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For more than a decade, the only remaining structure from the original Portland Zoo stood in Washington Park as a monument to the city’s backlog of deferred maintenance. The Bear House—a 1926 Tudor shed so named because, according to oral tradition, its first inhabitants were a collection of black bears—stood rotting because Portland Parks & Recreation had neither the money to restore the structure or demolish it.
That choice is now moot. The Bear House burned down early Sunday morning.
At 4:30 am, Portland Fire & Rescue received calls that the decaying structure was on fire. Firefighters responded quickly and had the fire extinguished in around 30 minutes, says Portland Fire & Rescue spokeswoman and firefighter Christine Pezzulo. The fire extended to a few surrounding fir trees, Pezzulo told WW, but crews used extinguishing hoses mounted on firetrucks to put out fire in the trees and hand-held hoses to curb the structure’s flames.
“The wildland interface and access posed a bit of a challenge, but we were able to safely extinguish the fire,” Pezzulo says.
Though the 1926 storybook-style house was quickly flattened to rubble, responders spent an hour after the fire spraying the area with foam to remove all heat and to ensure the heavily vegetated park hadn’t picked up any stray flames.
The cause of the fire is not immediately known. Pezzulo says there were no injuries and the case is currently under investigation.
The building was located above West Burnside Street on the northern edge of Washington Park.
When the Portland Zoo moved to its current location on the southern end of Washington Park in the 1950s, the city kept the house as a maintenance shed. But as WW previously reported in its “Chasing Ghosts” series on vacant properties, the city vacated the structure in 2017, citing safety concerns and leaving it a magnet for graffiti.
A study would have determined what to do with the building. But the parks bureau never had the money to complete the study.
Portland Parks & Recreation’s maintenance backlog now stands at more than $800 million.
The Bear House is at least the third vacant building WW examined in the “Chasing Ghosts” series that later burned down. An abandoned Elks lodge in East Portland went up in flames in 2023, while a North Portland bar overtaken by squatters caught fire two weeks later.
