Building's 2nd tenant here to stay

A couple of great old pictures of the building that houses the daily newspaper operation surfaced on the internet last week, and it got me thinking about this big old pile of bricks we work in each day.
I wish I could put my arms around even half of the stories it has to tell.
The building — a four-story brick structure at 309 W. Main St. in Portland — is more than 100 years old now. It dates, as best I can figure it, to about 1908.
And when it was constructed, it wasn’t intended to be the home of a newspaper business.
Instead, it was the site of the W.H. Hood Company, a wholesale grocer back in the era when there were no supermarkets but a constellation of little mom and pop grocery stores in every crossroads and every neighborhood.
The Hood Company was a pretty serious concern back in the early years of the last century. It produced its own labeled products, things like spices and tea that it would buy from another source and mark as its own.
But in the 1940s or 1950s, the grocery business began to change and change rapidly. Supermarkets started popping up. Refrigerators replaced ice boxes and changed shopping habits. By the late 1940s, the W.H. Hood Company building was vacant. The company was out of business.
It started life anew in 1956 when it was purchased by the Graphic Printing Company, the publishing company my parents launched. And when it was re-born, it was a mess.
The building — which was 95 percent warehouse space — had been leased to an adjacent feed mill for storage. Grain was spilled routinely, and that meant rats.
My older brother Steve drew the job of cleaning the place up, sweeping for what must have seemed like months, dodging rats, and wondering what our parents had gotten us into.
I remember helping to paint offices when I was eight years old, and for years my sister Louise and I used old Hood Company letterhead and blank telegraph forms as playthings at home.
Now, 60 years in, the building still has its quirks, its mysteries, and its charms:
•It’s not the tallest building in the county, but it’s close. My guess is the old Haynes Mill dogfood plant tops it.
•The top two stories look to some folks as if they were added later, but that’s not true. For some reason, a contractor who was tuck-pointing the mortar in the 1940s didn’t mix brick dust with his mortar. So the joints on the top two stories look whiter than the bottom two stories.
•The elevator — a venerable piece of craftsmanship — still works and is inspected regularly. But some people find a ride in the elevator a little unnerving, just the same.
•Originally, only a small front office of the building was properly finished. The rest was warehouse space. A vacuum tube system sent orders up to the upper stories, and goods were delivered to the loading dock.
•The top two stories were not heated and none of the building was air-conditioned (of course). It had to be a pretty brutal workplace. There were no restrooms on the top two floors for employees, making things even worse. Stenciled signs on the walls on the upper floors say, “Do not spit on the floor.” But they were altered generations ago so that they don’t say “spit” anymore. You get my drift.
•There were, at one time, a candy room and a tobacco room on the third floor of the building. The cases for the candy room are long gone, and the tobacco room is a closet-sized humidor.
•The folks who built the place were well aware of Portland’s issues with flooding. That’s why the first floor is about three feet above street level, a fact that led us to construct an ADA compliant ramp on the east wall.
•Sanders Construction built the place in the great age of concrete, and the company did so using some of the same methods found in the Weiler Building: A steel-reinforced concrete skeleton, concrete floors, a concrete roof, and curtain walls of brick. In other words, we’re not going anywhere.
And, maybe, that’s the most important point to make: We’re here to stay.