- address: 8333 NE Russell Street
- Year Built: Unknown
- area: 1.2 acres
- market price: $1.1 million
- owner: Port Athletic LLC
- How empty it was: 2019 and beyond
- Why is it empty: The building burned down.
The vacant 1.2-acre lot at the corner of Northeast Russell Street and 84th Avenue in East Portland looks like it once was, with very few people living there.
But for decades, the building on the site was a gathering place for enthusiasts of various sports and exercises, until 2019 when their gym burned down to its concrete foundation.
For nearly 40 years, rowing company owner and wrestling coach Mark Sprague ran the Oregon Athletic Club in a 30,000-square-foot building that featured a Junior Olympic-size pool, numerous weight rooms and six racquetball courts. The club was frequented by area families, Sprague, 83, recalls proudly.
“It was great for the area,” he said. “A lot of older people were swimming in the pool.”
Mr. Sprague finally gave in in the mid-1990s. “It’s a long story, and I don’t want to get into the details.”
That’s when Myron and Evelyn Nelson came on board. They renamed the gym Nelson’s Nautilus. (At Nautilus’s peak, there were seven gyms across the state. The couple bought their first gym location in 1988 from Billy Jack Haynes, the legendary Portland pro wrestler who was charged with murdering his wife in Lentz earlier this year.)
The Nelsons ran the Nautilus for about 12 years. Still, the main attractions were the pool and Olympic-size diving board, said Nelsons’ son, Preston. “We ended up closing it down for insurance reasons.” [the high dive] “There are some things in 2000 that are not cash generating,” he says.
Nautilus rotated smaller clubs within the gym, including Sprague’s wrestling club, Cobra Wrestling, and at one point a company even taught scuba diving lessons in the pool.
In 2008, a Nautilus member named Rick praised the gym in an online review: “The sauna at this gym may be the most densely packed place I’ve ever been in terms of diversity,” Rick wrote. “Sitting mostly naked in a small, hot room with guys who speak five different languages is quite an eye-opening experience.”
Preston Nelson, 56, has worked for his family’s network of gyms for 20 years.
One of the characters in Jim’s story who weathered the many businesses that came in and out of the building was Milton O. Brown, who owned it for decades (he sold it briefly to the Nelsons, then bought it back a few years later) and rented it to a variety of businesses. Brown, a Portland attorney, was disbarred in 1988 for misconduct but later acquired a vast real estate portfolio. Worldwide See the article in this column last month (“Fremont’s Pompeii,” May 29th).
“Milt loved his initials because they spelled out MOB,” Preston Nelson recalls. “My dad liked him, and the two of them started a business together.”
It’s unclear what happened, but the Nelsons’ business began to fall apart a few years later. Then, Preston Nelson said, his father had a falling out with Brown. The Nelsons were kicked out of the gym in late 2008.
Brown, now 95, could not recall anything about the building when reached at his Washington state home. A real estate agent listed on Brown’s trust’s business report did not respond to a request for comment. His granddaughter, Shauna Friedenberger, also did not respond to a request for comment. Brown works as a psychic, according to his LinkedIn page.
Portland Fire Rescue added the building to its “dangerous buildings” list shortly after a fire broke out in the gym in 2011. For many years, boxing club Grand Avenue Boxing was the only tenant there, until an August 2019 fire gutted the building.
The remains of the building were demolished later that year. It has been vacant since then, and in February complaints were received about furniture being dumped on the premises.
Preston Nelson remembers driving by the house shortly after it burned down in 2019.
“It was heartbreaking,” Nelson said. “Everything was rubble.”
