Fox Tower Retail Full After Four Years

PORTLAND-Nearly four years after it opened, the last and most awkward retail space in this city’s newest Downtown high rise has been leased. The 8,300-sf mezzanine space on the backside of Tom Moyer’s Fox Tower office building has been leased by local restaurateur Steve McLain, who this fall will open his third area restaurant in the space. It is accessed via a small, street-level lobby adjacent to a movie theater also located in the building.

While it was the last retail space to be leased in the 26-story office tower, it is by all accounts a location with good potential for success. In addition to being at the foot of a fully leased, 700,000-sf office building, the restaurant will be adjacent a 10-screen Regal Cinema, a Nordstrom department store and a surface parking lot that eventually will be put underground, expanded and topped with a park. As well, light rail and the city’s de facto gathering place, Pioneer Square are just one block away, and much of the city’s Downtown hotel, retail, and office buildings are within a five-minute walk.

McLain is president of Celebrity Concepts LLC, the restaurant company that owns Oba! in the Pearl District and Hall Street Grill in Beaverton. To help attract people to the new Downtown restaurant–the name, concept and design of which are still under development, or at least not yet being revealed–McLain tells GlobeSt.com that he will focus on signage and transform the rather normal looking street-level access into a “dramatic entrance” that will include both a stairwell and an elevator that top out at the restaurant.