Chasing Ghosts

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL RAINES

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Willamette Week AUGUST 17, 2022 wweek.com

You pointed us to the eeriest vacant buildings in Portland. We found out why they’re empty.

Empty buildings are like missing teeth or blank pages in a photo album—the story lies in what isn’t there.

They are untapped potential, forgone wealth, and a narrative arc gone wobbly.

Last month, WW chronicled two vacancies we found especially puzzling: the emptying of a downtown senior living facility called the Taft Home and the demolition of the Quality Pie building, which sat empty for 30 years on the corner of Northwest 23rd Avenue and Northrup Street.

Then we asked readers to nominate the ghost buildings haunting their neighborhoods.

They came forward with dozens.

Doug Decker, a neighborhood historian who writes the Alameda Old House History blog, says it’s natural for people to be curious.

“I think all of our older buildings are time travelers, and they all have stories to tell,” Decker says. “When you see one that’s seen better days, you can’t help wonder what happened.”

In Portland, where residential and commercial real estate prices have marched continuously higher for decades, empty homes and storefronts make no sense, especially as thousands of unsheltered citizens bake in the summer heat.

It’s true that boarded-up storefronts became a common sight during pandemic disruptions.

But Portland still has one of the lowest residential rental vacancy rates in the country. Home prices have risen faster here than in all but five of the nation’s 40 biggest cities over the past two decades. And even with the current glut of office space, vacancy rates show we’re still better off than many cities.

That’s why properties left empty over the long term are a mystery.

That’s especially true if the empty building is owned by a nonprofit that only exists to put roofs over people’s heads, as is the case for one of the properties you are about to encounter, or if it’s located in a trendy part of town where retail is always at a premium, as is the case with another.

As we checked around, we found numerous explanations, legal disputes, family dysfunction, incompetence, inertia—and perhaps the most galling factor: an uncaring bureaucracy.

Rob Brewster, whose Seattle-based Interurban Development rehabs old buildings around the Northwest—Pine Street Market and Under Armour’s West Coast headquarters are two Portland examples—owns one of the most visible ghost buildings, the former Gordon’s Fireplace shop at Northeast 33rd Avenue and Broadway.

Brewster is beside himself with fury over the amount of time it’s take his company to get city permits to convert Gordon’s into a floor of retail and two of housing.

“Portland’s by far the worst city we do business in terms of permitting,” Brewster says.

“We don’t have a housing emergency here, we have a political crisis.”

Others are more hopeful about the lonely spaces that dot the city.

“You find them in every neighborhood,” Decker says. “You look at them and think, ‘If they stood that long, maybe they still have a future.”

Address: 3312 NE Broadway Year built: 1918 Square footage: 25,665 Market value: $2.15 million Owner: Interurban Development, Seattle How long it’s been empty: 6 years Why it’s empty: Red tape Gordon’s Fireplace Shop closed in 2016 after 61 years in business selling andirons, pokers, screens and other equipment necessary for burning trees indoors—as well as lamps, furniture and well, everything.

Now a target for every tagger who can afford a spray can, the three-story structure overlooking Sullivan’s Gulch began its life a century ago as a factory where homebuilder Oliver K. Jeffery briefly built airplane struts out of spruce—hence its current name, the Aircraft Factory.

Rob Brewster bought the building for $2.7 million at the end of

Address: 3907 NE Broadway Year built: 1933 Square footage: 12,868 Market value: $6.9 million Owner: Ben Bross Trust How long it’s been empty: 11 years Why it’s empty: Because a Portland institution died Just off Sandy Boulevard in Hollywood stood one of Portland’s most enduring restaurants: Poor Richard’s.

Harlow Rudolph “Hal” Hulburt, a poor farm boy from Washougal, Wash., who worked as a torpedoman in the Navy and a fisherman in Alaska, opened his place on June 17, 1959, at

2017 and says his first idea was to develop creative office space, but he and his partners have switched to two floors of housing—18 or 19 units—over retail.

Then came the pandemic. Since then, he says, it’s been agony. City permitting officials didn’t raise any major concerns, he says, they just took a long time.

“We were supposed to have been in and out of permitting in eight months,” Brewster says. “It was 14 months.”

During that time, inflation drove the price of everything higher and the Portland Bureau of Development Services slapped the developer with $50,000 in fines after complaints about the vacant structure.

But now, workers are busy along the east face of the building beginning the seismic upgrade of the shell and Brewster can see the future. “We are stewards of these properties which are part of the city’s infrastructure,” he says. “It’s up to us to make it better.” N I G E L J AQ U I S S .

the then-bustling confluence of 39th, Sandy and Broadway, according to a paid obituary.

“PR’s,” as it was known, did well, but it really blew up in 1972 when Hulburt and business partner Stan Prouty started two-for-one dinners—one of many gimmicks they tried over the years to get diners in the door.

The twofer included steaks, which were PR’s forte. They came with a baked potato, salad, and two onion rings perched on top. People mobbed the place.

Hulburt had a clinical psychologist screen potential employees, according to a 2006 feature in The Oregonian. It appears to have worked. Some of them stayed for 40 years.

Hulburt bought out Prouty and kept Poor

Richard’s going until 2006, when he sold the restaurant and retired. New owners ran it until 2011, when Brett Kucera, owner of the Tony Starlight Showroom, tried to rent the space. “It was so out of date it was comical,” Kucera says. The deal fell through, and PR’s closed for good in September of that year.

The owner of the building is Ben Bross Trust, which has an address in Charlotte, N.C. Property records show the trust bought the building, which also includes a Bank of America branch, for $2.03 million in 1987.

The trust couldn’t be reached for comment.

It’s up to date on its property taxes, according to county records. A N T H O N Y E F F I N G E R .

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Address: 2931 SE Harrison St. Year built: 1929 Square footage: 26,222 Market value: $11.4 million Owner: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints How long it’s been empty: 2 years Why it’s empty: Mormon flight For two years, one of Oregon’s oldest Mormon churches has stood empty. After its congregation left four years ago, the Gothic-style Portland Stake Tabernacle in the Richmond neighborhood of Southeast Portland was briefly used solely as a library—until the pandemic closed that too.

There weren’t enough Latter-day Saints to fill its seats, explains Bishop Dave Noble, whose congregation once met in the 2,000-seat building.

They’ve been scared away by the rioting and “political stuff,” Noble says. “They’re moving to Utah and Idaho.”

It’s true, Mormons are fleeing. In the past two years, the church has lost 1.5% of its members in Oregon, which has long been one of the top 10 most Mormon states, according to an analysis of church data by the blog LDS Church Growth.

Address: 3766 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

Year built: 1907 Square footage: 1,169 Market value: $650,930 Owner: Sellwood Corner LLC How long it’s been empty: 8 years Why it’s empty: A diner’s legal battle On the same bustling block as a few historic mainstays of Hawthorne Boulevard—including McMenamins Bagdad Theater & Pub and Nick’s Famous Coney Island—lies a boarded-up building covered with graffiti. The vacancy makes little sense considering its prime location in the middle of a hub for commercial activity and tourism.

“It definitely jumped out at me that it was unoccupied,” says Chris Boyle, property manager of the nearby Bagdad.

The property contained Tabor Hill Cafe, a breakfast and lunch spot that since 1986 was a neighborhood fixture, but in 2003, owner Mark Gearheart, a local physician, leased the property to Ngay Luong for 10 years.

Bill White, owner of Fred’s Sound of

In 2009, Bill Macfarlane went to pick up his dress shirts at Wash World on Belmont—and found the dry cleaner closed.

“I called the number on my ticket and had to meet a guy in a parking lot to get my shirts,” Macfarlane recalls. “No advance notice that they were closing at all.” Ever since, he’s wondered why the property has remained fenced off and boarded up.

Documents submitted to state environmental regulators provide some clues.

Industrial sites with suspected chemical contamination must submit a cleanup plan to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, especially if the owners seek to redevelop the land. For the better part of four decades, the Wash World on Belmont used a solvent called perchloroethylene, or PCE, to dissolve grease stains from suits and dresses.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says prolonged exposure to PCE causes neurological and liver damage. Probably cancer, too.

Willamette Week AUGUST 17, 2022 wweek.com

LUCAS MANFIELD.

Music, the business adjacent to Tabor Hill Cafe, says the creativity of the food declined under new ownership, but he remembers Luong and his family fondly. “They were always friendly and nice people to work next to and always very courteous,” White says.

Tabor Hill Cafe closed in 2014 when Luong’s lease expired. Gearheart filed a lawsuit against Luong in February 2020, claiming Luong’s disregard for maintenance was so egregious he had “left it uninhabitable.” The two sides reached an undisclosed settlement this February.

Gearheart testified for the lawsuit he was trying to restore the property to a habitable condition. An advertisement posted online in 2018 by Gearhart Properties signaled he has also tried to sell it.

In the meantime, the property suffers from broken windows and graffiti, says Veronica Douglas, manager of Crossroads Trading, a clothing store on the same block. White says his employees frequently pick up trash left outside the building. Its future remains unclear.

“We see activity there once in a while,” White says, “but I’m not so sure what they’re doing.” E T H A N J O H A N S O N .

Address: 2755 SE Belmont St. Year built: 1968 Square footage: 4,500 Market value: $1.9 million Owner: Killian Pacific How long it’s been empty: 13 years Why it’s empty: Environmental pollution

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Built in 1929 by Charles Kaufman, the tabernacle on Harrison is one of the two oldest remaining meetinghouses in the state, Noble says.

It’s a victim of the Portland exodus, part of a larger trend of Mormons across the country moving out of urban areas and into the suburbs.

Noble says the building is now for sale, a decision church leaders in Utah made a few months ago. And it’s not the only one. Noble’s congregation has had to move twice—and the Tabor meetinghouse has also closed.

The buildings are among four Mormon churches in the Portland area that face uncertain future, according to church spokeswoman Irene Caso. She blamed “changing church member demographics” and noted the church is “still determining potential uses” for the tabernacle.

Despite the uncertainty, church membership is still growing worldwide, and a 2020 investigation by Truth & Transparency, a nonprofit newsroom, valued the church’s land holdings alone at nearly $16 billion. It also holds around $100 billion in other investments, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Like all religious institutions, the Mormon church has paid no taxes on the property. The new owners could face a hefty tax bill, although if they decide to raze the building and start over, they’ll have limited options—the property is zoned for residential development only.

So it was a problem when, in 2015, an environmental remediation firm found that “volatile PCE vapors have been detected in soil, gas and indoor air samples.”

The property owner at the time, a company called Alfa Belmont LLC, installed a “vapor extraction” system that pulls PCE gas from beneath the building’s concrete floor, treats the vapor and expels it outside.

In 2016, Alfa Belmont sold the building to Mark Desbrow’s Green Light Development. In part to reduce exposure to PCE vapor, the developer planned to reverse the existing footprint: by erecting a five-story apartment building on what was once the parking lot.

Six years later, that still hasn’t happened. The empty Wash World building is covered in brightly colored murals featuring an octopus, a trolley car, and a troubled-looking yellow duck.

The building was sold again, for $2.2 million to Killian Pacific, the Portland developer best known for the Goat Blocks towers.

Michi Slick, a principal of development at Killian Pacific, tells WW that two developers are now planning 32 units of rental apartments.

The project is called Shortstack Housing, and is intended to fill the “missing middle” of small-scale multifamily developments in residential neighborhoods.

“The presence of site contaminants,” Slick adds, “which are required to be addressed with redevelopment of the property, make construction of any new building at the property more complex.” A A R O N M E S H .

Address: 3060 SE Stark St. Year built: 1942 Square footage: 159,000 Market value: $18.2 million Owner: OR4Laurelhurst LLC, Hong Kong How long it’s been empty: At least 25 years Why it’s empty: Senior care management The pandemic brought something that residents of the Sunnyside neighborhood hadn’t seen in decades: lights and activity at the long-shuttered western half of an assisted living center that city records say is the oldest and largest in Oregon.

A Catholic-related organization called Mount St. Joseph owned the facility until 2005, when it sold the ground and turned operations of the senior care center to the first of a series of for-profit operators. (Avamere, a large Oregon com-

pany, currently runs it.) The sprawling, 6.19-acre property is bustling on its eastern half, but the older, western section is long dormant.

In 2016, the Hong Kong-based owners went through a lengthy land use process with the city to add 112 new residential beds and 22 skilled nursing beds. That would have meant knocking down the hulking old structure on the west end of the property.

It hasn’t happened yet—neither Avamere nor representatives for the owners returned calls seeking comment—although the empty space came in handy during the peak of the pandemic when it served as a place to quarantine seniors with COVID-19.

The long-term vacancy frustrates neighbors, however. “It really seems like our property tax system is structured wrong when properties can lay fallow that long,” says Jim Wood, who lives nearby and estimates the old part of the structure went dark more than a decade ago. N I G E L J AQ U I S S .

Address: 1485 NE 128th Ave. Year built: 1952 Square footage: 1,000 Market value: $280,000 Owner: Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives How long it’s been empty: At least three years, but a neighbor says nearly 20.

Why it’s empty: There’s no money to redevelop it.

The decrepit ranch-style house with a collapsing garage, peeling teal paint, a moss-covered roof, and boarded windows looks tiny on its 7,000-square-foot lot. The home, situated in the deep East Portland neighborhood of Hazelwood, has been owned by Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives—a nonprofit that develops, maintains and rents affordable housing—since 1992. Because of its 501(c)(3) status, PCRI pays no property taxes on the lot.

Nuisance complaints investigated by the city over the past 22 years include trash littering the land, suspected squatters, and a collapsing garage.

Kymberly Horner, executive director of PCRI, tells WW the nonprofit is amid a plan to build, rent and sell 1,000 properties in 10 years, and adds this property is included in that plan: “Right now we don’t have the timeline set, but we do know we want to get some of our vacant properties under construction within the next two years.”

Horner did not say how many of the 1,000 units have been made available since the program launched in 2018, and funding for the project remains unclear.

Horner says PCRI “applies for funding streams all across the board, we ask banks to donate to our organization, we’ve received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust, but it’s very expensive to develop housing...we’re constrained by financial resources to develop.”

The house in Hazelwood was one of hundreds PCRI purchased from a predatory mortgage broker and real estate company called Dominion Capital that went bankrupt in 1990. PCRI agreed to maintain the homes as deeply affordable housing—a costly endeavor that’s resulted in a number of PCRI-owned homes sitting vacant for years.

Horner declined to say when the home was last occupied, adding she could not answer WW’s questions by deadline because “as a smaller staffed non-profit organization, time and resources are never plentiful.”

According to the most recent filings with the federal government, PCRI has net assets of more than $20 million and its executive director at the time was earning $189,000 a year. S O P H I E P E E L .

Address: 2738 NE Alberta St. Year built: 1917 Square footage: 4,748 Market value: $1.3 million Owner: Erzsebet Eppley How long it’s been empty: 9 years Why it’s empty: Because a pizza place left The last tenant at this charming, dilapidated, two-story gem on Alberta and 28th was Al Forno Ferruzza, a Sicilian pizza place that opened in 2009 and closed in 2014.

At the time, owner Stephen Ferruzza said he had to close because a pipe burst and the landlord didn’t act in time to prevent an “excessive mold buildup” that “rendered the building unsafe for our workers and customers.”

Ferruzza and building owner Erzsebet Eppley ended up

in court over another property a few months after Ferruzza closed his restaurant. It appears that Ferruzza rented both his business space and his home from Eppley. She evicted Ferruzza from a house on Northeast Tillamook Street in June 2014, according to court records.

Eppley, who calls herself an “independent apparel and fashion professional” on LinkedIn, didn’t return emails seeking comment or messages left with her attorneys.

Ferruzza didn’t return a call seeking comment, either.

If you miss Al Forno Ferruzza on Alberta you’re in luck. Ferruzza has another location in Rhododendron.

As for the once-lovely brick building? It’s decaying and is covered in graffiti. A sign with the name of a developer came down off the side recently, and Eppley owes two years of back property taxes totaling $2,397.56, according to Multnomah County records. A N T H O N Y E F F I N G E R .

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Address: 3550 NE Broadway Year built: 1983 Square footage: 3,192 Market value: $5.6 million Owner: Raleigh D. Lau and family How long it’s been empty: 4 years Why it’s empty: Fast food contraction The closure of the city’s third-best Burger King, tucked off Broadway on the lip of Interstate 84, isn’t all that mysterious.

But its nomination by a reader gives us a chance to explore what happens to the husks of fast food franchises when they fold. The distinctive shapes of former Wendy’s and Pizza Huts can be spotted across Portland, recognizable even after they’ve been repurposed.

Such turnover is common. In fact, two Burger Kings have shuttered in Central Portland in the past five years. The closings occurred as the Whopper’s parent company, Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International, launched a “closure program” for poorly performing outposts. (The company shutters about 200 Burger King locations nationwide each year and opens about the same number of new restaurants, according to QSR magazine, a trade publication for the quick-service restaurant industry.)

In most cities, those shuttered restaurants are quickly replaced. But the Portland City Council banned new construction of drive-thru lanes in 2018, seeking to reduce carbon emissions from idling cars. That means when a Burger King is razed, a new one won’t sprout elsewhere in the city.

In theory, that should make an existing drive-thru window more valuable. Especially because one of those empty structures is on prime real estate: at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. That Burger King property, at 1525 SE Grand Ave., has a market value of $1.9 million. It’s up for sale, but its real estate broker didn’t return a call from WW. As for the Broadway location, its owners—the Lau family of Happy Valley—have listed it for sale for the past three years. Their broker, Eleanor Aschoff, tells WW that vandals broke into the building a couple of times early in the pandemic and stripped out what was left of the kitchen.

“We’re actually selling it more for the dirt,” Aschoff says. “It’s an acre of land. We have it priced below market.” Her hope is that a developer will snag the property for an apartment block, like Grant Park Village a quarter-mile west. A A R O N M E S H .

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Willamette Week AUGUST 17, 2022 wweek.com

Address: 6666 N Columbia Way Year built: 1925 Square footage: 14,500 Market value: $2.4 million Owner: Antoine Dean How long it’s been empty: 7 years Why it’s empty: Donated to a college For decades, this curious, triangle-shaped building sandwiched between two high-traffic streets in St. Johns was home to an auto parts shop owned by an eccentric named Merlin Radke.

When Radke died in 2017, he left much of his estate, including this beige, single-floor building to Warner Pacific University. (Radke’s attorney, Michael Peterson, recalls that Radke started attending church later in life. He never married or had children.)

Andrea Cook, former president of Warner Pacific, first met Radke on campus as she was walking to her car in 2006.

“He stopped me and asked, ‘What would it take to get my name on a building?’ I learned a long time ago that you take every question serious-

ly. So I said let’s talk,” Cook recalls. “We talked about it off and on for 10 years, and ultimately he decided to give his assets to the university.”

Warner Pacific, which never used the property, sold it last October to 29-year-old entrepreneur and self-dubbed “real estate mogul” Antoine Dean for just over a million dollars. Dean’s a real estate and investment vlogger who owns properties in North, Northeast and Southeast Portland. He made a 19-part YouTube series called Making of a Mogul about how he became wealthy by investing in real estate.

Dean says he hasn’t decided yet what to do with the lot, but he’s in the process of splitting the commercially zoned parcel in two. He plans to sell off the parking lot and then either sell the building or renovate it into creative workspaces.

He says he has no timeline, but he tends to flip real estate quickly.

“It was just a good deal,” Dean tells WW. “The parking lot alone was worth a good amount of money. So it just was something that I could buy, divide, sell a piece and keep a piece.”

SOPHIE PEEL .

Ekansh Gupta contributed reporting to this story.

Address: 317 NW 4th Ave. Year built: 1905 Square footage: 10,000 Market value: $3.9 million Owner: Yick Kong Corporation How long it’s been empty: It’s not.

A WW reader reported the Hop Sing Tong building in Chinatown as vacant. And on a recent Wednesday afternoon, it certainly appeared to be. The doors were barred. A shirtless man slept on a couch out front.

But the building is actually not vacant. The Portland chapter of the 150-year-old Chinese American organization Hop Sing Tong owns the building and still meets there—although it’s done so less frequently during the pandemic, says Victor Leo, president of the corporation made up of Hop Sing Tong members that owns the building and the neighboring commercial space.

Hop Sing is one of several tongs that flourished in the United States in the 20th century as Chinese immigrants arrived. The organizations quickly became associated with gambling and violence as their members took up arms and competed for influence.

Now, the tong is largely a social club, says Leo, a licensed clinical social worker. Its remaining members are aging and they meet to catch up and chat.

For 60 years, the neighboring commercial space was home to Fong Chong, a family-run Chinese grocery store and, for a period of time, one of Portland’s best dim sum restaurants. It closed in 2014, and the building has stood vacant since. Efforts to open a variety of businesses there, from strip clubs to a cannabis processing plant, have gone nowhere.

Leo blames city bureaucracy for the building’s extended vacancy.

“Three or four people tried to get through the red tape, but they failed,” he says.

That is, until this summer, when Rainbow City, an all-ages arts venue, moved to the Hop Sing Tong building from across the river on East Burnside, where it opened in 2020. Strawberry Pickle, one of the owners, says she sold her Hillsboro house and closed her in-home preschool business to make her dream, a home for Portland’s wackiest artists, come true.

The venue celebrated its grand opening in the new space with a July 4 dance party. Last Thursday, it hosted Charlie Von Doom, who describes himself on Twitter as a “dystopian DJ and producer.” At one of the venues’ most popular events, hosted by Sword Society, participants dance and spar with lightsabers.

Pickle and her business partner, Vin Eden, shoulder the $7,000 rent. They’re now breaking even, she says. And despite the nearby abandoned buildings and occasional busted car windows, she feels as though life is returning to the neighborhood.

“The landlords were like, oh my gosh, we’d rather see 100 weirdos and artists coming and going than having it be empty or just a standard nightclub,” Pickle says.

Leo agrees. He wants to shed the neighborhood’s reputation for vice.

But the rise in visible homelessness and crime has left him discouraged.

“I’d love to see a booming Chinatown,” Leo says, “but I don’t think it’ll happen.” L U C A S M A N F I E L D .

Address: 1120 NW 21st Ave. Year built: 1924 Square footage: 6,500 Market value: $1.87 million Owner: Northrup Brothers LLC How long it’s been empty: 21 years Why it’s empty: A backroom deal, exposed Just north of Northwest 21st’s restaurant row sits a perfect retail opportunity—the big-windowed home of Northrup Grocery, which hasn’t served a customer since 2002.

For many of those years, as the Northwest Examiner reported, Jeff Baldwin, whose parents bequeathed him the property, filled it with other people’s castoffs in a DIY recycling effort. Baldwin rejected offers from buyers and brokers eager to purchase or lease the space, but he finally sold it in 2016 for the modest sum of $1.1 million—about half what brokers then said it was worth.

The deed showed that Baldwin had

accepted the offer from buyers George Fussell and John Hauser (doing business as Northrup Brothers LLC) in exchange for a promise not to redevelop it for a decade, which reflected Baldwin’s desire to preserve his family’s legacy. A developer, however, soon filed plans with the city for a 46-unit apartment project.

After the Examiner blew the whistle, that project faded and the building remained dormant. In 2020, Northrup Brothers sought permits from the city to make more cosmetic improvements—a new storefront, new roll-down doors, landscaping for the parking lot, and new exterior lighting. The city granted approval.

But neither the owners, their management company, their architect, nor the broker who has the property listed for lease returned WW’s requests for comment. Kirk Becker, whose company offers the large eastern wall of the store as billboard space, might have spoken for everybody when he said, “Business isn’t very good.” N I G E L J AQ U I S S .

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