Once boasting air conditioning, ample free parking, color TV and direct dialing phones, the Riverside West Motor Hotel has been reborn as the swanky new Hotel Fifty.
Here’s a shot from approximately the early 60s:
And here’s the now shot:
Me likey.
Hotel Fifty boasts the H5O bistro & bar, and according to the web site, a “$7M total makeover from top to bottom, inside and out.”
Kudos to the builders, developers and owners for taking a perfectly fine, usable building and, instead of leveling it, expanded and re-used it.
Lost Oregon 
9 replies on “Riverside West reborn as…Hotel Fifty”
Lost Oregon is a wonderful site. Who be running it -[ Draplin is that you?]
So I just ran across this site via Twitter I believe and coincidentally I had just finished a ruminating post about Portland’s Hillsdale District. Check it out here – http://www.social-cache.com/2008/12/hyper-local-news-and-portlands-hillsdale-district
It may be somewhat of a fit for this site’s readers.
D.A.
It’s interesting to see the number of hotels that have been seen new life. Just recently the old Days Inn in downtown has been reopened as a new chic hotel. Another example of reusing old motels is the Jupiter Hotel/Inn next to Doug Fir…
Direct dial? oooh…
Have you noticed that some hotels don’t have phones anymore?
Note the entrance to the pedestrian underpass in the 1960s photo. To get to the other side of Harbor Drive? Or maybe to go north, across the Morrison bridge on-ramp.
“Note the entrance to the pedestrian underpass in the 1960s photo. To get to the other side of Harbor Drive?”
That pedestrian underpass ran from where Hotel Fifty/Riverside West Motor Hotel to Waterfront Park(west to east directionally speaking).
When I was a kid in the early Seventies we’d use the underpass to get to the Rose Festival Carnival. I thought that underpass was way cool.
My relatives stayed in that place a year or two ago when it was a Four Points Sheraton.
I worked at the old Riverside West, and her sister hotel, the Portland Motor Hotel back in the early 80’s. These were wonderful properties until the owner died and they were unscrupulously sold to a Canadian firm which cared not at all about decent service, and even less about their employees. The RW in particular boasted excellent cuisine, and a gorgeous riverfront view in the restaurant. They had beautiful furnishings and paintings in their “Parlor Suites.” I am glad the hotel has survived, and been renovated; it is such a beautiful setting.
I worked there in 1984, Maybe we know each other, I was a cocktail waitress, I remember a Brooke, Dave, Diane…. I remember new owners, I quit soon after that.
Just saw this post i worked there in the 70’s and early 80’s