Editor’s note: This season, Timbers.com and Howler Magazine are collaborating on a series that will explore soccer in Portland and the city’s influence on the game in the United States. This story, the second in the series, looks at the history, culture, and constant re-invention of Providence Park and how its evolution has produced one of the finest soccer venues in North America.

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In 2001, a construction worker took a lunch break on some planks of wood resting on pallets. The job was upgrading Portland’s nearly century-old stadium into a new home that could house minor league baseball and soccer, which meant that some of the structures that had been built for over the decades of use needed to be cleared away. He began to pick absentmindedly at the paint covering the planks, which were about to be hauled off and recycled. The boards had formed the benches in the northeast corner of the stadium, a section now set to be new game day suites. Soon, the worker noticed something beneath the topcoat. He became curious. He unfolded a pocket knife and began to chip away.

Eventually, nine layers of paint later, he found that the boards were yellow, straight-grain old-growth Alaskan fir, the kind of wood you just can’t find anymore. It was a startling discovery, dating back to the stadium’s opening in 1926, and the project’s overseers saw an opportunity to keep some of the building’s history intact. They rerouted the boards, stripped the paint, and stored them. Now those benches are part of the furniture in some of the stadium’s suites and in the ROOT SPORTS Lounge Bar overlooking the field. Ken Puckett, the Portland Timbers’ senior vice president of operations, is looking for the right opportunity to use the rest; three pallets remain, waiting to be re-purposed in what has become one of the country’s most historic soccer venues.

In the beginning, there was a wild field. In years to come, the area enclosed by 18th and 20th and Morrison and Salmon in Southwest Portland would host dog racing and ski jumping. Jack Dempsey would fight there. Pelé would play his final soccer game as a pro between those streets. But before they put together a stadium, and before a series of renovations that would, finally, make it one of the best places in America to watch soccer, the plot of land was nothing more than a lush green pasture in Tanner Creek Gulch, named for the tannery that had operated just a hundred yards away.

It was a large, anonymous field—nothing much to look at and certainly nothing special in the young city of Portland, which had fewer than 50,000 residents in 1890. The city had plenty of open space, but it needed a place to play. So in 1893, 26 American football players, founders of the Multnomah Athletic Club (MAC) two years previously, made a decision that would alter the future of sports in Portland forever: they leased the land, transformed the pasture into a playing field, and set in motion a string of events that continue to reverberate around the Goose Hollow neighborhood and beyond more than a century later.