Kelly's Olympian, the 124-year-old watering hole downtown Portlanders have long called the city's oldest dive bar, reopens Tuesday with a freshened-up interior, a new passage to its music venue, and a coworking company moving into five floors that once sat largely empty above the bar. The celebration at 426 SW Washington St. doubles as a grand opening for UrbanWork, which is taking over the upper floors of the Bullier Building alongside the bar's renovation.
A $750,000 Bet on Downtown
Co-owner Ben Stutz and other investors put $750,000 into the project, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive, which reported that the bar added a shared workspace upstairs, a new connection between the bar and its music venue, and both interior and exterior improvements. Stutz bought Kelly's along with the rest of the six-story Bullier Building back in 2005, according to Willamette Week. The building itself totals 24,525 square feet across six stories, per records from the Pacific Coast Architecture Database.
Kelly's Olympian describes itself on its own website as Portland's oldest dive bar, established in 1902, and the city's third-oldest continuously operated bar and restaurant. Ownership passed from longtime owner Greg Powers, who has since retired, to Stutz and local business partners Jeff Mincheff and Jacqulyn Mincheff, according to the bar's own history page. The space operates as a neighborhood bar and diner by day and turns into a live music and DJ room by night, with the music venue dating to June 2008.
Battle Scarred Through Downtown's Hardest Years
The reopening follows years the owners describe as difficult. Across the street, the Washington Center became a nexus for drug trafficking, including fentanyl, in 2023, and its owners eventually boarded up the former retail and office complex, per the seed reporting. Kelly's Olympian budgeted for naloxone to treat opioid overdoses in emergencies, and employees used it when they saw people overdosing nearby, the report states. The bar's owners have described themselves as battle worn and battle scarred, yet Kelly's remained open through it all.
Stutz previously told Willamette Week that the bar spends $15,000 a month on full-time security guards for the business and the tenants above it, a cost tied directly to the conditions surrounding the building. That spending underscores just how much the surrounding block has shaped operations at Kelly's in recent years, even as the bar pushed ahead with its renovation and new tenant.
Downtown's Office Market Shows Signs of Life
Portland's downtown office towers and coworking spaces have seen plenty of closures and relocations over the past six years, including the U.S. Custom House, which sold for $30 million in 2017 and has since returned to the market, and the Big Pink tower, sold to a real estate investor for a fraction of its previous sale price, with the Upstart Collective consolidating its locations onto the tower's fifth floor. WeWork shut down its own downtown Portland coworking office in the Power + Light Building after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 6, according to Willamette Week, though it offered displaced tenants a move to its remaining Lloyd Center location.
Still, the broader numbers suggest the market may be stabilizing. Downtown Portland office vacancy fell to 31.9% in the first quarter of 2026, down from 33%, marking the first decline in nearly three years, according to Kidder Mathews. By the third quarter, direct vacancy had eased further to 15.1%, and net absorption turned positive at 214,993 square feet for the quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to 392,662 square feet, per the same firm's quarterly market report. Office leasing activity reached 825,342 square feet in the third quarter, up 13% year to date compared with 2025, even as average asking rents slipped to $28.92 per square foot. Kidder Mathews characterized the recovery as gradual rather than broad-based, with results varying by location and building quality.
A Tacoma Connection Behind the Portland Move
Kelly's owners knew Reid Fetters, who had opened an UrbanWork location in Tacoma, and that connection helped set the Portland partnership in motion. Plans for an actual Kelly's Olympian bar in Tacoma did not materialize because of COVID-19, but UrbanWork's Tacoma location saw enough success, per Stutz, to support bringing the coworking concept to Portland instead. UrbanWork had been expanding aggressively in Tacoma, with all but two of its 45 coworking spaces at the Rhodes Center leased, according to South Sound Business, which also reported plans for 11,000 square feet of coworking space and 12,127 square feet of office suites at Tacoma Centre. UrbanWork's suites typically combine private offices and open work areas with a shared conference room and pantry, with coworking memberships offered month to month and suite leases running one to five years or longer.
What's Planned for Opening Day
The celebration Tuesday is structured in stages. A ticketed opening begins at 4 p.m. for $50, followed by a free public open house at 6:30 p.m., with the band Neon Prairie Dogs performing live at 7:30 p.m., all at the Bullier Building address of 420-426 SW Washington St. Kelly's own website frames the day simply: on October 27, the bar reopens refreshed as the five floors above come back to life as a new home for UrbanWork.
The Portland opening arrives against a backdrop of unresolved ambition elsewhere. Kelly's had once planned a sister location in downtown Tacoma at 950 Broadway, a roughly 7,000-square-foot space at the Rhodes Center designed for live performances, covered outdoor seating with heaters, and family-friendly dining areas, according to South Sound Magazine and Connect CRE. Whether that Tacoma bar ultimately opened is not addressed in available reporting. For now, the news is downtown Portland's: a 124-year-old dive bar with fresh paint, a new passage to its music room, and five floors of offices humming above it again.
