“I’m sure the area will come back in five or 10 years,” says Grant Raddon, owner of Windplay. What’s worse, they say, is the feeling that they tried to bring something special to the city and weren’t supported. Financially, few can comfortably absorb a business failure. Shop owners charge that the city, the Naitos, and the press have all lost interest in Old Town: that the area’s problems-transients, parking, distance from downtown-and aging faddishness lost the city’s attention to the Transit Mall, the Naitos’ to Galleria, and the press’ to the next big thing. But in Old Town, the bitterness runs deeper. Sure, the economy is aching, they admit, and specialty retail shops are usually the first to feel it. Even a few encounters in Old Town make it clear that business is bad, foot traffic is down, and the mood among the merchants is sour. Three more shops will be leaving “before the summer,” according to the owners. Couch Street Gallery and Space 117, each of which housed a group of small shops and restaurants, are both down to single tenants and going begging. They’re not so chipper, though, in the existing shops. With more development planned for vacant lots throughout the historic district, things look pretty chipper. After a false start with the Daon Corporation, Northwest Natural Gas is ready to break ground in June for the first phase of the $200 million Pacific Square project. If a retail store lasts 10 years, I’d say they’re doing very, very well.”ĭevelopers are happy, too. When you deal with a fickle public, the law of supply and demand is what rules.
“The small merchants are undercapitalized.
As landlords, the Naitos are blamed by the merchants for much of their trouble, but Sam Naito is plainly realistic. In the spread of small, 19th-century buildings that stretches from the waterfront west to 3rd Avenue, and from Oak to Everett, two major rehabilitation projects-the Porter and Haseltine buildings-were recently completed two-the Blagen Block and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Hall-are now under way a bunch of others, including Erickson’s Bar and Import Plaza, will start alterations any day.īill and Sam Naito, the principal movers behind most of these projects, are optimistic, pointing out that the limited amount of developable land in the city virtually guarantees that Old Town will be a success. From a planner’s point of view, the pace of restoration in the Skidmore-Old Town Historic District is indisputably healthy. When the economy improves, the weather gets bad, the transportation center opens, the preservation money rains down. When Baloney Joe’s moves over the Burnside Bridge. Bank Tower anchors the edge of the district. When the Northwest Natural Gas complex is built. They’ll call this period a slump, a slide, a cycle, a slowdown, a perceptual problem that’s bound to turn the corner Because it feels as if Old Town is shutting down for good.īut check Old Town’s pulse with the Planning Bureau, the Development Commission, the Landmarks Commission, or the Naito brothers, who own most of Old Town. Across the street, at the end of the day, the till doesn’t even hit $100, and another shop owner walks home mulling over what it would be like to take a part-time job, or to start wholesaling, or to move into Clackamas Town Center. In The Nor’wester Bookshop, Phil Hubert tamps his pipe and fiddles with the volume on the radio in his quiet shop.
In Collector’s Cabinet, owner Lee Sprague is typing a letter in a store empty except for a host of petrified beetles. Walk down Northwest 2nd Avenue, past the boarded-up Pomona Hotel, the For Lease signs on Couch Street Gallery, the vacant storefront on the corner of Couch, the empty shops in Space 117. This story first appeared in the March 16, 1981, issue of Willamette Week.
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