wants.

Welcome home, it seemed to say.

Come in. Stay a while.

We've been waiting.

Location: Clackamas, OR, USA

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