If you live in Richmond, your daily walk to coffee, dinner, or the bus is about to get louder. Between July and mid-fall, the stretch of SE Division you know best is scheduled for a full repaving. The same three blocks that will be under construction happen to hold the corner where the neighborhood's longest-running bar just handed off its keys.
Two things are happening at once on the same asphalt. One is a public works project with a firm start date. The other is a bet by veteran operators that Division's density of independent bars and restaurants can absorb a construction summer without losing its center of gravity.
The story on Division this summer isn't the repaving or the new bar. It's that both are landing on the same corner at the same time, and the people opening into the disruption have been doing business here for over a decade.
What's happening to the pavement
The Portland Bureau of Transportation is repaving SE Division from Cesar Chavez to 50th, the exact segment that runs through the heart of Richmond's commercial strip. Construction is expected to begin in July 2026, and total construction time for repaving is expected to be approximately 10 weeks.
Here is what that means block by block for someone who actually lives on these streets:
- The project will be constructed in phases to avoid as much disruption as possible, with construction segments approximately three blocks in length, apart from the intersections at SE Cesar Chavez Blvd and SE 50th Avenue.
- Work at SE Cesar Chavez Blvd will involve a full weekend closure.
- SE 50th Avenue will take approximately three weeks and will involve partial closures, 24-hour flagging, and periods of full closure.
- All other segments will be constructed Monday through Friday during standard business hours, and SE Division Street will remain open for one direction of traffic.
One-way access during weekday work is the detail that matters most. It's the difference between the corridor going dark for a summer and staying operable. Full details and updates live on the PBOT project page.
The corner that's changing hands
Walk to 32nd and Division and you'll see the empty shell of a bar that anchored that block for more than a decade. The Richmond Bar closed after 13 years on SE Division and 32nd, with a final night of service on Friday, October 17. That address, 3203 SE Division, has been vacant through the winter and spring.
It isn't staying that way. The team at Double Dragon is opening a new bar on Division Street, taking over the space formerly occupied by Richmond Bar, after Double Dragon owner Daniel Casto purchased Richmond Bar and took over the lease in November 2025. The new project has a name now. The Richmond Club, the successor to the very popular Richmond Bar which closed after 13 years, will open this summer.
Casto is not a stranger to this stretch. Aside from being The Richmond Club's new and only owner, he's also the owner of Double Dragon, a popular Vietnamese spot about a mile to the west on SE Division. He's also lived here. "I've lived basically three or four blocks away from the Richmond for 15 years," Dan explained, and for most of that time he's worked at Double Dragon.
What the room will feel like is a deliberate calibration. The drinks at The Richmond Club are going to feel, as Dan says, "a little more classically rooted and maybe a little more refined," compared to Double Dragon's very maximalist drinks that are juicy and fun and big and loud. One asset that hasn't changed is the back. The patio he feels is somehow still kind of a secret to a lot of people is a huge asset to the space, and there aren't a lot of those up and down Division Street, a totally enclosed 60 seat patio.
Opening timing is aimed squarely at the construction window. Look for The Richmond Club to be open daily, 4pm to midnight, with the team really hoping for July.
Then and now on your block
If you moved to Richmond three years ago, the map of who owns what on this stretch has quietly rearranged. Here's the shorthand version:
| Address | Was | Is or will be |
|---|---|---|
| 3203 SE Division | The Richmond Bar (closed Oct 17, 2025) | The Richmond Club (projected July 2026) |
| 1216 SE Division | Apex Bar space | Nevermind, open since fall 2025 |
| SE, near Division corridor | (new build) | Pizza Thief, opened Dec 12, 2025 |
Nevermind is worth a stop if you haven't been yet. Nevermind is open, and after many months of anticipation, the new bar Nevermind in the old Apex Bar space is finally open, with an official opening night. Pizza Thief on the SE side of town is another recent addition, per Bridgetown Bites' running list, which shows Pizza Thief (SE) opened December 12, 2025.
Three new drinking-and-eating rooms inside 18 months, on and around one boulevard. That's the baseline against which the summer construction should be measured.
Why operators are opening into a construction summer
A reasonable question: why would an experienced operator sign a lease and target a July opening on a street that PBOT is going to tear up in July?
The likely answer sits in a public dataset most residents will never open. After PBOT finished its Outer Division safety build farther east, the bureau ran an economic review at the request of APANO's Jade District program. These inputs informed high-level findings that after construction, local business openings on SE Division Street showed strong growth, doubling between the third quarters of 2022 and 2023, with the increase in new business registrations at 104%, compared to 126% in the rest of Portland.
Read that carefully. New business formation on Outer Division roughly kept pace with the rest of the city after a much more disruptive multi-year rebuild than the 10-week repave scheduled for the inner corridor. That's the pattern Casto is opening into. It's also consistent with what he said about location choice. "Ultimately, I'm interested in the success of this space and in this neighborhood being an awesome place to live and hang out," he said, "I'm excited to open another space that is a part of the neighborhood that I live in and hopefully it will be a positive addition to it."
There's a second signal in the same corridor. Gusikoff and co-owner Nate Tilden closed The Richmond Bar in November 2025 and sold the business to Daniel Casto, owner of Double Dragon. The operators who left didn't leave the industry. The upcoming bar Lucille is set to open in June or July 2026, opening in the evenings, from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. The Richmond Bar's original team is opening a sister to their Multnomah Village bar. The Richmond space itself is being kept by someone who lives four blocks away. Nobody with skin in this corridor is leaving it.
A resident's playbook for the 10 weeks
If you already own or rent on these blocks, the practical questions are small and near-term. A short list:
- Plan for weekend closures at Cesar Chavez. That's the intersection PBOT flagged for a full weekend shutdown. If you use it as a car route to Trader Joe's or Ladd's Addition, map an alternate through SE 26th or SE 39th before the first weekend hits.
- Expect three weeks of slow going at 50th. Partial closures with 24-hour flagging means the intersection will move, but not on any predictable cadence.
- Bike lanes will be affected. Any weekday segment under active repaving is one-way for cars, which means the bike lane on that block is likely gone or shifted for the duration of that segment.
- Assume patios stay open. The Richmond Club's 60-seat enclosed patio and Nevermind's back space are both set back from the roadway. Construction dust is real, but service doesn't stop.
- Bus riders should check TriMet reroutes. The Division corridor carries Line 2 and the FX2 Division Transit line, and PBOT typically coordinates temporary stop moves during phased work.
The through-line for a Richmond household is this: the disruption is finite, phased in three-block chunks, and it lands the same summer the neighborhood's most-watched new bar is trying to open its doors. That's the story that isn't in any of the coverage lists. The block is turning over its operators and its pavement in the same window, and the people making the biggest bets on Richmond in 2026 are the ones who already live here.
If you're a Richmond homeowner thinking about how corridor construction, tenancy turnover, and new operator investment shape what your block looks like a year from now, that's a conversation worth having with someone tracking the market at street level. Devin Arthurs works one-to-one with Richmond buyers and sellers and can walk through what the current cycle on Division means for your specific block. Schedule a free market consultation to talk it through.
