The Coffee Shop on Belmont Is a Few Months Old. The Street Fair Out Front Turns 29.

For most of the first half of this year, the storefront at Southeast Belmont and 34th sat dark. The orange signage was gone, the windows were papered over, and the espresso machine that had been pulling shots on that corner since 2001 had been packed up and hauled away. Regulars walked past a blank window for close to six months, from late February into August, wondering what would eventually fill a space that had anchored that block of Eastside Portland for a quarter century.

What finally reopened there was not a chain trying again. It was two people who'd been pulling shots at pop-ups out of their own garage less than a year earlier.

A Corporate Deal Emptied the Corner, Not a Falling-Out With the Block

The space had been home to Stumptown, one of the businesses credited with starting Portland's third-wave coffee movement, for 25 years before it closed on February 28, 2026. Stumptown had been owned by Peet's Coffee since 2015, and the closure landed in the same stretch of the year that Keurig Dr Pepper was completing its roughly $18 billion acquisition of JDE Peet's, the parent company that had owned Peet's and, by extension, Stumptown. The corner's emptiness wasn't a story about neighborhood demand drying up. It was a story about ownership changing hands several tiers above street level, in a transaction that had nothing to do with Belmont Street and everything to do with what happened to it.

That distinction matters if you live nearby and watched the space sit vacant longer than anything else has on that strip in recent memory. A quiet corner isn't always a sign of decline. Sometimes it's just what a corporate handoff looks like from the sidewalk.

What Moved In

Clark's Coffee opened its first permanent cafe in that same space in August 2026. The founders, Clark Johnson and Ricky Rickman, met at See See Motor Coffee, a few blocks away, now operating as One Moto Cafe, where Johnson was working behind the counter. Rickman had moved to Portland from California just before the pandemic to study photography at Portland Community College. What started in November 2025 as a series of pop-ups in their own garage turned, within months, into a lease on one of the most recognized coffee corners in the neighborhood.

The build-out kept some of what made the corner familiar. The original counter seating along the front windows stayed. The bar itself was refurbished rather than gutted, now built around a bright orange two-group La Marzocco Linea espresso machine. Fresh white paint covers the walls and the high ceiling, and the long exposed-brick wall now holds shelves of pop-culture, skate, and other memorabilia instead of Stumptown's old branding. The coffee itself comes through a local roaster, Tignor, working directly with producers in Colombia and Nicaragua, and the pastry case is stocked by An Xuyen, a Vietnamese bakery in Foster-Powell, with gluten-free options on offer.

Johnson signed a three-year lease with an option for two more, a commitment that reads less like a pop-up testing the waters and more like two people planning to be on that corner for a while.

"I'd rather have less money and push to get by so that everyone else has a fair wage."

That's how Johnson described the approach to running the place, a line that sits closer to the neighborhood's own read on itself than anything a Third Wave pioneer turned corporate subsidiary was likely to put on a sign.

Then and Now, On the Same Corner

A Street Fair Older Than Any Business Currently on the Block

Here's the detail that puts the last several months in perspective. The Belmont Street Fair returned this year for its 29th edition, which means the first one happened around 1998, three years before Stumptown ever set up shop on that corner. Every business currently operating along Belmont, including the one that just moved in a month ago, is younger than the event that shuts the street down for one Saturday every September.

This year's fair ran Saturday, September 19, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., produced by the Belmont Area Business Association across six blocks of Southeast Belmont between 31st and 39th Avenues. More than 200 vendors set up along the strip, two stages carried live entertainment through the afternoon, and the Hangout PDX Kids Area returned for families working the fair with kids in tow. Clark's Coffee, only weeks old at that point, was named among the spots to check out during the fair, alongside the Belmont Inn, a longtime standby on the strip, and special offerings from India Oven and Nate's Oatmeal Cookies.

The fair's own write-ups, this year and last, keep circling back to the same handful of businesses that make Belmont feel like Belmont regardless of who's behind the espresso machine on any given year: the happy hour crowd at Aalto Lounge, the small plates and cocktails at Bar Loon, the vintage racks at Mix Tape and Tantrum, and Movie Madness, still renting physical movies on a street where almost nothing else has stayed the same shape for three decades.

Belmont Was a Park Before It Was a Business District

A few blocks toward downtown, at Southeast 20th and Belmont, sits a piece of the street's history that predates even the fair. Colonel Summers Park was originally named Belmont Park when it was established, before being renamed in 1938 to honor Colonel Owen Summers, a former Oregon state legislator with a military background. That renaming happened 88 years before this year's Clark's Coffee lease was signed and 60 years before the first Belmont Street Fair.

The park picked up a splash pad, a new picnic shelter enclosure, and accessibility upgrades in a 2017 renovation, and more recently added a futsal court built with help from Operation Pitch Invasion, the Portland Parks Foundation, and the Buckman Community Association. A community garden sits alongside it, and dogs are welcome on leash. Earlier this summer, on August 2, the Buckman Community Association held its annual neighborhood picnic there, the kind of low-key, donation-funded gathering with inflatable activities and local music that doesn't make headlines but happens like clockwork every year regardless of what's changed a few blocks away on Belmont.

The Part Worth Remembering

Storefronts on Belmont will keep changing hands. Sometimes that happens because a beloved local shop simply runs its course, and sometimes it happens because a multibillion-dollar acquisition several states away decides the math no longer works for a single corner cafe. Either way, the fair keeps happening every September, the park keeps hosting the same picnic every August, and the corridor's identity turns out to rest less on any single tenant and more on the rituals that were already running before that tenant signed a lease.

If you've lived near Belmont long enough to remember the old Stumptown sign, the new orange machine behind the counter at Clark's is worth a visit on its own merits. But the fair outside, now closing in on three decades, was never really about which coffee shop anchors the corner in any given year. It was about the block showing up for itself, on schedule, regardless.

If you're curious about what else is shifting across Portland's eastside neighborhoods, or you'd simply like a local perspective the next time you're thinking through a move, Monaghan Real Estate Group is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.