Railway Palaces of Portland, Oregon: The Architectural Legacy of Henry Villard (Landmarks) by Craghead Alexander Benjamin

Author:Craghead, Alexander Benjamin [Craghead, Alexander Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

It was harsh, but not unfair, and it was difficult, in the immediacy of the crisis, for Villard to disagree.

Villard did not go in to work on the sixth floor of the Mills Building on the seventeenth or on any morning thereafter. In the face of adversity, he fled. For a time, he and his family moved into the unfinished town houses in order reduce his hotel expenses, but Villard found this to be a conspicuous hiding place, and by the middle of the new year, they had vacated these to take shelter at Dobbs Ferry. There he began to write a defense of his management of the railroads. His nerves remained a wreck, however. While his enemies delighted in his failure, even his friends began softly to betray him. Under the guise of protecting his health, those investors still allied with him told him that he “was not expected to do any work…until he had recovered his health.” By the end of 1884, he added his resignation from the presidency of the Northern Pacific. He would retain his position with the Oregon & California for another year, in part likely because this company was the weakest and therefore least important of his former triumvirate of railroads, but even this he would eventually step away from. Still embroiled in such affairs, the retreat to Dobbs Ferry seemed inadequate. “The sense of falseness of friends and the outrageous vilification he had undergone remained in his mind.” In the summer of 1884, he returned, with one of the Garrisons, to Germany for a respite. By October, he was in New York, packing up his family to move back to Germany. Their new home and shelter would be Berlin, where he would be insulated from the wagging tongues of America. With his departure, his grand plans for Portland withered. The grand station was frozen as no more than a drawing, the great hotel stopped as a stone foundation supporting no more than an invisible and now unrealizable dream. 103

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