Grocery chain WinCo — a destination for budget-minded shoppers — apparently likes to buy a treat for itself sometimes.
In June, the Idaho-based company bought the building at Chad Drive and Coburg Road in Eugene where its store is located, records show. Winco had been a tenant since it opened there in 2022.
The deed didn’t disclose the price, but Lane County pegs the market value of the 95,000-square-foot building on seven acres at $13.6 million.
The property is no visual charmer: WinCo’s new façade looks out on one of the uglier parking lots in Eugene, a vast, barren asphalt stretch devoid of landscaping or trees.
But the place has an interesting history, including a tenuous tie to Gordon Sondland, who won international renown in 2019 as a key witness in the Donald Trump impeachment hearings. It was Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, who delivered the bombshell that Trump had offered aid to Ukraine if that country agreed to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
Shopko builds, sells
The Eugene store was built by the then-prosperous Shopko department-store chain in 1987, as Lane County emerged from a crushing 1980s economic recession/depression. After the store opened, it was recognized as an aesthetic disaster, lacking not only landscaping but any designated pedestrian walkways in the parking lot. Eugene city planners resolved to prevent a repeat.
Two decades later, Wisconsin-based Shopko’s fortunes were sagging. To raise money, it sold the Eugene property in 2007 for $9.9 million to a recently formed Portland real estate investment firm, Atlas Investments, the deed shows, and Shopko stayed on as the tenant.
Atlas is headed by Katherine Durant, a prominent Portland developer and philanthropist. Durant was also in the hotel business with her longtime husband, Sondland, helping to run Provenance, their chain of boutique hotels. (They sold Provenance in 2022 in the wake of a hammering by the COVID pandemic, and the couple divorced in 2023, according to news reports.)
Meanwhile, Shopko went bankrupt and closed all its stores in June 2019. That left Durant with an empty building — but not for long. By August 2019, she had signed up WinCo for a 20-year lease, real estate records show. An up-and-coming budget-format grocery chain, WinCo remodeled the building and opened it in 2022.
WinCo has 142 stores. News reports say it owns some of its sites and leases others. It owns the real estate of its two other Lane County stores, one in Eugene and the other in Springfield. Neither Durant nor a WinCo spokesperson responded to Eugene Weekly emails seeking comment.
End of the line for Greyhound Bus depot?
The long-vacant former Greyhound Bus station in downtown Eugene is heading for its final stop: demolition.
The Pearl Street building’s owner, an entity headed by Dan Giustina, a local real estate and timber businessman, late last month applied for demolition permits from the city. Giustina for years has offered the run-down yet architecturally interesting building for lease. It’s unclear if he has plans for the site. He did not reply to a message from Eugene Weekly. The zoning allows offices and apartments.
The building, with its rounded corners, is Art Deco-ish, but is not on preservation lists.
Giustina bought the property at Pearl and 10th Avenue from Greyhound in 2018, after the Texas-based bus company closed the site.
Giustina also owns the surface parking lots immediately east of the old station. Add all those parcels together and you have more than an acre. That’s big by central Eugene standards.
The city is processing the demolition permit. The permits typically are good for a year.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.