Skip to main content
Last summer, as a downtown city block deteriorated into an open-air fentanyl market, the mayor’s top fixer, Sam Adams, swung into action.
He negotiated an understanding with the owners of Washington Center, the vacant commercial real estate complex that dominates a block of Southwest Washington Street. Its owners, a top Portland real estate family, would keep it clean, and the city would pay to board it up.
The agreement fell apart. Six months later, after WW and other news outlets documented the extent of the blight, Washington Center was raided by a police squadron and boarded up—but not the way the deal originally intended.
The city didn’t pay for it, as promised. And Washington Center’s owner, Menashe Properties, left the job unfinished, fencing only along one corner of the complex and leaving open an area under the eaves to the west, commonly used for the sale and smoking of fentanyl rocks.
Eric Zimmerman, an adviser to Mayor Ted Wheeler on downtown matters, said at the time that the mayor’s office and the Menashes were “talking.”
Now, WW has confirmed just how long those talks have been going on. Emails and documents obtained by WW via a public records request show that the city was pressing the Menashes to do something about Washington Center’s deteriorating condition as early as two years ago.
And indeed they did, putting up a fence and securing doorways, before fire inspectors discovered a previously unknown tenant in the basement and sent the negotiations backpedaling.
The emails leave many questions unanswered. The mayor’s office tells WW that Adams’ original plan for the city to pay to board up the property was a bad idea, but did not explain what precipitated the change in attitude. Adams resigned in January amid allegations he was bullying employees, and initiatives under his purview have been shifted to other officials.
Barry Menashe, in an interview with WW, says his family has received no help from the city but was unaware of specifics about the negotiations. His son, Jordan, subsequently asked WW to stop “harassing” his family. Jordan Menashe, who controls the LLCs that own Washington Center, moved to Dallas last year and has left day-to-day management to his sister, Lauren. She has stopped responding to emails.
What is clear is that empty promises were made by nearly everyone involved in Washington Center’s attempted rejuvenation—precipitated by a city bureaucracy where the left hand does not talk to the right.
Despite appearances, Washington Center has, until very recently, not been vacant. Verizon Wireless ran a data center in its basement. Full of valuable gear, flammable storage tanks, and possibly asbestos, the subterranean infrastructure was a frequent target for thieves and vandals, emails obtained by WW indicate.
Verizon wanted Menashe Properties to do something about it. So did the mayor’s office. In the summer of 2021, it met with representatives for Menashe Properties, pleading with them to fence off the property. So the company did. It even sealed off several of the buildings’ exits at the urging of the Portland Police Bureau.
Portland Fire & Rescue, however, was not pleased. On July 16, 2021, a fire inspector emailed Menashe Properties executive Ross Kelley, saying he was “surprised to discover” Verizon operating in the basement.
Sealed exits in an inhabited building are a safety hazard, the inspector explained. Fire exit signs led nowhere, and some parts of the complex couldn’t be evacuated without a key. “You are potentially risking lives and are assuming a huge liability,” he said.
Kelley appeared frustrated. “We are trying our absolute best to respond to every agency in Portland, which at many times are at odds with each other,” he noted.
Still, Menashe Properties unsealed the doors and moved the fence. The firm hired a security company to patrol the upper floors of the main building “several times a day.”
In July 2022—a year later—Kelley sent the fire inspector a photo of a gated, fenced enclosure around the entrance of a CenturyLink office, saying a tenant was asking Menashe Properties to do the same at Washington Center. “I believe the answer is ‘no’ from our prior discussions,” Kelley wrote.
Not so, explained the inspector, as long as it was outfitted with “panic hardware” allowing for an emergency exit. (It’s unclear what Kelley did with this information. The upgraded fences do not appear to have been installed.)
Meanwhile, a drug market popped up on the sidewalks outside the complex, first in the areas not surrounded by a fence—and then inside too, once the chain-link barrier was breached and toppled.
The city had been aware of this for months. In November 2022, Lauren Menashe told the city that the situation was getting “worse and worse as each week goes on.”
“Sophisticated criminals” were sneaking in to steal fiber optic and power cables, she said. Meanwhile, campers on the sidewalks appeared “more dangerous and physical.”
But what was “beyond belief,” she noted, was Washington Center’s “new tenant.” Someone was using the vacant complex’s valuable placement in the center of downtown on Google Maps to advertise an escort service, with photos of scantily clad women and a WhatsApp number. (A city official responded, saying Lauren Menashe should “contact PPB via 911″ to handle the trespassers. It’s not clear whether she did—or if any escorts ever physically occupied Washington Center. As of press time, the listing remains on Google Maps, although the number has been disconnected.)
By then, Sam Adams had gotten involved. At the time, Adams was Mayor Ted Wheeler’s right-hand man, a former Portland mayor himself with deep connections to the city’s business community and the ability to navigate its byzantine bureaucracy. He, Lauren Menashe and Mark Wells, manager of downtown’s enhanced service district, Clean & Safe, toured the buildings on July 8.
In a September 2022 email, Adams sketched the outline of a deal in which the Menashes would pay a city contractor, Graffiti Removal Services, to clean up the outside of the complex while the city boarded it up. “VERY GOOD NEWS,” Lauren Menashe responded.
By November, the proposal had become a “plan,” circulated by Christine Leon, director of the mayor’s newly created Public Environment Management Office for graffiti cleanup and trash removal. In exchange for the city’s help securing Washington Center, the Menashes would “maintain [a] locked and secure fence” and Clean & Safe would increase patrols of the block.
(Mayoral spokesman Cody Bowman says WW’s characterization of “early conversations as a ‘deal’ is a bit inflated” and repudiates Adams’ offer to pay to board up the complex: “We believe this would have been a costly endeavor and not a good use of taxpayer dollars.”)
In order to get started, the Menashes needed to secure permits and hire an architect, the city said. Lauren Menashe was losing patience. When city officials asked for her opinion about murals they wanted to paint on exterior walls, she shot back: “The murals are wonderful, but not the #1 priority for this hazardous and dangerous site that I own and have no control over.”
“To put it simply: when can we start boarding the building up?” she asked in a Nov. 22 email.
Delays mounted. By March, when WW visited the block, neither the Menashes nor the city appeared to be making any progress on implementing the plan. By then, scavengers had broken into the vacant KeyBank on the corner and ravaged the vault. The fence had been torn down, and each of the complex’s alcoves were filled with people smoking or openly dealing fentanyl.
WW’s story published March 22 triggered recriminations among all parties.
Wells pointed the finger at the Menashes, saying they had stopped talking with him after refusing to pay their Clean & Safe dues in September. Lauren Menashe blamed city code enforcement. “We all know that mutual plans to board up were disallowed numerous times due to suggested fire code and fire life safety violations,” she wrote.
Kelley, the Menashe Properties VP, appeared to believe the mayor’s office was responsible. “What happened to the proposal from [the contractor] that the Mayor’s office was looking to board up the property?” he asked in a March 22 email.
“Let’s just say we didn’t get help from anybody,” Barry Menashe now tells WW.
The mayor’s spokesman, however, says the city has done its part by cleaning up graffiti and trash. City Hall is now continuing to push for “greater boarding up of the alcoves,” Cody Bowman said in a statement to WW on May 1.
He pointed the finger at the Menashes. “Private property owners across the city are stepping up to take care of their tenants and securing vacant properties to deter loitering, which is an issue that was allowed at the Washington Center,” Bowman wrote. “Every building owner has the right to trespass unwanted people doing unwanted things on their premises. The city has been asking the owners of this building to improve the situation for about a year, regardless of whether they had a tenant or not.”
Still, the city was spurred into action. Police began round-the-clock patrols. And on April 12, dozens of officers piled into Washington Center to clear it of squatters. The issue of egress was now moot—Verizon had moved out. Shortly thereafter, plywood walls went up around the southwest steps, long a hangout for unhoused Portlanders smoking fentanyl.
The boarding-up cost $30,000. “The city didn’t pay a dime,” Barry Menashe says. “I’m born here. Forget the buildings. I’m sick and sad that everybody is suffering.”
Meanwhile, the steps’ denizens migrated to the other side of their building to hang out under the eaves of the former KeyBank. In the evenings, dealers continue to stalk the corners. On Friday night, a trio of police squad cars sped to the scene because two men were kicking a third in the head as he lay in the middle of Washington Street.
