Ballpark Digest

The first professional baseball at the field was played in 1905, when the Lewis and Clark Exposition forced the PCL Portland Giants from their regular home, Vaughn Street Park.
At that time the stadium consisted of a 3,000-seat grandstand and the Exposition Building, considered the largest wooden building west of the Mississippi. That much wood certainly represented a huge fire hazard, and on July 14, 1910 the building and the grandstand burned down; the fire was so intense that the steel girders supporting the grandstand melted.

The grandstand was replaced the following year, but it was clear Portland needed a large facility, and by 1925 officials with the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club laid out their plans for a new 28,000-seat Multnomah Stadium. To raise money for the $500,000 project, organizers sold personal seat licenses: $100 gave the buyer the right to a seat at the stadium for five years and the chance to renew for another five years. The funding drive was a success: within two months $300,000 in seat licenses had been sold, and construction began.

The original design called for a full horseshoe, but the athletic club could not acquire all the land on 18th Avenue to complete the horseshoe, leading to the unique dimensions still seen at PGE Park. Construction was done by the fall of 1926, when the stadium hosted its first football games. Financially, however, football was not enough to pay the bills, and between 1933 and 1955 the stadium's main tenant was the Multnomah Kennel Club, which held dog races.

Baseball did not arrive at Multnomah Stadium until 1956, when the PCL Portland Beavers moved to the stadium from Vaughn Street Park, a wooden facility from the turn of the century that finally gave up the ghost. When the Beavers moved, legendary groundskeeper Rocci Benevento took up the turf from Vaughn Street and installed it at the team's new home.

The 1968 season was the last one to feature play on real grass, as Civic Stadium (as it became known after the athletic club sold the stadium to the city) became the first minor-league park to feature artificial turf with a 1969 installation of Tartan Turf. Installation did not proceed on schedule, however, and the Beavers played some games with the rubberized base exposed.

After the Portland Beavers left in 1993, city officials worked to bring back a Pacific Coast League team, though the Portland Rockies ended up being a huge draw for the Northwest League in 1995-2000. It was clear Civic Stadium was not up to PCL standards, so it was clear that the city would either need to renovate Civic Stadium or build a new facility should the PCL return to Portland. The decision was made to renovate Civic Stadium, and the rebuilt PGE Park opened to acclaim in April 2001.