Former Site of Zidell Marine Corporation Shipbreaking Yard (Portland, Oregon)

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Founded in 1946 after the purchase of the defunct Commercial Iron Works Shipyard, the Zidell Ship Dismantling Company acquired this plot of land for use in a new shipbreaking operation.

Aimed at securing contracts from the US Government to scrap surplus Navy and commercial ships after the end of the Second World War, the yard was soon filled with old ships being cut up for scrap steel, in high demand for rebuilding America's industrial base in the postwar period. Peaking with the dissolution and reconsolidation of the US Navy's Pacific Reserve Fleets in the 1960's and 1970's, the company quickly became the largest shipbreaking operation on the US West Coast, and 2nd largest in the country.

With the availability of obsolete ships dwindling in the latter half of the 1960's 1970's, the shipbreaking operation gradually wound down. One of the yards final and most illustrious jobs came in 1974, with the arrival of the decommissioned Aircraft Carrier USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) for scrapping. The end of the 1970's brought an end to the shipbreaking operations for Zidell, and the company focused on barge building. In total, some 336 ships were scrapped on this site from 1946 to 1980, an average of 9 per year.

Today the site of the shipbreaking yard is unused, but is slated for environmental remediation and reuse for commercial construction. Some traces of the old yard can still be seen, such as the wooden ramp supports used to drag hull sections ashore lying just off the riverbank.

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