Heartbreak hotel

BACK STORY • Grove future in doubt; today’s no picnic

By chris lydgate

The Portland Tribune, Jan 22, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (47 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / Portland Tribune

Grove Hotel resident Sharon Hren (with her dog, Katie) shows a room that’s no longer occupied after it was emptied of garbage that was piled as high as the sink.

“This place is filthy.” Standing in her pajamas, shivering with cold, Sharon Hren runs a hand through her dark, shoulder-length hair, fires up a Pall Mall and surveys the wreckage of her life. To put it kindly, Room 227 is a shambles.

The mattress is a jumble of bedding, the floor littered with dirty clothes, towels, coats, books, boxes of crackers and candy-bar wrappers. Blankets hang over the grimy windows, smothering the daylight.

The closet is a length of pipe nailed to the corner. The walls are covered with butcher paper, affixed with dabs of toothpaste, on which Hren has scrawled a cacophony of reminders and reflections. One reads simply CHAOS.

Down the hall, in Room 212, Matt Van Alstyne sits on his bed, wrapped in a thick overcoat. A bitter January wind blows through the broken window, but Van Alstyne doesn’t seem to care. Holding a packet of Jell-O cubes, he stares at the wall as if tuning in to an imaginary TV.

The ragged carpet is sodden with filth; scores of dead insects lie entombed in spider webs. Mice scrabble amid the chicken bones and tubs of teriyaki sauce that have piled up behind the radiator.

Van Alstyne’s wrists and ankles are swollen with bedbug bites, and he has no socks. The room stinks of cigarettes and despair.

As he trudges down the dark, gloomy corridor to the communal bathroom, the sound of a neighbor’s hacking cough mingles with the moronic beep of an ineffective alarm clock and the skunky whiff of marijuana.

Welcome to the Grove Hotel.

Forget about bellhops or valet parking — the Grove Hotel is a lodger’s nightmare.

Located at 421 W. Burnside St., it long has been one of the most notorious addresses on Skid Row, a haven for drug-dealing and prostitution, where the front desk is fortified by security wire and the concierge is a broken vending machine.

But the Grove is more than a catalog of social problems. It also is, tragically, a home to some of the city’s poorest and most disabled citizens.

One or two stay on by choice, but most are trapped in the Grove by a combination of bad luck, their own mistakes and bureaucratic complacency on the part of the institutions supposed to help them.

“They don’t have the wherewithal to complain, and no one would listen if they did,” says Portland police officer Jeff Myers, who has become the Grove’s unofficial guardian angel. “They’re prisoners.”

Despite its problems, the future of the Grove is uncertain. In November, the city purchased the building from its former owner, Morris I. Hasson, whose family had owned it since 1950.

At the time, the city intended to clamp down on the criminal activity, rehabilitate the aging structure and preserve its 70 rooms of low-income housing — then have it torn down after building replacement housing.

But after the sale of the Grove to the Housing Authority of Portland, some city officials now are having second thoughts about its future.

Commissioner Erik Sten, the City Council’s low-income housing expert, recently used the Grove as a bargaining chip in his efforts to expand homeless services in the Old Town-Chinatown area. Unless he gets his way, Sten said the Grove might never be torn down.

Once upon a time, Hren sold real estate. Then, in 1992, she was the victim of a brutal mugging in downtown Seattle. Her assailant fractured her jaw and skull, shattering her ability to think.

“I can’t remember what I’m doing from one moment to the next,” she says, spritzing the room with hair spray and petting her faithful companion, a blue Doberman named Katie.

Living on a $569 monthly check from Social Security, Hren, 52, has racked up an impressive string of evictions over the years. That background makes it almost impossible for her to find a decent apartment, which is how she wound up at the Grove.

“It’s so oppressive and depressing and confusing. But I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.

Hren moved into the pitiful room at the end of the corridor in May, paying $520 a month in rent. The sink was broken, the bathrooms vile, the floor so filthy that she covered it with butcher paper to avoid touching it, but at least she had a roof over her head.

‘It was a hellhole’

Unknown to Hren, at that time the Grove was just coming into the cross hairs of city Commissioner Randy Leonard’s Housing Interdiction Team, or HIT. The unit is spearheaded by Myers, which focuses on run-down lodgings that have become hot zones of crime and squalor.

When Leonard ventured into the Grove for the first time, he was stunned by the conditions. “In my career as a firefighter and a fire inspector, I’ve been through some bad buildings,” he says. “This was worse than anything I’d ever seen. It was a hellhole.”

Mentally ill residents lived amid jugs of urine and trash piled to the ceiling. The halls were covered with debris. Mice, cockroaches and bedbugs roamed the halls and rooms. The building had no sprinklers and no fire alarm. Batteries in the smoke detectors were dead. And the stench was indescribable.

That night, Leonard says, he had a nightmare. The Grove was burning, and firefighters were trapped in the narrow corridors with no escape.

Two weeks after Leonard’s dream, the fire marshal declared the building “an inimical threat to human life” and ordered that a fire patrol walk through the building every hour, day and night.

The HIT stepped up the pressure on Hasson, the Grove’s owner. Fire inspectors, building inspectors and police officers visited the hotel every day. Every time a room became vacant, the fire marshal slapped a red tag on its door, condemning it for human habitation.

For his part, Hasson insists that he is not responsible for the hotel’s problems. “The fact of the matter is that the residents were damaging the rooms and not letting us inspect them,” he told the Portland Tribune. “Anytime we found things wrong, we corrected them.”

The city is disputing Hasson’s claims, citing the numerous problems documented in the inspection reports. Whatever the case, after the city began condemning the rooms, Hasson raised the rent for the remaining tenants but still couldn’t — or wouldn’t — pay for improvements.

Instead, he hired a lawyer and accused Leonard of targeting the Grove for unfair treatment. In response, Leonard pulled out the photographs taken by Myers and pushed them across the table.

In November, Hasson finally gave in and agreed to sell the Grove to the city for $1.8 million. When she heard the news, Hren scrawled a sign on a scrap of cardboard and hung it in her window: “God Bless Commissioner Leonard.”

City officials quickly reduced the residents’ rent to $320 and began to haul out the accumulated junk of decades of neglect, and embarked on a $3.2 million plan to bring the building up to minimal standards.

But they soon discovered that the structural problems were a cakewalk compared with the human problems.

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