Return of the Busy Corner

 

 A small neighborhood grocery that served Southeast Portland’s Woodstock neighborhood for nearly a century begins a new life soon after a long vacancy and a detailed building restoration.

 The Busy Corner Grocery, a two-story frame building erected in 1911, has sat mostly vacant since its closure in 2007.  The empty shell was bought in 2025 by Matt Froman, a Portland firefighter with a passion for restoring vintage commercial buildings instead of seeing them replaced by new developments.  The Busy Corner was a common type of neighborhood store built in its era, with living quarters above the store on the main floor. While similar stores once dotted Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, most are gone today.

 Froman wasn’t willing to see demise of the Busy Corner, which likely would have given way to a housing project.  Restoration meant peeling off the T-111 plywood on four sides and a partial rock façade that had been applied to the front façade a few decades ago.  The restoration was guided by historic photographs that indicated the original wood siding and clerestory windows in front.  Luckly, much of the original siding remained under the T-111 and Froman managed to find similar salvaged siding to replace what was missing.

 

The exterior’s preservation also included restoring large painted signs advertising Coca Cola on the building’s south side and 7-Up on the north.  Froman felt the signs “tell the story of the building and its place in the neighborhood.” He liked preserving an era when advertising was provided by sign painters rather than by printed signs that are common today.  In their era, the signs provided the building owners a small income stream. 

 Finding a new use for the building has been difficult since 2007.  Froman knew the Busy Corner was too small to compete with two larger modern grocery stores just a few blocks away.  Fortunately, another old building aficionado fell in love with it, too.  Deanna Reed, a well-stablished hair stylist, will move her Arabella Salon from Northeast Portland in August and rename it the Busy Corner Salon.  Like Froman, “I really like old buildings and their stories and history,” she said.

 

Circa 2007

Froman’s latest plunge into historic preservation is his third so far.  In 2022 he finished restoring the old Phoenix Pharmacy at SE 67^th and Foster Road into a retail space.  The next year, he added a single-story building offering multiple small storefronts on Foster between SE 59^th and 60^th Aves.  Froman calls his interest in saving old buildings a “glorified hobby,” but warns that “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.”  Challenging as these projects are, Froman is not giving up.  He said he has another project in mind, this time on the west side of the Willamette River.  For now, the rest of us will wait in suspense.

 ------ Fred Leeson

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