Club 21 Will be Demolished to Become Apartments, After Owners Sign Over Remaining Decade of Lease

Club 21 will close in less than a week, owners Marcus Archambeault and Warren Boothby told the Portland Mercury today.  The last day is January 15.

The bar will also not move—though the owners had been considering moving Club 21's distinctive witchhouse building to a vacant lot, as WW first reported two years ago.

Even as recently as three weeks ago, Archambeault told WW they were still planning to move the bar on a truck. He now says the building is "not structurally sound enough to survive the move."

"We gave it a really good try," Archambeault told the Mercury today. "If I owned the land, I would keep the Club there forever."

While they don't own the land, Archambeault and Boothby did have another decade on their lease according to an interview they gave the Mercury in June 2014.

"We have a 15-year lease and we're two years into it," Archambeault said. "There has been some movement, some preliminary development plans for the space, but we're not going anywhere."

Reached by phone, Boothby declined to answer questions about the length of the lease or the terms of its dissolution.

Citing the previous quote, we asked Boothby if they still had another decade on their lease.

"I'm not sure, I'll have to check," he said and then ended the phone call.

Last month, WW asked Archambeault about rumors that the club was closing after New Year's, and that the club had given up on moving the building. "Everything you just said is false," said Archambeault at that time.

Club 21 will be demolished, the owners now say, and turned into a 212-unit mixed use apartment building called the Jantzen Apartments, owned by Marc Nathanson, a Los Angeles cable tycoon, real estate billionaire and appointee of multiple Clintons. The Club occupies only a small part of the real estate used for the massive apartment project.

Club 21 has one last weekend, and closes after festivities January 15.

Boothby and Archambeault also own Gold Dust Meridian, the Sandy Hut, Double Barrel, and, newly, the Alibi.

Have fun out there, kids.