Shop owners: Buses? You can have them

Merchants on Third, Fourth avenues glad for transit mall completion

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Feb 19, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (10 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

While some shop owners on Third and Fourth avenues are happy heavy bus traffic shifts back to Fifth and Sixth avenues this spring, Cory Reeder, owner of the Smokin' Pig food cart on Fifth, is looking forward to the increased bus traffic. 

Over at the Smokin’ Pig food cart on Southwest Fifth Avenue downtown, Cory Reeder is getting excited about buses moving back to the Fifth and Sixth Avenue transit mall.

The buses have been on Third and Fourth avenues for more than two years, since construction remaking Fifth and Sixth into a mall that can carry buses, cars and MAX trains began. But a few weeks ago, buses began training runs on Fifth and Sixth in anticipation of their official move back in May.

Business has been off at the Fourth Avenue food carts since the buses moved out. In fact, Reeder bought the Smokin’ Pig from a previous owner who just could not make a go of it with the pedestrian traffic lost because the bus stops were no longer there.

When the transit mall is fully operational, there will be a bus stop just across the street from the carts and a MAX stop one block away. Reeder is anticipating that business from people getting off the buses and the trains will boost his income from its current average of $175 on a summer’s day to the $250 a day he needs to stay in business.

“That’s part of why I took it over,” Reeder says of his food cart.

A number of shopowners on Fifth and Sixth will be happy to get the buses back. And that’s more than all right with shopowners on Third and Fourth, who will be happy to see the buses go – even if it costs them business.

“I know the exact day (of the move), and I can hardly wait,” says Debi Baker, floor manager for Portland Luggage, perched on the corner of Southwest Fourth Avenue and Washington Street. “All the crack heads can go up there. When the bus mall moved here, our shoplifting increased threefold.”

Baker says she never had to keep an employee by the front door until the buses arrived on Fourth Avenue and that she regularly sees drug dealing taking place just outside the store.

But over on Fifth Avenue, Harry Mossalman, owner of Pasha, a Mediterranean restaurant two doors north of Burnside, says his business is off 30 percent since the buses moved away. Mossalman remembers the drug dealers who populated Fifth when it was a bus mall, but he still says he is looking forward to the buses coming back and the trains arriving.

Bob Repp, who runs Atlasta Lock and Safe on Fourth, has had a bus stop just a few feet from his front door for the past two years. On a rainy Tuesday afternoon he points out his door to the bus shelter, where there are no people but plenty of signs of them – discarded blankets and garbage mostly.

“I’ve been here 21 years and there have never been so many problems as since the bus mall has been there,” Repp says.

People waiting in and around the shelter are constantly smoking, blocking his doorway, shoplifting and dealing drugs, Repp says.

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