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ADDRESS: 5605 SE Division St.
YEAR BUILT: N/A
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 0.2 acres
MARKET VALUE: $1.1 million
OWNER: Akum Investment Group LLC
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since 2019
WHY IT’S EMPTY: The owner wants to build a bigger and better Dairy Queen.
Bonnie Zogby, 77, who is prone to hyperbole, swears her mother served the Beatles ice cream as the Fab Four made their way to Portland International Airport in 1965. That was at the first Dairy Queen her parents owned, on Northeast Broadway. (And the story’s at least plausible: The Beatles performed at nearby Memorial Coliseum that summer.)
Zogby’s parents would accumulate seven more. One of them, at the corner of Southeast 55th Avenue and Division Street, is now demolished and used by locals as a dump. A new Dairy Queen—bigger, better and friendlier to cars, according to permit applications filed with the city—is supposed to rise in its place.
Until then, Zogby has a tale to tell of her parents’ Dairy Queen empire.
Theodora and Paul Arter moved to Portland in 1950 from California, where they had been lily farmers. Paul Arter became a franchiser for Archway Cookies. Zogby says the Dairy Queen on Broadway was on her father’s route, and he got to know the owner at the time, who told her father, by Zogby’s telling: “I’ve got my eye on you. You’re a man of integrity, and I’d like to sell the company and I’d like to give you this opportunity.”
So the Arters became Dairy Queen franchisees. Zogby remembers bagging french fries on her lunch break from Grant High School—that was the midday rush. Philip Arter, Zogby’s 75-year-old brother who lives in California and has a less romantic view of his parents’ DQ empire, corroborates this. In fact, the most popular students at Grant High School worked at his parents’ Dairy Queen on Broadway.
“It was the place to be, it was the thing to do,” Arter says. “By the time I’m out of college, the Dairy Queen is the last place you want to work. Everything changed.” (Arter remembers his father as a no-frills businessman who kept close tabs on his employees’ conduct.)
Zogby doesn’t recall when exactly her family bought the Division store, but she does remember it was one of their more successful operations because of its proximity to Franklin High School.
Theodora Arter died in 2016. Her husband had died 17 years earlier. They had already begun to sell off the Dairy Queens prior to their passing, but had hung on to the Division store. It passed to Philip Arter and Zogby, who in turn gifted it to a couple who had managed it for many years.
That couple turned around and sold it for $480,000 to a newer wave of Dairy Queen franchisee: a limited liability company called Akum Investment Group that’s controlled by Mohanbir Grewal of Beaverton. At the time, Grewal was also a 7-Eleven franchisee. He now appears to own a handful of Dairy Queens across the state as well as a Burger King.
Grewal demolished the building two years after he bought it, city records show and, in recent years, has submitted applications for a new, updated Dairy Queen with expanded parking and a second story. Those permits are slowly inching forward, records show, but in the meantime, Grewal’s land, like other vacant properties in Portland, has become a dumping ground and an occasional respite for homeless Portlanders.
Various complaints in recent years report moldy mattresses, bags of trash, and litter.
Grewal and his wife, Narinder Grewal, who’s also listed on business filings, did not respond to requests for comment, but the couple has submitted testimony to the Oregon Legislature in recent years, advocating for various bills aimed at protecting franchisees.
“Please pass this bill,” Narinder Grewal wrote in 2021 for House Bill 4152, which would have limited the ability of companies to break franchise agreements with franchisees. “Support this bill and need it desperately,” Mohanbir Grewal wrote.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.