Months after the T.P. Market at 39th and Columbia was damaged by fire, much money was spent on the building. Then nothing for months and months. Now the whole building is being demolished. What’s up with that? Will we get another badly needed neighborhood gathering place to replace that once-thriving market?
— Sara Rolling, Upper Lincoln
The building is not being demolished, Sara — but the project sure has grown larger, and taken longer, than anyone expected.
“Welcome to my world. This has become far more extensive than a normal remodel,” said Mike Richards.
As neighbors remember painfully well, the market at 3815 Columbia St. was ruined by fire on Christmas Eve 2008. Instead of reopening as a market, the building was sold to the Office and Professional Employees International Local 11 for its union office, which has long been located on Northeast Halsey Street in Portland. The union bought the building in March 2010 for $450,000, according to county property records, and executive secretary-treasurer Richards told The Columbian last summer that he thought his group would have set up shop there by September.
But progress has been mired in all sorts of molasses — economic, bureaucratic and construction.
“It took us much longer than we thought,” Richards said last week. “Some of it had to do with some legal proceedings about the purchase of the building. Then, the permitting took longer than we planned — although the city was friendly and open. It wasn’t a totally unpleasant permitting process.”
Then, construction financing. “As you know, in this world, currently, no matter what your financial status is, the financing is probably the hardest thing to do — in residential or commercial,” Richards said. “That’s where the stumbling block came in.”
All these difficult ducks got lined up at last. Richards said the work that looks like demolition is a reroofing job — replacing a worn-out flat roof with a new pitched one — which required some pretty serious structural work on the building walls, as well.
“To get it to where it’s going to be a long-term, lasting building for us, that’s the kind of work that needed to be done,” Richards said. “We will make it a much more desirable place to look at, and we know what it looks like now.” The building should be completed around April 1, he said.
But you won’t be getting that new neighborhood gathering place, Sara. The union office will be just that — an office. No retail is in the works, Richards said.
The union represents approximately 2,000 office workers in fields such as banking, insurance, higher education, shipping, hospitals and clinics, utilities, transportation and hotels in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Utah.
— Scott Hewitt
