Jacksons Food Stores has applied for permission from the city to demolish the 136-year-old Odd Fellows Building, which the Idaho company has owned since 2021. The structure sits just north of the Jacksons convenience store on the east side of Main Street near Auburn Avenue.

Baker City’s Historic District Design Review Commission on Tuesday, June 6 approved Jacksons Food Stores’ application to demolish the Odd Fellows building at 1780 Main St.

The commission asked the Idaho company, which bought the building in July 2021 from the Baker School District, to document any historic items identified during the demolition and save those that can be salvaged.

Jessica Aguilar, real estate manager for Jacksons, told the commission that the company, after tearing down the 136-year-old building, plans to fill in the basement to create a temporary gravel parking lot.

The second phase, which would involve a separate application with the city and could happen in 2024 or 2025, entails building a new convenience store on the property, Aguilar said.

Jacksons owns the current store just south of the Odd Fellows building.

Aguilar said the current store would also be removed prior to construction on the new store.

If possible, Jacksons wants to start demolition later this year before winter, and to finish the work before the end of 2023, Aguilar said.

She said the estimated cost is from $700,000 to $1 million, which includes installing structural steel to the building just to the north, to which the Odd Fellows building is connected.

She told commissioners that the company would work with the city to avoid disruptions during downtown events.

“We don’t want to do anything that has an adverse impact on some type of event or something that’s going on and I think we could probably adjust our schedules to figure this out,” Aguilar said.

She said the temporary gravel lot would be a public space, potentially available for parking or for events such as a summer market or winter Christmas tree sales.

“We wanted to kind of share the space with you, with the downtown, however the community might see it be a win-win for everyone to kind of buy us a little time until we get to that next window to start construction (on the new convenience store),” Aguilar said.

Christine Howard, who attended the commission meeting, said it seemed to her as if all the information about the building and its condition is coming from Jacksons.

“I’m wondering if the design review committee or even Jackson company has considered or have brought in a specialist in renovation,” Howard said.

She said there are firms that specialize in historic preservation. Howard noted that in the early 1990s it was thought that the Geiser Grand Hotel could not be saved, yet the building was not demolished and, after a renovation by Dwight and Barbara Sidway in the 1990s, the hotel reopened.

Aguilar said Jacksons hired CSHQA Architects, the current architect working on the Orpheum Theatre restoration on Main Street, for the Odd Fellows project.

Aguilar said the building has contaminated soil in the basement.

According to records from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the building can’t be used as housing due to the contaminated soil.

“We have an order on it that we can’t even occupy it and we want to make an investment and contribute to the economy, contribute to downtown, provide jobs,” Aguilar said.

Building’s age doesn’t guarantee historical importance

Commission member Ariel Reker, who is also executive director of Baker City Downtown, which promotes the historic district, said that although the Odd Fellows building is among the older structures downtown, it is not on the National Register of Historic Places and is not eligible for official historic designation.

Reker noted that the building’s original ornate facade was removed in the 1950s.

She also said the building poses a potential safety hazard.

Jacksons, in its application for demolition, included photos of loose bricks and mortar.

“The issue is more about the contaminants, it’s more about the safety concern,” Reker said. “And that is more the way that I guess I’m approaching this. It is a historic structure, it is a historic building, but the facade is gone and it is currently a significant safety concern and since it cannot be utilized as it currently stands, where does that leave us?”

Reker said Baker City has one of the largest and most intact historic downtown districts in the Northwest, with 110 buildings.

“I don’t want to see that number drop, however that also means we have (109 other) buildings that we need to be investing in and maintaining, preserving, rehabilitating, and renovating,” she said.

Reker said she is proud of the work Baker City Downtown, the commission and building owners have done in the past.

“We have a very large historic downtown that we want to preserve and save as many structures as possible,” Reker said. “But this is a structure that is heavily contaminated and has sat there for an incredibly long time.”

Reker said her goal is to ensure that other buildings are preserved and restored — ones that don’t have the contamination and structural issues of the Odd Fellows building.

Caroline Kulog, former owner of Betty’s Books and owner of the historic building where the store is located, also on Main Street, asked Aguilar whether the second story of the proposed new building could be used for housing.

“I’m going to have that conversation with the president of our company and we’ll look at it,” Aguilar said. “My recommendation to him would be, if we did it, it would be housing for employees first.”

An artist’s rendering of the proposed new building is of a brick structure. Reker emphasized that the design is preliminary, and that the final design will be included with Jacksons application to build the new structure.

Aguilar said Jacksons plans to replicate the mural on the south side of the Odd Fellows building, which welcomes visitors to the historic downtown, on the new structure.

Reker said she is “very confident that Jacksons is committed to constructing a new building which would be complementary and maintain the historic aesthetic of our downtown district.”

According to court documents and records from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the Baker School District worked under the DEQ’s oversight to remove some contaminants from the Odd Fellows building in 2020.

The Odd Fellows donated the building to the school district in 2018, according to records from the Baker County Assessor’s Office. The school district then sold it to Jacksons Food Stores in July 2021. The district didn’t disclose the sales amount, according to the assessor’s office. Doug Dalton, president of the Baker Technical Institute and formerly the school district’s chief financial officer, said a draft sales agreement with Jackson’s for the building had an amount of $195,000.

The building has a current market value of $271,870, and the land’s value is $120,670, according to the assessor’s office.

The DEQ determined in 2021 that the school district finished all the work it had planned to do, under an agreement between the DEQ and school district from 2018, and the agency approved a certification of completion.

The DEQ has, however, prohibited the building from being used for housing unless the contaminated soil in the basement is removed.

A “closeout and construction completion” report by Wood Environment & Infrastructure Solutions Inc. of Portland, dated Jan. 28, 2021, and done on behalf of the school district, notes that the Odd Fellows building is a “brownfield” property under DEQ standards, meaning it contains toxic materials that could make it difficult to reuse the building for housing, businesses or other purposes.

According to the report, in the basement where the printing press for the Record-Courier newspaper operated for more than half a century, levels of lead, petroleum hydrocarbons and arsenic from a 2016 sample exceeded DEQ thresholds for “residential, occupational, and construction worker receptors.”

Subsurface soil samples also contained “gasoline-range petroleum hydrocarbons,” possibly from the fuel tanks from the adjacent gas station, that exceeded “vapor intrusion” levels for residential use, but not for other uses, such as construction or excavation. The property just to the south, the site of the current Jacksons food store and a gas station, has been used as a gas station since 1925, according to an environmental site assessment done in 2016. According to that assessment, DEQ determined in 1993 that the station, and its underground tanks, “have not significantly degraded groundwater quality.”

From July 2020 to November 2020, a contractor hired by the school district removed materials from the building containing asbestos and lead, including lead paint, according to the report. Workers also removed contaminated soil from the basement below the Little Bagel Shop.

Workers didn’t remove contaminated soil from the basement where the printing press was located, in part because that would require excavation around building support beams. Workers did install a concrete floor over the excavated area to prevent harmful vapor from entering the building. Subsequent air samples showed that contaminants were below levels for residential uses except for benzene, which exceeded the level for residential use but not other uses.

— Jayson Jacoby