Marquam Building

Marquam Building
Image courtesy of the Architectural Record
General information
Type	Office, theater
Architectural style	Romanesque Revival
Address	600 SW Morrison Street
Town or city	Portland, Oregon
Country	United States
Named for	Philip Augustus Marquam
Completed	1892
Demolished	1913
Height	160 ft (49 m)
Dimensions
Other dimensions	200 ft (61 m) by 60 ft (18 m)
Technical details
Structural system	Steel frame
Material	Brick, sandstone, and terra cotta
Floor count	8
Lifts/elevators	2
Known for	First modern office building in Portland
Renovating team
Main contractor	Ernest Boyd MacNaughton

This article is about the demolished Marquam Building formerly at the corner of SW 6th Avenue and Morrison Street in Portland, Oregon, not the Marquam Building at 2501 SW 1st Avenue. The demolished building was replaced by the American Bank Building.

The Marquam Building was an eight-story, Romanesque Revival office building in Portland, Oregon, United States. Named for Philip Augustus Marquam, the building has been called Portland's first skyscraper and first modern office building. The building resembled a structure designed by Seattle architect John Parkinson and Pennsylvania architect John B. Hamme as an entry in the Portland Chamber of Commerce design competition of 1890.

Philip Augustus Marquam acquired the lot at the corner of SW Sixth and Morrison from William W. Chapman in 1854 as payment of $500 in legal fees. Marquam resided on the property and constructed other dwellings, but in the late 1880s he began planning the Marquam Grand Opera House and the Marquam Building, adjoining structures that would cost him $600,000.

The Marquam Grand Opera House, a five-story structure adjoining the Marquam Building, opened in 1890 and was demolished in 1976. An early manager was future Portland mayor George Luis Baker.The opera house, later known under a series of names including Loews Theater, the Hippodrome, the Pantages, and the Orpheum, opened to highly complementary reviews. A Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, called it "one of the neatest theaters of the west." Another review offered higher praise: "The Marquam...will eclipse all other such buildings in the northwest. It yields the palm to only one on the Pacific coast, the grand opera house in San Francisco, and that only to a small degree as regards size." But critics were not as complementary when describing the Marquam Building.

Opening in 1892, the Marquam Building was Portland's first modern office building. The Oregonian described the architecture as "very imposing." Another critic described it as "rather gloomy and cheerless, like so many of the office structures designed under the spell of the Richardsonian Romanesque...It has no doubt all sorts of faults."

Rather than pay high prices to local brick suppliers, Marquam started his own brickyard, and he shipped cheaper bricks to Portland from San Francisco.