Not even face coverings could hide the satisfaction of architects Don Copper and Janet Olson while crews continued to wrap up construction of the 17-story 5 MLK mixed-use building in Portland’s Central Eastside.

Copper is a managing principal and Olson is a principal with GREC Architects, a Chicago firm known for designing lakeside high-rises in the Windy City or lush, sprawling parks in far-flung places like Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. But at the east end of the Burnside Bridge, general contractor Hoffman Construction is finishing a project in a much different setting.

“This is our first project in Portland,” said Copper, who has worked with 5 MLK developer Gerding Edlen in Chicago on several occasions. “The scale of the city, the 200-foot blocks, as opposed to Chicago with its 300-by-600-foot (blocks), it’s a significant difference in how we experience a place – because with the smaller blocks, even though it’s a legitimate city, it has a really manageable scale.”

Beyond the city, Copper and Olson were inspired by the natural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest as they designed 5 MLK, which is located on the southwest corner of the intersection of East Burnside Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. There, the gleaming new building sits kitty-corner from the 21-story Yard residential tower like a massive sentinel guarding the entrance to East Portland.

“We definitely looked at things on many levels of scale,” Copper said, “but all of them in the context of Portland and the region.”

That context ranged from the region’s natural features to the bustling area.

“I’d say on the location and the site, we kind of saw what was happening here, which now has happened, and I think it’s really developed nicely,” Copper said. “(Gerding Edlen) let us run. That’s the beauty of working with them; they have … business approaches to a building and we take the creative architectural design approaches, and the two mix really well.”

5 MLK has two distinctly different faces. The northeast corner facing the Burnside/Martin Luther King Jr. intersection features the main entrance and lobby, which serves both residential and commercial tenants. The southwest corner, by contrast, is marked by a prominent sequoia tree and a rounded facade that serves to highlight the entrance to ground-floor retail spaces that front both Southeast Ankeny Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The building’s southwest corner also has on the second through sixth stories a series of terraced outdoor patio spaces.

“We came up with this concept directive that we call urban landform,” Copper said, “to try and make the building like a natural landform that sort of cascades down and has waterfalls. And having all these landscaped terraces that once the landscaping is mature, the landscaping will hopefully become as much a part of the structure as the architecture and soften the architecture.”

On the inside, 5 MLK is different from anything the firm has done before, Olson said. The goal was to start with a tree in the main lobby and adopt as many natural elements as possible. In addition, the lobby is intended to be a much more public space than those in similar buildings. Plans call for it to eventually host live musical performances and other events after the pandemic subsides.

“It really kind of is what that area of the lobby has evolved around – engagement with the tree,” Olson said as she circled the large planter.

Other natural elements in the lobby come in the form of stone-clad walls that are intended to resemble Oregon’s ubiquitous basalt columns formed by volcanic activity, as well as generous natural wood finishes and furniture. Even the carpets and furniture have circular shapes and patterns as an ode to water droplets spreading steadily outward.

“With things like this, where it’s a big statement, and it’s viewable from outside, if you’re a passerby on Burnside you can view this and feel a part of it even though you’re not inside,” Olson said. “So that, along with bringing in natural daylight.”

To that end, there’s even a lobby skylight that is both a source of light and a connection to the rest of the building.

“You can look up and see the terraces, and eventually the plantings will grow and you will see that,” she said.

Floors two through five have a combined 120,000 square feet of office space and separate amenity decks, while floors seven through 17 hold 220 residential units that range from 510 to 1,174 square feet.

The unique sixth floor has a huge array of amenities to serve both residential and business tenants. These include a large fitness center, conference rooms, classrooms and more. Another amenity space on the 17th floor offers residential tenants additional entertainment areas, as well as a small, outdoor swimming pool.

Structurally, the building bears little resemblance to those built in the Midwest, where seismic resilience isn’t as important. 5 MLK has concrete shear walls and columns.

“Where we could, we left those exposed,” Olson said. “In a handful of units we have exposed shear walls, like some in the entry, or in the bathroom, like a kind of surprise. Also, on the sixth floor it’s an element that separates two of the conference room spaces, and we’ve exposed it on both sides of that. It keeps that raw material aspect engaged.”

The building’s seismic resilience was created in an interesting manner, Copper said.

“The two elevator cores are shear walls that almost create a box,” he said. “They’re two U-shaped structures that go all the way up the building, and the elevators are inside those.”

Structural engineers with KPFF decided to link them with very large steel beams at each end, Copper added.

“In this way the core is designed to fail at a certain level of force,” he said. “There’s a lot of reinforcing steel in this building that would not be in the same building in Chicago.”

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Key Development‘s Sideyard fits snugly into place as one of the final pieces in the rapid redevelopment near the Burnside Bridge‘s east end.

In many Portland neighborhoods, Sideyard would stand out as a five-story building constructed with cross-laminated timber and a modern, geometric envelope. But that isn’t so at the bridgehead, where Sideyard’s older sibling, Yard, looms 21 stories and the brightly colored, swirling façade of Guerrilla Development‘s Fair-Haired Dumbbell competes for attention.

Skylab Architecture designed Sideyard, and Andersen Construction built it. Catena Consulting Engineers provided structural engineering.

Cross-laminated timber manufactured by D.R. Johnson Inc. in southern Oregon supports the structure. The compressed wood panel products were processed by Cut My Timber, a Northwest Portland company.

“It’s not only a beautiful building; it’s a special location at the Burnside bridgehead,” said Claudia Munk-von Flotow, chief operating officer of Key Development.

The location at 365 N.E. Couch St. offers two retail frontages – one on Third Avenue and the other facing the Burnside-Couch Couplet. Drivers traveling toward the bridge slow as they flow around Sideyard.

Key Development is well on its way to filling the approximately 25,000-square-foot building with commercial tenants. Ferment Brewing, which like Key Development is based in Hood River, will occupy one of the retail areas. Ferment focuses on traditional beer styles such as extra-special bitter, porter and saison; however, it also brews kombucha and makes a variety of pickled vegetables. Ferment will work with a chef-driven hospitality group on a food concept, Munk-von Flotow said.

Floors three, four and five offer approximately 5,000 square feet of office space at each level.

“We’re talking to a couple of creative agencies in town now to take all of it,” Munk-von Flotow said.

Most likely, two tenants will take the three floors, she said.

“Nothing is inked, but we’re having serious conversations,” she said.

Tamer Riad, a commercial broker with Debbie Thomas Real Estate, is representing the property.

Sideyard is part of an emerging generation of cross-laminated timber office buildings, particularly in the Central Eastside. The Portland-metro area is quickly becoming the premier one in the United States for cross-laminated timber construction. CLT is regarded as more environmentally friendly than concrete-and-steel and often is quicker to erect. The material lends itself to open-floor designs with exposed wooden beams that have proved popular with office tenants.

Andersen had limited elbow room to construct Sideyard. The parcel – known as Block 76 West – had served as a construction staging area for earlier projects. There was no such empty parcel for construction of Sideyard.

“It’s a postage stamp,” Catena Consulting Engineers principal Jason Thompson said of the site. “CLT works well for that kind of construction.”

At Sideyard, the use of concrete shear walls keeps lateral forces in check. Also, mass plywood is employed in the staircase.

For Key Development, Sideyard’s opening is a milestone. The developer first became involved at the Burnside bridgehead in 2010 by responding to a request for proposals from the Portland Development Commission (now Prosper Portland).

Key Development in December 2016 made a profitable exit from Yard, for $126.68 million to a Thailand-based investment firm. Munk-von Flotow said there are no plans to sell Sideyard.

“We’re not particularly interested in letting go of this jewel box,” she said. “We love this building. Our partners love this building.”

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The area surrounding the Burnside Bridge‘s east end has experienced a surge of new development in the past several years, and it’s not done yet.

The Burnside Bridgehead, a gateway to Portland’s inner east side, formerly was a site of urban blight. But new buildings Yard, Slate and the Fair-Haired Dumbbell have arrived. Some existing buildings in the area have received adaptive reuse projects.

Now, crews are constructing the latest addition: 5 MLK.

Designed by Chicago firm GREC Architects to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold standards, 5 MLK will feature a 17-story, U-shaped tower as well as a five-story podium structure with a landscaped courtyard inside the “U.”

Gerding Edlen is developing the project on a compact, 0.14-acre parcel at the corner of Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and East Burnside Street. The building will hold 220 residential units, 120,000 square feet of office space and 15,000 square feet of commercial space. There will also be 170 vehicle parking spaces in a three-level, below-grade garage.

Crews broke ground slightly more than a year ago after demolishing the century-old former Fishel’s Furniture building. The project team expects to top out the concrete structure in September, and finish in April 2020.

At present, general contractor Hoffman Construction is self-performing concrete work via subsidiary firm Hoffman Structures Inc. Crews are set to finish pouring concrete for post-tensioned slabs on the fifth floor.

“What we’re doing is trying to put these on a 10-day cycle with the concrete PT decks,” Hoffman Superintendent Lou Parker said Feb. 27 amid a morning snow flurry. “So we’re trying to pour every Thursday or Friday. We poured last Friday and this one here is supposed to pour this Friday.”

Of course, a recent outburst of winter weather managed to present challenges.

“The weather does affect us,” Parker said. “Everybody that came in today is stepping up. We put a (concrete wall form) panel in this morning early, trying to beat the wind, and they were still wrestling with it pretty good; it’s a tough day out there.”

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Guerrilla Development‘s Fair-Haired Dumbbell has begun to attract a mix of hip retail shops and creative agencies drawn to the two colorful, connected buildings that were constructed in 2017.

Fifty percent of the 56,000 square feet of speculative office space is leased, Kevin Cavenaugh, principal of Guerrilla Development, stated in an email message.

The buildings opened for leasing amid strong competition in the Portland office market, and in particular the Central Eastside submarket, where developers are rushing to deliver projects.

Plastic Sunshine, a creative agency that offers brand, digital and activation services, has taken 2,000 square feet on the sixth floor of the north building.

TenPod, a co-working company, is taking the second floor of both buildings and will open in early June, Cavenaugh said. Fuzzco, another branding agency, also is an office tenant.

On the ground floor, Crema Coffee plans to open soon. And 11:11, a new retailer of modern office furnishings, is also working toward opening.

The sixth floor of the south building and the fourth floor of both buildings are taken by tenants that Cavenaugh could not yet disclose.

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell has attracted outsized attention in part due to the exterior mural of vibrant, abstract paint designed by Los Angeles artist James Jean. Cavenaugh also became the first developer in Oregon to use an innovative crowdfunding model to attract small investors.

Several of the office spaces are being built out to suit tenants.

“While the Dumbbell looks slow and empty now, we have crews in there building out the office spaces as fast as we can,” Cavenaugh stated. “Tenants are ready and I’m trying to keep up.”

Plastic Sunshine moved into its space in January after searching for something suitable in a newly constructed building, said Danica Wilson, co-founder of the agency. Most of the available office space in Portland was arriving via adaptive reuse, she said.

“Everything looked like it was in the old, dark, converted warehouse-y buildings,” she said.

Wilson was attracted to the lighter, modern look of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell.

“For us, the building looked really odd from the outside, but from the inside the building is beautiful and full of light, which is key to our creative inspiration,” she said.

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell’s seismic resiliency was another strong selling point, Wilson said.

The building has no vehicle parking. Wilson said that hasn’t been an issue because of street parking existing nearby, employees commuting by bicycle and easy access from the Portland Streetcar.

11:11 started with a successful pop-up at The Cleaners – the Ace Hotel‘s rentable space. Plans call for the new store at the Fair-Haired Dumbbell to softly open May 31, with a grand opening June 21.

Paloma Medina, the store’s proprietor, said she looked for seven or eight months before finding the right spot for 11:11 in the Fair-Haired Dumbbell. She drove by the building several times and grew to enjoy the colorful exterior.

“I really wanted to hate the building, but I kind of love it,” she said.

The building was built by Andersen Construction, with a design by FFA Architecture and Interiors.

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Key Development‘s follow-up to Yard will have little in common with the controversial Burnside bridgehead tower.

Instead of an imposing building envelope and black exterior panels, Yard‘s sibling will be much smaller and feature warm, reddish-brown bricks.

“We’re trying to make it more of a classic Central Eastside building than a striking, contemporary project, which we’ve kind of already done with Yard,” said Claudia Munk-von Flotow, chief operating officer of Key Development, the developer of Yard and the new project on Block 76 West. “It’s really not the little sister to Yard as we once concepted it to be.”

The mixed-use project was known in planning as SideYard – a play on it being a smaller neighbor to the 21-story project built first. Now that Yard has sold to an institutional buyer – the largely residential building was snapped up by a Thailand-based investor for $126.68 million in December 2016 – the SideYard name no longer made sense, Flotow said.

The Block 76 West building will rise to five stories and include 23,569 square feet. It’s being designed by Skylab Architecture, which also designed Yard. Andersen Construction, which previously built Yard and Guerrilla Development‘s Fair-Haired Dumbbell nearby, recently broke ground on the new project.

The program for Key’s building at 365 N.E. Couch St. hasn’t been finalized, but it’s likely to be two floors of retail space and three floors of office space, Flotow said. The retail spaces will likely face Northeast Couch Street and Third Avenue.

No vehicle parking will be provided. However, the development will include bicycle-friendly features such as “rolling curbs.”

Key Development, based in Hood River, has a lead on a potential ground-floor tenant: Ferment, a brewery that is opening a production facility and small taproom in Hood River. The company may be interested in a Portland location, Flotow said. Ferment is led by Dan Peterson, a former head brewer at Hood River brewery pFriem.

Block 76 West’s structure will set it apart: Key opted to use cross-laminated timber. The structure will be a CLT diaphragm with brick cladding. The CLT materials will be provided by D.R. Johnson, a timber manufacturer based in Riddle.

“We have done lots of conventionally framed, heavy-timber buildings,” Flotow said. “We’ve never done a CLT project. For us it’s both an aesthetic thing and time efficiency, especially with such a heavy building push and a labor market that’s not super available to do heavy-timber construction projects.”

Using CLT materials with precut holes and connections accelerates the building schedule, Flotow said.

“It makes for a really efficient construction process,” Flotow said. “You can just fly your structure a lot quicker.”

Flotow said she is not concerned by the recent delamination of CLT subflooring during construction of a building at Oregon State University in Corvallis. CLT is a proven technology with an established safety record in Europe and Canada, she said.

“There’s piles of literature of test results from both a structural and a fire-protection point of view that is giving us some confidence,” she said. “I don’t think we’re putting ourselves at a huge risk by going for a CLT diaphragm.”

Andersen Construction even sent a manager to Germany to learn about CLT, Flotow said. Andersen’s experience building in the cramped Burnside bridgehead area factored into its selection as general contractor, she said.

“They have efficient ways of staging and scheduling to stay on schedule and on budget,” she said.

The building is on track to open in spring 2019.

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A 101-year-old building has been razed to make way for construction of a new 17-story mixed-use building at the Burnside bridgehead. NorthStar handled demolition of the former home of furniture retailer Fishels at the intersection of East Burnside Street and Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. In its place, developer Gerding Edlen is building 5 MLK, which will include 10 stories of apartments over six levels of office and amenity space, retail space and below-grade parking. The building was designed by Chicago-based GREC Architects, and Hoffman Construction is the project’s contractor.

Demolition wrapped up last week, and earthwork is set to follow. Foundation work will begin in May, and the project is slated for completion by the fourth quarter of 2019.

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A Portland developer is planning an ambitious overhaul of a century-old apartment building.

Green Light Development is proposing to transform the former Vivian apartment building, at 110 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., via an adaptive reuse project. Plans call for a gastropub on the ground floor and hostel rooms on the second and third floors.

Ground could be broken in late spring or early summer, and the renovated building could open in the second quarter of 2019, Green Light principal Mark Desbrow said.

Desbrow cautioned that the project is at its beginning stages.

“We’re still in the very early stages of conceptualizing and capitalizing this project,” he said.

The hostel is referred to on Green Light’s website as a Kex location. Kex is an upscale hostel in a former biscuit factory in Reykjavik, Iceland; it has a ground-floor gastropub and advertises with lifestyle tags such as “a gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.”

Hennebery Eddy Architects is designing the project, and R&H Construction will serve as general contractor.

“We’re really excited about these two relationships,” Desbrow said.

DCI Engineers will conduct a seismic retrofit and energy-efficiency upgrades.

The three-story, 16,500-square-foot building was built circa 1911. It occupies a corner of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Couch Street. Green Light is pursuing a listing on the National Register of Historic Places for the building.

The proposal calls for outdoor seating, a green roof, refreshment of the exterior with a new main door, an aluminum storefront frame and masonry restoration in places.

The hostel would add to a boom in development at the east end of the Burnside Bridge. Projects such as Yard, Slate, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell and the renovation of the Towne Storage Building have made the area the epicenter of development in Portland.

“We really like the location,” Desbrow said. “It’s really one of the best locations for our use.”

A hostel and a gastropub would be new territory for Green Light. The developer mostly has tackled multifamily projects. Green Light previously completed D Street Village, a mixed-use building with 85 apartments on Southeast Division Street, and Attwell off Main, a 167-unit multifamily building in Tigard that was developed in a partnership with Capstone Partners.

Currently, Green Light has under construction a 119-unit apartment building in Southeast Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood. That project is Green Light’s first large enough to require a construction crane, Desbrow said.

The hospitality industry is growing quickly in Portland. Kex would likely offer a lower price point than other projects in the works, such as Provenance Hotels‘ Woodlark, Graves Hospitality‘s hotel at Southwest 10th Avenue and Alder Street or the 600-room Hyatt Regency Portland at the Oregon Convention Center.

“In general, we’re in a real growth period in types of lodging,” said Marcus Hibdon, a spokesman for Travel Portland.

For travelers, hostels occupy a space somewhere between full-service hotels and home rentals via websites such as Airbnb.

“Hostel lodging tends to come in quite a bit less expensive than your traditional hotel room,” Hibdon said. “I would imagine there’s a market for a budget traveler who’s looking for a really good deal on a place to sleep.”

The post Burnside bridgehead still booming appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

For eight years, the Portland Development Commission patiently cobbled together four blocks at the eastern end of the Burnside Bridge.

City leaders thought the area could serve as a gateway to downtown from East Portland, and so the PDC in 1998 began acquiring properties there.

Revitalization of the area had a long way to go. The Convention Plaza building was a second-rate office property, and the surrounding area had little going on.

Yet the site offered 4 acres of close-in land fronting the Willamette River on one of Portland’s busiest streets.

Development there would be aided by maximum height allowances of 200 feet, a generous floor-to-area ratio of nine-to-one and central employment (EXd) zoning.

Today, the area is bustling with construction and activity. Guerrilla Development‘s colorful Fair-Haired Dumbbell is under construction, while Beam Development and Urban Development + Partners‘ Slate and Key Development and Guardian Real Estate Services‘ Yard are fully built. Additional projects are at various stages of development.

“It’s a really interesting site in Portland, an interesting opportunity,” said Jeff Pickhardt, a Key Development principal. “It’s basically the epicenter of Portland, and it had been a blighted site for a long time.”

Initially, the PDC inked a memorandum of understanding with Opus Northwest, a subsidiary of Minnesota-based Opus Group, for podium-and-tower construction on the entire property. But Opus was hit hard by the Great Recession in 2008 and ’09, and the deal dissolved.

The PDC – led at the time by Executive Director Bruce Warner under then-mayor Sam Adams – restarted. The agency brought in Beam Development, a local firm that had performed several well-regarded rehabilitations of historic buildings, as a strategic adviser to craft a new framework plan.

Crucially, instead of seeking one large developer to take the entire site, the PDC moved to bring in multiple developers.

“It was smart on PDC’s part to have some diversity of development groups,” said Jonathan Malsin, a Beam Development principal. “We understood that that could lead to a better result of having a mix of architectural styles and product types.”

Beam Development was invited to redevelop a parcel in the area. The firm, led by Brad Malsin and his son, Jonathan, chose the Convention Plaza building, which since opening in 1926 had served at various times as a military barracks, a soup kitchen and offices before being targeted for demolition. But instead of knocking it down, Beam renovated the property at 123 N.E. Third Avenue into the Eastside Exchange.

Cascade Energy Inc. was the first tenant to take space in the 80,000-square-foot building, and then the Technology Association of Oregon and the Oregon Film Office followed.

Beam Development opened the door for others to step into the area, Pickhardt said.

“You could credit Beam and really PDC for activating that part of town,” he said. “Beam was heavily involved in the framework plan, and they really took the first step at the bridgehead. Their work early on, and particularly Eastside Exchange, was a catalyst for others to follow suit.”

In the wake of the Great Recession, most developers were not in a position to redevelop 4 acres of urban property. Parceling out the four-plus blocks over time enabled the PDC to spread the financial risk among several developers.

Key Development had investigated developing a large project in the Burnside bridgehead area in 2010. The Hood River company was interested in making its mark in Portland. After Beam developed Eastside Exchange, Key jumped in with bids for Block 67 and a portion of Block 76. Block 67 became Yard, a 21-story tower with 284 residential units and ground-floor retail space.

Yard attracted criticism for its dark appearance and unbroken mass, but Key Development and Guardian Real Estate Services sold the building in December to a Thailand-based company for $126.68 million after an unsolicited offer.

After completion of the Eastside Exchange, Beam and UD+P followed with Slate, a 10-story mixed-use project on Block 75. The Works Progress Architecture-designed building has 75 market-rate apartments and 45,000 square feet of commercial space. The building opened in November.

Guerrilla Development’s Fair-Haired Dumbbell – two six-story buildings totaling 56,000 square feet – is rising on Block 76. A June completion date is targeted for the office and retail project, developer Kevin Cavenaugh has said.

Cavenaugh used a unique crowdfunding mechanism to raise $1.5 million for the $18 million project. The façade will have a colorful design by Los Angeles artist James Jean, setting the project apart from Slate’s light-colored boxes and Yard’s dark appearance.

Meanwhile, Key Development is preparing to break ground on the western portion of Block 76 for a six-story, 22,000-square-foot commercial building, Pickhardt said. That project has received design approval from the city of Portland.

Development continues to radiate outward from the 4 acres comprising the Burnside Bridgehead Framework Plan formed in 2010. To the east, Dallas-based Trinsic Residential Group is building Aura Burnside. The six-story multifamily building at 55 N.E. Grand Ave. will include 167 residential units; it’s scheduled to open in late summer.

To the south, Gerding Edlen plans to build a 17-story mixed-use building at 5 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. 5 MLK, as the project is known, is set to include approximately 220 apartments, 10,000 square feet of commercial space and 170 underground parking spaces. 5 MLK is being designed by GREC Architects of Chicago.

At 17 S.E. Third Ave., Sentinel Development and Westport Capital are rehabilitating the 108,600-square-foot Towne Storage building into creative office space. LRS Architects is designing the project, and Bremik Construction is serving as general contractor.

At 230 E. Burnside St., Arthur Mutal and NFN Investments completed adaptive reuse of the 16,400-square-foot R.J. Templeton Building into creative office and retail space in 2014.

ESI Group designed and constructed a 28,720-square-foot warehouse rehabilitation for New Seasons Market’s central kitchen at Southeast Second Avenue and Ash Street.

More properties could be developed in coming years. Cairn Pacific owns property at 811 E. Burnside St. that hosts an eclectic collection of local shops. There are no current plans to develop the property, located across Burnside Street from the Doug Fir Lounge and the Jupiter Hotel, but that could change as the neighborhood develops, Cairn Pacific founding principal Tom DiChiara said.

“It was sleepy down there for a long time,” he said.

Not so now. Looking back, backers of Burnside bridgehead redevelopment are proud of their work.

“It’s amazing that it’s all come together like it has in a relatively short period of time,” Pickhardt said. “To get that scale of development done collaboratively with the neighbors and PDC is remarkable.”

Geraldene Moyle, now a senior project manager at the PDC, said the city was able to be nimble in acquiring the parcels and selling them for fair market value. Developers had to work around a Portland Bureau of Transportation couplet project, elevation changes and other issues.

“I think it’s been successful,” she said. “Based on what we owned, based on the constraints of the site, the couplet, the height, we were able to deliver a site that fulfilled the goals of the framework plan.”

The post Burnside bridgehead grows up appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The partnership between Portland developers Beam Development and Urban Development + Partners started with Slate, a mixed-use project in the Central Eastside Industrial District with 75 luxury apartments and 45,000 square feet of commercial space.

Beam had been a player in the Central Eastside for years – mostly retrofitting large, historic buildings such as the Eastside Exchange and Water Avenue Commerce Center into creative office space. But Beam, led by Brad Malsin and his son, Jonathan, had less familiarity with other kinds of projects.

“We didn’t have experience building ground-up multifamily, so we set out to partner up with a team that had experience with that product type,” Jonathan Malsin said.

Meanwhile, Urban Development + Partners was looking to get more involved in the Central Eastside. It was a match made in heaven, or at least the Burnside bridgehead.

“We found that our firms have similar goals or values; we’re in alignment,” said Joren Bass, project manager for UDP. “Beam has a deep history of creative office space. UDP, we have pretty broad experience on the residential component. That was beneficial at Slate.”

Slate is opening to tenants this month. Yet that’s only the beginning of the Beam-UDP partnership. The companies are in the thick of developing three other projects together in the Central Eastside along Stark Street near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Hotel

First comes the renovation of Hotel Chamberlain, at 509 S.E. Grand Ave., which for decades housed a Shleifer Furniture store. The upper floors of the four-story building contain hotel rooms that have sat empty since the 1970s, when Shleifer Furniture ownership decided the trouble of running a hotel wasn’t worthwhile in the once-rough neighborhood.

Beam and UDP plan to transform the 36,000-square-foot property into a modern boutique hotel with about 60 guest rooms. The ground floor will become a hotel reception area, a lobby and a restaurant or coffee shop.

Features added by Shleifer Furniture over the years, such as a mezzanine and sidewalk-facing display windows, will be removed.

“Taking it back to the original storefront will bring in an amazing amount of natural light and really engage the street,” Bass said.

The developers are working closely with the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office to retain the 110-year-old building’s historic characteristics. The renovation will require a full seismic upgrade.

“We’re going to preserve this as a gem,” Bass said.

It’s the first hotel development project for both firms, although UDP owns a hotel in another market. Emerick Architects is designing the hotel.

Hotel and apartments

Beam and UDP plan to build a 13-story mixed-use development with hotel space, multifamily units and ground-floor retail space at 550 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., a half-block slightly west of Hotel Chamberlain where a parking lot sits currently. Two floors of underground parking are planned, along with a rooftop deck.

The mix of uses has not been finalized, Jonathan Malsin said.

“We’re still determining that,” he said. “We anticipate having a hospitality component and multifamily.”

Works Partnership Architecture is designing the project.

Creative offices

At 531 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., the developers plan a mid-rise creative office building of approximately six stories on a parking lot now used by Portland Music Co. Retail space will occupy the ground floor. The developers are working within the restriction of an 80-foot height limit.

Beam and UDP are pursuing the creative office market that has proved lucrative for other Central Eastside projects such as Eastside Exchange.

“We will be targeting the same type of tenant, but every project is so different, especially if it’s adaptive reuse versus new construction,” Malsin said. “We try to deliver a similarly high quality, unique product.”

Portland architecture firm Hacker is designing the office project.

Beam and UDP hope to break ground on all three projects next year, Malsin said. He declined to reveal a total project cost for all three developments, but it will be substantial.

“It’s going to be quite the node of activity here with the three sites,” he said.

Hotel construction has boomed in Portland, but Malsin said Hotel Chamberlain and the hospitality project next door will differentiate themselves in the market.

“There’s definitely a lot of supply coming online,” he said. “It’s definitely something we’re cognizant of. But I don’t lump together the (Central Business District) and the Pearl (District) and the Central Eastside. A cool boutique hotel on the Central Eastside? Yeah, there’s a market for that.”

A potential expansion of the Jupiter Hotel is the only competing project in view, Malsin said.

For Beam, it makes sense to continue investing in the Central Eastside on the heels of the firm’s earlier projects in the area, Malsin said.

“We’ve had a lot of holdings down here for years, so all of our projects are bolstered, and it’s a phenomenal neighborhood,” he said. “We love the grittiness. We love the character.”

The developments by Beam and UDP fit the city’s long-term plans for the Central Eastside, said Debbie Kitchin, who served as co-chairwoman of the stakeholder advisory committee for Southeast Portland.

The neighborhood’s future is guided by the city’s Southeast Quadrant plan, part of the 2035 Comprehensive Plan. The plan calls for activating the area’s major corridors, while preserving the rest for industrial uses.

“We focused on keeping mixed-use development in the corridor and on the bridgehead streets,” said Kitchin, who is also past president of the Central Eastside Industrial Council and principal of general contractor InterWorks LLC. “That’s been allowed for 30 years, and it’s just now coming to fruition. I think activating those corridors is great.”

These projects started with a relationship that Beam founder Brad Malsin developed with Shleifer Furniture owner Stuart Shleifer. Malsin told Shleifer that if he were ever interested in selling, Beam would be interested in buying.

“This is where we have our network,” Jonathan Malsin said of the Central Eastside. “We’re able to identify properties off-market.”
For a clue as to what Beam and UDP will do together, look at what they’ve done. Slate has a distinctive 10-story design. There are 1.5 floors of retail space and 2.5 floors of office space topped by six floors of apartments. In addition, there is one level of underground parking.

Tenants include surfboard and coffee shop Cosube as well as a restaurant that has inked a letter of intent. CENTRL Office, a co-working company, has taken a space. Two more retail spaces along Third Avenue have not yet been leased.

Slate’s apartment units primarily have two bedrooms, “mostly as a way of differentiating our product,” Malsin said.

The interior has concrete floors, an approach favored by UDP. Bass said the polished concrete blends beauty and durability, is friendly to pets and allergy sufferers, and is resistant to flooding.

“We really won’t build anything that doesn’t have a concrete floor in a residential building like this,” Bass said.

Slate is a linchpin for a fast-developing area; it’s neighbored by Yard and the under-construction Fair-Haired Dumbbell from Kevin Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development. Gerding Edlen is developing a 17-story mixed-use building at the Burnside bridgehead.

Slate’s distinctive design by Works Partnership Architecture (now Works Progress Architecture) and built by Yorke & Curtis is reminiscent of stacked boxes, with apertures protruding from the building.

“It was an aesthetic decision,” Malsin said. “We first started looking at this building as an expression of an industrial neighborhood. We were enamored of the idea. It’s not the easiest detail to construct, but we’re really pleased. I think the design has been really well received.”

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Gerding Edlen has requested early assistance from the city of Portland to build a 17-story mixed-use tower at the east end of the Burnside Bridge.

The developer’s proposal calls for 200,000 square feet of residential space in approximately 220 units, 100,000 square feet of office space and ground-floor retail space. Approximately 180 below-grade parking spaces would be included for residential and office users.

Kelly Saito, a managing partner at Gerding Edlen, confirmed the filing and the firm’s interest in pursuing the project. He said it’s too early to comment on the project itself.

The proposed site is at 5 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., where a 75-year-old, 7,800-square-foot building houses Fishels Furniture. A message at the business’ phone number publicizes a going-out-of-business sale. Fishels has operated since 1921.

The applicant is Kurtis Fusaro, Gerding Edlen’s director of acquisitions and development. The property owner is listed as Fishels and MKB Investment Co.

Gerding Edlen anticipates a Type III design review and possible type III Central City parking review, according to the early assistance request.

The inner eastside has been one of Portland’s hottest areas. The proposed site is slightly east of the Towne Storage redevelopment site at 17 S.E. Third Ave., and near the Yard, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, the Lower Burnside Lofts and other developments.

Gerding Edlen has developed major projects throughout the Pacific Northwest, including First & Main in downtown Portland, the Brewery Blocks in the Pearl District and Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Health and Healing in the South Waterfront District.

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