Monday, October 06, 2008

Dekum Building, downtown Portland

dekum_519

I adore this face, among the many that adorn the Dekum Building.

From Wikipedia:

The Dekum Building is a historic office building in downtown Portland, Oregon. Since 1980, it has been on the National Register of Historic Places.[2]

From the marker on the building:

Inscription. German immigrant Frank Dekum amassed a fortune during Portland’s explosive early history with his confectionery business. The massive Dekum Building, completed in 1892 at a cost exceeding $300,000, used exclusively Oregon materials in its construction. The brick masons drank beer instead of coffee on their job, according to one old timer whose duties as a boy had been to haul the large pails of beer up to them.

The architects of the Dekum Building, McCaw and Martin, made an audacious break from the cast-iron architecture of the 1880s. They adopted the new, lesser-known designs of Richardsonian Romanesque, characterized by massive rough-cut sandstone pillars on the ground level and red brick surfaces with cast terra-cotta ornamentation on the upper stories.

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