When Willie Levenson first moved to Portland, he was disappointed. After living in Boise, Idaho—where the Boise River Greenbelt, called “A Ribbon of Jewels,” connects a series of trails and parks through the heart of the city—he expected this Northwest river town to offer something similar. But in 1990s Portland, he found no such thing. Instead, there were frequent sewage overflows and neglected postindustrial riverbanks.

“I wanted to live in a city that loved its river,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t have moved to Portland if I had understood that people didn’t swim in the Willamette. For me, one of the tenets of livability is the ability to ride your bike to the river and swim in it.”

Two and a half decades later, people do swim in the Willamette, often from docks and dedicated swim areas Levenson and his nonprofit, the Human Access Project, helped establish. HAP’s latest project, a new swim dock at Cathedral Park under the St. Johns Bridge in North Portland, will have its grand opening 2–8pm Saturday, June 29. Levenson predicts the day will have the spirit of a mini Big Float, he says, “a bit of a mild rager.”

The Big Float was a HAP fundraiser/party Levenson launched in 2011, in which Portlanders took to the Willamette in floaties and kayaks to celebrate the river’s newfound swimmability. Earlier that year, the city had completed the Big Pipe, a 20-year public works megaproject that drastically reduced the frequency of sewer overflows into the Willamette, from an average of 50 a year to about four. “Before the Big Pipe, it would only take 1/10 of an inch of rain for raw sewage to flow directly into the river—in Portland!” says Levenson. “That’s such a low threshold.”

Since the Big Pipe’s completion, Levenson and HAP have worked with various partners to develop access points to the river and add swim ladders to docks, with a simultaneous “public information campaign to help intelligent people in Portland understand the science that [shows] you can swim in the river,” he says. HAP’s marquee annual event, the Big Float, went on hiatus after 2022, a year it attracted more than 5,000 floaters to the downtown waterfront. “It got to a point where it was such a monster, it would kind of absorb me,” says Levenson.

For the Cathedral Park dock’s grand opening on June 29, the Black Swimming Initiative will lead a basic-skills swim clinic 2–3:30pm, followed by a formal ribbon cutting and a general party with food and live music. Mosquito Fleet—a climate justice activist network that runs a kayak lending library out of the nearby Green Anchors creative space—will provide free kayak rentals at the event. Metro, the regional government, is giving away life jackets.

The new dock, whose swim ladders were still being installed this week, replaces an old wooden floating dock popular for fishing and selfies, but not an easy design for getting in and out of the water. That usually happened from the riverbank, but a mess of concrete rubble and other debris made the beach at Cathedral Park a bit of an obstacle course.

The cleanup has been years in the making, Levenson says. Volunteers got rid of about 25 tons of strewn concrete in 2021. Another 150 volunteers and some heavy equipment moved out another 125 tons in 2023 as plans came together for the new dock, part of a partnership involving Portland Parks & Recreation and HAP’s $300,000 grant through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Most of the new swim ladders face a protected cove formed by the dock and one of the St. Johns Bridge’s massive supports, with another ladder at the end of the dock and one accessible from the open-water side. The ladders and the tidied beach may be a small thing, but they dramatically add to the swim opportunities in North Portland, where the only indoor city pool, under a bubble in Columbia Park, shuttered in 2021. A replacement North Portland Aquatic Center is still in its planning stages, and neighborhood parents wonder if it might open before their kindergartners graduate from high school.

Even with the new access points and the success of the Big Pipe, convincing parents, or anyone, that the Willamette River is swimmable, especially in this part of North Portland, isn’t an easy task. Cathedral Park sits right next to the Portland Harbor Superfund site, and signs posted a stone’s throw from the new dock warn of contaminated sediment and resident fish that may be harmful to eat. The cleanup will be ongoing for generations.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding around the Superfund site in terms of what you can and can’t do,” Levenson says. Heavy metals, PCBs, and other dangerous contaminants are present in the sediment, but a person would generally need to eat bottom-feeder fish to be affected. Playing, wading, and swimming, as the signs by the beach note, are low risk.

The Superfund site is a massive federal undertaking, but it’s not the only river cleanup project in the works in Portland. HAP has been fundraising for studies, lab testing, and engineering plans to address a harmful algae bloom at Ross Island, with federal earmark funds, commitments from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, and a grant from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “I am committed to bringing the Big Float back once we solve the Ross Island lagoon harmful algae bloom,” Levenson says. “That’s kind of the carrot at the end of the rainbow once we get through all the work.”

HAP’s advocacy work strikes a balance of raising awareness of dangerous situations and helping people understand that in most places, at most times, it’s safe to swim in the Willamette. “It’s a nuanced communication,” says Levenson. “I definitely have two sides of my brain.” Levenson thinks HAP’s actions to make river swimming easier complements its campaigns to help solve issues like Ross Island. “Before people were swimming in the river, I think people were paying less attention to it.”

Portland might not be Boise in terms of celebrating the river that runs through it, but maybe today a new arrival won’t be as disappointed as Levenson was.