By Erika Bolstad, Photo: Lauren Petracca/The Associated Press, PEW, August 2, 2022
As a boy in the late 1950s, Terry McDonald watched as workers built an 80,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in an industrial neighborhood on the west side of Eugene. Long after childhood, McDonald felt an affinity for the factory, where American Steel once fabricated heavy-duty logging equipment until the timber industry waned in Oregon.
Now, as the executive director of the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul, McDonald has made a career of turning other people's castoff goods into cash to support low-income housing and the charity's other anti-poverty initiatives. He easily imagined a creative reuse for the midcentury factory, a space flooded with natural light from paned-glass windows high above the manufacturing floor.
"I looked at this building and said: 'Someday, I would like to own that building,'" McDonald said. "Old industrial buildings are just kind of fun."
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