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When Portland Fire & Rescue abruptly shut down The North Warehouse, the city’s top rave club, in mid-December, nobody was more surprised than the woman who founded—and named—the venue.
Jen Baque, a Portlander with a background in events promotion, registered the name The North Warehouse with the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office in 2015.
She’d previously held a lease on the century-old building at 721-723 N Tillamook St. with her then-husband. They made brewing equipment there. But after a divorce, Baque switched the cavernous space’s use to corporate events, weddings and other gatherings.
Under its zoning (which remains in effect), the venue could host 12 for-profit and 12 nonprofit events annually. But after the Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people at a live-work warehouse in Oakland, Calif., in December 2016, Baque says she knew things were likely to change.
Indeed, in 2017, the Portland City Council passed new safety code requirements. Baque says inspectors from Portland Fire & Rescue let her know that, as of 2018, the events allowed in the space would have a strict attendance ceiling: 300 for daytime events and 100 for “nightclub”-like events. To host bigger gatherings, she’d have to get a zone change and install fire sprinklers.
Baque says she took out an initial loan of $70,000 to begin the process and install sprinklers, but after speaking to city officials, she learned the total cost of the upgrade would likely climb to $500,000.
“I could not afford the sprinklers and had already lost a lot of money trying to adapt to the code changes, which I understood was about the safety of citizens,” she says.
So Baque decided to sell her business to MAC Holdings, a company run by Scott McElroy, a former insurance industry consultant who was moving into the entertainment business.
Baque says after selling, she didn’t pay much attention to what McElroy did with the venue—until WW reported that Fire Marshal Kari Schimel had abruptly shut down The North Warehouse after an inspector found that a Dec. 15 electronic dance music show at the venue far exceeded capacity (“Hard Drop,” WW, Dec. 20, 2023).
The revocation of permits meant the cancellation of a slate of scheduled holiday shows and cast a pall of uncertainty over events ticketed out through May.
McElroy, who did not respond to a request for comment on this story, has vowed in a blog post to reopen. “We have had 113 successful events in which Portland Fire has inspected the vast majority of. At no time during inspections did Portland Fire deem the event ‘unsafe,’ and nothing was communicated to any management at TNW that we needed to close down the event; which we would have complied with,” McElroy wrote Dec. 20. “Bottom line is if we didn’t know it was safe, we wouldn’t invite you to our party.”
The story and McElroy’s response floored Haque.
“I was baffled,” she says. “Why I could I not hold big shows and they could? If the issue was sprinklers, what’s the difference? They still don’t have them.”
Baque says she’s frustrated at what looks to her like disparate treatment. She says she sold her business for next to nothing because she couldn’t afford to make the safety upgrades the city required, only to learn from WW’s story that McElroy has promoted more than 100 shows (113 by McElroy’s count) at the same venue without making those changes.
“I am not sure what moves business obstacles in Portland, but it seems to be being a Portland business MAN, with connections and money, or the appearance of having money, which buys enough time to skirt the laws and make the money needed to change codes and zoning,” she wrote in a Dec. 21 email to the fire bureau (she says no one responded).
Spokesman Lt. Rick Graves says the fire bureau did not intend to treat McElroy differently from Baque. He says the inspectors did their jobs, but McElroy and his company misled them.
“The North Warehouse hosted large events using a special event permit and misdirected event permit specialists with inaccurate statements on the submitted permits,” Graves says. “The intent of the style of permit that was submitted by the business owner and then subsequently approved by the Fire Marshal’s Office was for small singular events and not intended to approve the large events with a ‘rave’-like atmosphere.”