Tag Archives: Beaumont Pharmacy

Beaumont Corner, 1928

June 30, 2020 By in Beaumont-Wilshire, Old Photos Tags: 8 Comments

Photo friend Norm Gholston has shared another view of a favorite corner, this one shows something important that’s missing, which gives us a good clue about when it was taken. Do you see it (or rather not see it)? Have a good look.

NE 41st and Fremont Avenue, looking southeast, about 1929. Photo courtesy of Norm Gholston Collection.

What’s missing is the Beaumont Market, which exists today immediately adjacent to the far left of this building. Here’s a post we wrote last year that includes a similar but slightly later photo, and beautiful color-pencil renderings of the market building (which came along seven years after the pharmacy), submitted to the city in 1935 by architect Charles Ertz.

Other things to note in this photograph include the absence of the McMarr Stores sign, which was present in the 1929 photo. Our hunch is that this photo was taken soon after construction–late 1928 or very early 1929–and used by J. Benjamin Lowe, Proprietor to get the word out about his new pharmacy, and his phone number. Note the Beaumont exchange was GA (someone trying to phone Proprietor Lowe would pick up the phone and say to the operator, “please ring Garfield 1614”). Do you know about old phone exchanges? Read more here.

The hinged box sitting on the curb: in more snowy climates, a box like this might hold gravel or sand for when the crosswalk and intersection become hard-packed and slippery, but Portland? Maybe. A drop box to keep the bundle of early-morning newspapers dry until the owner opened up? Other ideas?

A day in the life of Beaumont: June 1927

January 3, 2016 By in Beaumont-Wilshire, Business History, Old Photos Tags: , 1 Comment

Here’s the final installment of Bessie Kramer’s Beaumont business district photos from the 1920s, and there’s so much to see. If you missed the earlier photos (including the great one of the houses at NE 40th and Failing), you can find them here and here.

This last one looks a bit like a Norman Rockwell painting: There’s so much going on. The view is looking north at the corner of NE 42nd and Fremont. From these same footprints today, we’d be looking at the edge of Pizzicato on the far left, and then Americana Frame and Silhouette. The building housing Tuk-Tuk, formerly known as Watson’s O-So-Good Restaurant and Sandwich Shop, hadn’t been built yet in the vacant lot behind the lineman on the pole. As noted in the earlier series, we think this was a sewer repair requiring deep trenching in front of 4223 and 4225 NE Fremont.

Click on the photo to enlarge for a good look yourself and then come back here for our take on what we see.

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4223 and 4225 NE Fremont, taken in June 1927. Courtesy of Bessie Kramer and Paul Kirkland Collection.

The other photos showed a display of fireworks for sale in the pharmacy window on the far right, hidden here behind the excavator, making us think this was late June or early July. Another one, shot from a different angle, indicated that the “Dutch Village” building across the street that now houses Gazelle hadn’t been built yet, which means this view is prior to 1928. Fremont Dry Goods doesn’t show up in the city directory until 1927, so by process of elimination, that’s our guess: late June or July 1927.

A man in a suit coat and fedora, who we think we saw down in the trench in an earlier photo, is taking a break here. Three boys are having a good look in the window at Mr. and Mrs. Witt’s Buy-Rite Grocery (did they have a fireworks display window too?). Two more, still on their bikes, are having a good look down the hole. A worker breaks up concrete, and another is at the levers of the excavator. A lineman is working on one of the omnipresent power poles. Everyone in this picture has a hat on.

We believe Bessie Kramer started out as a saleswoman and clerk here at Fremont Dry Goods, the middle store with the dresses and fabric in the window. According to the city directory of 1929 (the year after the new building had been built just across the street), Fremont Dry Goods disappears from its location in this photo and Beaumont Dry Goods appears in the space across the street occupied today by Shop Adorn. Hypothesis: Bessie moved the business across the street. A generation of Beaumont kids remembered Mrs. Kramer’s dry good store there on the south side of Fremont. They probably had more vivid memories of Mrs. Cox’s Variety Store, which was really a candy store, strategically located due east across from Beaumont School in the long narrow space now occupied by Daruma Sushi + Sake. What a great place for a candy business: literally a stone’s throw from the classrooms.

This great series of photos allows us to give AH readers a nudge: we’re always looking for pictures that might be in the family attic or afloat in an old shoebox. Street scene, family pose on the front porch, kids at Wilshire or near a school. We’re interested. Most of these photos from Bessie Kramer were originally very small: less than two inches by three inches. We’re able to scan them carefully and return them to you safely.

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