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- ADDRESS: 1312-1334 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
- YEAR BUILT: Vacant lot
- SQUARE FOOTAGE: 12,000
- MARKET VALUE: $2.1 million
- OWNERS: Riad Haider and Hering Properties 4 LLC
- HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: More than two years
- WHY IT’S EMPTY: Fire
Where there was once a cluster of thriving businesses that kept Portland weird, there is now a concrete slab and some grass, surrounded by a battered chain-link fence.
Really Good Stuff, the O.G. of Stumptown vintage stores, operated on the site for 20 years, alongside Lounge Lizard, a retro furniture store, and two restaurants: Thai Touch and Riyadh’s Lebanese. Then, on the morning of Oct. 5, 2021, a fire consumed them all.
The blaze started in the ventilation system of Lounge Lizard’s paint booth, where workers buffed up used furniture, according to a lawsuit filed by Really Good Stuff owner Evan Shlaes, 69.
“On information and belief, the fire started because the Lounge Lizard vent system was dirty, coated with the residue of flammable materials, was serviced by substandard electrical appliances and wiring, and not properly inspected and maintained,” Shlaes said in his suit.
In the fire’s aftermath, Shlaes followed looters into the smoldering rubble to salvage what he could, which wasn’t much. The torched hulk was torn down, and the fence went up.
Just last week, a “for sale” sign appeared on the property, which is owned half by Riad Haider, proprietor of the now-shuttered Riyadh’s Lebanese, and half by an LLC controlled by local landowner Jerry Hering.
Neither returned calls or emails seeking news on the once-bustling corner, but George Lampus, the broker selling the lot, says they are looking to sell to an apartment developer because that’s the “highest and best use” for land in the neighborhood. The asking price is $1.75 million.
The owners had an interested buyer until about eight months ago, Lampus says, when persistently high interest rates prompted the buyer to bail. A glut of apartments isn’t helping, either.
“The world has changed since the fire,” Lampus says.
There has been action in court, too. Just this month, Shlaes settled his suit with Lounge Lizard. He wouldn’t disclose the details, but he said the deal took some of the sting out of losing a business that he had hoped would fund his once-imminent retirement. After two and a half years of legal wrangling, Shlaes says he expects a check from Lounge Lizard this week.
“I got half of what I asked for but four times what I expected to get,” Shlaes says.
An employee at Lounge Lizard said the owner, Christopher Twombley, was out of the country. Twombley didn’t return an email sent to the store’s main account by press time.
Just before the fire, Shlaes had set up an online auction site (popular in the vintage business these days) where he planned to sell everything in the store, shelf by shelf. That plan went up in flames, literally. “When it burned, I lost everything,” Shlaes says.
So, Shlaes stayed in business. He reopened on Southeast Division Street at 36th Avenue, very near Really Good Stuff’s original location when he first opened it in 1993.
“My wife approved,” Shlaes says. “It keeps me out of her hair.”
Lounge Lizard reopened closer to its old home, a block east, in a building owned by another LLC controlled by Jerry Hering, Hering Properties 1.
Shlaes says he knows nothing about what Hering might build at the site of his old store. If he had to guess, he says it would be a five-story apartment building with retail on the ground floor, like so many new buildings in Portland. Once, as a joke, he put a sign on the front of Really Good Stuff saying it was closing to become a pet lingerie store called Victoria’s Corgi’s Secret.
“People thought it was for real,” Shlaes says. “People don’t read the small print.”
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.