Nice job today by The Oregonian summarizing the mess that is Memorial Coliseum. I especially loved our fine mayor’s contributions to the story, including this gem, in reaction to The Trail Blazers’ “Jumptown” concept:

“Terrible,” Adams said of early Jumptown drawings. “The most un-Portland-like, significantly un-Portland like, renderings of what it would be.”

Now I wasn’t pleased with the role the Trail Blazers played in this whole thing. Most people I know believe they were the ones — not a band of architects — who torpedoed the idea of tearing MC down and building a ballpark. But I was intrigued by “Jumptown” and more than that, I fell on the floor laughing at Sam Adams’ idea that it was “un-Portland-like.”

What does that mean, Mr. Mayor? That it might actually be successful? Gawd, isn’t it time to go with something un-Portland-like? The whole idea that people can’t come to grips with the fact that the building is old, worn out and in serious need of a demolition is still something this city doesn’t want to face up to.

So, just as Portland has done with PGE Park, it will keep pumping taxpayer dollars into it, chasing good money after bad, trying to save something that deserves to be discarded — recycling gone wild. This city won’t come to grips with the idea that sports arenas have a distinct shelf life. Of course, this city won’t come to grips with the idea that every other major city in the world builds new arenas.

I’m warning you, Portland, you follow Adams’ idiotic plans for this site — basically just an overgrown community center — you’re going to be subsidizing that white elephant for decades.

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I’m sure you saw this story about Orlando landing the 2012 NBA All-Star Game. It’s the second time the Magic have played host to the game since it came into the league.

Meanwhile, Portland remains one of the few teams in the league to never have played host to the game — which sticks in the craw of a lot of long-time Portlanders. Oh, I know, when you talk to the Trail Blazers they’ll tell you that the lack of hotel space, or the lack of a huge headquarters hotel in the vicinity of the arena, means Portland CANNOT host it.

That’s an impediment, but seriously — it’s just the easy excuse for the league and the team. The simple fact is, the Blazers quit bidding for the game years ago. They really haven’t wanted it. Many NBA teams have no interest in staging the game. It is a major pain in the backside.

I don’t think the Blazers have had any interest in messing around with all the details and distractions that the All-Star Weekend can bring to a franchise. The only entity that really benefits from the event is the city itself, with all the visitors and attention in can bring to a community.

There are two real reasons for a team to chase that game. The first is that you’re having trouble selling season tickets and you need the game to spark interest in your NBA team. You can even include tickets to the game or the Saturday circus of events as part of a season-ticket package. This reason is much less common than it used to be, mainly because the hosting teams just don’t get all that many tickets anymore. The league sucks most of them up for its bigwigs and VIPs.

The best reason to want the game now is that it’s major leverage in your community. If you need some juice with the mayor or city council in getting a new arena built or renovated, you can promise the All-Star Game — and often the local political hacks will fall all over themselves to help you. The game does bring major revenue into town and also brings plenty of attention to a community.

For politicians, it doesn’t get any better than that.

OK, so let’s fast-forward to our situation in Portland. Right now in the Rose Quarter, three different groups are trying to win the right to develop the area — including the Trail Blazers’ Jumptown proposal. The basketball team is the favorite in the process, by the way. The Blazers usually get what they want around here, as all of us who wanted to see Memorial Coliseum turned into a showplace for a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium know by now.

But if you’re the City Council and the mayor’s office, the least you can do is extract a commitment from the Trail Blazers that they’ll do ALL they can to get an All-Star Game in Portland in return for the rights to developing Jumptown. It would be a nice way to open that neighborhood when and if it ever does get built.

And honestly, hotel rooms or not — and with all the damn trolleys and trains running around this town, our hotels are all accessible from the Rose Quarter — this town DESERVES an NBA All-Star Game. And the Blazers damn well ought to start bidding for it again.

The league owes us one and so does the team. I cannot believe our “city fathers” — and in the case of Portland even using that old term is pretty hilarious — haven’t pressured the team to make it happen by now. Well, I CAN believe it because the level of naivete around City Hall when it comes to sports has never been higher.

But the mayor, city council and everyone else in a position to have a say about developing that Rose Quarter area should make sure they do all they can to get past the BS and hold the Trail Blazers accountable for bringing the game here.

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This franchise can take injuries and defections at just about every position but one — at the very top. There is no other owner out there like Paul Allen.

I remember telling someone this summer, every time this man sets foot in the Rose Garden he ought to get a standing ovation. He’s been that important not only to this franchise but this city. Do you really think Portland would have built a new arena unless he paid for it? Really? I don’t. No way.

The city of Portland would either be still trying to tweak and “renovate” Memorial Coliseum — or the team would be long gone to Memphis or somewhere else by now.

Do you think any other owner would be willing to lose the millions and millions of dollars Paul Allen has lost on the Trail Blazers? I don’t think so. The realities of owning a team in a small market haven’t been a problem here for years. We’re so spoiled here that fans and media take it for granted. I have for years.

Allen treats this franchise as if it’s located in New York or Los Angeles, spending what it takes to win and knowing the bottom line is going to be scary. He’s tightened his belt at times, but who doesn’t? It still hasn’t deterred him from trying to make this the best franchise in the NBA.

He just wants to win. God love him for that. And God bless him in his fight against non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

My first reaction upon hearing the news that he’s fighting cancer again was pretty much what I wrote at the start of this post. I worry about who would own this team if he doesn’t. I can’t imagine the next owner being willing to subsidize the franchise the way he has.

I think that’s a natural knee-jerk reaction a lot of us had. But what I’m thinking about now is the man I’ve now been acquainted with for nearly two decades. A quiet, hard-to-get-to-know guy who keeps to himself and doesn’t reveal much. I’ve tweaked him in print and on the air countless times, without him ever complaining or whining or even acknowledging it.

But to watch, through his tenure as the team’s owner, what he’s put in to this town, both financially and emotionally, has been amazing.  He doesn’t ask for kudos or credit, but there ought to be a statue of him in the courtyard of the Rose Quarter.  Someday, the arena should bear his name.

I’m reminding you, he’s a special guy. Sure, he’s made mistakes and we’ve criticized him for them. But I also think we’ve taken him for granted for too long in Portland. Without him, I just don’t know where we’d be as a sports town — but it would be a lot less than what we are now.

Good luck, Paul. Beat this thing. Your team has a long run ahead but for it to reach its potential, you’ve really gotta be here running the show.

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Here’s your link to the website. The plan also includes “a bright future for Memorial Coliseum.” That promise right there might be enough to make the project difficult to pull off.

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Our politicians have always been well behind on this issue. The people of Portland would love to have a casino centrally located where they can go a couple of times a month to watch big-time entertainment and dump a whole lot of money onto some table, never to be seen again.

I’ve always been for it. Been for legalized gambling of all sorts, actually. Doesn’t offend me in any way and has always appealed to me as a way to let others pay my taxes for me. Legalize it, tax it and I’m cool with it.

But the big thing — let’s allow that casino but leverage it. Get something big in return. Talk about some life for the Rose Quarter, a plush casino on the waterfront on the old hotel property Paul Allen owns, with a boat dock so you could also get there by water. And for the right to put it there, whoever is the owner of that casino must do the rest of the Rose Quarter up real nice. Level Memorial Coliseum, build that ballpark, put in a few other nice restaurants and clubs.

Oh, never mind. Makes too much sense for Portland to ever even think about.

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. . . the idea this city is probably most in love with: The idea of turning it into some sort of athletic club. This, from our comments section:

Now we can pick up the pieces , starting with recalling sammy , and fix up a fine work of Architecture. The idea of turning it into a Community Sports Center is STILL a great idea.

I could puke. I mean, there aren’t enough athletic clubs and community centers in Portland as it is? They’re everywhere — plush ones, too. There are rock-climbing gyms, weight-lifting gyms, basketball-court gyms and several places with a combination of all things necessary to a fitness center. There are so many a lot of them are losing money. To even imagine what it would take to convert that old rat-infested barn into some sort of “community athletic center” and keep it running is mind-boggling.

But typically Portland. Again, an idea fostered by people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

I love the premise, too, that there’s no point in building a new Triple-A ballpark because the Beavers “only draw 5,000 a game.” Seriously? Man, if PGE Park were any worse for baseball, the Beavers wouldn’t draw that many.

The whole point of a new ballpark is to make the experience of going to games more rewarding. PGE Park has been rejected as a baseball stadium at this point. Just as Civic Stadium and Multnomah Stadium were rejected in previous years. It’s NEVER really been a ballpark — yes, Portlanders, there is a huge difference between a ballpark and a stadium — and the previous renovation did not address the problems with access, concessions, rest rooms and sightlines. PGE Park is still just a football stadium you can play soccer in.

If you’ve seen any of the modern Triple-A ballparks around the country, you’d know why one here would be a roaring success. The one in Sacramento has been a huge attraction for the community.

I used to get upset about how this town didn’t think big. But nowdays, it doesn’t even think medium. It thinks small. An athletic center? Seriously? The old idea of building a roller coaster is better than that. Especially if that coaster is the world’s biggest, or fastest, or the only one that’s covered to protect it from rain — ANYTHING that’s unique and fun.

Not in my city, though. Our big dreamers here would rather put up one more athletic club or just leave it as it is. Let someone else worry about it, is really what they’re saying. Put it off. Think about it sometime in the future.

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I get tired of beating this old dead horse-barn to death but seriously — you want the new ballpark to be built in Lents Park? Really? It was going to be in the Rose Quarter, where those seventy-some nights a year of games would feed the entertainment district along with the mostly fall/winter/spring stuff in the Rose Garden.

You want to bail out on all that just because a few very misguided guys with T-squares and pocket protectors think the MC must be saved? I certainly wouldn’t believe you’d pull back on it due to pressure from the Trail Blazers — they’ve had more than a decade to do something about the Rose Quarter and their efforts have been met with nothing but crickets and empty storefronts.

Ask around. Go find ANYBODY who actually goes inside the coliseum for events who thinks it ought to be saved. Who thinks that building has a future. Real citizens, real people — not the ones with a vested interest or an axe to grind — think the arena was good for its time but that its time is long gone. It’s now a dump — one that would be a whole lot cheaper to tear down than to upgrade. And upgrade for what reason? You’re trying to get people to bed down on a cot when they’re accustomed to the king-sized bed next door.

Once people saw the amenities of a new arena the day the Rose Garden opened, MC was doomed. Frankly, we didn’t know how outdated it was until we saw the next big thing. The old black-and-white television was great until you saw the color ones, right?

What, exactly, is going on? Seriously. I don’t get it. It’s time for all of you on the Council to realize this is a moment when you can actually make your mark. Time when you can actually be responsible for doing something that matters to people.

Come on, folks. Step up to the plate for once in your lives.

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But from what?

I hope everyone who had a hand in keeping the wrecking ball away from the old dump will be made to attend an event there real soon. I hope they enjoy the broken seats, stained ceiling, cracked cement, dingy atmosphere and stinky bathrooms. And they can sit back and ponder the amount of money it’s going to take to make it a functional building. But of course, that won’t happen. None of those people will do that and no money will be found to do anything with the old barn. It will just sit. And sit. And sit.

The building will be there empty most of the time, as it is now, a memorial to Portland’s inability to recognize that time marches on and it would be a good idea to get in step with that march just once in a while.

Meanwhile, we’ll entrust the Trail Blazers to develop the Rose Quarter. They’re the same people who built it and brought in three hotshot places to make it lively and successful in the first place — Friday’s Front Row, Jody Maroni’s and Cucina! Cucina! — Remember that?

Yeah, those places worked real well. It’s been pretty much a ghost town over there for years. Obviously, I’m very optimistic about the future of that little part of our world.

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Yes, it appears a roving gang of angry, torch-wielding men with pocket protectors and T-squares is standing in front of plans to tear down the stinky old rat hotel known as Memorial Coliseum:

That brought the discussion back to tearing down the coliseum, an idea that has created an uproar in the city’s architecture community.

Basically, what the story says is that now the city is again contemplating putting the new baseball stadium in Lents, rather than at the Rose Quarter, because, uh, you know you just can’t tear down that timeless architectural symbol, the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal… oops, Memorial Coliseum — hereafter known as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

My goodness, when you start getting an “uproar” in this city’s architecture community, it’s time to nail the windows shut, run to the bomb shelter, put on the hard hat and crawl under the bed. But really, judging from the rather uninspired look of everything that’s been built around here for the last 30 years, who knew the city even had an architectural “community”?

The Angry Architects, if they are this powerful, ought to forget about silly coliseum issues and get to work on figuring out how to save their jobs. With the economy nipping away at them, I’m stunned there were enough of them left to form an opinion on this issue.

Actually, maybe it is a jobs issue. It’s certainly going to take hundreds of architects to figure out a way to make that old dump Eighth Wonder of the World functional again.

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Ben at Blazers Edge has photos, taken around 3 a.m. and word now from the guys at the MSP is that the line may be 1,000 people strong at this point.

I think it’s great that people who are willing to stand in line all night could be rewarded with playoff tickets. But I have to confess, my biggest worry is that in today’s reality all the people in the front of the line are professional ticket scalpers, who are ready to gobble up those tickets and resell them at huge profits — perhaps even to fans of the Houston Rockets.

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