The Virginia Cafe

Portland Oregon is in the throes of gentrification for its downtown core. Many blocks have been leveled, to make room for modern and architecturally attractive buildings. These buildings vary.

I live in the "Cultural District" of downtown Portland. Though my apartment building is subsidized housing, we are surrounding by buildings such as the Schnitzer Theater of Performing Arts. The newly remodeled art musuem, the new Safeway and the Museum Place building, the Fox Tower, which houses a multi-plex theater, Banana Republic and Marios, to name a few.

On a quiet little patch of sidewalk is an anachronism called the Virginia Café. At 725 SW Park Avenue you can walk into the past. But you better walk soon for the block owned by Zell Brothers has been sold to movie theater mogul, Tom Moyer. The $13.5 million dollar purchase will be developed by TMT into a thirty-five story skyscraper.

Not only the disenfranchised and street people are in danger of being swept out with a new broom, but this piece of history will be gone. Virginia Café has been at its present location since 1922. There is talk of rebuilding it on the ground floor of the new building, but nothing could resurrect its charm and ambience.

Three Greek brothers bought the original café at 1041 SW Stark. They had been laid off from driving railroad ties near Mt. Hood. Theodore, William and Christopher Dussin created the Virginia Café, but no one knows why they chose that particular name for the enduring establishment.

At that time the neighborhood was known as a 'tenderloin' district, home to hookers and the grifters who lived in the grimy sleaze-hotels nearby. Business was good enough that the Dussins opened a second location close by on Southwest Park Avenue. The Stark street café did business for a few more decades.

In 1922 when the second Virginia Café opened it was prohibition and the café did not sell alcohol, depending on its sandwiches and home-made soup that served mostly a lunch crowd.

Christopher's son Guss took over management of the café, and doing two tours of duty in the Korean Conflict. Success runs in the Dussin genes. Guss opened a new restaurant called the Old Spaghetti Factory, which has grown into an international chain and is famous for its Italian cuisine and simple, but delicious spaghetti. That enterprise opened in 1968 and keeps expanding to this day.

If you think of Cheers, the Boston bar made famous on television, you can picture the Virginia Café. It is snug with dark oak and ambience. The menu now includes liquor of course. You can order fish and chips, steaks, chicken and many other items. Each meal is a good big order and you won't leave hungry.

The North side of the café is a bar running the length of the café. Here you can find menus going back to the 1940s. There are also 140 floor tiles inscribed with the names of people who bought them to fund the building of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Artist Tom Hardy, a Virginia regular, had three tiles, one for his first, middle and last names. It has been rumored that Hardy, now 85, had a "reserved" stool at the café, one with his three tiles neatly lined up with the stool. Hardy says he thinks this is a myth, but myths are what give restaurants and bars a quaint and homey atmosphere.

Will they dismantle the Virginia Café and rebuild her in the new Moyer Tower? That thinking is best left to a lazy afternoon sitting at the bar. Whatever they decide, a Portland landmark is being destroyed for the sake of big money.