photo/Kiki Garfield
The old Fogg’s Body Shop on Anderson Street in Portland’s East Bayside enclave loitered on the short list of dumps we intended to investigate for years. The ramshackle gray wooden structure, with its bent and sunken corrugated-metal roof and odd popsicle-stick siding, looked increasingly out of time and place as the area gentrified around it. Modern condos and apartments sprouted nearby as the old warehouses and other industrial buildings were transformed into hip places to drink craft beer and seltzer, mead and kombucha, and something called “urban wine.”
We weren’t the only ones eying the property. Dante Maderal, who opened the Hi-Fidelity nanobrewery across the street three years ago, thought the abandoned auto-repair shop, with its funky geometry and iconically fonted sign, would make a great bistro. And it was for sale! But the price tag — around $350,000, Maderal recalled — was too steep, and he and Hi-Fidelity co-founder PD Wappler had their hands full building out their own space.
Well, when we stopped by last month, lo and behold, the old shop is on the market again! A precarious outbuilding has vanished and the property’s been tidied up. The new selling price: $795,000.
You’d have to sling thousands of tons of tapas to make that investment pay off, and indeed, the property’s future uses seemed quite limited, given that it was in an industrial land-use zone.
Peter Mullin, a Portlander with an apartment on the Eastern Prom, picked up the property with a partner in the spring of 2021 for about $390,000. The plans they developed show a modest and clean-lined, single-story building with room for one or two light-industrial (or should we now call it, craft-industrial?) tenants.
After a protracted effort to get the city permits necessary to start construction, they shelved those plans and put the property back up for sale this fall. “I was surprised by the time it took to work through the Site Plan approval process for such a minor project,” Mullin wrote in an e-mail to The Bollard, “but given the scale of development happening city-wide I suppose it was to be expected.”
That’s putting it nicely.
Oh, and also, the property is no longer in an industrial zone. Portland’s recently adopted ReCode zoning overhaul now puts the old body shop in a B-5 business zone. That zone, the new code explains, “is characterized by larger underdeveloped lots with great potential for dense, clustered, urban mixed-use development and reuse of existing land and buildings.”
“This dramatically changes the types of uses that are permitted for this property,” according to Mike Anderson, the broker with Malone Commercial who’s listing the property. Exactly what will now permitted remains to be seen; Anderson said they’ve reached out to the city for clarification. But the listing on Malone’s website reads: “New owners will have the flexibility to realize many different commercial or low-impact industrial plans: general offices, research facilities, cannabis related operations, warehousing or storage, recreation or event spaces and much more.”
“In the end, it was not the right time for me to move forward with the construction process,” Mullin continued. “I think that the re-zoning presents new opportunities for the site and am keeping my options open.”
