Astoria’s Pier 39 has hit the market, offering more than 110,000 square feet of mixed-use space on the Columbia River.

The property houses 26 tenants, including Rogue Pier 39 Public House, a coffee shop, a financial planner and the Hanthorn Cannery Museum, in a cluster of low-slung buildings with reddish-orange roofs east of downtown Astoria. The commercial space is 42 percent occupied, according to CBRE, the listing agent.

The listing also encompasses an adjacent 2.06-acre parcel. The land is zoned for multifamily, hotel, retail or mixed-use development, and is the last undeveloped site of its kind in Astoria, according to CBRE.

The parcels are located within an opportunity zone and an enterprise zone, offering tax benefits to developers and investors. The site attracts 50,000 visitors a month on average, according to CBRE.

Longtime owner Floyd Holcom is selling the property. An Astoria resident and U.S. Army special forces veteran, Holcom reached out to Wes Bochner, a Portland-based CBRE broker and U.S. Navy veteran, to sell the property. Erin Smith and Trent Steeves are also managing the listing for CBRE.

Holcom purchased the property in 2002 and owns it through a limited liability company, NBSD.

The pier traces Astoria’s economic transformation from reliance on natural resources to a focus on tourism. The pier was home to Hanthorn Cannery, the first and largest tuna cannery in Astoria, which later became a Bumble Bee Tuna cannery.

CBRE has not published a listing price for the property.

“Comparable properties in San Francisco and Southern California have traded at 10x valuations of where we expect Pier 39 to sell, reflecting the massive investment upside with lease-up and redevelopment of remaining original cannery spaces,” Bochner stated in a news release.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced the selection of $6.85 million in Brownfields Grants to communities in Oregon. Nationwide, $267 million in grants are being awarded.

Federal grant recipients must satisfy legal and administrative requirements to receive funds from EPA, an EPA press release states. Brownfield Grants include Assessment, Revolving Loan Fund, and Cleanup Grants.

Assessment Grants will provide funding for brownfield inventories, planning, environmental assessments and community outreach. Oregon is receiving four Assessment Grants.

• The city of Beaverton will receive $500,000;
• Northwest Oregon Economic Alliance will receive $1.2 million;
• the city of Portland will receive $500,000; and
• Tillamook County will receive $500,000.

Cleanup Grants will provide money to carry out cleanup activities at brownfield sites owned by the recipient. Oregon is receiving three Cleanup Grants.

• The city of Astoria will receive $2 million;
• the North Plains Urban Renewal Agency will receive $500,000; and
• the city of Portland will receive $500,000.

Supplemental Revolving Loan Fund Grants are awarded to high-performing recipients to help communities continue their work to carry out cleanup and redevelopment projects on contaminated brownfield properties. Supplemental funding for Revolving Loan Fund Grants is available to recipients that have depleted their funds and have viable cleanup projects ready for work. Oregon has one recipient of a Supplemental RFL Grant:

• The Oregon Business Development Department will receive $650,000.

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ASTORIA (AP) — The listing agent for the Victorian home featured in “The Goonies” in Astoria, Oregon, said this week the likely new owner is a fan of the classic coming-of-age movie about friendships and treasure hunting, and he promises to preserve and protect the landmark.

The 1896 home with sweeping views of the Columbia River flowing into the Pacific Ocean was listed in November with an asking price of nearly $1.7 million.

Jordan Miller of John L. Scott Real Estate said the sale is expected to close in mid-January, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. The new owner, a self-described serial entrepreneur, will make his name known at that time, Miller said.

Since the movie came to theaters in 1985, fans have flocked to the home in northwestern Oregon’s historic port of Astoria. The city celebrates Goonies Day on June 7, the film’s release date, and welcomes thousands of people for the event.

An offer was accepted six days after the house was listed, according to public record.

“After the word spread that the property was for sale, we received multiple offers, at asking price and higher, and we have a full backup offer,” Miller said.

Seller Sandi Preston is passing along movie memorabilia she has collected or has been given, and some of the furniture in the home, restored to its original 1896 style, may also be sold to the buyer, according to Miller.

Preston was known to be largely welcoming to visitors. But she lived in the house and the constant crowds were a strain that prompted her at times to close it to foot traffic.

After the film’s 30th anniversary celebration in 2015 drew about 1,500 daily visitors, Preston posted “no trespassing” signs prohibiting tourists from walking up to the property. She reopened it to the public in August.

Based on a story by Steven Spielberg, the film features a group of friends fighting to protect their homes from an expanding country club and threats of foreclosure. In the process, they discover an old treasure map that leads them on an adventure and allows them to save their “Goon Docks” neighborhood.

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By CLAIRE RUSH
Associated Press/Report for America

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Good news for fans of “The Goonies:” the old Victorian home featured in the film is on sale in Astoria, Oregon, and potential buyers are considering making it more accessible to the public.

“We have a few interested parties right now,” said realtor Jordan Miller, the listing agent for the property. “It seems to be everybody’s intention to be able to open up the house a little bit more and have more access.”

The 1896 home with sweeping views of the Columbia River flowing into the Pacific Ocean has been listed with an asking price of $1.7 million on Zillow, where it’s described as “fully loaded with history, nostalgia and iconic level of fame.”

Since the movie hit theaters in 1985, fans have flocked to the home in northwestern Oregon’s historic port of Astoria. The city celebrates Goonies Day on June 7, the film’s release date, and welcomes thousands of people for the event.

Owner Sandi Preston was known to have been largely welcoming to visitors. But she lived in the house full time, and the constant crowds were a strain that prompted her at times to close it to foot traffic.

After the film’s 30th anniversary drew about 1,500 daily visitors in 2015, Preston posted “no trespassing” signs prohibiting tourists from walking up to the property. She reopened it to the public this past August.

City officials, who restricted parking in the area, have long sought to mediate the tensions between residents and the fans hoping to see and photograph the location.

“While the owner of this location from The Goonies is a fan of the movie and enjoys chatting with visitors making the trek to Astoria to see the film locations, as you can imagine, it gets hard having hundreds of people crowding into your personal space every single day,” the Astoria-Warrenton Chamber of Commerce wrote in August on a Facebook page they administer called Goonies Day in Astoria, Oregon.

In the coming-of-age film, based on a story by Steven Spielberg and featuring a young Sean Astin, a group of friends fight to protect their homes from an expanding country club and threats of foreclosure. In the process, they discover an old treasure map that leads them on an adventure and allows them to save their “Goon Docks” neighborhood.

Astoria and its rugged coastline served as the backdrop for several well-known films from the 1980s and ’90s, including “Kindergarten Cop” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For now, potential buyers of the iconic Goonies house don’t seem to want to make the house their primary residence, said listing agent Miller, suggesting it has drawn interest from people who want to “make it their passion.”

“It’s kind of a fun buy,” Miller said. “Whoever buys the house is going to have a relatively steady stream of extremely happy people walking up outside to fulfill their childhood dreams.”

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A plaza project in downtown Astoria that acknowledges the city’s Chinese heritage has received an award from the Oregon Recreation & Park Association commending the design.

The Garden of Surging Waves, completed in May, this week received an ORPA Design Award during a ceremony to recognize outstanding parks and recreation projects, professionals and partners. The design award honors superior architectural or landscape design of new or renovated park projects completed in the past five years.

The project’s designer, Suenn Ho, a principal at Portland-based RESOLVE Architecture + Planning, said she was honored to receive the sole ORPA award that recognizes project design.

“It was really, really special,” she said. “The effort was pretty involved. It took eight years to get it built. The other part is the subject matter is very unusual. It’s not just another playground or park. It’s acknowledging the contribution of early Chinese immigrants.”

The 15,000-square-foot plaza is part of the 65,000-square-foot Heritage Square.

“It’s really nice to add that to a city that never had a town square,” Ho said.

The full-block development includes various art installations that commemorate Astoria’s history and diverse community. A steel screen has anonymous quotes incorporated in it that tell the story of the area’s Chinese immigrants.

“The intention is that anyone that reads those quotes can relate from their own culture and their family,” Ho said.

She’s proud to have been a part of the project.

“It had a very noble intention,” she said. “I just got lucky to lead the charge on the design side.”

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Downtown Astoria has a number of vacant storefronts. Meanwhile, just five miles away in Warrenton, Walmart has plans to join a growing population of big-box retailers including Costco and Home Depot.

Susan Trabucco, who chairs the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association, said this is good news. The big retailers will draw people to the northern Oregon Coast.

“Then we can lure them to downtown Astoria for a different kind of shopping experience,” she said.

Finding silver linings is what a new downtown revitalization effort is all about, Trabucco said. Her association hired Michele Reeves of Civilis Consultants in Portland to go through the neighborhood block by block and identify ways to attract visitors and economic development.

“We’ve brought in the big guns to help us,” Trabucco said.

Reeves is helping people in the community identify and promote what is unique about it. That’s not difficult to do in Astoria, Trabucco said.

The town’s Victorian homes and coastal village character make it a popular movie location. Astoria has hosted filmmakers of “The Goonies,” “Short Circuit,” “Kindergarten Cop,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III” and “The Ring Two.”

“You can’t compete with the small-town environment with the river and the mountains in the background,” Trabucco said. “The local architectural stock is also very important.”

The trick, she said, is parlaying that quaint reputation into serious economic development. Consultants are looking at everything from the big picture to the smallest details.

“Our one-way street grid apparently drives people crazy, but if you live here, you don’t notice it,” she added. “We’re also learning you don’t want gaps in retail. If you have retail, retail, service business, retail, gap, it turns people off.”

Officials at Oregon Main Street, a State Historic Preservation Office program that helps communities come up with revitalization strategies, are working on a plan for Astoria in concert with Civilis Consultants.

The city of Astoria, Astoria Sunday Market, Pacific Power and the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association have contributed $20,000 toward the revitalization plan, Trabucco said.

People involved in the effort will come to North Portland on Jan. 15 for a bus tour of the Mississippi Avenue neighborhood to learn more about urban areas in transition.

Reeves is scheduled to make her final presentation, along with Sheri Stuart of Oregon Main Street, in March. A precise date has not been set.

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Sarah and Royal Nebeker nearly lost everything a few years back.

It was 2007, and a storm was brewing off the coast of Astoria. Royal was on the waterfront boarding up the windows of an old fishing facility called the Uppertown Net Loft. Built in 1900, the large, shack-like structure sat on an old, rickety wooden pier that the Nebekers had painstakingly renovated since purchasing the building 10 years before. The building served as Royal’s professional art studio, and the couple envisioned developing it into a creative space for other professional artists.

Then the storm hit.

“It was as if the top floor and roof kind of twisted and lifted up, and went over the river and fell into the river,” said Sarah, recounting the 160-mile-per-hour winds that tore through Astoria that day, ripping away the second story of the building.

Around town, telephone poles snapped and car windows caved in under the pressure of the hurricane-force winds. Eddie Park, a friend of the Nebekers who had been helping board up the windows was thrown 40 feet and broke his arm against a wall. Royal and Park were trapped in the loft as winds raged around them. After 20 hours, they escaped by strapping themselves to a ladder for weight and then crawling on their bellies down the long gangplank to shore.

Royal called his wife to let her know he was alive.

“That was very special to me,” Sarah said, “just to hear his voice.”

But the Uppertown Net Loft was destroyed. And Royal’s studio, along with all of the structural improvements and two years worth of income had washed away. Insurance covered only the cost of Royal’s equipment, and not the retail value of his art. The community rallied to help clean up the debris, but extensive damage remains.

Last month, the named the Nebekers’ building to its 2012 list of the most endangered places in Oregon. A nonprofit organization, called WHARF, was formed to try to preserve the building. The plan is to pursue the Nebekers’ desire to make the space a creative incubator for artists.

Royal got the idea when visiting the Lofoten Islands in Norway, a one-time fishing village that became a mecca for artists.

“It has revitalized their community and preserved their buildings,” Sarah said of the Norwegian community.

The Uppertown Net Loft – known affectionately as Big Red by locals – was built by a group of Norwegians, and Brandon Spencer-Hartle at HPLO said it is one of the last vestiges of Oregon’s salmon canning era still in existence.

Sarah said a focus on artists is important because they drive cultural vitality and make communities desirable. But as high-earning professionals move in to absorb that same atmosphere, the cost of real estate goes up and artists are pushed out.

Preserving that space will be good for writers, musicians and artists of all types, Sarah said.

“But we also think it’s good for the local economy and the region because it will bring people here and it will boost our presence in the state as an art- and culture-based (community),” she said.

Sarah said WHARF is open to assistance of any kind and could use help conducting a feasibility study and an engineering report, and creating a website presence. Interested readers can reach Sarah or Royal Nebeker at 503-738-8121.

“There are probably things that we don’t even know are out there,” she said. “Most of us are just pushing through this fog step by step trying to figure out how to make this work.”

Block by Block is a weekly look at commercial real estate around Portland. Send suggestions for properties to BlockxBlock@djcOregon.com.

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A multimillion-dollar urban park project in Astoria recently received a financing boost from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Heritage Square project will receive $200,000 to conduct an environmental assessment of the park site and another $200,000 for cleanup activities, according to Susan Morales, an EPA brownfield coordinator based in Seattle.

The city broke ground in April on the Heritage Square project, which will transform a full block of the downtown area into a new Chinese garden, market plaza, boardwalk and amphitheater.

But part of the site includes a section of Duane Street that was once occupied by an auto repair shop, dry cleaner and later a printer. Because those businesses may have left behind toxins in the soil and groundwater, the EPA considers the site a brownfield, and the project thus qualifies for funding to help redevelop it.

Astoria was one of nine cities to win a chunk of the $3.8 million that the EPA distributed as part of its new “multi-purpose” grant program, which is a pilot effort in which the agency distributes funds for brownfield assessment and cleanup simultaneously.

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Ground was broken over the weekend on an Astoria urban park project that could lay the groundwork for future development in the city’s downtown area.

City officials hope the project, Heritage Square, will become an example of how to handle the area’s unique infrastructure system, which is made up of 100-year-old “chair walls” that separate hollow spaces below sidewalks.

“We want to make it so as other projects develop, it won’t be as time-consuming and expensive,” Mayor Willis Van Dusen said. “We’re going to hope they can learn from the mistakes we made and what we do right to fix the chair walls.”

The city’s infrastructure was rebuilt in 1922, after a fire, without streets, pipes or electrical systems. Wider roads were constructed and chair walls were built to provide concrete tunnels for water and gas lines. At the time, not many cities in the Northwest had underground systems for wiring; chair walls were considered innovative.

The walls are now a century old, but Astoria city officials said they have surprisingly endured without many problems. But during preliminary studies for Heritage Square, which will include adding a Chinese garden, an amphitheater and a festival space to a city block downtown, some of the walls around the 25,000-square-foot site revealed deterioration. Officials say this discovery will lead to more construction in the area.

“Because it’s a showcase project, we wanted to do our homework,” said Suenn Ho, senior designer at , which designed the project. “We were very surprised how well (the walls) were put together, but the city will take this opportunity to start the whole rebuilding process of the underground system.”

Ho said the studies showed that repairing the chair walls would be more expensive than building new ones, and identified which materials the replacement walls should be built from.

The Heritage Square project was delayed for a few years while officials determined how to construct and pay for the new walls. City officials now believe work can be done in a cost-efficient way.

“If the infrastructure wasn’t so complicated and expensive, we would be done (with the project) by now,” Van Dusen said. “The project has been a very public process and there’s been a lot of exposure on how you deal with chair walls in 2012.”

The project also will demonstrate what type of construction should be done above the walls. Ho said the tests showed that the soil underneath most of the downtown area is poor and made up of debris from the fire; she said this information will help future project developers determine how heavy their structures should be.

The project calls for new sidewalks, which will be built partly out of wood to limit costs and to honor the boardwalks and docks that existed before the fire. After the project is completed, Ho said the city will develop a prototype package for property owners and developers to use as a reference for construction. Because chair walls are connected to sidewalks, which, by city law, are property owners’ responsibility, they will be required to address future maintenance needs.

“How we approach the public right-of-way will become a good reference for other property owners,” Ho said. “It will be a very beneficial testing ground for the city.”

The project’s first phase, expected to finish late this year, will be the Garden of Surging Waves, which will honor the significant Chinese contribution to the city and the Northwest. The amphitheater and the festival space are expected to be built shortly thereafter.

“We wanted to make this block similar to the Pioneer (Courthouse) Square in Portland – Astoria’s living room,” Van Dusen said.

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After 13 years and more than $7 million, the restoration of Astoria’s Liberty Theater is nearly completed, and the final projects are expected to add a new dimension to the city’s downtown.

The historic theater, which opened in 1925, underwent significant renovations that in 2005 enabled a grand reopening of the Italianate auditorium, which seats 665 people. But the small coastal town is also trying to rebrand itself as a hub for business conventions, and it’s looking to still-languishing portions of the Liberty’s second floor as a potential venue.

“The Liberty is right in the downtown core, and then you can have other meeting locations spread out throughout the town,” said Brett Estes, the city’s community development director. “It’s a different model that Astoria has been looking at to market itself as a conference venue.”

The plan is to turn the long-vacant portion of the second floor facing 12th Street into a large room with movable walls so that the space can be divided into three smaller rooms. Once completed, the space will be used for conferences, theater-related rehearsals and smaller meetings. The floor also will feature amenities for these activities, including kitchen, restroom and changing areas.

“The city looks at it as a way to activate the upper-floor spaces within downtown core, which are more difficult to find uses for,” Estes said.

The project will cost approximately $772,000, according to Rosemary Baker-Monaghan, executive director of Liberty Restoration Inc., the nonprofit that has led the project since 1998.

“Right now that portion is empty and not at all restored,” Baker-Monaghan said. “It’s dark and leaky and when you walk through it you just think, ‘Oh my goodness.’ ”

Most of the costs will be covered by urban renewal money from the Astor East District, which has earmarked a $386,000 matching grant for the project. The restoration group has until March 7, 2012 to raise enough money to acquire the full matching grant. Significant support has already come from the Ford Family Foundation, which issued another matching grant for up to $75,000; the Oregon Community Foundation and the Collins Foundation.

“The Liberty could become the central hub for conferences with meetings spread throughout the city,” Baker-Monaghan said. “It wouldn’t be like sitting in one big building in Seaside or Portland. You’d get to experience our people, our weather, our restaurants – our whole community.”

The project scope and design features for the room along 12th Street will be set once the budget is finalized, according to Jared Rickenbach, president of Rickenbach Construction. The Astoria-based company has worked on various phases of the Liberty restoration since 1999, Rickenbach said, and is slated to complete both design and construction work on the upcoming project.

The current plan includes the movable walls, seismic upgrades, and the addition of sound-control mechanisms to separate the auditorium from the second floor.

Future project plans include the addition of two commercial office spaces along Duane Street and a business office, as well as changes to the theater’s backstage area, according to Baker-Monaghan. Part of the second floor has already been renovated and can be rented out for events.

“The biggest thing that stands out about this project is really just for me as an individual in the community,” said Michelle Dieffenbach, the architect who designed the next phase of the renovation and also worked on several previous Liberty projects. “It will facilitate conference center-type functions and will play really well into the whole grand scheme for both the theater and for the downtown.”

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