The vacant, boarded-up former Shari’s restaurant on West 11th Avenue in west Eugene may soon be no more.
A Portland developer is looking into tearing down the distinctive, six-sided, 30-year-old building and putting in a drive-through eatery of an unspecified brand.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the Eugene-Springfield metro area, a small Salem-based convenience-store group is looking into remodeling a shuttered former Subway sandwich shop on Main Street in downtown Springfield into a convenience store.
For the west Eugene project, preliminary paperwork filed with the city shows the Shari’s being replaced by a 3,000-square-foot rectangular building plus drive-through lanes on the 1.6-acre lot.
The developer, Cole Valley Partners of Portland, didn’t reply to Eugene Weekly’s messages.
The building is owned by Portland real estate broker Gerald Miller. If Cole gets the necessary city permits, Miller says he’ll sell the property to the company. The fate of the deal will be clearer in a couple of months, Miller says.
Miller bought the then-empty parcel of land in 1990, constructed the building to the specifications of the then-thriving Shari’s chain in 1995, and leased the place to Shari’s through to 2024, when the chain imploded financially and shut most of its outlets. In October 2024, Shari’s handed the keys back to Miller and closed the eatery, real estate records show.
The property, at 2950 W. 11th Avenue, has a market value of $2.5 million, the Lane County assessor estimates. It’s a big lot that backs onto Amazon Creek.
Beaverton-based Shari’s had operated four restaurants in Eugene-Springfield. Shari’s leased all four sites from investors. The Gateway Shari’s was bought by Peak Credit Union and has been torn down to make way for a credit union branch. The other two empty Shari’s are still standing and unsold. They’re on Division Street in Eugene and Pioneer Parkway in Springfield.
Old Subway
As for the former Subway store at 774 Main Street in Springfield: It’s a weather-worn 55-year-old building that Chanpreet Singh Gahlla wants to put to a new use.
The building will become the fourth Sunrise Market, says Gahlla, who bought the property last year, and whose family owns the Sunrise chain with stores in Salem and Independence. (The chain is unrelated to the Sunrise Asian Food Market in south Eugene.)
The timeline depends on getting permits and firming up the remodel work, he says. He and his family previously lived in Springfield and operated a larger-format convenience store in Walterville, “so the community has always felt like home to us,” he says. “This project is an opportunity to come back and invest in the area again.”
The Main Street property, a 1,700-square-foot building constructed in 1969 on a quarter acre, has traded hands in recent decades.
Last October, Gahlla bought it for $599,000 from a Vancouver, Washington-based group of investors, property records show. That Washington investment group, NPL LLC, had bought the property in 2020 from a Eugene investment group for $600,000, records show. The Eugene investment group had bought the property in 2004 from another local investment group for $600,000, records show. It’s unclear how long the Subway operated there or when it closed.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.