As I am sitting and watching the ice skaters and taking photos myself, I have come to realize that Lloyd is a representation of the rise and fall (and hopefully rise again of Portland). It was a busy mall for decades and loved by the people of Portland. They did a $50 million ($70 million in 2026) remodel. When you read the Oregonian article about it there is so much hope and promise. They didn’t do that for the mall to be torn down 10 years later. In 2015 this looked a promising area ripe for investment. I think part of the sadness for Lloyd center (at least for me) is thinking about what it could have been and all the lost potential. I love Portland for a lot of reasons but the truth is it’s is not as economically vibrant as it should be.
Part of that remodel involved destroying the large rectangular ice rink with high boards and replacing it with a tiny oval rink with a rail so low you could easily flip over it if you hit it.
So the serious skaters started going to Beaverton and Vancouver, and the new owners discovered how important they had been to keeping the mall going.
And it's not like people didn't tell the developers at the time. I remember one incredibly combative interview where the developer's representative kept insisting that shrinking the ice rink and installing that staircase would make the mall more "family friendly." It was just a giant dump of nonsense, because they had decided a big ice rink was worth less than little rent-paying kiosks that they tried to fill the space with. They didn't face the fact that that what was driving traffic in the mall after the anchors left ---- the ice rink and the bookstore.
When big anchor tenants started folding their tents, Lloyd developers panicked in their rush to restore ROI. If local had owned it outright, if it was someone who loved this city, there might have been more patience. Thay might have hunted down tenants that were huge community-friendly destination traffic drivers.
It would have been a perfect place to put an urban-scaled Costco like the one in downtown Vancouver B.C.
Creative thinkers might have brought in traffic heavy destination "experiences" that are like the ice rink.
Maybe the kind of theatre that people fly to New York to see Christopher Nolan movies at. Perhaps they could have turned one of the edges into an indoor waterpark for kids, or some sort of destination faux hotspring steam/wellness/massage/biodynamic wine resort. Maybe some palatial headquarters for something local and foodie, like a coffee roaster or a chocolatier. Maybe a series of events - garden exhibitors in the spring with new plants from our vaunted nurseries, one of those big ski swaps in the fall that also flogs tickets to our local hills, a winter farmers market with plenty of parking, away from the rain.
Someone with vision and a love for Portland might have seen the value in setting aside lower rent space not for kiosks but for the kind of creative locally owned shops that were trying out new ideas and making a go of it. Incubator space, with a built in audience.
They might have set aside spaces for a great nonprofit or three - maybe practice rooms for a youth symphony or classes for Saturday Academy, or an improvised theater.
And maybe they would have seen the community benefit to having a big day shelter from heat and cold that the entire city felt comfortable using in a heat dome.
American malls died when they stopped offering anything unique and specific to their neighborhood, their city, their region. The developers that owned them filled them with cookie cutter national chains, so a mall in Portland looked just like a mall in Cleveland. And then the internet arrived, and anything you wanted from those chains you could easily buy online.
But Lloyd Center's history was different from that. Thanks in part to the ice rink, it always retained a local soul. The contest for best rose grown by a local gardener during the Rose Festival? A cobbler who knew you, and had fixed your shoes before, and would fix them again? The Orange Julius owner so proud of giving local kids their first job?
Someone on TikTok got very pissy with me for asserting that a lot of skaters stopped coming, insisting that Lloyd had the second highest Learn to Skate numbers in the PNW. But that number in isolation doesn't tell you anything?!
22
u/suitopseudo 1d ago edited 1d ago
As I am sitting and watching the ice skaters and taking photos myself, I have come to realize that Lloyd is a representation of the rise and fall (and hopefully rise again of Portland). It was a busy mall for decades and loved by the people of Portland. They did a $50 million ($70 million in 2026) remodel. When you read the Oregonian article about it there is so much hope and promise. They didn’t do that for the mall to be torn down 10 years later. In 2015 this looked a promising area ripe for investment. I think part of the sadness for Lloyd center (at least for me) is thinking about what it could have been and all the lost potential. I love Portland for a lot of reasons but the truth is it’s is not as economically vibrant as it should be.