Before the Parking Garage...

Photograph used by courtesy of Oregon State Library Photograph Collection

The next time you swing your car into the Chemeketa Parking Garage entrance on Commercial Street, give a thought to what was at that location before the garage was built in the 1970s. In the 1898 photograph above, the business on the corner was the Barnes Cash Store. Mr. Barnes's son Ralph was a Foreign Correspondent for the New York Harold Tribune in Europe during the World War II years and died in an wartime airplane crash in 1940. You may be able to Mr. Fry's name above the Drug Store entrance. That was the Daniel Fry who owned Fry's Hill (Now the High Street property known as Gaiety Hill) and lived in the historic Smith-Fry House. His warehouse was just demolished (the concrete triangle) as part of the Boise-Cascade property renovation. Further south on this block, out of the picture, in the only remaining section of this Eldridge building that stretched from Chemeketa to Court Street: Greenbaum's Quilted Forest, a family business in the third generation that began in the year this photograph was made, still operates there.