The empty parking lot at the former West Albany Safeway, where I-5 Sports has been in business in recent years, on June 28, 2025.
For the past few weeks the vast parking lot in front of 635 Pacific Blvd. in Albany has stood empty. On a bike ride last week I wondered what happened to the power sports business that occupied what had been the West Albany Safeway store back in the day.
The site offered no clues other than the vague wording on signs posted inside the locked doors. The signs mentioned “moving” and a “business remodel,” making this reader wonder, well, which is it?
In April 2018, when I last wrote about this address, the building was about to be remodeled for I-5 Sports, a business dealing in all-terrain vehicles.
The business operated there until recently. Online, I discovered that the owners sold it in May 2022 to a man whom a story in PowerSportsBusiness.com described as a “retail-tech entrepreneur from Texas.”
The buyer, Farhan Hasan, was a principal in an Oregon limited liability company named Deosaid Outdoors. The online records of the Oregon Secretary of State show the LLC as having been dissolved as of May 23, 2025.
The inside of the 30,000-square-foot building is almost as empty as the parking lot. Peeking through a gap in the paper covering the windows, all I could see was some lonely racks of tires sitting in the empty space.
On Facebook, someone wondered in late April why the store was closed. This prompted various comments, none of which I could confirm.
The property is still owned by the Kampfer family of Harrisburg, the same as when Safeway was there.
Safeway closed its West Albany store in 1999, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood, and moved to its current location off Southeast 14th Avenue.
One of the Facebook commenters remembered that change and hoped that maybe a new supermarket would now move in. The economics of the grocery business, I believe, make such a development extremely unlikely to come about. (hh)
This sign was posted inside one of the doors of the closed business on June 28.
I remember eating lunch at a coffee shop counter inside the Safeway store during the 1970s.
I expect whomever the new owners are, if they can’t spell the word business, probably won’t be in business for very long.
The downtown/southwest neighborhood desperately needs a closer grocery store we can walk to!
Couldn’t agree more and it would lesson the traffic over the tracks ahead..
Good luck getting a grocery store there…Too much competition… but it sure would be nice to have one back there.
I just saw a post that there will be a liquidation auction next weekend in Salem. The post was on “What’s Happening in Albany Oregon”.
Before the YMCA filled all the acreage around their building with youth soccer fields, speculation (some of it in print) was that Trader Joe’s would put a store there.
That sure would have been nice for Albany and for people in Southwest Albany.