30 May 2015

[Out122ndWay] 122nd and Stark … Goodbye Strip Club, Hello Church

3183.
I consider this the mother of all real-estate flips.

The building you'll see in the next illustration is very close to 122nd and SE Stark; it's address is 333 SE 122nd Avenue. It corners on 122nd and SE Oak. For a very long time, it's been a strip club or lounge of some sort; it's most recent invocation was a place called Soobie's, a place which was mostly responsible for low-quality food and the occasional gun battle. Some months back, it went through the traditional stages of Portland-strip-bar terminal disease; loss of OLCC liquor permit, conversion to 'juice' bar, and closure.

But look at it now. What a … conversion.


She's doffed her sexy red dress, put on more sombre, Sunday clothes … and she's now a church. The Shepherd's Gate Church, to be exact. It's not that large a building … I can't see it being that big of a congregation.

Going from a den of remarkable iniquity of a den of extreme morality must have twitched the fabric of space-time just a bit.

The most cosmically humorous point occurs on the current configuration of the new church's reader board, displayed with its existentially-tracked message perforce:


GOD IS NOWHERE seems to me to be a counter-intuitive message for a church, but what do I know from theology?

And so it goes. 

1 comment:

Emma said...

It might be intentional. Maybe your view on their almighty dictates where you place the spaces. Either way, they've fixed it recently.