City Wants East Bank Fire Station to Become Riverfront Restaurant

PORTLAND-The Portland Development Commission this week is expected to sign off on an interagency agreement that would put a restaurant in an existing 5,500-sf fire station on the city’s new Eastbank Esplanade.

Currently used as office space by the city’s Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services Bureau, the No. 7 station is located adjacent the river on the north side of the Hawthorne Bridge. City officials envision adding a second floor to the building in order to have an upscale restaurant upstairs where people can gaze back across the river at Downtown and a café downstairs where people walking the Eastbank Esplanade can make a pit stop for a latte or a fruit smoothie or sit down at street level for soup and a sandwich.

“The synergy of having a restaurant with an incredible view of the city skyline adjacent a public park like the Esplanade is a potential home run,” says Lew Bowers, the Portland Development Commission’s senior development manager, tells GlobeSt.com. “It would serve as a public attractor, enhancing daytime activity and creating night activity that will help change people’s sense of what the east bank is.”