Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

The Beatles, Elvis and the only NBA championship in Portland history all happened inside a glass cube balanced on four columns. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, at 300 Winning Way in the Rose Quarter, opened on November 1, 1960. The design by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill remains one of American Modernism's boldest arenas: a freestanding circular concrete seating bowl inside a 360-foot glass-and-aluminum curtain-wall cube, with 80,000 square feet of tinted glass giving the lobby views of the skyline - and 1,060 feet of black curtain that can seal the bowl in 90 seconds. Financed by an $8 million bond passed in 1954 and dedicated to veterans who made the supreme sacrifice, the building the city calls the Glass Palace hosted the 1965 NCAA Final Four before its defining tenant arrived. The Trail Blazers played here from their 1970 birth through 1995 - 1,093 games, three NBA Finals, and the 1977 championship clinched in Game 6 on this floor during a 10-0 home playoff run - while beginning the 810-game sellout streak unmatched in American pro sport. The concert lineage is equally deep: the Beatles on August 22, 1965, Elvis in 1970, Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin and decades of tours before the larger Moda Center rose next door in 1995. Renamed Veterans Memorial Coliseum in 2011, the roughly 12,000-seat building remains the home of the WHL's Portland Winterhawks and a working venue for concerts, rodeos, ice shows and graduations, even as preservationists and planners debate its long-term future. President Gerald Ford watched the Blazers here in 1974 - the first sitting president ever to attend an NBA game - one more line in the ledger of a building that carries most of Portland's big-event history under one steel roof. The building's architectural standing keeps growing even as its bookings age: preservation groups list the Glass Palace among the country's most significant modernist arenas, and the city's Rose Quarter plans have repeatedly bent around the public's refusal to let it be demolished.