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The Memory Den Vintage Mall on the Central Eastside takes up an entire city block. In a city with more than its share of retro-shopping nuts, that makes it a real attraction—it’s the largest vintage mall in Portland.
The massive building at 125 SE Stark St. contains more than 140 vendors that sell bell-bottom jeans from the 1970s, Sears stationary bikes from the 1940s, and silverware that’s a half-century old. The layout is akin to that of a convention center filled with rows of booths, but instead of booths, cluttered closets spill into each other atop creaky floors. The place is bustling and jolly.
But Memory Den, barely a year old, is also in turmoil.
Less than six months after the vintage mall opened, dozens of vendors say they struggled to get paid consistently by Memory Den’s first owner. They allege the mall’s founder, Phil Sparks, sold their merchandise, then failed to pay them all of what they were owed; he’s since been impossible to track down. New owners now argue to some vendors that they’re not responsible for past debts Sparks accrued to vendors.
“I’m not going to lie: At first, I thought it was going to blow over,” says Alexandra Hauge, a Memory Den vendor of fashions from the 1970s to 2000s who left in July and says she’s still owed $1,244. “But I was so naïve. It’s just a slap in the face. It’s this moral thing of, that’s my money.”
Hauge is one of six vendors who spoke to WW about the yearlong saga of bounced or nonexistent checks and unanswered questions left by the disappearance of Sparks.
Those interviews, paired with court documents, emails, texts and video recordings shared by former and current vendors, paint a picture of chaos at a shopping destination that promised revival for a neighborhood that could use a boost.
“It’s been rough. I was doing so well at Memory Den that I got rid of two of my smaller locations,” says Sarah Langford, a vendor who says she’s owed $2,000. “It has essentially cut my income in half over the last six months.”
Vintage connotes rarity. But in Portland, vintage shops are anything but. Travel Portland estimates the city has at least 50 shops selling clothes, furniture and décor that smells faintly of mothballs.
In fact, Memory Den vendors say, it’s such a saturated market that it’s hard to find space to sell retro goods. Memory Den’s appeal when it first opened in the summer of 2022 was its abundance of space (50,000 square feet) and relatively cheap monthly rent of $300 for a small booth.
Phillip Sparks, 62, rented the massive building from real estate mogul Jordan Schnitzer with grand promises of making it the largest vintage market in town.
By all accounts, Sparks was an eccentric character. His office at the Memory Den was low-lit and carpeted, featuring a fireplace and décor that reminded one vendor of Liberace. Vendors remember Sparks as friendly.
In 1983, then 22 years old, Sparks was crowned Mr. Gay Oregon by the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court of Oregon. He dabbled as a drag performer, then owned several design-related businesses, including a florist, according to state business records. None of the business registrations is still active.
His latest venture seemed promising. At its height last fall, Memory Den had more than 160 vendors in the building and it regularly teemed with customers.
The mall’s business model was unusual. Vendors paid Sparks monthly booth rent. Shoppers rifled through items from any of the vendors and brought them to a central front desk, where they paid a cashier who worked for Sparks. At the end of the month, Sparks would pay vendors 85% of whatever was sold from their booths.
Just months after its opening, vendors’ checks began to bounce, or just never arrived, according to Memory Den vendors and dozens of emails and texts provided to WW by those vendors.
In a Sept. 22, 2022, letter to vendors, Sparks blamed the bounced checks on his credit union being unable to process the high number of transactions. He asked for patience with payment issues. “With all good planning and growth,” Sparks wrote, “also comes many growing pains that we had not expected.”
Melissa Halvorson began renting a booth in September 2022 selling Scandinavian objects and furniture. But in December, she says, the check Sparks gave her bounced.
“Sparks’ explanation was that they were in the process of switching banks, and the credit union that they used to use just wasn’t big enough to support the volume of checks,” Halvorson recalls. “It was kind of a plausible story.”
But then, Halvorson says, she didn’t receive checks for the next three months. She kept sending demands to Sparks and Memory Den director Tyler Gregory, to no avail.
By the following spring, a new message arrived: Sparks was selling the place.
Gregory wrote March 9 that Sparks was “finalizing a deal with a small group of investors.” Then, on March 15, he wrote that “the new owners fully intend to get everyone paid and current, it’s just a process and we were left with a lot to sift through unfortunately.”
Those new owners: Ben and Jay Fackler, who also own McMinnville-based Fackler Construction Company. (It’s unclear when, exactly, the Facklers officially took over the business. But they registered Retro Renaissance LLC with the state on Aug. 1, 2023.)
In a series of letters and emails to vendors over the course of the summer, the Facklers assured vendors they’d be paid in full. “We have committed to assuming the debt incurred prior to the sale of the business,” Fackler wrote in a May 9 letter, adding that the business had narrowly avoided eviction by Schnitzer Properties for unpaid back rent.
The brothers held two town hall meetings for vendors this summer in one of the furniture rooms. Recordings of those two meetings shared with WW show that the Facklers promised to make everyone whole financially but conceded that Sparks had left them with over $400,000 in debt.
“We didn’t cause this mess, and we’re doing our best to move through it,” Ben Fackler said, adding that some vendors were threatening to sue over unpaid debt. “I’m not taking a dime out of this until everything is resolved.”
Fackler said that vendors who “stick it out for the long haul will take priority over those that don’t.”
Then the Facklers appeared to change their tune. Their attorney, Craig Robinson, wrote a letter Sept. 7 to one vendor seeking over $2,000 in payment that the Facklers “are not successor-in-interests to Mr. Sparks and/or his legal entities; and, accordingly, may not be held liable for any claims that may exist under your Rental Agreement with Memory Den Broadway Antique Mall, LLC.”
Robinson also warned against “defamatory comments,” writing they would be “handled accordingly.”
Vendors—both those who have since left and those who remain—say the Facklers have paid them each month but have not settled Sparks’ prior debts. (Some vendors say they have sporadically received partial payments, either from Sparks or from the Facklers, over the past few months.)
Corey Swim, owner of Traveling Man Treasures, is still trying to get paid $2,000 for prior sales and $10,649 for ancient Egyptian artifacts and antiques stolen from his booth one night in May. He says the Facklers walked in to the business with their eyes wide open.
“They ultimately shrugged their shoulders at my, and many others’, situation as if it is our faults and our problems,” Swim says.
The Facklers did not answer WW’s questions, but a friend and employee of the Facklers, Jeremy Lodge, wrote in an email that “at present we are working our way through the migration from the old business to the newly formed Memory Den.
“With the ex-owner filing bankruptcy,” Lodge wrote, “we have some extra things to move through and would suggest meeting at the end of October when we would have time to sit down and share the future plans.”
And what of Phillip Sparks? Since he left Memory Den this summer, he’s been hard to find. Vendors have texted and emailed him, with varied success.
This September, Sparks filed for bankruptcy in U.S. District Court, listing debts topping $1.2 million. They include money owed to Memory Den vendors, a half-dozen personal loans topping $128,000, numerous business loans (including $50,000 owed to Fackler Construction), and a slew of bills from materials companies for specialty stone, tile, carpet and countertops.
According to court filings, Sparks moved to a small home in Aurora, Ore.—one of the top antiquing towns in the nation—in October. He did not respond to requests for comment.
As for Memory Den, everything appeared jovial on a recent Saturday. Old-timey music flooded the unending rows of vendors. Two high school girls trying on sparkly dresses in the makeshift dressing rooms oohed and aahed at each other’s reflections in the mirror. A patron sat at a standup piano and played a melancholy melody.