Portland’s oldest commercial building is receiving a major renovation intended to restore the look and feel of the original brick masonry and cast iron.

Owner John Russell has tapped Emerick Architects and Bremik Construction to conduct historically sensitive improvements to the Hallock-McMillan building at Southwest Naito Parkway and Oak Street.

The Hallock-McMillan building was completed in 1857 – two years before Oregon became a state – but hasn’t had a tenant since Peter Corvallis Productions left about 15 years ago, Russell said.

Bremik has removed the east-facing façade. Much of the original brick was salvaged and will be restored, and a moment frame will be added to bolster strength.

Russell envisions a creative-office tenant occupying the two-story, 5,000-square-foot building.

“The tenant has to want visibility and values that, and the prestige of a building of real significance,” he said.

The Hallock-McMillan building was designed and developed by architect, surveyor and engineer Absalom B. Hallock in a short-lived partnership with contractor William McMillan. The east façade used cast iron to support three large arches. The wood and glass entrance is more than 10 feet tall. Some of Portland’s earliest structural brick was used in the building. The project team is looking to protect the historic brick from moisture, possibly by using a clear coating product, said Aaron Vogel, a project manager with Bremik Construction.

After the building was completed, Hallock moved his own office into the ground floor. He rented the top floor at one time to an agent of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hallock lived on the second floor at times, according to materials from the Oregon Historical Society.

The project team has found photos of the building from circa 1870.

“We’re going back to try to create the original look and feel of the façade,” said Keith Daily of Emerick Architects. “You’ll get the old-school warehouse look as much as we can.”

Russell, a longtime figure in Portland’s commercial real estate industry, owns five buildings on the same block. Their common ownership enables the project to link the Hallock-McMillan building to its neighbors, the Dielschneider and Fechheimer buildings.

On the south side facing Oak Street, a new glass façade and stairway will join the Hallock-McMillan building with the neighboring Dielschneider building to the west.

A second phase will involve additional seismic bracing. In the event of an earthquake, the three buildings will support each other, Vogel said.

Russell has planned the project for years after purchasing the Hallock-McMillan building in 2010. Nearby development, including Wyndham Resort Development Corp.‘s 75-unit vacation time-share project at 221 S.W. Naito Parkway, helped spur Russell to go ahead. There are also plans for numerous properties in the area owned by the Goodman family’s Downtown Development Group.

“I wish all of these blocks would be developed,” Russell said. “They will be.”

New office developments commanding about $40 per square foot are boosting rates for older office space, Russell said.

“It’s roaring and there’s what I call a price umbrella,” he said.

The Hallock-McMillan building could also host a small shop or restaurant, but the project team is moving forward with the intention of attracting a creative office tenant, Daily said.

For Russell, the project is more about preserving the history of the Victorian-era building.

“It’s more philanthropy than anything,” he said. “It’s such an important building.”

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The latest stage in the journey of the Eric Ladd Cast-Iron Collection might soon conclude.

Preservationists are hopeful that new design guidelines for the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District will encourage reuse of these artifacts, now stacked like cordwood in an open-air lot under an overpass of Interstate 5.

The 110 or so innocuous-looking columns and grates, bearing the deleterious effects of corrosion and relocation, have been owned by the city (as the Portland Development Commission) since 2006. At present, it’s unclear who exactly wants to use them, but advocates are optimistic they’ll be part of the building boom moving forward.

Architects and developers don’t always go into business to preserve the past, and it’s thought by some that it’s telling there’s been so little interest so far.

A ‘wonderful moment’

Over the years, William A. “Bill” Hawkins Jr. moved from discouragement to acceptance that the Eric Ladd collection would never be fully utilized. But lately, he’s “hopeful.”

“I’ve had this wonderful moment in the last month,” said the architect and historian.

Hawkins is regarded as the cast-iron authority in Portland. His book, “The Grand Era of Cast-Iron Architecture in Portland,” documents the role the one-time innovative building style played in shaping modern architecture, as well as the Rose City.

Cast iron was a national movement during the latter half the 19th century. Common to Italianate architecture, it was a new structural way to build using large, prefabricated, often ornate, iron pieces affixed to building fronts. They communicated owners’ wealth and status, and were cheaper to build and install than the stone masonry of the day. The style became the norm in Portland starting in the 1860s, when the area’s first iron foundries were established.

Coincidentally, that was also when much of old Portland was built. So instead of a cast-iron building here and there, as in previously-established urban areas like New York City and Paris, there was a whole section of Portland emblematic of the cast-iron aesthetic.

But time moves fast, and other voguish building trends came and went. The cast-iron came down nearly as fast as it went up. Fires ravished the growing city, and the heart of commerce shifted away from the waterfront. Later, in the 1950s, a man named Eric Ladd, fascinated with Portland’s past, worked to set aside and salvage cast-iron elements from approximately 12 demolished storefronts.

His collection was first stored at the Jacob Kamm House before being relocated to a farm along the Sandy River, where it sat for decades. The PDC purchased the pieces in 2006, but an effort to streamline design guidelines to encourage reuse of the artifacts was stalled when the discussion turned to other matters, notably zoning and building height. As staff and committee membership turned over, hope held by preservationists including Hawkins faded. Until this month.

A mixed-use project planned for Pine Street and Oak Street was at first rejected by the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission because of a design “unsympathetic” to surrounding architecture. But after returning from the drawing board with plans calling for cast iron, and other historically-appropriate considerations, the project team gained the commission’s support.

Unlike the previous guidelines, the new ones are concerned more with the “cast iron” than the “Italianate,” so new buildings look less like they’re mimicking a historical style. A companion resolution to the guidelines pressed city bureaus to make “reasonable efforts” to use the cast-iron elements in development and renovation efforts.

Another project offering hope for cast iron is the future home of Ankrom Moisan Architects. Though cast iron won’t be incorporated in the new building, the firm will display artifacts from the Eric Ladd Collection in a grove of freestanding elements along the building’s Naito Parkway frontage.

“We wanted to ensure the story of cast iron is told in our development,” Executive Vice President Murray Jenkins said.

Most of the interest in using the Ladd pieces in recent years has come from developers who have sought to use them as decorative art pieces and not as building exteriors or entryways, said Val Ballestrem, educational director at the Architectural Heritage Center.

As for why the Ladd iron is in limbo, Ballestrem has several theories. First, modern architects “can’t seem to fathom putting this old material on a new building.”

“I think that would be the ultimate statement of recycling and reuse – something that Portland used to be very proud of, but now I’m not so sure,” he said.

Second, the National Park Service, which oversees the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District, traditionally doesn’t like buildings that are reconstructed.

Lots of parking

No doubt, the Skidmore/Old Town Historic District has a different feel than the rest of the Central City, and part of it has to do with the parking lots. Portland effectively banned surface parking in the Central City in its 1972 Downtown Plan, though existing ones were grandfathered in. Today there are more than a dozen surface parking lots in the 17-block district, and most are owned by the Goodman family.

The rule discouraging parking lots led to an unintended consequence – as parking lots are superseded, remaining ones become more valuable.

Parking is now such a valuable commodity in downtown that observers believe a developer can achieve more profits with a parking lot, especially where building heights are limited to 75 feet.

“The economics are such that if you have a choice between running a parking lot and building a 75-foot building, you run a parking lot,” developer John Russell said. “It’s just bad public policy.”

Russell, owner of the Hallock-McMillan Building, has no love lost for parking lots.

“They’re about the worst neighbor you can have,” he said. “(They’re) dead. There’s no pedestrian delight about walking past a parking lot.”

But Hawkins and others think the status quo might change as land values keep rising. It’s thought that new construction could finally be more productive use of Old Town property. (The Goodmans recently unveiled expansive plans to redevelop a number of their properties.)

To renovate the Hallock-McMillan Building at Southwest Naito Parkway and Oak Street, Russell had cast-iron pieces forged – a painstaking six-month process. The building, designed by Absalom Hallock, among the first architects in Portland, was one of the first forays into cast-iron architecture in the city. Russell said he purchased it without understanding its significance in Portland architectural history.

Despite the hope surrounding new uses for cast iron, the state could do a better job incentivizing adaptive reuse of building materials, said Peggy Moretti of Restore Oregon.

Among the lessons of the cast-iron revival in Portland is the importance of effective urban planning, she said.

“First of all, don’t demolish something unless you have a plan for what to replace it with,” she said. “There were a lot of buildings that were torn down and just became empty lots. That was just awful. It just sucked the life right out of the district. Some of the ideas that we had about livable communities just didn’t exist back then. You know, we wouldn’t do that today.”

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Five years after purchasing Portland’s oldest commercial building, John Russell is finally starting the process to renovate it.

The Hallock & McMillan Building, at 237 S.W. Naito Parkway, was constructed in 1857 – two years before Oregon became a state. It eventually was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, shortly after World War II, the building’s owners removed the historic cast iron facade. And in recent years, the building has lacked commercial use.

But Russell, founder of Russell Development Co., decided six months ago that the time was right to seek city approval for a revitalization project. That was when a prospective tenant declared its love for the Hallock & McMillan Building, offering to pay $50 per square foot to lease it. The problem was that Russell couldn’t refresh the 4,525-square-foot building within the prospective tenant’s time frame.

“It was a fabulous tenant – exactly what the building should have,” Russell said. “They were really excited about the value and the visibility of what that building would offer them. But they needed it in a certain time and because of all the review processes, we couldn’t deliver it. I said, ‘We need to get the ability to deliver that building for a tenant.’ ”

Russell believes he is six weeks away from getting land use approval and that he will be able to apply for a building permit soon after. He said that, in theory, the building could be available by July 1, 2016.

Right now, the Hallock & McMillan Building is occupied by Zena Zezza, a contemporary art enterprise. Russell and Sandra Percival, Zena Zezza’s director and curator, began talking about the space being used for a contemporary art project in spring 2014. By fall 2014, Russell had donated the space to Zena Zezza and the first exhibition had taken place.

“It’s been a phenomenal space to use as far as exhibitions and art,” Percival said. “John has been incredibly generous. And it’s always a great opportunity to give a building a life rather than having it sit dormant, where now it has another memory in it and another history as a contemporary art space.”

Russell plans to restore the Hallock & McMillan Building’s exterior “to precisely what it looked like,” before the historic cast iron facade was removed. The interior will retain original brick and wood floors.

One of the biggest challenges will be a seismic update.

“It’s a little bit complicated, but we have a dedicated owner who really wants to preserve the building and the historic nature,” said Robert J. Grummel, principal at Grummel Engineering LLC. “He’s putting in a lot more money than can be justified by rents to restore an old building. It’s just wonderful.”

The project is expected to add value to four adjoining buildings owned by Russell. He also believes that the Hallock & McMillan Building will provide a tenant the kind of space now popular in Portland.

“It’s the type of building that’s in the highest demand right now for high-tech tenants, startup tenants,” he said. “It’s got high ceilings, exposed brick walls. That’s what people want if they can find it.”

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In November 2011, developer John Russell took on an ambitious project.

For the first time in modern history, a foundry was used to recreate large sections of a cast-iron facade. It once adorned the Hallock & McMillan Building at 237 S.W. Naito Parkway. Russell wants to restore the structure – regarded as the oldest commercial building in Portland – as a creative office space, but can’t until the neighborhood comes to life.

“That little building is surrounded by parking lots, and until those get developed I just don’t think it’s feasible,” said Russell, founder of Russell Development Co. “It’s so expensive to do the restoration the way that I would insist on doing it that you need pretty significant rents, and with those parking lots on Naito, I don’t think I can achieve it.”

Constructed in 1857, the building was designed by architect Absolom Hallock to serve as his office. The name McMillan comes from the contractor that partnered with him on the project.

Brian Emerick, a principal at Emerick Architects and the designer in charge of Russell’s renovation, said Hallock was the first architect in Portland and the building – listed on the National Register of Historic Places – was one of the first of its kind. While most structures of the day were built with wood, Hallock used masonry with bifold metal shutters to create a protective shell against fire – a significant threat in the 1800s.

The cast-iron facade came from California.

“If you think about Portland in the ‘stump town’ days, there was not a lot of machinery and technology out here to make complicated things like cast iron,” Emerick said. “So at first we bought cast iron out of San Francisco. The shipping industry was taking off and so was the economy, and we wanted to have established, old-world buildings and culture.”

Russell owns four other buildings on the block, and had his eye on the Hallock & McMillan Building for 30 years before he bought it in 2010. Because of the surrounding parking lots, the building sits on something of an island of inactivity – despite being centered in a national historic district.

He said an ad hoc group of building professionals, including SERA Architects founder Bing Sheldon, are trying to change that. Russell said development could be spurred by replacing the grandfathered parking spaces with a parking structure featuring ground-floor commercial space.

Russell said the city of Portland is preparing to begin a study of those redevelopment options. Russell said interested tenants are standing by.

“It needs a jump start in activity,” he said. “And then the fact that the building fronts on Naito is a huge asset because it’s waterfront property basically.”

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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In November, a small cross section of Portland’s building industry gathered in a dark, smoky foundry to witness a rare execution of modern cast-iron craftsmanship.

Workers at the Silverton Foundry recreated pieces of the cast-iron facade of Portland’s oldest building. According to several of the experts working on the restoration of the Hallock and McMillan Building, it was the first time in modern history that the process was used to cast large sections of a building’s facade entirely in iron. Though many preservationists consider the project an exciting step in the right direction, the restoration is stalled until the neighborhood is developed more fully.

At the foundry, cranes swooped overhead, bringing molten iron from a tall, cylindrical furnace to custom molds that were created based on historic photographs of the 155-year-old Hallock and McMillan Building. The firms carrying out the project – , and – all sent representatives to the Silverton Foundry to witness the unique recreation of the historic facade.

“It seemed ancient as all get-out,” said architect and cast-iron expert Bill Hawkins, who was a consultant for the project. “(The building) will once again look as it did when its architects designed and built it.”

After housing an electronics business for many years, the Hallock and McMillan Building was purchased in 2010 by John Russell, founder of He then assembled a group of experts to restore the building’s cast-iron facade with full-iron replicas.

“It’s a long process and you can’t hurry it,” Russell said. “You have to plan for six months of preparation work, but it’s absolutely worth it.”

Several experts needed nearly a year to design and prepare the molds. The Silverton Foundry then fashioned a series of cast-iron ornamental pieces and seven-foot columns to replace the originals, which were removed in the 1940s and then lost.

The casting process employed basically the same techniques that would have been used when the building was constructed in 1857, according to David Field, who owns the foundry with his brother George.

“It’s a craft that is pretty rare, and the knowledge of the foundry men is really, really critical,” said Dave Talbott, president of Architectural Castings Inc., a Portland firm that helped develop drawings and molds for the foundry. “It would be tough to do without the aggregate knowledge of these guys.”

Russell, who owns multiple cast-iron buildings in Portland’s Skidmore/Old Town Historic District, said he will not install the recently cast pieces on the Hallock and McMillan Building until the area is improved.

“The neighborhood is just not ready for it; there are too many empty parking lots,” he said.

However, this recent effort to restore the Hallock and McMillan Building, which is located at the corner of Southwest Naito Parkway and Oak Street, may influence future redevelopment of the area.

“We need to rehabilitate the resources we have left and infill the missing pieces (of the district) that right now are surface parking lots,” said Peggy Moretti, executive director of the . The HPLO recently listed the Skidmore/Old Town district on its 2012 list of Oregon’s most endangered places.

The Hallock and McMillan Building originally had the kind of showy, cast-iron frontage that defined Portland in its early days. But many of the building’s cast-iron neighbors have been torn down, and an unclear vision for the district has stalled redevelopment.

“The whole district is in a gridlock,” Moretti said. “Tackling that poor, pathetic-looking building represents what the district used to be and can be again.”

A new Skidmore/Old Town task force is gearing up to tackle some of the district’s ongoing development issues. But Hawkins and other preservationists have already made it clear that they hope that the city’s stockpile of salvaged cast iron will be used to rebuild the Skidmore/Old Town area. The same process used for the Hallock and McMillan project could be used to recast the missing pieces.

“I hope (the project) will trigger a little renaissance for our historic district,” Hawkins said. “If the area is going to be reborn, it should be done in iron.”

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After languishing as an electronics store for decades, the Hallock & McMillan building is being restored to reflect its original appearance, including cast-iron arches on the entrance facing Naito Parkway. So far, the building has been stripped down to its shell, revealing some of the original brick and cast-iron and leaving the space looking very raw during last week’s well-attended hard hat tour.

Developer John Russell joked about how it was actually quite expensive to get the building to its current state. Instead of wondering  “Is that what you get with your money?” the preservation-minded attendees were pained by the extent of the historic building’s previous mistreatment – they audibly moaned when Russell described the acoustical structures that had to be torn down from the ceiling.

Russell spoke about his decades-long interest in the Hallock & McMillan Building and happily noted that his purchase of it completes a row of five Russell developments on that block.

Cathy Galbraith, executive director of introduced other members of the project team, including architect Brian Emerick and Brent Parry of Bremik Construction, both of whom gave brief comments and noted their deeply rooted, ancestral legacies in Oregon and the significance of this restoration.

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Sure, Portland doesn’t have a tour like “” in New York City, where businessmen and other eccentric New Yorkers just happen to break into dance routines right when the tour bus passes.

We have to look a little harder for tours that capture what makes Portland a special city. Even if you’re a native Portlander, you have a unique opportunity to learn about this city through a tour of its oldest commercial building next week.

In 1857, two years before Oregon graduated from territory to official statehood, Absalom Hallock and William McMillan built a cast-iron building on what is now prime property on the corner of Southwest Naito Parkway and Oak Street.

John Russell of Russell Development Company Inc. bought the building last October and now owns a row of five buildings on the block. The tour group will get to walk through all of these historic buildings, including the penthouse of the Dielschneider Building, which was once Russell’s apartment. Apparently, the advertising agency that uses the space now has not removed the from Russell’s bachelor days.

The Hallock & McMillan building, which served as an audio visual rental location for Corvallis Productions until about a decade ago, has been stripped down to a shell, which Russell said has been an expensive process.

“You have to take the asbestos and take all of the interior partitions out, but we have been able to expose openings that have been bricked up,” he said. “It’s almost like archaeology to be honest. It’s surprising how well preserved the bricks are on the inside.”

The “” will be next Thursday, July 14 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. For members of the Architectural Heritage Center, the cost is $15; for the general public, it’s $20.

Maybe I’ve been hoping too hard, but you don’t actually have to wear a hard hat.

-Lindsey O’Brien

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One of Portland’s most historically significant buildings has sold for $700,000.

The Hallock & McMillan Building, at 237 S.W. Naito Parkway, was purchased by John Russell of Russell Development Co. Ed Handris of the Handris Realty Co. represented the seller, Peter Corvallis.

Russell bought the building “after 30 years of trying,” he said. “I took (Corvallis) to dinner every year trying to get him to sell it.”

Corvallis used the space for his event company, Peter Corvallis Productions. But Russell owns other historic buildings nearby and wanted to add it to his portfolio.

“I wanted to fix it up, to restore it to the same standard as when it was it was built,” Russell said.

Corvallis did not return calls for comment by press time, but Russell said Corvallis decided to sell the building after he found another building with which he could exchange.

The Hallock & McMillan Building is Portland’s oldest surviving commercial structure. The building was constructed in 1857, according to the Architectural Heritage Center. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The building, at two stories and 4,525 square feet, is modest in scale, but it was revolutionary when it was built.

It’s an example of cast-iron architecture, a style popular during the Industrial Revolution, before the development of steel. Cast iron is an alloy of iron and enough carbon to make it brittle. It cannot be either wrought or bent into shape and is instead cast into form.

The material became popular because it could be molded into designs that would be more difficult to carve out of stone. Cast-iron columns also allowed for taller buildings without thick stone walls. The material also was relatively cheap and abundant.

Surpassed only by the SoHo and Tribeca areas of New York, Portland’s Skidmore/Old Town National Historic Landmark District is home to one of the largest collections of surviving cast-iron buildings, according to the Architectural Heritage Center.

Russell owns cast-iron buildings on each side of the Hallock & McMillan Building – the Fechheimer Building, built in the 1880s, and the Dielschneider Building, built in 1859. He plans to restore the Hallock & McMillan Building and then connect all three.

“If you were to look at (the Hallock & McMillan Building) now, you wouldn’t think it was the oldest,” he said. The building’s brick was covered with stucco in the 1950s, and its cast-iron columns have been removed. But the cast-iron window frames are still intact.

Russell plans to convert the Hallock & McMillan Building into office space, like his other buildings nearby.

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