In the fall of 2020, Restore Oregon hired locally-owned Albina Construction, LLC to weatherize and protect the Mayo House from damage. Paid for through a Most Endangered Places seed grant made possible by the Kinsman Foundation, the cottage now has new downspouts, and clean gutters, and has been cleared of moss on the roof and treated with EPA-approved moss killer. Albina Construction also covered basement openings and trimmed back arborvitae on the property. Now prepared to withstand another rainy Portland winter, the building is one step closer to housing the Davises’ ARTchive vision.
Restore Oregon thanks Albina Construction, LLC, who graciously provided materials at-cost, and deeply discounted their labor in order to provide this much-needed service to their Albina-community neighbor.
“Preserving the Mayo House as a family home to create generational wealth for a longtime Black Portland family is exactly in line with Albina Construction’s mission as an affordable housing builder and remodeler, especially for our Eliot neighborhood community in NE Portland. It was our pleasure to be in a position to assist the Davis family.”
-Albina Construction, LLC
The Mayo House is a Queen Anne Cottage with a complex history. Built in 1895 by Austrian immigrant, Martin Mayo, the gingerbread-trimmed cottage originally sat on the northwest corner of Union Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd) at NE Sacramento Street in Portland.
In 1912, after Mayo commissioned an apartment building for this site (still standing as the Union Manor Building), the house was moved onto Sacramento. When Union Avenue was widened in 1930, the cottage was moved again. It sat at 206 NE Sacramento until 2019 when it was rescued from developers. The Mayo House’s current location at 236 NE Sacramento — very near its original lot — is part of a much larger story of recognition and atonement for Portland’s decades-long campaign to seize Black-owned homes under the guise of “urban renewal.”
After appealing to the Portland City Council to waive $40,000 in fees required to move the house, Eliot neighborhood residents Cleo Davis and Kayin Talton Davis saved the house from demolition. For the Davises, City approval holds significance beyond saving a historic home from the wrecking ball. It also signifies a step towards recompense for decades of racist City of Portland policies that directly and negatively impacted generations of the Davis family.
To ward against supposed “blight,” the City actively targeted black homeowners with fines, fees, and intimidation from the 1940s through the 1990s. Cleo Davis’ grandmother was one such owner who, in the 1980s, was forced to relinquish ownership of her boarding house and watch it be demolished. Today the Mayo House sits on a new foundation on the boarding house property, and represents atonement for a grave injustice.
In partnership with the City of Portland Archives and Portland State University, the Davises are working to convert a family property that was once wrongfully targeted by the City of Portland for condemnation into an archive for the Black diaspora in Portland. They envision the Mayo House as embodying a multipurpose future through the creation of an “ARTchives”– a hub for African American arts, history, and culture. The ARTchives concept builds on years of Cleo Davis’ public art projects, including the highly acclaimed Historic Black Williams Project, a collaboration with wife Kayin Talton Davis that details the history of Williams Ave.
“It will be an extraction and extension of the narrative story and artwork of the oppressed, exploited, and innovative history of Blacks in Portland,” says Davis.
Restore Oregon thanks Albina Construction, LLC, who graciously provided materials at-cost, and deeply discounted their labor in order to provide this much-needed service to their Albina-community neighbor.