Emporium uncovered: visiting the renovated J.K. Gill Building

Lobby of the renovated J.K. Gill Building (Brian Libby)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

If you're like me, the name J.K. Gill is both familiar and unfamiliar.

When I was growing up in Oregon in the 1980s, the company had about 30 stores across four western states and was a familiar presence in malls and on main street around the state. By that time, the longtime family business had been sold and its longtime flagship, downtown at SW Fifth and Stark, was already in the process of being rented out. But for a few generations of Oregonians, the company name remains a memory.

A 1980 J.K. Gill television commercial (via YouTube)

 
What I never knew about J.K. Gill was what a huge presence that flagship store and building were: a cultural hot spot even. You might even say it was Portland's top bookstore before the arrival of Powell's City of Books. And J.K. Gill may have started out as a book and stationery store in late 19th century Portland, but it grew to an emporium of musical instruments, office furniture, and much more.

In the early 20th century, it was even the kind of place that visiting celebrities like Duke Ellington and Nat "King" Cole made appearances at. Ellington appeared there just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 

Duke Ellington at Gill's, 1941 (Ray Atkeson, via Thomas Robinson)

Ellington with Jack R. Moore's Edmund Cusson (ACME/Oregon Historical Society)

Last year, after being known as the Gladys McCoy Building since 1998, during which time it served as headquarters for the Multnomah County health department, this circa-1922 building completed a renovation designed by SERA Architects for owner/developer Urban Renaissance Group and was rebranded as the J.K. Gill Building for its original occupant. I'm late to the party in visiting, mostly due to the pandemic. But touring the space a few days ago, I marveled at its simple interior beauty.

Obviously there is much uncertainty about the future of the office. Over the past year during the pandemic, millions of workers have realized they prefer working from home, and today's technology allows for that seamlessly. At the same time, something is lost when we never come together in person. Studies show that over 85 percent of office workers don't want to return to a five-day-a-week presence, but that only a small minority want to work from home all the time. The average work/home preference going forward, according to surveys, is 2.5 days a week. That will likely mean that offices are increasingly devoted to meeting spaces and flexible workstations over cubicles and personalized desks. Yet office buildings that cater to creativity, with plenty of natural light and wide-open interior spaces have a leg up, especially if their locations are high-density and close to other attractions like parks, shops and restaurants. That makes the J.K. Building well-positioned. It's just that the building has not been a commercial office building before. It's taken time to give it a proper facelift. It's been hiding in plain sight.

For two years beginning in about 1999, I worked around the corner from this building and, despite passing it often, didn't pay it much attention. The clerestory windows were covered up, and there was no sense of transparency. And in the two decades since, I'd thought about the building even less. Viewed from outside, it's what you might call a fabric building: handsome, and a positive contributor to its neighborhood, with a dignified Commercial style that adds decorative classical touches at its parapet. Yet it also doesn't call attention to itself.

What's exceptional about the J.K. Building, though, is not how it looks from the outside but how it feels inside. That's especially true on the ground floor, where a huge two-story volume with massive cylindrical columns fluted at their tops add up to a grand, large volume of space that's full of light. Upstairs, the columns continue, giving this building a robust quality.

Upstairs at the J.K. Gill Building (Brian Libby)

There's a kind of paradoxical quality to the columns, in fact: whereas normally interior columns just feel like obstructions of sorts, these ones have a commanding presence. I realize it may sound a bit silly, or even paradoxical. But at least for me, there was something about the added girth of the columns that made them an attraction, even though they must take up rentable space and certainly interrupt one's view across these spaces.

Maybe it's also their cylindrical form and the way they angle at the top: they perhaps make the space feel a bit more classical, even like a public building. Obviously an emporium of office supplies, books and other ephemera is not a courthouse or a concert hall. I'm not saying the J.K. Gill building is the Acropolis. Yet it was more than I expected it to be, and that's because of the light, volume the columns inside.

The J.K. Gill's top floor is unique. Tucked behind the building's parapet, it has hardly any windows at eye level (mostly just clerestories) and not beautiful cylindrical columns but ordinary blocky ones. Yet the redesign added a large skylight, which is more than enough to make this a compelling space of its own. My photo here (and a habit of upping the contrast in Photoshop) makes it look much darker than it really is.

 

Top floor of J.K. Gill (Brian Libby)

But let's go further back, to the beginnings of this building and, before that, the business itself.

Joseph Kaye Gill was born on August 13, 1841 in Yorkshire, England and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1854, settling initially in Worcester, Massachusetts. While studying at the Wilbraham Wesleyan Academy, Gill met his future wife, Frances Willson, whose father had platted the town Salem, Oregon. After their 1866 marriage, Gill was offered and accepted a teaching position at Willamette University due to his late father in law's influence, but Frances also asked him to oversee book sales at a Salem drugstore she co-owned. Enjoying the latter, he dropped the teaching position and opened with partner C.F. Yeaton the Gill & Yeaton bookstore in Salem in 1868, even constructing their own building for it. But after just one year, Yeaton dropped out and the store became known as J.K. Gill & Co.

 

Gill's original store in Salem (Urban Renaissance Group)

In 1870, former Portland mayor and local tycoon William S. Ladd, along with then-U.S. Senator Henry Corbett, approached Gill at the State Fair in Salem and suggested that he take over the Harris & Holman book business in Portland, which was the city's fourth-oldest. (Stephen J. McCormick’s Franklin Bookstore had been the earliest bookstore in Oregon, founded in 1851. Gill's new Portland store, first called Gill & Steele (for a partnership with George A. Steele) descended from a bookstore that started in the mid-1850s by Adam R. Shipley.) Gill agreed, selling his in Salem bookstore and moving to Portland in 1871.

Gill invested heavily in stock, and the store's variety and quantity was said to be on-par with East Coast book stores. They also sold stationery as well as teaching supplies such as globes, maps, charts, and crayons. There was a large music department that included sheet music, instructional books, and a wide variety of instruments such as pianos, organs, flutes, violins, and accordions.

The J.K. Gill store, as it became known again a few years later, occupied a variety of the city's best late-19th Century buildings. In 1872, it moved to the Holmes Building on First Avenue between Stark and Washington (it's since been demolished). In 1881, the company relocated to the newly-built Union Block on First between Oak and Stark, considered the finest office building in the city at the time (also since demolished). In 1893, J. K. Gill initially occupied the basement, first, and second floors of the original Masonic Temple on Third Avenue (also demolished) . In 1913 they leased the five upper floors of the adjacent Hamilton Building (still standing — I even used to work on the ground floor 20 years ago when the AIA chapter was located there).

By 1921, Gill's was booming. They were the largest distributor of books and stationery in the Pacific Northwest, and the designated state depository for school textbooks.

Before building the J.K. Gill Building, which was completed in 1922, the company spent a full year searching for an appropriate downtown site. Over the past decade following the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition, population growth and a real estate boom had pushed downtown further west, across Fifth Avenue to the west and Alder Street to the north. They chose this site at Fifth and Stark (now Harvey Milk Street).

 

Shortly after the building's 1922 completion (Oregon Historical Society)

 

Architecture firm Sutton & Whitney designed the nine-story building. Albert Sutton and Harrison Allen Whitney formed their partnership in 1912. Their state architectural licenses were only the 16th and 18th issued. Richard Ritz notes in Architects of Oregon that the firm produced “some of the most outstanding designs in the Northwest during the 1920s and 1930s.”

Their portfolio included buildings still standing today such as 1921's Ballou & Wright Company building at NW 10th & Flanders in the Pearl District, and 1922's Meier & Frank Warehouse at NW 14th and Irving (today home to the Vestas company). After Sutton's death the firm continued (as Sutton, Whitney & Aandahl) and went on to design 1928's Weatherly Building, the tallest structure in Southeast Portland (standing near the east end of the Morrison Bridge).

Albert Sutton, a Victoria, B.C. native born in 1867, practiced in Tacoma and San Francisco before relocating to Hood River, Oregon in 1910. Two years later he formed the partnership with Whitney, commuting from Hood River for the first for years and relocating to Portland in 1916. Sutton died in 1923, the year after the J.K. Gill Building was completed.

Harrison Whitney, was an Iowa native whose first job in Portland was working for the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition. He also co-founded the Oregon chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1911. Whitney worked for the city's most prestigious firm, Whidden & Lewis, before forming the partnership with Sutton, and after his partner's death, he lived on nearly four more decades, until 1962.

When the J.K. Gill Building opened in 1922, the ground-floor space was 22 feet high with a 4,500-square-foot mezzanine balcony. That's the vast space I encountered on last week's visit, enjoying how the clerestory windows had been uncovered for the first time since shortly after Gill's vacated the building. Back in the 1920s, a wide aisle separated the book department from displays of office equipment and commercial stationery on the ground floor. The upper floors housed an engraving department, displays of office furniture, and J.K. Gill's publishing and wholesale division. On the top of the building, books were packed and then sent down a twisting chute to several floors below where they were shipped out.

 

Ground floor of J.K. Gill, 1940s (Dede Montgomery)

The arrangement of the store interior changed over time. As described in its National Register application, later accounts of Gill's have mentioned a children’s floor, an extensive art supplies department in the basement, and an entire floor dedicated to sheet music. The store had a pianist who would play sheet music at a customer’s request so they would get an idea of what a piece sounded like. At one time, J. K. Gill was the largest retail outlet for sheet music in the Pacific Northwest.

After Joseph Gill’s 1931 death, the company continued to grow and opened additional stores in Oregon, Washington, and California. Ownership remained with the Gill family until 1970, when the firm was sold to Young & Rubicam. At that time, there were 11 J. K. Gill stores with $13.8 million in annual sales.

A 1967 sale at J.K. Gill (The Oregonian)

After selling the building in 1988, the J. K. Gill Company remained a tenant with reduced square footage until the downtown store closed in 1991. That's when the Multnomah County Health Department moved in, staying until last year.

Looking at photos of the Health Department space in the then-Gladys McCoy Building, it's easy to see how the bones and great features of the building were largely hidden away under drop ceilings, with clerestory windows blocked, and at the mercy of fluorescent lighting. That's the story of nearly every building that survived the mid to late-20 Century. Even so, particularly that ground floor of J.K. Gill's was also subdivided with several different partitions.

Yet the really compelling architectural experience comes from the space at its most wide-open. You can see that not only in my mediocre photos of the ground-floor space, but the renderings that SERA did for the building's new owner, Urban Renaissance Group. Of course a tenant can probably rebuild some of those partitions if they want, but I doubt that will happen. And I hope it doesn't.

I laugh at myself a little thinking of how in September of 2018 I visited the Expensify building just across the street from J.K. Gill and swooned at the renovated First National Bank building from 1916: its wide-open space, light and volume. It's hard to beat that magnificent space and its renovation by ZGF, but the ground floor of J.K. Gill is also quite memorable and impressive. Back in 2018, I called the building across the street a gem hiding in plain sight. Turns out the 1922 building facing it is another case. When you couple Sutton & Whitney's handsome original architecture with the cultural history of J.K. Gill's, one can only be glad that the combined story is coming to the surface again: not thanks to me, but thanks to the developers and architects who breathed new life into the structure.

 

 

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Comments

[Fred Leeson]

Wonderful article. It's good to see excellent architecture of the past restored and the various "remuddlings" removed. Best wishes to these developers and architects.

[Dana Fadely]

Since 2005 we’ve owned a unit in The Avenue at NW 14th & Irving. A former Meier & Frank warehouse, it sports the same mushroom columns as the Gill building, which I think were fairly common back in the day. They give the units a definite character, a sort of latter day Luxor. When we repainted shortly after buying the place I wanted to paint the tops of the columns with Egyptian papyrus motifs. Fortunately the family talked me out of it. The forest of columns in the internal parking area can be a bit challenging for the unwary driver.