Property Watch: Downtown Portland Skyscraper ‘Big Pink’ Is for Sale

When the US Bancorp Tower‘s chief tenant and namesake, US Bank, announced last September that it would vacate its offices there, Portlanders weren’t exactly shocked. Its reported occupancy rate of around 45 percent is a little eyebrow-raising, but downtown office buildings have had a certain dead-mall feeling for a while now. And we weren’t too surprised when the 42-story tower’s Seattle-based majority owner, Unico Properties, listed it as for sale in May. Portland’s second-tallest building has changed hands plenty in its short lifetime, most recently in 2015. We’re still going to call it Big Pink, no matter who owns it or what anchor tenant might give it a new formal name.

An elder millennial born in 1983, Big Pink is older than MTV but younger than Nickelodeon. It was a welcome new arrival in Portland’s skyscraper family, a younger sibling of the slightly taller Wells Fargo Center and the shorter Standard Insurance building. (We won’t talk about the Portland Building, the real problem child—which is too short to be a skyscraper, anyway.) Then–US Treasury Secretary Donald Regan spoke at the tower’s 1983 dedication, praising his boss’s tax cuts (yes, Ronald Reagan had a treasury secretary named Donald Regan) and saying the federal deficit was Congress’s fault—quite a change compared to Salvation Army Capt. Mary Stillwell‘s songs and sermons, delivered on the site nearly a century before. 

It was nicknamed almost immediately for its pink champagne hue, though these days salmon is a more frequent color reference. For a highly vertical, gleaming pink erection (another word for a building, we swear!), it’s surprisingly nonphallic. Dome-topped pointers like Nebraska’s state capitol or the tallest building in Kentucky inspire more titters than Big Pink. Modernist architect Pietro Belluschi (of Equitable Building fame) consulted on the design, which surely helped keep things classy.

In 1984, US Bank’s Tower branch was the company’s first “electronic office,” featuring three “U-Bank machines, which allow customers to make deposits, withdrawals and transfers with a teller’s help,” according to an Oregonian story published at the time. There were also two computers to help customers balance their account, set up a budget, or get answers to what-if questions about purchases and investments. Account holders had to set up an appointment to use a computer.

Atwater’s, the first restaurant in the space now occupied by the Portland City Grill, offered boneless ducklings and assorted relishes along with the view from the 30th floor. Higher up, the 37th floor has hosted gala fundraisers and wedding receptions. Santa has been known to make appearances on the ground level. 

For reasons we can’t quite fathom, JLL, the firm handling the sale, includes neither proto-ATMs nor Santa’s visits on its huge list of reasons to be excited about this city block. The sales pitch calls out Big Pink’s proximity to the Midtown Beer Garden and the forthcoming James Beard Public Market, city tax incentives for new business leases, promises of increased policing, the state’s drug-recriminalization bill, Mayor Keith Wilson’s return-to-office mandate for some city workers and the accompanying foot traffic, and recent $8 million elevator modernization. (We like it when those work, too!) While hand-wringers worry if Portland will ever recover from the changes brought about by the pandemic, in JLL’s building-half-full view, we’re back and better than ever, baby.

• Address: 111 SW Fifth Ave
• Size: 42 stories / 1.15 million rentable square feet
• Parking Spaces: 999
• Most Recent Sale Price: $372.5 million in 2015
• Listing Agent: JLL

Regular Property Watch columnist Melissa Dalton will return next week. Contact Dalton here. 

Editor’s Note: Portland Monthly’s “Property Watch” column takes a weekly look at an interesting home in Portland’s real estate market (with periodic ventures to the burbs and points beyond, for good measure). Got a home you think would work for this column? Get in touch at [email protected].