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Address: 5516 SE Foster Road
Year built: 1915
Square footage: 7,400
Market value: $1.4 million
Owner: New Day Associates LLC
Property tax owed: $57,459
How long it’s been delinquent: 6 years
What those taxes could buy: A year’s salary for a full-time music teacher at Portland Public Schools
Why it’s delinquent: A misunderstanding
In 1967, the Day family bought the performance theater next to their music store on Southeast Foster Road and turned part of it into a piano showroom, which they ran for the next 40 years.
Like some other iconic Portland structures, the building that once contained the Day Music Company is now covered in graffiti and its sidewalk strewn with tents, mattresses and trash. “Take responsibility and CLEAN UP THIS MESS!!!” one neighbor wrote in an online review of the long-closed theater.
After five generations of Days, Tim Ellis, a local musician and recent inductee into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame, took over.
Ellis’ recording studio, Kung Fu Bakery, has produced albums for The Shins, The Decemberists, and Pink Martini. And he had grand plans for the space. He hoped to build a state-of-the-art recording studio and music venue, and for years he rented out the refurbished theater, then called the New Day Center for the Arts, as a dance studio.
But Ellis died of cancer in 2016. No one has paid any taxes on the property since. The LLC that owns the building is controlled by his wife, Susan, and Arizona radiation oncologist Dr. Norman Willis. It currently owes the county nearly $60,000.
When called by WW, Willis initially blamed their subtenant, Robb Crocker, an Oregon City real estate investor who was hoping to expand his reach to Foster-Powell.
Not so, says Crocker. For years, Crocker says, he included property taxes in his monthly checks to Willis and Ellis, along with the nearly $7,000 in rent, as stipulated in the 2019 lease agreement—and sent a copy of a check to WW as proof. Crocker says he also made a six-figure down payment for the option to later buy the building.
But the tax payments were never forwarded to the county. It was due to a misunderstanding, Susan Ellis says.
Ellis thought Willis was handling the paperwork. Willis thought Crocker was paying the taxes. Meanwhile, the county was sending bills to Ellis’ home, which she’d sold after the death of her husband before moving to California.
By the time Ellis figured out what was going on, she was four years in debt and the county was demanding payment in full. “Robb Crocker was planning on buying it anyway. So we thought, well, as soon as it sells, we’ll pay it off,” she says. “No harm done.”
But that never happened. Crocker walked away from the deal. “COVID knocked us out,” he tells WW.
Dealing with vandalism didn’t help. “We spent so much money just trying to keep it clean, keeping people out, cleaning up the graffiti. It’s just a total losing battle,” Crocker explains.
Fortunately, Ellis says, she’s found another buyer: a ballet studio, which paid $1.5 million for the building and plans to spend nearly a million more renovating the decrepit theater. She expects the deal to close, and the taxes to be paid, in the next month.
