Skip to main content
The paint covered, burned out walls of the old Taylor Electric building where finally brought down May 11th, following months of close watch by street artists and Portland Street Art Alliance.
The site, at Southeast 3rd Avenue and Clay Street, will soon be 240 Clay, an office building in the inner Southeast Industrial area.
Taylor Electric's long-vacant concrete shell, leftover from the factory's 2006 fire, has been a rare Mecca for paste poster artists, sticker taggers and graffiti artists to put up their work. Portland's strict no tolerance graffiti policy prevents painting on walls without a specific set of approval from city and the site's owner.
While critics in the inner Southeast community viewed the abandoned building as an eyesore, for graffiti artists, musicians shooting music videos, wedding photographers and tourists, it was just as much a venue as Portland Art Museum or St. Johns Cathedral Park.
"It's been accessible for people who wouldn't normally see this kind of thing." Says Portland's most famous sticker turned wheat paste artist Skam.
"Before I was doing street art, I was just coming down here with my friends, looking at the walls," said the anonymous street artist founder of Invoice, a Portland graffiti blog.
A worker on the job site told WW that they would be saving pieces of the site to remain in the new building's parking garage. However the most famous and most graffitied walls were torn down.
Some of Portland's street artists are working on putting together a gallery including photos and pieces of the site including work from artists Invoice, Arrex, and Skam.
WWeek 2015