I’m a sucker for good terra-cotta, I’ll admit. Pair it with red-brick, and I’m hooked. The only thing wrong, for me, with Portland’s Dekum Building is that I’d rather have seen red sandstone at the bottom. Call me picky.
Built at a time when Portland was growing rapidly, and a few years after a fire had cleared away older wooden buildings, the Dekum was a sort of monument to its owner, Frank Dekum, who arrived in Portland in 1853, age 24, and with a partner started the city’s first candy business. Then he went into real estate. And banking. And insurance. And railroads. And construction, which leads us to the 1892 Dekum Building designed by McCaw, Marting and White, a local firm that designed many of the city’s distinctive buildings.
The style is called ‘Richardsonian Romanesque,’ after a popular (for a while) architect Henry Hobson Richardson, whose blend of motifs into one style worked better for him, and for McCaw and Martin, than it did for many others. There’s a real difference between eclectic and hodge-podge!
The building repeats many of Richardson’s motifs: Heavy stone arches at the base, the red brick and the absolutely gorgeous terra cotta. A note: I spent some time annoyed at McCaw and Martin for the white terra cotta appliques below the windows (remember, the fire escapes were added later); they seemed unnecessary and ‘fake.’
But later, I took another look at the long view and it struck me that they are not meant to be viewed this close; at a distance, they are one with the stone, and the window framing extends between them.
You, and I, almost didn’t get to see any of this. A new owner of the building when it was sold to a developer who intended to tear it down and build a high-rise parking garage in its place. Fortunately, another local company, Norcrest China, bought the building from him and pledged not to demolish it. It underwent renovation and rehabilitation, and by 1980 it was ready to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
As mentioned, Richardsonian Romanesque didn’t last long; the Hamilton Building, built only a year later and the Postal Building built in 1900 across the street, share a much more restrained style, but still with worthy decorations.
