Mayor Decides The Rock Stops Here After Year-Long Debate, Gift Of Boulder From China Finds Home At City Hall

What can you do with a 16-ton boulder? Well, when it’s a gift from someone special, you find a prominent spot to display it.

After a year of looking for that spot, Portland city officials say they’ll put their gift from sister city Suzhou, China, outside City Hall once renovations to the building are complete.

The two-story rock arrives Wednesday by ship, and will be stored until the four-story City Hall reopens.

Portland Mayor Vera Katz and Suzhou Mayor Zhang Xin Sheng are expected to announce the boulder’s future home on Friday.

Few city officials would speak publicly about finding the boulder a home, but privately, some admitted to calling the process “passing the stone.”

Mayor Zhang specified the gift be placed next to City Hall, but the $28.2 million renovations complicated that plan.

Other possible homes included Terry Schrunk Plaza and Portland’s South Park blocks.

But the federal government nixed a plan to put the boulder in the plaza because its weight might cause structural problems. Terry Schrunk Plaza is a square-block federal park on top of an underground garage.

When the city considered a spot near the Portland Art Museum, the Parks Bureau said the porous rock would be permanently marred if tagged with graffiti. The bureau also said the boulder’s craggy surfaces would invite rock climbers and thrill seekers.

As recently as Tuesday morning - about a week before Zhang’s arrival in Portland - the final site had not been picked.

So, not wanting to jeopardize the sister-city relationship, Katz took a chapter from President Truman.

The rock stops here, she proclaimed.

“In our form of government, this was a perfect example of a silo mentality - one bureau has authority over City Hall, one bureau has authority over sister-city relations and one bureau has authority over parks.

“Somebody had to make a decision on where that gift would go, and in this particular case, the mayor did it,” she said.

The boulder was excavated from China’s Lake Tai, and is among the largest of the limestone specimens ever to be mined from the bottom.

Such stones often are centerpieces of classical Chinese gardens. But the boulder’s size and Mayor Zhang’s political wishes meant that placing the rock in the classical Chinese garden planned for Chinatown was not an option.

The rock probably will be placed in a small plaza on the Fourth Avenue side of City Hall, occupied until July by a 10-ton ancient petroglyph. The 15,000-year-old Wallula Stone has been returned to its rightful owners, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

“Placement is going to be very important,” said Skip Stanaway, the head architect on the City Hall renovation. “We need to know the cultural feelings about the stone, where it’s appropriate, what’s politically correct.

“It’s not a little rock.”