Drive past 435 Liberty Street NE this spring and you'd have seen the same thing you'd seen for three years: a dark Rite Aid sign, papered windows, a parking lot with more weeds than cars. A block over, the old JCPenney building at Salem Center had been sitting empty since the store closed in October 2020, still connected to the rest of the mall by its skybridge. And the three-story building at Liberty and Chemeketa, once Liberty Plaza, had been mostly vacant since the pandemic hollowed it out.
All three of those addresses are active or about to be this month. That's the headline version. The detail that actually matters if you live here is how differently each one is coming back. Only one of them is reopening as a single business replacing a single business. The other two are splitting into a dozen or more.
The Building That Didn't Get One Replacement
Liberty Plaza sat mostly empty from the start of the pandemic until 2023, when Chris Blackburn, part-owner of the Salem construction firm Clutch Industries, bought the building. The renovation stretched across roughly three years before the space reopened this past May as The Forge, co-owned by former Portland Timbers defender Nat Borchers.
The Forge didn't bring back one store. It brought back more than forty.
The ground floor holds restaurants and retail, including Clink! and Dreamies Creamery. The second floor is a wellness collective with 25 individually owned beauty and wellness businesses operating out of their own suites. The third floor houses a financial services tenant, and the basement functions as event space for the kind of gathering that used to require renting a hall across town. Borchers described the intent plainly: a place where he could bring his family for ice cream and coffee while his wife gets a service upstairs, with a party happening in the basement at the same time. One building, one address, four completely different reasons to walk in the door.
That's the model working through downtown right now. Rather than waiting for one large tenant willing to fill an entire footprint, the buildings that sat empty longest are reopening as collections of smaller, specific businesses sharing a roof.
The Grocery Store Downtown Waited Three Years For
El Torito Supermarket is the exception, and the exception is instructive. The old Rite Aid at 435 Liberty Street NE closed in 2023 and sat vacant until owners Lily Perez and Alfredo Mendez took possession of the property in late December 2025. The store is set to open this month in a straightforward, single-tenant format: one grocery store filling one former grocery-adjacent footprint.
The reason it didn't subdivide is the reason it took three years to fill at all. Downtown Salem has lacked a walkable full-service grocery store for years, and that's a gap you can't fix with five boutique tenants sharing a floor plan. You fix it with one operator committing to the whole use. The city's urban renewal agency put real money behind that logic, approving $1.2 million toward the downtown grocery project as part of its broader push to get this specific kind of anchor back into the core.
So the pattern isn't "downtown space always splits now." It's that the buildings split when the demand underneath them is fragmented, the kind of demand that supports a wellness suite here and a dessert counter there. And they stay whole when the demand is singular and unmet, like groceries within walking distance of an apartment or a state office building.
The Mall Anchor That's Splitting Instead of Reopening Whole
Salem Center's former JCPenney anchor is the clearest version of both patterns happening in the same building. The space was a full two-level department store when it closed. What's moving in is a furniture store, still unnamed as of this spring, occupying just 11,070 square feet of the first floor, a fraction of what JCPenney used. The rest of the anchor space is earmarked for multiple additional tenants under plans still working through approval.
Read that again against what's next door. Macy's, the mall's other major anchor, closed in March 2025 and remains dark. Kohl's and Ross Dress for Less are still operating as they always have. So downtown's largest retail structure currently has one national anchor sitting empty, one anchor about to reopen as a fraction of its former self plus several smaller tenants still to be announced, and two anchors that never left. It's not a mall coming back to life all at once. It's a mall where the math on big single tenants stopped working, and everyone rebuilding around that fact is choosing to split the space instead of waiting for another JCPenney-sized commitment that may not come.
What This Actually Changes on a Saturday
The practical version, for anyone who lives close enough to walk:
- You can get dumplings, ice cream, and a haircut inside the same building at The Forge, on Liberty Street across from Salem Center, without moving your car.
- By the end of this month, you can buy groceries on foot at 435 Liberty Street NE for the first time since Rite Aid closed there in 2023.
- Sarina's Italian Kitchen, which spent years as a delivery-only kitchen operating out of McGrath's Fish House, now has its own storefront at 401 Center Street NE with a full bar and patio, open since July 23 with both a mall-facing entrance and an exterior door that stays accessible after the mall itself closes for the night.
- Keep an eye on the old JCPenney glass at Salem Center. When the lights come on there later this year, it'll be a furniture store using less than half the old footprint, with more tenants still to be named for what's left.
None of this required one big retailer to decide downtown Salem was worth a bet again. It required several smaller ones to decide the same thing at roughly the same time, in buildings that had sat empty long enough that splitting the risk made more sense than any single business absorbing it alone.
That's the actual story behind the construction fencing and the new signage you've been driving past all year. Downtown Salem isn't filling back in because one confident anchor tenant showed up. It's filling in because the buildings themselves changed shape to let more than one business take the risk at once, except in the one case where the missing use was too basic to split.
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