Designer, Doctor See Promise in Bunker-Like Building in Multnomah Village

ADDRESS: 3675 SW Troy Street

YEAR BUILT: 1958

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 6,114

MARKET VALUE: $1.2 million

OWNER: 3675 LLC

HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since at least 2019

WHY IT’S EMPTY: Fire and pandemic

Just off a vibrant stretch of Southwest Capitol Highway in Multnomah Village sits a vacant masonry hulk that could double as a machine gun bunker.

It was commissioned as a U.S. Post Office in 1958 and has some odd features, says Kenton Wiens, one of the current owners. A hall with eye-size portholes, where postal inspectors could watch workers handling letters, runs around what was the mail sorting room.

“We were still caught up in Cold War intrigue, I guess,” Wiens says.

The building also has prison-thick bars on the windows, though those may have been added by a post-post office tenant: The Coin Cottage, a numismatic shop run by a dealer named Paul Rigby. “WE BUY GOLD AND SILVER. GET CASH TODAY!” a sign on the side of the building once read.

Wiens, a designer, bought the building with two business partners in 2019 for $900,000. Wiens has a passion for relics. He bought the old Pine Street Theatre building, once home to La Luna, one of Portland’s founding alt-rock clubs, in 2005 and fixed it up. (It was 100% haunted at one time and may still be, he says.) He also designed the restaurants Bar Casa Vale, Tasty N Alder, and Laurelhurst Market.

One of Wiens’ partners in the old post office is Dr. Tomasz Beer, an adjunct professor at Oregon Health & Science University who has done groundbreaking work on prostate cancer. In his spare time, Beer enjoys the challenge of Portland real estate.

“He keeps us grounded,” Wiens says.

The structure itself, which had been gutted by fire, and the neighborhood are what had attracted them to the building, Wiens says. They imagined turning it into a small market, a hardware store, or a restaurant, but the pandemic intervened. Building costs soared, and now interest rates are through the roof.

“We bought it not too long before the pandemic, when everything looked easy,” Beer says. “The numbers that worked in 2019 aren’t working today.”

The group is pressing ahead with permits, which are almost done. They are looking for a tenant to rent it or for a buyer with good intentions.

“We’re not some big East Coast developer who is looking to make a killing,” Beer says. “The neighborhood could use a lot of things.”