Ride the Oregon City Municipal Elevator to the top of the bluff and look west, and for the better part of a decade you'd have seen the same thing: a chain-link fence, a shuttered industrial hulk, and a stretch of the Willamette River that the town could hear but not reach. The elevator itself is one of only a handful of public municipal elevators anywhere in the world, a genuine vertical street connecting Oregon City's historic upper Main Street to the waterfront below. It has carried more than 100,000 riders a year for decades. What waited at the bottom, though, hadn't changed much since 2011.
That's finally different this year. Understanding why matters more than any single grand opening, because the thing happening at the bottom of that elevator shaft explains why the top of it has suddenly gotten busy too.
Fifteen Years of Looking at a Fence
The Blue Heron Paper Company operated on the east bank of Willamette Falls for well over a century before it closed in 2011, the last of a string of paper mills that had occupied that shoreline since 1866. When it shut down, it took the public's access to one of North America's largest waterfalls with it. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde bought the 23-acre site in 2019, and for a few years it looked like the mill's next chapter would run through a joint public effort: Metro, Clackamas County, Oregon City, and the state of Oregon had already formed the Willamette Falls Legacy Project and hired the Norwegian design firm Snøhetta to lay out a riverwalk across the property's exposed basalt shoreline. The plan was ambitious, a sequence of overlooks and public yards carved into 22 acres of industrial ruins.
Then it stalled. Frustrated with the pace, the Grand Ronde withdrew from the joint Legacy Project in 2022 and started developing their own plan for the site, which they named tumwata village, a reference to the Native name for the falls. For four more years, the fence stayed up.
What Broke Ground in May
On May 28, 2026, the Grand Ronde broke ground on tumwata village. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek attended, along with Oregon City Mayor Denyse McGriff. Grand Ronde Tribal Council Chair Cheryle Kennedy put it plainly at the ceremony: "Today we start rebuilding. Today we lay the foundation of tumwata village and start the process of bringing our people back to the falls."
The plan for the site includes retail and office space, housing, cultural gathering spaces, restaurants, and a riverwalk that will eventually give the public a direct view of the falls for the first time in generations. This is a tribal-led project now, separate from the original Legacy Project design, but it's aimed at the same fence line that's been closed off since before most current Oregon City homeowners bought their houses.
If you've lived here a while, you've probably stopped expecting anything to happen down there. That's exactly what makes the groundbreaking worth paying attention to. It's the first real construction activity on that shoreline in fifteen years.
Main Street Didn't Wait Around
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're only watching the mill site: the upper part of downtown started filling back in before the groundbreaking, not after.
Oregon City Market opened its doors at 610 Main Street on March 3, 2026, a small, locally owned grocery run by Jana Daisy-Ensign and Tim Ensign, who have lived in Oregon City for nearly 20 years and bring decades of combined experience in craft beverage and retail grocery. Mayor McGriff joined the ribbon-cutting, hosted by the Oregon City Chamber of Commerce with support from the Downtown Oregon City Association. The market sits a few doors from the Municipal Elevator and about half a mile from the falls, and its own logo works in the Camas flower from the nearby Camassia Preserve, the elevator, and a Douglas fir, a nod to the Christmas tree farms that still cover a lot of Clackamas County.
A few blocks over, more openings followed through the summer:
- Yovu Beer soft-opened its taproom on August 14 at 14214 Fir Street, Unit H, pouring its own beer alongside guest pours from Alchemy Cider, Ginger Cult, and Athletic Brewing.
- Fox Den Antiques held its grand opening celebration on August 22 at 215 13th Street.
- Oregon City Market finished out its first spring and summer as, by most accounts from regulars, the kind of stop-in spot downtown had been missing for years.
None of this happened because the mill site broke ground. Main Street had already been quietly filling back in on its own timeline. What changed in May is that the two halves of downtown, upper Main Street and the waterfront below it, started moving in the same direction at the same time for the first time since the mill closed.
A Weekend That Still Works the Old Way
Not everything new downtown is about redevelopment. Some of it is just the calendar doing what it's always done. The Oregon City Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. through October 31 at its home on Clairmont Drive at Clackamas Community College, rain or shine, with the kind of steady weekly rhythm that predates any of this year's news.
And on August 30, Main Street closes to cars for the 30th annual outdoor antique fair hosted by Maizee Mae's Antiques and Treasures. More than 100 vendors set up across seven blocks of downtown, turning the same street that runs past Oregon City Market and the Municipal Elevator into an open-air vintage shop for one day, noon to 7 p.m. It's a tradition thirty years older than any of the businesses that opened this year, and it's still one of the better reasons to be downtown on a Sunday.
Why the Timing Actually Matters
The easy read on all of this is "downtown is having a moment." The more useful read is narrower: for the first time since 2011, the top of Oregon City's vertical street and the bottom of it are both under active construction of one kind or another, at the same time, and neither one is waiting on the other.
That's not how it's worked for most of the last fifteen years. The mill sat empty regardless of what Main Street was doing. Main Street's ups and downs happened without much reference to the fence line half a mile away. This year those two stories finally overlapped, a market and a taproom and an antique shop opening on the bluff in the same season the tribe broke ground on the shoreline below it.
If you live here, you don't need a real estate agent to tell you whether that matters to your daily life. You'll notice it the next time you take the elevator down to the river and the view isn't a locked gate anymore. What's worth knowing is that this isn't a coincidence dressed up as momentum. It's two separate, long-stalled processes that happened to unstick in the same year, and downtown is the place where you can actually see both of them at once.
If you're watching Oregon City change from the inside and find yourself curious what that shift means for your own house down the road, the team at Daniel Belza knows this stretch of Clackamas County closely and is happy to talk through it, no pressure, no obligation.
