TetraIf you’ve ever spent time on Belmont, you might recall a quaint brick building that used to butt up against Peacock Lane. This was a classic piano repair shop known as the Immortal Piano Company.
With its iconic green neon sign, the Immortal Piano Company graced Southeast Portland with a dash of quirky charm starting sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. The history of the building itself, however, goes all the way back to 1927—at one time even serving as a bakery!
For those of you “Keep Portland Weird” bumper-sticker wielding locals demanding to know what became of the old Immortal Piano Company, fret not. This is one of the ever rarer instances in which an out-of-state development company didn’t kill off another piece of old Portland (RIP).
The Immortal Piano Company shut its doors because the owners wanted to move to the Oregon coast and live out their retirement plans. After a long and successful run restoring classic pianos—some dating back to the 1800s!—they moved on to the bed and breakfast business. We purchased the 1927 brick building that housed their business in March of this year—and for the record, they were totally cool with it becoming a pot shop.
From Immortal Piano Company to Tetra
While the idea for Tetra had been in the works for more than a year before opening, the space was the missing puzzle piece that brought it all together. Portland has issued 145 recreational dispensary licenses and counting, and to find a location that meets all requirements set by local and state law is challenging to say the least.
We were pretty stoked to find that the old Immortal Piano Company building sits in an elusive sweet spot—far enough away from other dispensaries and outside the boundary for surrounding schools.
The process for transforming the old brick building into Tetra took between four and five months, and was wrought with debate over things like whether to keep the red and black checkered tiles. Rather than demolish the building and start fresh, we decided to reinvent it into something that would maintain a tinge of familiarity while also reflecting the kind of dispensary we set out to become.
Bright, clean and relatable are words we threw around often throughout the planning and design phase, and we’re pretty happy with how it all came together. From the way we display our products to the system of categorization we use for our menus, everything inside of Tetra was created to facilitate a welcoming and uncomplicated dispensary experience.
Come see us at 4011 Southeast Belmont Street! We’d love to get to know you better.