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The building at 203 N.W. Third Ave. is full of history. In fact, it’s littered with it.

Jonathan Cohen, a member of the group that plans to redevelop the building, recently held up a crinkly and weathered piece of paper dating back to the 1890s, when the 12,000-square-foot structure served briefly as a hospital.

“We have a (list) of people who were leaving the hospital, and it’s kind of a who’s who of famous Portland names,” he said.

“Ladd” and “Ainsworth” were both prominent names on the list.

With the help of the Portland Development Commission, Cohen and three business partners plan to convert the 134-year-old building into a modern hostel and boutique hotel.

The Society Hotel will require a major seismic upgrade as well as extensive interior refurbishment because many of the rooms haven’t been touched in more than a century. One wall still has a hastily scribbled message from the “Frisco Kid,” who evidently passed through in 1934. Project partners see an opportunity to play up the building’s storied past, which began as a safe haven for sailors who were lured into incurring drinking and gambling debts.

“So that’s where the idea of Shanghai-ing came from,” Cohen said. “It wasn’t so much that people got knocked out and dragged onto boats. It was essentially that they were indentured servants. So this building was built to somewhat stem that effect.”

The building was one of the first brick structures in Portland to be raised off the ground, said project partner Matt Siegel, the owner of Building Blocks LLC; that bumped the building up from three stories to four. He said plans for seismic bracing will involve tying the building into a new concrete elevator shaft. The structure also features one of Portland’s few remaining cast-iron facades.

Interior designers will have lots of material to work with. One creepy item inside is the skeleton of a long-dead bird staring at its egg. Old newspapers also abound. One wartime copy of the now-defunct Portland Telegram reads, “China’s war is over,” and ” ‘Zep’ nears U.S.” A full-page ad from the Meier & Frank Co. urges readers to buy war bonds and donate blood.

Those papers were published in the 1940s – around the same time, Cohen said, that a consortium of Chinese families acquired the building. It was previously owned by a Japanese family that the government sent to an internment camp during World War II.

The building’s present-day owners hope their redevelopment will help bring those stories back to life – throughout the neighborhood.

“You can feel the history here because of the building stock,” Cohen said. “So you can’t help but talk about all of the different things that have happened here. This is the Ellis Island of Portland essentially. This part of town is where everybody came off the ships.”