A Newspaper’s Reporting Preserved a Pledge Not to Raze a Slabtown Grocery. It’s Still Empty.

Address: 1120 NW 21st Ave.

Year built: 1924

Square footage: 6,500

Market value: $1.87 million

Owner: Northrup Brothers LLC

How long it’s been empty: 21 years

Why it’s empty: A backroom deal, exposed

Just north of Northwest 21st’s restaurant row sits a perfect retail opportunity—the big-windowed home of Northrup Grocery, which hasn’t served a customer since 2002.

For many of those years, as the Northwest Examiner reported, Jeff Baldwin, whose parents bequeathed him the property, filled it with other people’s castoffs in a DIY recycling effort. Baldwin rejected offers from buyers and brokers eager to purchase or lease the space, but he finally sold it in 2016 for the modest sum of $1.1 million—about half what brokers then said it was worth.

The deed showed that Baldwin had accepted the offer from buyers George Fussell and John Hauser (doing business as Northrup Brothers LLC) in exchange for a promise not to redevelop it for a decade, which reflected Baldwin’s desire to preserve his family’s legacy. A developer, however, soon filed plans with the city for a 46-unit apartment project.

After the Examiner blew the whistle, that project faded and the building remained dormant. In 2020, Northrup Brothers sought permits from the city to make more cosmetic improvements—a new storefront, new roll-down doors, landscaping for the parking lot, and new exterior lighting. The city granted approval.

But neither the owners, their management company, their architect, nor the broker who has the property listed for lease returned WW’s requests for comment. Kirk Becker, whose company offers the large eastern wall of the store as billboard space, might have spoken for everybody when he said, “Business isn’t very good.”