Beaverton Burgerville to close, Vancouver chain announces

Burgerville announced Wednesday it would close its central Beaverton, Ore., restaurant June 16.

The Vancouver-based company has leased the space at 11900 S.W. Canyon Road since July 1, 1969.

“After careful evaluation, (the company) has determined that the building is near the end of its useful life,” the company said in a news release. “Due to ecological considerations and wetlands conservation, a major remodel of the location is not possible.”

“It has been an honor to serve the Beaverton community at this site for the last 50 years, and we appreciate the decades of support we’ve received from generations of Burgerville fans,” Beth Brewer, Burgerville’s senior vice president of operations, said in the release.

The release notes two nearby Burgerville locations at 9385 S.W. Allen Blvd. and 1245 N.W. 185th Ave. The central Beaverton location, adjacent to the Beaverton Town Square shopping center, was one of the company’s oldest operating restaurants.

Employees will have the opportunity to reapply at other Burgerville restaurants.

The Beaverton location is the chain’s first closure since September 2011, when it closed its downtown Vancouver location off of East Mill Plain Boulevard. The walk-up building in Vancouver was the chain’s second-oldest, dating to 1962. The property was sold to Prestige Development of Vancouver and the entire block was subsequently redeveloped into a mixed-use apartment project called Prestige Plaza.

The Vancouver closure left Burgerville with 38 restaurants. That number has grown to 42 as of 2019, and will drop to 41 when the Beaverton location closes.

Burgerville has pursued a strategy of slow growth in the years since the 2008 recession, opting to self-finance new restaurants and remodels at a rate of one or two per year.

The chain is headquartered in Vancouver, and its parent company, The Holland Inc., was founded in Vancouver in 1926 as a creamery. Burgerville debuted in 1961 and built its reputation on fresh, local ingredients.

More recently, the company has made headlines as the birthplace of the first federally-recognized fast-food employees union in the United States. Employees at the chain’s 92nd and Powell location began demanding corporate recognition of their union in 2016, and the company agreed to a union election two years later.

Employees at the 92nd and Powell location voted to unionize in April 2018, and employees at four other Portland-area locations have followed suit — most recently the Montavilla and Convention Center locations, both of which voted to unionize last month.