Make Gloves Not War
I think I must be blind. I have driven past this intersection of SE 82nd and Stark countless times – aand I honestly don’t remember ever seeing this sign before. This huge grenade on a post declaring “
.” Apparently this is the HQ for Grenade Gloves a sportswear company for snowboarders/skateboarders.
The sign doesn’t really look new – am I I indeed just blind?
It’s new-ish but not very new. I live out that way and I don’t recall it going back too terribly far.
I love our area of town, but hey! visit Montavilla now, before it becomes the next Hawthorne district and gets to expensive to even walk through!
The grenade has been up for about a year or so. For years prior the guts of the sign existed as a broke-ass old ’70’s clock. It used to have a readerboard that was my special project while I was employed at Liberty Natural Products, the owner of the building throughout the 90’s up until a couple years ago when Grenade Glove bought the place.
That building has quite a history, I believe it was built as a Safeway in the early 1940’s. (It was replaced in the 60’s by the current Safeway at 82nd & Burnside) After that it was a Kodak film processing lab, and then a VFW Hall through the ’80’s. I’ve been in there since Grenade rehabbed the place. There’s now a half pipe where my desk used to be. Cool!
I miss Montavilla, I lived and worked and drank in it’s shady smokey taverns for four years in the earlier part of this decade. I moved to North Portland, and a year later, Montavilla becomes trendy. What gives?