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- ADDRESS: 3908 SE Woodstock Blvd.
- YEAR BUILT: 1909
- SQUARE FOOTAGE: 2,351
- MARKET VALUE: $525,980
- OWNERS: Steve Niemi and Mary Charbonneau
- HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: 10 years
- WHY IT’S EMPTY: Renovation costs
Soaring twin copper beech trees with trunks like elephants’ legs line the walkway to one of the oldest and most notable homes in the Woodstock neighborhood, a yellow, three-story, prairie-style rambler with wraparound porch.
It’s a distinctive house with a distinctive story, perhaps best told by former longtime owner Brian Barisich, whose family has long been a substantial property holder in the Woodstock neighborhood. Barisich says when he bought the house in 1997, it lacked some basic amenities.
“It had been one of the biggest grow houses in Portland,” Barisich says. “One of the things they did was pull the furnace out so they could grow on the slab.”
The lack of a furnace, Barisich says, led to the home’s longtime nickname among students from nearby Reed College who’d rented it for decades. “They called it the Frigidaire because it was colder inside than outside,” Barisich says. Students grabbed an empty Frigidaire box from Standard TV & Appliance just up Woodstock and displayed the brand name in a front window.
For a time in the 1980s, the house served as the headquarters for The Free Agent, an award-winning monthly publication that covered local and national news and culture and was distributed across the city.
Some of the Reedies who lived there discovered treasure in the attic: Latvian records.
“We discovered a ton of vinyl up there,” says Sandeep Kaushik, a 1989 Reed graduate who lived in the house. “I remember we played it—it sounded like rock but it was in Latvian.” (The songs included “Manai Tautai” (“To My People”), which the Los Angeles Times reported in 1988 had become “an anthem of the Latvian movement that is trying to reclaim the nation from the Soviet Union.”)
A woman named Brigita Ritmanis wrote and recorded the song. Her father, Dr. Andris Ritmanis, a Latvian immigrant who practiced medicine in Milwaukie, owned the house at 3908 SE Woodstock before Barisich.
After his 1997 purchase, which completed his ownership of the block, Barisich spent years seeking to convert the property to mixed-use development. When he could not get city permission to do so, he sold the block in 2013 to Everett Custom Homes.
But the neighborhood association insisted on one condition: The Frigidaire could not be scrapped. “[Everett] agreed to sell the house so somebody could fix it up,” Barisich says.
In 2013, eight months after Everett bought the block, the company sold the Frigidaire to Steve Niemi and Amy Charbonneau for $274,500. The new owners applied for city permits to renovate in 2014, but the house has remained unfinished since then—and vacant.
“I walk or drive by it every day,” says Julie Wallace, a neighbor. “I always wonder what’s going on.”
Niemi says the project turned out to be bigger than he and Charbonneau anticipated.
Their goal is to restore the home to its original splendor—it was built by Capt. George Pope, a wealthy businessman whom Niemi says acquired the twin beech trees from the 1908 Franco-British Exposition in London.
“We still have full intention of moving into the house,” Niemi says. “Money and timing and many things have gone into making the restoration a long process.”
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.