10 May 2021

The Grain Elevators At River Mile 12

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Just north of the Steel Bridge, standing between the Rose Quarter and the Willamette River, is a hulking grain elevator and shipping facility that seems increasingly out of place in the evolving cosmopolitan atmosphere that seems to obtain there.


This has been an active grain-shipping facility for a very long time now. Since approximately 2010, it's been owned by the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the biggest firms you never heard of. It's glandularly huge in world commodities; chances are, if you eat, it's touched the ingredients in your food at some point along the line. If you don't eat ... well, good for you, you android you.

Also, fun fact? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she who was Elaine in Seinfeld and the title character in Veep, is the daughter of the late Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who ran the company for a while. It's a family-owned joint. 

And this is the name I've known it under; working in transportation dispatching as I have, I've known it as the Louis Dreyfus Dock or just the Dreyfus Dock. But that has come to an end apparently, according to the Portland Business Journal, in '19, LDC sold the facility to an outfit called Rabin Worldwide, who buys and sells industrial properties. It'll either remain empty for a while, remain a grain terminal, or maybe suffer the fate of so much of old Portland: redevelopment. 

So that goes.

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