Industrial Home 
- Development cost: $7 million +
- Construction start date: mid-2012
- VIEW PHOTO GALLERY
Venerable’s new development project is the 26,000 sq ft Salvation Army Industrial Home located on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Ash Street. The project will offer approximately 10,000 square ft of ground floor retail/restaurant space to serve the Central Eastside neighborhood. Features will includes large expanses of storefront glass, multiple sidewalk entries, high ceilings, exposed heavy timber structural elements and an oversized skylight for a unique one-story 2,000 square ft addition on Ash Street. The second and third stories will offer 16,000 square ft of office space with huge, new operable windows, high ceilings, exposed structure and light well.
As a bonus, the views of Downtown Portland are outstanding. Finally, Industrial Home will offer parking on a contiguous 9,000 square ft lot accessible by both MLK and Grand.
This redevelopment will be executed by the same team that resurrected White Stag—Venerable Development, Fletcher Farr Ayotte Architects and Bremik Construction. Architectural planning has being and construction is expected to commence in mid-2012.
Brief Building History
The building appears to be one building from the exterior; however, the south half was constructed in 1893 and this structure was then expanded and remodeled in 1930 by architect Frederick Manson White, giving it the uniform appearance it has today.
While the 1893 building first had a hay-and-feed use, it was later owned and used by the Salvation Army as their Industrial Home in 1913. Industrial Homes were more common in major American cities during this time as the Salvation Army was growing and spreading their mission to help the poor. The purpose of the Home was to provide work and shelter for homeless, unemployed men. They would collect, sort and resell recyclable items such as rags and paper and collect, repair and sell second-hand merchandise such as clothes, shoes, furniture and household items.
As was typical for these complexes, Portland’s Industrial Home included a retail thrift store, sorting and repair rooms. The building also contained a dormitory, large washroom, kitchen, dining room and chapel for the workers.
In addition to its significance related to the Salvation Army’s work in Portland, it is notable that this building housed the longest running second-hand shop in the city from 1913 to 2010 and probably also housed Portland’s first organized recycling effort.