Saving a Portland Neighborhood, A Pizza and a Beer at a Time

The city of Portland started out as a clearing on the western bank in the Willamette River in 1843, claimed by White settlers from land where the Multnomah people lived. Just a few miles from the Willamette’s confluence with the Columbia, Portland earned its name by serving as a deep-water port for ocean-going vessels. One of the city founders was a captain, and much of the activity of the early years involved seafaring. The heart of the settlement, which incorporated in 1851, was known over time by a number of names: the North End, Whitechapel, Chinatown, and Skid Row—though today we call it Old Town. From the very start, it was a neighborhood of sailors and stevedores, and it has for the better part of two centuries been that hardscrabble, rough central neighborhood every city has.

Safe from the sanitation of gentrification, Old Town has also, through the decades, acted as a safe haven for many Portlanders not welcome elsewhere. It became the hub of Portland’s Asian population, and later businesses catering to Portland’s LGBTQ community. It has always had bars and a robust nightlife, including important music venues like Satyricon. It never had the kind of wealth found across Burnside Street to the south in the financial district, or further west in what became the upscale Pearl District, but it always reflected the real people of Portland better than any of the other neighborhoods in the inner core.

Unfortunately, Covid dealt Old Town an especially hard blow. It magnified preexisting problems of a housing shortage, the fentanyl crisis, and a persistent office vacancy rate. Businesses have closed, and tourism has dried up. Yet one of the Old Town’s stalwart institutions is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month, and its owner has been attempting to not just survive, but pump life into this historic neighborhood. I’ve written about the brewing half of that company, but it has always stood on the foundation of that venerable and beloved eatery, Old Town Pizza.

A Counterculture Institution

Fifty years is a long time. In 1974, Portland was transitioning out of a period of massive local corruption and developing the contours of the city it would become, based on livability and quality of life. In the 1970s, Portland still felt like a frontier city, with log flotillas making their way down the river, and working people building ships, casting steel, and living far from the cultural centers of San Francisco or points east. Over the next decade, the city would become a playground for progressive city planning, and it would become a haven for the kind of quality food and drink Portland’s famous for now. Old Town Pizza, founded by the Accuardi family, was an early pioneer on this front. Catering to (and staffed by) hippie-ish customers, it focused on quality ingredients. Later, people might call it “gourmet,” but at the time America didn’t even have language for these kinds of restaurants. People just thought of it as the best.

“The place was hopping,” Adam Milne told me over beers at the bar. The current owner, he purchased Old Town more than twenty years ago. “I’m told this restaurant sold more beer than any other account in Portland. It was the hub of the counterculture, too. Employees were on acid sometimes.”

The location, then and now, was always part of the charm. The Merchant Hotel was built in 1880, one of the city’s rich collection of cast-iron structures (only New York has more). Old Town Pizza is located where the hotel entrance once stood, and patrons order pizza in the old lobby. The restaurant is a warren of rooms and alcoves, decorated with a truly dazzling collection of antiques and tchotchkes. They mostly date to periods before the restaurant’s founding, but over the years, it has built up its own historical record. Many celebrities over the years have visited, it’s been featured on a number of national television shows, and perhaps most impressively—to Portlanders—it was one of the hangouts of the first-generation Trailblazers, including Bill Walton, who was drafted the same year Old Town opened. (Walton, fans know, was a countercultural icon himself, a tie-dye wearing Deadhead who was 100% west coast.)

Modern Era, Old Town Brewing

In its first half-century, Old Town Pizza has served generations of customers, many of whom celebrated important life transitions there—birthdays, proposals, anniversaries, wedding rehearsals. People who first came in the 1970s brought their kids, and now those kids have grown up and bring their own kids. One of those customers was Adam Milne, who grew up in Eugene, which in the 1980s had their own Old Town outpost. “We used to have birthday parties there when I was a kid,” he said. He stopped to reflect, adding, “I had my 30th birthday here, too. I just loved the place.” By the new century, it was owned by a hospitality company, and Adam set his sights on buying and preserving this piece of Oregon history.

In the early aughts, he was working as a marketing and branding guy for companies like Addidas and Columbia, but it wasn’t where he wanted to end up. “At heart, I always knew I was an entrepreneur,” he said. In 2003, he bought Old Town, which after thirty years had lost some of its cultural cachet. “Whenever I talked to people, they’d say, ‘Oh, I love Old Town Pizza—I didn’t know it was still open.’ My idea was to start doing some marketing and bring people back.”

He re-established Old Town’s rep as a grand old Portland institution, getting it featured on the Tonight Show and Rachael Ray’s show. He started delivering downtown in throwback three-wheel bicycles. Five years later, he decided to open a second location in Northeast Portland, where he lived, with the idea of adding a brewery. “People love pizza and beer, so it was an obvious choice. When I started the brewery, it was really easy to get excited about it. I just really loved beer, and it seemed like a lot of fun.” He bought the second location on Northeast MLK in 2008 and installed the brewery in 2011. Since then, he’s had a series of exceptional brewers, won quite a few awards, and increased the visibility (and beer sales) of Old Town Pizza in Old Town.

Highlighting Portland’s History (or “History”)

Old stories and legends collect in the corners and alleyways of neighborhoods as the age, and Old Town’s center on the dark spaces underneath the buildings. This describes not just the buildings’ cellars, but a network of passageways that connect them, running, by some accounts, a mile and a half west to Northwest 23rd. What nefarious activities transpired beneath the feet of respectable folk? Opium dens? Prostitution? Speakeasies? Almost certainly. But the most famous use was the practice of a certain form of “coercive recruitment.”

“Shanghaiing describes the practice of kidnapping a man for service aboard a sailing ship. A shanghaied sailor, usually drunk or incapacitated by knockout drops, was delivered by a “crimp” to a ship’s captain shortly before sailing time, for which the crimp collected a fee, often known as blood money. Some 1,500 or more men are said to have been abducted annually, and some people have claimed that the tunnels were used to facilitate kidnapping women for prostitution. The existence of the tunnels is alleged to have been purposefully suppressed, in order to protect Portland’s genteel reputation.”

These tunnels are a big part of Portland lore, and whether the most florid stories or true or not, have served as a connection to that rougher, wilder time. Most people, even those who live in Oregon, however, have never actually seen them.

That has given Adam an opportunity. It turns out that some of these tunnels run underneath Old Town Pizza, 14,000 square feet of them, in fact. In recent years he has gotten permission to host tours and serve beer down there. On the day I visited Adam to talk about the anniversary, we dipped in for part of the tour, as the raconteur leading leading it regaled the group with stories true and, well, unverified. The Merchant Hotel has its own apocrypha, headlined by its ghost, the long-deceased prostitute Nina (pronounced nye-na). By legend, Nina plied her trade in the hotel before meeting an untimely, and violent, death. The tour leader played up this bit, suggesting the assembled might recognize her by a whiff of perfume in the air, if they kept their nostrils peeled.

Down in the darkness, Adam has begun to recreate the scenes people might have once seen—an opium den, a cell behind iron doors, a speakeasy next to a quick-escape staircase. You even pass the old keg chute from the sidewalk that once led to the beer cellar. The tour concludes, of course, with a beer at the subterranean bar. It’s one of the best tourist draws in the city, and it’s helping keep a steady flow of people coming through Old Town. On the night I visited—a regular Tuesday evening—the restaurant was mostly full and the tour had more than a dozen people.

Old Town launched a “Believe in Portland” campaign to raise fund for neighborhood nonprofits, and Adam has been using the pizzeria to demonstrate the vibrancy still remaining in Old Town. “My heart is into this place. It’s why I kept it open for 18 months through Covid,” he said. “It’s very easy to be negative. It’s obvious to be negative. But I’m an optimist about our city. I just love our city.”

Old Town hosted an intimate birthday celebration earlier this month, but the milestone means a lot to Adam. He repeated something he told me the first time I met him, back when he was fighting the city over their egregious violation of his trademark (he won): “I didn’t want to be the one who screwed up Old Town Pizza.” That was long before Covid arrived, destroying a lot of Portland’s culinary history. But Old Town did survive, both the pizzeria and the brewery. In eight years, Adam will have owned Old Town half its life. Perhaps by then he’ll quit worrying about screwing things up, and take joy in how he managed to keep it going so long.

Here’s to a great brewery, a great slice of pepperoni, and a thriving Portland institution. May it last another fifty years—