Cooke Stationery building sold to Salem developer for remodel
Building Salem is a regular feature from Salem Reporter intended to highlight planned building projects around the city. Is there a building going up or demolition underway you’re curious about? Let us know by emailing [email protected].
Name: Historic Cooke Stationery building
Project type: Remodel, retail and residential
Location: 362 and 370 State St. (downtown Salem)
Estimated completion: Mid-2025
Cost: $1 million building purchase, “a few million” for renovation
Units: Four apartments, two retail storefronts
The need: With hundreds of apartments planned for downtown, Salem developer Kevin Harrison said bringing new retail space to life for downtown residents is important. “They’re going to need retail because you’re basically expecting people to walk and work and live downtown,” he said.
Description: It’s been the better part of a century since anybody lived in the rooms above the former Cooke Stationery storefront on State Street.
Harrison wants to bring them back to life.
The Salem developer purchased the historic Cooke Stationery Building in July through his company Cook Building LLC. It’s sat vacant since the longtime office supply store closed its doors in April 2023 when the third-generation owner retired.
The building, constructed around 1880, has two storefronts and space for four apartments upstairs. Harrison will lease the retail spaces and rent out the apartments, which he plans to renovate with historic touches to evoke the late 1880s.
The upstairs is accessed via a metal gate to the west of the storefront.
“I don’t think anybody’s been doing anything up there since the ‘60s or ‘70s,” Harrison said of the upstairs.
Birth records Harrison has found indicate people used to live upstairs, and he believes the space was most recently used for offices in the 1940s or 1950s.
Broker Conrad Venti, who’s working with Harrison to lease the retail space, described the upstairs as a “time capsule.” It has a mix of red carpet and hardwood, tall windows overlooking State Street and peeling wallpaper in some rooms facing away from the street.
Renovations began with redoing the roof, stripping at least eight layers of plaster and material.
“When we pulled the roof off that thing … if somebody would have pushed on one of the upper sections of the wall I think it would have fallen into the street,” Harrison said. He wants to preserve and lean into the building’s history.
A lifelong Salem resident, Harrison through his companies owns about 1,000 apartments in the Salem area all across the city. When he saw the Cooke building was for sale, he “thought it would be cool to own a building in downtown Salem with all the activity coming down here.”
Venti, who works for First Commercial Real Estate, said the two storefronts — one about 3,060 square feet, the other 3,672 — would be well-suited to restaurants. He’s gotten several inquiries on the listing but nothing is set.
Harrison plans to sandblast the ground floor down to its original brick walls and see what tenants want from there. He expects renovations to take about nine months once he secures building permits from the city of Salem.
October 2024 building statistics from the city of Salem
New multifamily building permits issued: 4 permits for 168 units
Total multifamily building permits issued since July 2024: 31 permits for 462 units
New home permits issued: 26 permits, including one duplex and one quadplex
Total new home permits since July 2024: 99
New commercial and industrial permits issued: 4
Total new commercial and industrial permits permits issued since July 2024: 29
CORRECTION: The name of the former business was reported incorrectly. It was Cooke Stationery, not Cooke’s Stationary. Salem Reporter apologizes for the error.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE.
Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade and is a past president of Oregon's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
