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- Address: 7129 SE Foster Rd.
- Year built: 1930
- Square footage: 11,659 (property)
- Market value: $677,990
- Owner: Catherine Chin
- How Long It’s Been Empty: 3 years
- Why It’s Empty: Grease fire
For decades (50 years, in fact), the Chin family has owned the Maple Leaf Restaurant, which occupies a Nevada-shaped lot at the intersection of Southeast 72nd Avenue and Foster Road.
Its location in the gentrifying Foster-Powell neighborhood seems ideal. Southeast 72nd Avenue, with its tree-lined green median on a street with early-20th-century homes, resembles Northeast Ainsworth Street and Southeast Reed College Place.
But the Maple Leaf went dark after a grease fire in August 2021, leaving disappointed patrons hungry for the mashup of Chinese and American comfort food. (The barbecue pork omelet was a big seller.)
On a recent crisp fall day, the Chins’ eldest son, Cisco Chin, loaded debris from the back of the restaurant into a panel truck.
The Maple Leaf, which Cisco Chin says operated as a diner for more than 20 years before his parents bought it in 1974, looks as if a giant picked it up and shook it. Kitchen equipment and furnishings sprawl along the building’s perimeter and outdoor patio, grim reminders of the grease fire that swept through the establishment. Only the vintage red-and-green neon sign atop the diner escaped unscathed.
The fire was only the restaurant’s most recent challenge. In 2019 a motorist drove through the front of the diner and into the kitchen. A couple of years before that, the Maple Leaf suffered damage when a nearby building caught fire.
Cisco Chin says moving the diner back toward the breakfast-all-day business has been challenging. During the pandemic and its aftermath, contractors were in short supply. “We lost an entire year just waiting for the electrician,” he says. More recently, his father died.
Cisco Chin and his siblings grew up in the Maple Leaf, and he thinks it could again be a neighborhood hub. But he laments the state of Foster Road, which he says hosts more than 25 empty storefronts between Southeast 52nd and 92nd Avenues.
“It is an attractive location and obviously a high-visibility location,” he says. “But unfortunately there’s a lot of vacant properties out here. We kind of feel neglected. With the exception of maybe one apartment complex the city built, it’s almost a desert of nondevelopment.”
One development the city did invest in, Portland Mercado, a Latino-themed string of food carts and shops catercorner from the Maple Leaf, is slowly limping back from its own devastating fire earlier this year.
For now, Cisco Chin is chipping away at cleaning up the Maple Leaf himself. “Insurance never pays for everything,” he says.
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.