Is Sandy Boulevard the next street to attract developers’ interest?

A new proposal on the Northeast Portland street could represent a tipping point for the commercial corridor, as large out-of-state firms follow the footsteps of smaller projects from local developers.

Security Properties of Seattle is eyeing a PepsiCo bottling facility at Northeast 27th Avenue and Sandy for redevelopment. The company has requested an early assistance meeting with the Portland Bureau of Development Services to discuss zoning rules at the site, 2505 N.E. Pacific St., according to a public notice.

The project is in the very early stages, but the public notice gives a hint at what the Seattle developer is considering: “Demolition and redevelopment of Pepsi distribution facilities with four to five mixed-use buildings. Potential uses include parking, retail, housing, office and senior housing.”

The 4.7-acre property is a superblock encompassing four city blocks. Since the early 1960s, it has been the site of a massive PepsiCo bottling and distribution facility.

A Security Properties spokesman, Ed McGovern, referred questions to PepsiCo. Jen Ryan, a PepsiCo spokeswoman, said “there’s no deal at this point” for the property. The Multnomah County Assessor’s Office had recorded no recent sales of the property, given a $13 million market value by the county’s assessor.

If it goes forward, Security’s development would follow in the footsteps of smaller projects from the likes of Kevin Cavenaugh, whose Guerrilla Development has developed several new construction and renovation projects along Sandy Boulevard.

Cavenaugh said he was not surprised a major developer is considering investing on Sandy.

“I kind of expect it,” he said. “It’s not just me, but any architect or developer that pioneers a street is going to do a lot of heavy blocking for folks that follow. I can’t get upset with what state developers are from. I only look at what they’re going to do to criticize.”

The PepsiCo facility was built in 1962 based on a design by Scott & Payne. The vaulted design was included in the city’s 1984 Historic Resource Inventory as a significant example of “Fifties modern” architecture.

Security Properties is not new to Portland. The Sandy Boulevard development would follow on the firm’s involvement in the Oregonian Press Blocks project. Security is the developer of a planned 250-foot tall tower in Goose Hollow that would have approximately 340 apartments and ground-floor retail space. The City Council on Thursday rejected an appeal filed by the Goose Hollow Foothills League over the height and appearance of the tower.

Historically, Sandy Boulevard has been a commercial corridor where Portlanders go to buy cars and get them repaired. The street extends from inner southeast Portland up to parallel the Columbia River before ending in the far reaches of northeast Portland near Troutdale.

Cavenaugh said he was excited to hear senior housing is in consideration for part of the product mix at the PepsiCo site.

“There’s a whole heck of a lot of studios and one-bedrooms going in the close-in Eastside,” Cavenaugh said. “The neighborhood’s feeling homogenous.”

Sandy’s width poses issues for any developer, Cavenaugh said.

“There are some big, wide boulevards in Portland that are just made to move cars through and are never going to be pedestrian-friendly,” Cavenaugh said. That includes Foster Road along with Sandy, he said.

The busy street poses a design challenge. At New New Crusher Court, Cavenaugh’s 17,900-square-foot office development at 2450 N.E. Sandy Blvd., Cavenaugh addressed the busy street by turning the building inward. The offices face a central courtyard.

“That’s a response to Sandy,” Cavenaugh said.

If Security Properties chose, the developer could replicate something similar on a much larger scale at the PepsiCo facility, with buildings of different uses facing a center. It’s not clear if Security has hired an architect for the Sandy Boulevard proposal. For the Press Blocks project, Security Properties used Mithun, also of Seattle.

Cavenaugh said the choice of architect “matters a lot” for large projects like that proposed at the PepsiCo superblock.

“The projects that I’m most disappointed on in town are hulking monoliths,” he said. “Usually when you talk about superblocks and out-of-state money, you don’t get granular answers to design problems. So that’s my fear, but I’m still hopeful.”

As Security Properties considers developing the PepsiCo site, other developments are moving ahead. Fairfield Development of San Diego was issued a commercial building permit Aug. 1 for a six-story building with 206 apartments over ground-floor retail. Parking is provided in an underground garage. The permit values the project at $22.17 million. Construction has begun on the project at 2865 N.E. Sandy Blvd.

The San Diego developer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Cavenaugh, who typically raises relatively small sums from local investors, was attracted to Sandy Boulevard in part because it was affordable.  “I tried to buy something on Mississippi for a long time,” he said. “I was too late. I can’t afford Alberta or Division.”

The PepsiCo superblock neighbors Cavenaugh’s development The Zipper, completed in 2015 at 2713 N.E. Sandy Blvd. The 8,000-square-foot building hosts Wares restaurant, Seven Virtues Coffee and other eateries.

Cavenaugh said he put an offer on the PepsiCo property years ago, but now admits the project would have been out of his league.

Another Guerrilla Development project on Sandy aims to rent affordable apartments without government subsidies. The project at 2510 N.E. Sandy Boulevard is on the site of a car repair shop. It would have 88 apartments, with 40 percent of those provided at below market rates. The project’s design has been approved, and Cavenaugh had planned to go in for permits last week. He’s still seeking investors and a builder.

“Pricing is through the roof,” Cavenaugh said.

Auto dealers aren’t going to forget about Sandy, either, but the used Cadillac lots of yesteryear are yielding to modern tastes. A three-story Lexus dealership, with another underground level, has been proposed for 3075 N.E. Sandy Blvd. The Lexus dealership is being designed by Mackenzie.

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Oh, the thinks Kevin Cavenaugh can think.

If you see what looks like a page out of a Dr. Seuss book going up on a building east of the Burnside Bridge, that’s just the painting of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, the latest and largest building from Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development.

Crews began painting the under-construction mixed-use office building Tuesday. The colorful, swirling design came about from a design competition won by Los Angeles artist James Jean.

A team of painters from Dan Cohen Creative Labs is painting the building with Keim silicate mineral paint, Cavenaugh said. The paint is designed to chemically bond to the synthetic stucco exterior surface and carries a lifetime color saturation warranty. It also costs up to $900 per gallon, depending on the color.

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is likely to become one of Portland’s most colorful and recognizable buildings, standing in contrast to its prominent and darkly clad neighbor, Yard. Cavenaugh has likened the Dumbbell’s appearance to two gift-wrapped boxes.

The 54,932-square-foot building at 11 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. consists of five floors of offices over ground-floor retail, including a forthcoming bar and a barbershop.

Painting the building will take an estimated four to five months, depending on weather, said Dan Cohen, owner of Dan Cohen Creative Labs. Painting is under way on the west-facing wall. On June 20, a second crew will begin working simultaneously. The second crew is holding off for now because of the Rose Festival parade route, Cohen said. The site also remains busy with construction activity.

“It’s still a live construction site, so we’re working around everyone else as well,” he said.

During design review, commissioners expressed concern about the mural’s durability. The building passed design review on its fourth hearing.

Cohen said the mural should not deteriorate with time. The exterior surface of the building is Dryvit synthetic stucco that will bond with the paint.

“It not only mechanically adheres to the surface, as most paints do, but it also chemically adheres,” Cohen said. “It basically bonds to the wall and becomes part of the wall. Because of that, it will never peel.”

The building gained notice from the start given its daring appearance and an unusual crowd-funding campaign that raised $1.5 million of the building’s approximately $18 million cost. It was featured in The New York Times, among other media outlets.

Cavenaugh recently unveiled another idiosyncratic idea: Tree Farm, an office building proposed for a parcel next to the Morrison Bridge which would have approximately 64 trees growing out of all four sides of the building.

The Lorax, who speaks for the trees, could not be reached for comment.

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The first job for a renovation of the space at 2340 N.E. Sandy Blvd. was to undo all the work done before.

The future home of Providore Fine Foods was once the future home of the Portland P Palace, an imaginative bar-recreation center that would have featured ping-pong, putt-putt, pinball, PBR — and other P-words. Voodoo Doughnut‘s Tres Shannon and his team invested more than $150,000 in the 96-year-old De Soto Building and were days from opening doors before the city stepped in mandating a significant seismic upgrade.

P Palace investors were sued by the building’s owners, Art and Mary Laws, and evicted because of thousands of dollars owed in back rent. But the P Palace team managed to complete all groundwork – plumbing, heating, electrical, a drop-down ceiling and bar below, a nine-hole mini golf course and many fashionable amenities.

“They did a lot; we had to undo a lot,” said Providore’s builder, Brian Bachelor of Bachelor General Contractor.

The dreary details of the P Palace project have often overshadowed the incoming tenant. Providore Fine Foods, designed by developer Kevin Cavenaugh, will be a collaborative “destination food marketplace.”

Despite red-tape issues of its own, the Providore team is five weeks from completion. The business will host vendors selling side by side. A number of notable chefs and vendors are involved – Pastaworks, Arrosto, Little T American Baker, Flying Fish, The Meat Monger and Emerald Flowers. A local produce vendor has yet to be announced.

The building will feature a Pastaworks production kitchen, on-site parking and space for events. The large garage doors that once opened to an auto body shop will open for diners in tolerable weather.

The anchor tenant is relocating from its longtime home: Pastaworks was founded 32 years ago in the “food desert” of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. Pastaworks has always been a European-style market, co-owner Kaie Wellman said.

“We aren’t restaurant people; we are grocers,” she said.

Cavenaugh has developed a motley portfolio of “adaptive reuse” projects and new construction. His Guerrilla Development is responsible for Box + One, the Zipper and the Ocean – all designs that celebrate and encourage collaboration between tenants. It’s a common approach elsewhere, he said, citing Melrose Market in Seattle and the San Francisco Ferry Building as examples. Providore will be slightly different from Portland’s City Market NW model, because Pastaworks will anchor the lease, Cavenaugh said.

“To you or I, this will look like one market,” he said. “But really it’s a bunch of different micro-businesses. Portland hasn’t done this yet, as far as I know.”

The De Soto Building was built in 1919. It has housed many businesses – auto shops, in particular – near the heavily-used Sandy Boulevard.

One issue for the P Palace team was that desired occupancy triggered a seismic retrofit. But with the code in mind, Cavenaugh said he was able to stay within limits and not run afoul of city code. For instance, Providore’s 6,000-square-foot production kitchen has a much lower occupancy level than the P Palace’s proposed game room, he said.

“No offense to the P Palace guys, but they weren’t exactly masters of the code,” he said. “We knew just how far we could push it.”

But permitting was also an issue for Providore; it took about seven months. A historic De Soto sign located out front – around from a time when De Soto cars were sold there – juts over a sidewalk. Purchasing city right-of-way was the only option, and it wasn’t easy, Cavenaugh said.

Though much work remains, Cavenaugh is confident they will hit the Jan. 29 scheduled completion date. Bachelor’s workers are “scrambling.” They’ve ripped out layer after layer of wall and ceiling, exposing “enormous” timber beams that factor prominently in the new design. The framing will wrap up in about a week. Drywall should start going up in two weeks. Vendors are waiting on the floors so they can move in coolers and begin setting up.

Right now, crews are “sandblasting the bejesus” out of the inside, Cavenaugh said.

“I work across the street, and every day there are workers crawling over each other, sprinting to get to the finish line.”

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The exterior of the “Fair-Haired Dumbbell” project proposed at the Burnside Bridgehead just won’t work if it’s left a solid color, said planner Jeff Mitchem of the city of Portland Bureau of Development Services.

The artist-designed painted exterior mural of birds, flowers and butterflies proposed for the 67,500-square-foot development at 11 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. raised concerns at a Portland Design Commission meeting last month, and commissioners requested to see drawings of the building without the artwork.

That rendering was presented at an Aug. 6 second design review for the project. The general sense among the commission members, according to Mitchen, was that without the exterior pattern, the project doesn’t work.

“This project is unlike any other in the history of the city,” Mitchem said. “It touches on the boundary between art and architecture. Left blank, it will look like blank finishes, but would not be able to stand alone as a significant contribution to the architecture of the city.”

Mitchem said the Design Commission has asked the Regional Arts and Culture Council to assess the artwork design that covers the building and provide feedback, Mitchem said.

“It will be very interesting as to what extent RACC is willing and able to reach toward that design,” he said. “It’s unprecedented.”

The Design Commission during the Aug. 6 meeting did seem satisfied with several other changes it requested at a previous hearing for the project, Mitchem said. Those changes included moving elevators to a central lobby location and addressing details on the design of public spaces.

Overall, he said, the commission seemed satisfied with the design, but were concerned about the application process and durability of the exterior art, which latest plans have extending onto the roof as well.

The two-building project is proposed for a rounded lot bounded by Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and East Burnside and Northeast Couch streets. Plans call for a 2,000-square-foot central courtyard with a sculptural stormwater planter between the structures, ground-floor retail space. Suspended pedestrian bridges will connect floors of the buildings.

Troy Ainsworth, principal at FFA Architecture and Interiors Inc., the project architect for the Dumbbell, said the project has undergone significant revisions since the concept was initially created last year by Kevin Cavenaugh of Guerrilla Development.

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The team proposing to construct near the east end of the Burnside Bridge a mixed-use development featuring two six-story buildings with a facade inspired by wrapping paper has applied to the Portland Bureau of Development Services for another design review hearing.

Phillip Chubb, an associate with FFA Architecture and Interiors, on Dec. 3 submitted the request to address modifications made to the Fair-Haired Dumbbell since a previous hearing before the Portland Design Commission. Ross Caron, a spokesman with the BDS, said no date has been set for the next hearing.

The development, designed by Kevin Cavenaugh of Portland-based Guerrilla Development, would be on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and bordered by Burnside and Couch streets. Plans presented to the design commission in January called for a wood-frame building with ground-level retail and parking. The second through sixth floors were designed with heavy timber construction to give the new building the feel of an old warehouse.

Commissioners expressed several concerns with the proposal, including the inclusion of ground-level parking and how it could cause traffic congestion.

When Cavenaugh approached banks for a loan to complete the approximately $15 million speculative project earlier this year, lenders led him to believe he’d have an easier time getting funding if he included parking.

“It probably looks about the same as it did to the average passerby,” Cavenaugh said of the revised design. “But I think we addressed 100 percent of the commission’s concerns.”

Initial designs included 72 ground-level mechanized parking spaces, but commissioners worried about impacts of cars entering and exiting the parking area. Now that 40 percent of the space has been pre-leased, lenders seem less concerned about parking, Cavenaugh said.

“When you’re in architecture school, they teach you that form follows function,” he said. “Then you get to the real world and realize function follows parking, and it’s kind of a sock in the gut.”

Cavenaugh intends to present three modified design options to the commission – one with 36 parking spaces, one with 14 and one with none.

“The no-parking scheme has the best ground floor presence,” Cavenaugh said. “The submittal we’re offering has parking, but my hope is that the design review board and I can get at it and nibble away at the parking.”

The modified design moves the elevators inside the building so that they’re no longer visible from the street. Also, construction material for the wrapped facade now would allow the color and image to stay strong in the long term, Cavenaugh said. Initially, the plans called for color to be applied to metal sheeting in a process similar to painting a car. Cavenaugh said the new method, which he declined to expand upon, is a “better solution” that brings with it a 20-year warranty from the manufacturer.

“I feel great about it,” he said. “The building as it sits now is sexy as hell.”

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After Kevin Cavenaugh, managing member of Portland-based Guerrilla Development, purchased a century-old former horse barn in Southeast Portland, he decided to convert the industrial-style building with no windows and 24-foot-tall ceilings into four residential lofts.

The challenge included peeling away a portion of the roof to create a central courtyard that lets light inside.

“It’s fun because it’s an experiment,” said Cavenaugh, a designer. “It was more about: Can anybody live in here? Can I make this thing habitable?”

Now the building, called Dr. Jim’s Lofts, is where Cavenaugh and his family call home.

Dr. Jim’s Lofts is one of eight urban infill developments that will be featured Oct. 11 on a hosted by the American Institute of Architects’ Portland chapter.

“For the most part, they’re really creative uses of old lots,” said Dave Otte, president-elect of the AIA Portland board, said of the structures included on the “” tour.

A committee of AIA members selected the homes – all completed either this year or last year – as prime examples of custom urban infill projects designed in harmony with inner Portland neighborhoods. Several of the homes strive to bridge the gap between residential and commercial areas. Others balance out contemporary designs by taking cues from nearby structures.

Designs by Portland-based Works Partnership Architecture for the Bowstring Truss House and Overton 19, adjacent developments in Northwest Portland on the tour, fit their surroundings, Works Partnership principal Carrie Strickland said. The live-work lofts blur the line between industrial buildings across the street and townhomes to the west, she said.

“I think it works really well in that neighborhood because it’s sort of a transition neighborhood,” Strickland said. “You set up a project scale that helps blend that transition line.”

When Portland architect Rick Potestio was tasked with helping turn a Southeast Portland parking lot into a contemporary three-story apartment building, he took a close look at the neighborhood first. His design for the Gragg Apartments, including the home of University of Oregon John Yeon Center for Architectural Studies Director Randy Gragg, will be featured on the AIA Portland tour.

The concrete base of the apartment building uses materials that are common in the neighborhood and colors that are compatible with nearby structures.

“I designed the base of it to reflect the rest of the buildings on the block,” Potestio said. “That’s actually my philosophy is work with your context.”

Like the Bowstring Truss House and Overton 19 projects, the Gragg Apartments sits between industrial and residential areas. It’s one reason why Potestio said he decided to incorporate a large covered porch into the top-floor unit.

“The porch is a homage to the big covered porches on the residential side,” he said.

Another home on the tour, the Pavilion House in Northeast Portland, matches the setbacks, massing and scale of neighboring single-family homes, said Portland architect Ben Waechter, who designed the project. Yet it’s distinctly contemporary.

The design features an open central room on the first floor with a second-story “pavilion” supported by pillars around it.

“The house could be described as having a second-story body that’s supported by four legs kind of like a table,” Waechter said. “The idea was to place these legs strategically in places where they create privacy within the room that aside from these legs is all glass.”

Along with taking cues from surroundings, designs for Dr. Jim’s Lofts and the Bowstring Truss House take advantage of the context within the existing industrial buildings.

Preserving the open warehouse feel of the Bowstring Truss House was important, Strickland said.

“We didn’t want to interrupt that visual continuity across the space,” she said. “None of those walls go all the way to the ceiling, so you can always see over them.”

When Cavenaugh opened some of the roof of Dr. Jim’s Lofts, he left the truss system in place. This created a dynamic setting, he said.

“It’s take-your-breath-away space, and I have nothing to do with that,” he said. “The building, I just let it go.”

If you go …

What: American Institute of Architects Portland Homes Tour: Crafted + Creative Urban Infill

When: Oct. 11 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Where: Eight contemporary Portland homes. Participants in the self-guided tour will receive a printed booklet with maps and descriptions of each home.

Cost: Tickets are $40

More information: aiaportland.org/aia-portland-homes-tour-2014

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Portland-based Realtor Debbie Thomas and Boly:Welch co-owner Patricia Welch have purchased the Jower’s Building on North Lombard Street in St. Johns. They’re planning to convert it into office, retail and possibly residential space.

The $528,000 transaction closed June 24, said Todd Peres, a broker representing Lombard 8803 LLC (Thomas and Welch).

“Debbie is sort of a Portland powerhouse and has been for over 20 years,” he said. “The fact that they’re looking at St. Johns and the potential for things to happen … gives it a sort of cachet.”

The partners are working with Kevin Cavenaugh, who owns an adjacent property and plans to build a mixed-use development, to bring the right mix of uses to the site, Peres said.

One option for the two-story, 15,000-square-foot building, he said, would be a bakery – identified through market testing as a desire of residents. Other options could include a mix of retail and office space with four apartment units upstairs.

The building for many years was owned by the Jower family. Its clothing retail business operated there for about seven decades, Peres said, and served mostly dock workers in the historically blue collar neighborhood.

Some seismic work and a roof replacement have taken place, but significant plumbing and HVAC work needs to be done, he said.

“The previous owners really gutted the place,” he said. “It’s actually a really cool, raw shell now with exposed walls, brick archways and exposed structure inside.”

Construction would take about six months, Peres said.

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Construction work is under way at a pair of buildings formerly occupied by Timberline Dodge, a former automotive garage in Northeast Portland that is being converted into a series of “micro-restaurants” that will each occupy spaces between 400 and 600 square feet. The site will be called “the Ocean” and is imagined by developer Kevin Cavenaugh to be a food cart incubator. The Ocean will house a bakery, retail space and a residential loft that will house Cavenaugh and his family. Work on the project is expected to be completed by the end of July. More photos after the jump.

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“Guerilla Developer” Kevin Cavenaugh says he’s on his way back out of financial trouble. At the end of last year, Cavenaugh announced a new project that will bring an up-scale outdoor food court to a superblock in the middle of Northeast Portland.

For a little background: Cavenaugh is an innovative developer who has been lauded by many, including the 91��Ƶ, for his forward-looking green building projects. The headline project of his career so far has been the LEED platinum Burnside Rocket.

When the economic downturn hit, however, it hit Cavenaugh hard. He then started making headlines with … and the troubles he was having with his bank.

At the end of last year, after a long struggle, Cavenaugh finally sold the Rocket – a move that seems to have brought his head above water enough to work on new projects. But who did he sell it to?

Enter Brad Cornell. who writes about and practices something called a “social entrepreneurship” model. Cornell, his son Drew, and business partner Ed Bergstrom run San Marino Business Partners LLC, which bought the Burnside Rocket last December for around $2.8 million, according to Cavenaugh.

I asked Drew Cornell a few questions about the transaction.

Tell me a little bit about San Marino Business Partners, the company you run with your father and Ed Bergstrom. What do you do?

San Marino Business Partners is a company we started in 2010 to provide general business consulting services and to seek out potential investment opportunities, particularly in the area of commercial real estate.

My primary job at [San Marino Business Partners LLC] is to find investments, such as the Rocket, that are aligned with the “social entrepreneurship” model presented by my dad and to help manage the properties that we own.  My dad is a finance professor at California Institute of Technology here in Pasadena as well as being one of the leading experts on complex financial transactions.

Why did you decide to buy the Rocket?

SMBP feels strongly that it is time to start thinking about important environmental and social issues.  Conservation and urban planning will only become more critical as resources become scarcer and the population continues to grow.

What drew us to the Burnside Rocket was that it addressed such social and environmental issues in an intelligent manner.  The Rocket is one of only about 100 buildings in the nation to receive a LEED certification.  Further, it was built in a section of Portland that is currently seeing a rebirth.  Our mutually beneficial meetings and discussions with Kevin Cavenaugh, the former owner and respected designer of the Rocket, further shed light of Kevin’s forward thinking ideas that have been incorporated into the building.

Do the both of you own other buildings? Have you made similar investments elsewhere?

Although we own two other commercial buildings in southern California, SMBP views the Rocket as our first state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly, socially responsible building.  We found the Rocket in a regular real estate listing and quickly determined that it was one of only handful of buildings that satisfied the exacting criteria we were looking for.

Do you have plans to change anything about the Rocket or how it is managed?

We have no plans to change the Rocket; our only plan is to keep it well maintained and looking great for years to come, as it is a great example of what sustainable development should be.

I should also note that Kevin’s continuing role as the property manager of the Rocket was a key factor in our decision to purchase the building.  Kevin not only knows all of the tenants very well, but he is a tenant himself.

Our hope is to continue to work with Kevin on similar projects in the future.  Kevin currently has a lot of projects in the pipeline like the Rocket that fit with SMBP’s vision for responsible development.  Going forward, the goal of SMBP’s partnership with Kevin is find other investors like my dad who share that vision.

The post Who bought the Burnside Rocket? We’ll tell you! appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The economic collapse hit Kevin Cavenaugh hard. The lauded developer of the Burnside Rocket – a mixed-use building rated Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum – had to put it and his home up for sale.

But Cavenaugh says he’s ready to move forward. A deal is in the works for the Burnside Rocket to sell for between $2 million and $3 million by the end of this week. And he says he is returning to his “guerilla development roots” with a new project: a food-cart-inspired renovation of a former auto sales business in Northeast Portland.

Cavenaugh is calling his latest redevelopment “the Ocean.”

“I tell people: On one shore is the restaurant, and on another is a food cart; this is in the middle. It’s the Ocean,” he said.

The idea was to create an incubator for food carts that want to transition into larger restaurant businesses, Cavenaugh said. Each “micro-restaurant” will be approximately 400 to 600 square feet and include separate indoor and outdoor seating.

Cavenaugh has worked on the project for a while, but he was forced to sell a previous site, even as he was applying for permits, because, he said, his bank “put a gun to my head.”

Now, the Ocean will occupy a set of buildings Cavenaugh bought from Timberline Dodge, on a large, triangular block bounded by Northeast Sandy Boulevard, Glisan Street and 24th Avenue.

Cavenaugh calls the area “the corner time forgot.” However, the block is gradually redeveloping to accommodate Voodoo Doughnut’s “Portland P Palace,” a movie studio, used car rack dealer ReRack and Oregon Taoist Tai Chi. The Ocean will add four micro-restaurants, a bakery, a residential loft and another tenant. The buildings once were mechanic shops and offices.

Cavenaugh is financing the project – approximately $1.3 million – with “other people’s money,” he said.

“I personally am rubbing two pennies together, but thankfully there are three other investors that really like and believe in the project,” Cavenaugh said. “My sweat and energy and vision, and their money, is getting it done. It’s about building the brand back up.”

Rather than food cart owners with expansion aspirations, most tenants of the Ocean will be established local restaurateurs seeking to test new concepts on a small scale. Rob Hemmerling of Slow Bar will sell only his signature Slow Burgers in one space. Other tenants not yet announced will bring more glamour to the site when it opens, Cavenaugh said.

Permit applications for the Ocean are in, design review is done, and project architect Brett Schulz says construction will last around four months once it begins.

In addition to the micro-restaurants, the Ocean will provide a permanent home for bakery business Pie Spot, which sells pies from a cart at Southeast 33rd Avenue and Division Street and a number of stores in Portland.

Pie Spot co-owner Ashley Ragsdale, who runs the business with partner Jessica Woods, said that the permanent space is an opportunity for growth.

“Right now we rent a commissary kitchen. We don’t have a problem, but it’s not available every day of the week,” Ragsdale said. “We need something we can get into every day, because we want to start doing online sales and possibly get another cart.”

One remaining, interior spot in the Ocean “screams yoga space,” Cavenaugh said. He plans to continue seeking a tenant as other project partners are announced in the coming months.

The last piece of the Ocean is a 2,000-square-foot shell that will become a single, residential loft. The space will border a “hacienda-style” courtyard and eventually become home for Cavenaugh and his family.

Cavenaugh said that nowadays he sees himself as a phoenix rising from the ashes.

“I was never as smart as people reported and I’m not as dumb as people reported,” he said. “This is not a ‘woe is me’ story.”

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