Target has signed a lease for space currently serving as an AMF bowling alley on Powell Boulevard in Southeast Portland, the company announced Tuesday.

The small-format Target store is expected to open in July 2018 after a substantial renovation to the 58-year-old building on site. The 32,100-square-foot location will be Target’s second smaller store in the Pacific Northwest, after the downtown Galleria location at 939 S.W. Morrison St.

The Powell Boulevard store is intended to provide a quick shopping experience, with produce and other groceries, a CVS Pharmacy, apparel, toys, sporting goods and other items.

The site will have “upwards of 100” parking stalls, electric-car charging stations and spots for car-share vehicles, MAJ Development Corp. President Michael A. Jenkins stated in a news release.

Target has opened 35 small-format stores, and plans to open 100 more in dense urban and suburban locations, and near college campuses, the company said.

The property at 3031 S.E. Powell Blvd. is owned by MAJ Development Corp. of Vancouver, Washington. MAJ Development purchased the 1.18-acre property for $4.8 million in August 2016, according to city records.

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Michael Graves, the prolific postmodern architect who designed the famed and often despised Portland Building, died Thursday of natural causes at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.

His death was confirmed by his architecture and design firm, Michael Graves Architecture & Design.

“Since founding the firm in 1964, Michael transformed the role of architects and designers, and even the place of design in our everyday lives,” read a on the firm’s website. “For those of us who had the opportunity to work closely with Michael, we knew him as an extraordinary designer, teacher, mentor and friend.”

Graves’ design of the Portland Building, completed in 1982 to house city government offices, helped launch his architecture career. The controversial structure has been heralded as one defining the emergence of postmodern architecture and criticized as an architectural atrocity.

When he visited Portland last fall to give a lecture on the project and defend his design, Graves said he was baffled why Portland residents don’t share his love for the iconic city-owned building.

“I don’t know where the hostility comes from; that disturbs me,” he told the sold-out crowd at the Portland Art Museum. “I think you all would be happy to pick up any history of architecture in the 20th century and find your building. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with you?”

Shortly after its completion, the Portland Building was praised as a break from the modernist architecture typical of public buildings and appeared on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2012, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

But last year a city report concluded that $95 million worth of repairs are needed to fix structural problems and leaks. After considering several options, including building demolition, city officials are now planning a remodel.

In 1980, Graves won an architecture competition to design the building for the city of Portland. At the time, he was a little-known architecture professor at Princeton University, and it became his first major project.

Graves went on to leverage this success to win other design competitions. His work includes the Humana Building in Louisville, Ky., the Denver Public Library and lines of kitchen products and furniture for Target and J.C. Penney.

After an infection in 2003 rendered him unable to walk, Graves leaned on personal experience to design disabled veteran housing and products such as wheelchairs, collapsible canes and showerheads.

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‘s hush-hush plan to open a store in downtown Portland was finally unveiled last month, but one local construction company knew about it from the beginning.

Crews from are at work today in the Galleria Building, prepping the space for the future City Target. But the general contractor also rents approximately 12,000 square feet of the space that is set to house the popular big-box retailer, so it is literally building itself out of its own offices.

“I’ve been involved in situations where you have to ask a tenant to move, but not where you have to ask (it) to move out of (its) own space, then gut it and rebuild it for another tenant,” said Bill Barendrick, CEO of , which owns the Galleria Building.

So Lease Crutcher Lewis was faced with a rare combination – the excitement of working on a high-profile, downtown renovation project, and the stress of losing the space where it operates.

“We’re working our way out of our own offices,” said Bart Ricketts, president of the company’s Portland branch.

Before the Target deal became public, Ricketts was talking to other Lease Crutcher Lewis clients about options for new office space, ideally in the West End area of downtown, where the company has had offices since 1996.

Lease Crutcher Lewis needed little time to land new office space – and a new job – in the Culver Building at Southwest 12th Avenue and Alder Street. Greg Goodman, developer and president of , owns the property and was planning an approximately $7.5 million adaptive reuse project.

Prior to construction, which began in January, the Culver Building was a run-down, 1920s-era building that housed only a dry cleaning business and parking stalls. But a design by rejuvenates the two-story structure and adds a modern, third-story penthouse.

Lease Crutcher Lewis plans to move into the upper two floors in August. The dry cleaning business will relocate within the building, and Goodman is courting Naomi Pomeroy to bring her successful Northeast Portland restaurant, , into the renovated building.

“We’re not leaving a single stone unturned – we’ll have a whole new storefront, big glass sliding windows on the ground floor (and) a walk-around patio outside of the penthouse,” Goodman said. “I’m really excited what it’s doing for the West End; there’s just a ton of stuff happening there.”

While the renovation involves new structural columns and other intricate seismic work, the biggest challenge for Lease Crutcher Lewis was timing. The whole deal required coordinating several lease negotiations along with complex construction timelines, and the plans did not come together as smoothly as Ricketts had hoped.

Because the renovation of the Culver Building will not be far enough along when crews start to get in the way of their own colleagues in the Galleria Building in May, Lease Crutcher Lewis will have to operate out of temporary office space in Northwest Portland for three months.

“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Ricketts said. “We didn’t anticipate how long it takes to do a major lease agreement and get construction documents ready for a large company like Target – it took longer than any of us anticipated.”

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After being sworn to secrecy during lease negotiations, Fletcher Farr Ayotte announced it has been released today from confidentiality agreements and can publicly confirm that Target is the tenant for space that is currently under construction in downtown Portland.

Crews from Lease Crutcher Lewis last week began soft demolition inside the historic Galleria Building in Southwest Portland and will soon begin prepping the core and shell for Target, according to Amalia Mohr, project manager for the architecture team from Fletcher Farr Ayotte.

“It’s been a great experience learning what they require,” she said.

The building’s owner, the , and in May requested design advice from the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission as they moved forward with the development. Then on Oct. 10, the Historic Landmarks Commission unanimously approved alterations to the Galleria Building, which occupies the entire city block bounded by Southwest Morrison and Alder streets and Southwest Ninth and 10th avenues.

Once final building permits are issued, crews will begin work on new elevators and escalators for the building. A seismic upgrade also is planned.

Target is working with California-based MBH Architecture for its tenant improvement work; Skanska will be the contractor handling the build-out. The store is expected to open in March 2013.

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Could this be a sign that Target is really coming to downtown Portland? Why, yes, I think it is.

The 91��Ƶ wrote in October that Target was finalizing its lease for a downtown Portland store, and now it looks like it’s really happening you guys!  Construction fencing has been erected around the Galleria Building at Southwest Tenth Avenue and Alder Street, and a large, vertical sign is welded to the corner of the building, though that sign has been there for a while. In any case, the sign looks a lot like the one in renderings originally submitted to the city when the store was in its early planning stages.

To confirm this, I put a call in to the Bill Naito Co., the owner of the building, but CEO Bill Barendrick was on the phone and couldn’t take my call immediately. The receptionist, however, let out a knowing chuckle when I said I was calling about the Galleria Building. Take that for what it’s worth. Employees with the company have for a while been under a confidentiality agreement regarding the Target store.

Anyway, do you know what this means?! It means working downtown is about to get so. much. better. I’m already thinking of all the things I’m going to be able to buy on my lunch break. Local economy? Psht. They can’t build this store fast enough!

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It’s that time of year again – early November, in which Thanksgiving festivities get overshadowed by a flurry of early Christmas decorations and a flurry of economic prognostications.

Yes, nothing says “Christmas” like projections as to how retail is going to do. This year, things actually look fairly non-terrible, as consumers are expected to spend about 3 percent more than last year.

That’s all to the good, . Why? There’s a lot of them, they face competition from smaller retail outlets, and big box stores have descended upon their market share.  And they have a huge, somewhat-empty reminder of what happens to troubled malls: the Galleria.

Believe it or not, the now-struggling Galleria was once a fairly hopping place. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, downtown Portland was an empty graveyard of office buildings and parking lots. The general populace of the city had no reason to come to the urban core other than punching the clock on their jobs, and the interior of Portland was a gray, empty wasteland outside of normal office hours. The city swooped in with the (when people talk about Portland’s urban planning, this is what they’re usually talking about) and soon began transforming a desiccated wasteland into a space where people would actually want to go.

Chief among the goals was creating a retail core, and in 1976 an old department store that was previously known as was transformed into a monument of then-modern culture: a mall. The Galleria, as it was renamed, was considered a marvel of it’s time. The Oregonian actually called it “the most exciting development in downtown merchandising in several decades.” Yes, way back in the 1970s, the Galleria was exciting. It also soon reached full capacity, and downtown began to transform into the fairly active space that we now know today.

In 1990, though Pioneer Place opened and the once-mighty Galleria was eventually brought to its knees by competition. Downtown was fine, and continues to act as Portland’s retail hub, but one of the major engines that made Portland so Portland-y is now a semi-hollow almost-ruin. However, it’s a big part of the reason why there’s any downtown Portland at all. Life for the formerly revolutionary space certainly isn’t over – Target has been in talks to move in, which could be a shot in the arm for the old place. On a smaller scale, temporary popup shops have, well, popped up in the Galleria. Crafty Wonderland, Flurry, Boy’s Fort and the Portland Design Collective have all moved into the old mall, each selling the wares of different local designers. The temporary storefronts have been a way for the landlords to sell the space even when they can’t find a permanent tenant, and will likely remain for the duration of the holidays. (Side note – definitely check out Boy’s Fort. It’s like the best tree house ever got turned into a store.)

The jury is still out as to whether the Galleria will be able to regain its former glory, but the next time you’re strolling among the food carts and coffee shops, and suppliers of locally produced artisan food items, remember – your city was not too cool to get helped out by a mall.

Photo by via Flickr

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The Portland Development Commission board today agreed to delay redevelopment on the parking structure at Southwest 10^th Avenue and Yamhill Street to assure developers of the nearby Galleria Building that there will be parking available for an incoming Target store.

As the Daily Journal of Commerce reported earlier this week, Target is in the process of finalizing a lease in the historic Galleria Building. The PDC did not identify Target as the potential tenant of the building, but the resolution identified a “retail use of approximately 80,000 square feet.”

According to , the commission has reserved funds for a potential redevelopment project at the 10^th and Yamhill garage, which is owned by the city of Portland. The report stated that the retailer that plans to move into the building “requires assurance” that there will be no reduction of parking in the garage for the first two years it is open – a period slated to end in 2015.

At this morning’s PDC board of commissioners meeting, the board unanimously passed a resolution to authorize the agreement with Galleria Building owner Bill Naito Company. The agreement will require Target to begin construction on the store by May 15, 2012 and to occupy at least 80,000 square feet, and in return the PDC won’t reduce the amount of parking available in the 10^th and Yamhill garage until two years after the store opens.

PDC Board Chair J. Scott Andrews said the agreement makes sense for the PDC and won’t delay any projects to redevelop the 10^th and Yamhill property, which are already a few years off. He added that the retailer is expected to create jobs and foot traffic downtown.

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Target is finalizing its lease agreement to open a store in downtown Portland, according to sources close to the deal.

The Historic Landmarks Commission on Oct. 10 unanimously approved alterations to the Galleria Building, which occupies the entire city block bounded by Southwest Morrison and Alder streets and Southwest Ninth and 10th avenues. Because the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, approval for the exterior alterations was the last major hurdle related to city requirements.

The 101-year-old building, initially home to the Olds, Wortman & King department store, needs several significant modifications in order to accommodate Target. Even though the building has been altered many times over the years, the addition of loading bays for supply trucks was a tough sell to some preservationists. But the building’s owner, the , and architecture firm in May requested design advice from the Historic Landmarks Commission as they moved forward with the development.

Renderings and documents submitted to the city confirm Target’s involvement, although neither the owner nor the architect could identify the incoming tenant on the record.

“The city is getting the preservation and maintenance of an important building in the downtown core, and also getting use out of it,” said Carrie Richter, chairwoman of the Historic Landmarks Commission.

The entrance of a national big-box retailer into the historic building required some compromises from both sides, but people involved with the project seem satisfied with the approved plans.

“I’m pleased that a resolution was reached,” said Art DeMuro, who was the chairman of the Historic Landmarks Commission when the request for design advice was submitted, but whose term ended last month. “I know there was a lot of excitement about accommodating that particular user and it’s great that there was a resolution not only to accommodate them, but to actually improve the historic integrity of this very significant building.”

DeMuro, who reviewed all alterations made to the building over the years in response to the request for design advice, suggested historic refurbishments that would make the next remodel a “net gain” for the building. Adherence to the commission’s design advice was critical, according to project architect Phil Chubb.

“We took the feedback to heart,” he said, “and the Naito Company was willing to do the things that would help clean up some of the conditions at the Galleria that the landmarks commission was interested in doing.”

One of the most significant changes to the historic facade will be the addition of loading dock doors so that Target trucks can enter and exit the building from Southwest Alder Street. But the design team came up with an innovative solution.

“Those doors will be one-of-a-kind – totally custom,” Chubb said. “We’re spending quite a bit of money to make the loading dock doors as invisible as we possibly can – and that was really important to the landmarks commission and to us, but it’s not an easy thing to do.”

A state-of-the-art seismic upgrade also is planned.

“Never mind the exterior improvements to the look of the building; the bones being reinforced are critical – that’s a huge step to the building’s historic integrity,” said Tim Heron, city planner for the Bureau of Development Services. “It won’t fall down if we get a shake, which we all know we’ll get sooner or later.”

The Nines Hotel and Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall are the only two buildings in Portland to feature the braced-frame technology planned for the Galleria. The so-called viscous dampers were adopted from a device used on military cannons to absorb recoil shock. Unlike a more conventional bracing system, the dampers don’t need to be stacked throughout the building or installed along its perimeter.

“The Galleria is full of existing tenants, each with peculiar needs, and this allows the flexibility to place lateral frames at positions that work for everyone instead of being this invasive thing,” Chubb said.

The design also includes a custom replica of the historic entry canopy on 10th Avenue.

Costs related to the marquee, seismic upgrade and custom loading dock made some of the other suggested improvements untenable. Some minor changes made in the 1970s, when the building was turned into the Galleria Mall, will remain as is, according to Chubb.

Target will lease approximately 100,000 square feet of the Galleria Building, which presently houses Brooks Brothers and other tenants. The retail space will be split between 40,000 square feet on each of the second and third floors; a ground-floor lobby and the loading dock facility will account for the remaining 20,000 square feet.

The main entrance to the Galleria will remain on 10th Avenue, but Target will have its own entry off of Morrison Street, near 10th Avenue, leading to its ground-floor lobby.

“It’s really just a nice return of that building to a full retail sort of facility, and it just happens to be a building that takes up a whole city block and can provide that kind of floor space for downtown retail use,” Chubb said. “It’s a nice marriage of modern retailing and a downtown site like that.”

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