Amid the strip malls and used car lots along SE 82nd, one big building, now home to Super King Buffet, looks out of place: glass walls stretching tens of feet tall, ceilings sharply sloping in different directions. Turns out these glass add-ons, designed by none other than Pioneer Square architect Willard K. Martin, were once home to a massive Wurlitzer pipe organ, which provided the live soundtrack for what some believe was once the world’s highest-volume pizzeria.
That restaurant was called Organ Grinder Pizza, and it holds fond memories for many Portlanders whose childhood years coincided with the business’s operation from 1973 to 1996. It was a prime location for kids’ birthday parties, with live organ performances of the Star Wars theme song, bubbles that would float down from the ceiling, a mechanical monkey, and even live monkeys (one with a particular penchant for cannabis) toward the beginning of the Organ Grinder’s tenure.
So why is a pizzeria that’s been closed for thirty years making news now? For three years, local filmmaker and organist Bob Richardson, who grew up going to the Organ Grinder, has been working on a full-length documentary about the restaurant called Pipe Dreams and Pizza Crusts. He expects to finish editing this summer and hopes to release the documentary as early as this fall—preferably premiering in a theater with a pipe organ.
“This is month 28 of production of what was supposed to be a weekend project,” says Richardson. But with each interview—he’s done 82 so far—new angles came to light.
“This whole story unraveled all these amazing connections to other things around Portland, to Hollywood celebrities, property in Hawaii, you name it,” says Richardson. “And the film evolved into not just talking about one restaurant, but an entire nationwide cultural phenomenon in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, because there were at one time over 100 of these restaurants, all created by different owners. Only three remain today in the world.”
The Mercury sat down with Richardson to talk about his upcoming film. (Comments have been lightly edited for length.)
MERCURY: So how was the pizza at the Organ Grinder?
RICHARDSON: That is the most polarizing question I ask people. For a lot of people it depends—were you having a good time or not? And we associate food with positive memories. But it also depends a lot on when you went there. In their heyday, they served over 1,000 pies a day. They were the largest pizza joint in the world. And even though they had the largest pizza oven around, which they brought in from Europe, they couldn’t keep up, so they started bringing in frozen pizza dough. It never lost that reputation from the ’70s of the food not being so great.
What made the Organ Grinder such a big deal at the time?
They were kind of the first family restaurant you could take your kids to where if your kids ran around and were loud, it wasn’t a big deal. It was before there was Chuck E. Cheese and Malibu Grand Prix and other places to just let your kids run wild. So they were hugely popular with families.
You mentioned something about a pot-smoking monkey. Tell us more.
Here’s your Mercury exclusive—there will be a tale of a pot-smoking monkey in the film. I interviewed the Organ Grinder’s monkey handler, who was sent to rescue this monkey who had come from an abusive home and was very traumatized and violent. The place smelled very strongly of marijuana. So she got the idea that maybe this monkey would calm down if it had a hit or two. She says she obtained this joint from a friend, she did not personally smoke marijuana, and she would take it into her mouth, and then she would puff it into the monkey’s face. And then after a few puffs, it calmed down. And after a while, it even came out of his cage and into her arms and let her bond with it.
The monkey eventually was comfortable enough to go with Vicki to greet customers in the vestibule in front of the restaurant. This monkey could smell pot on a customer from a mile away, and one time it ran up and grabbed somebody’s bag of weed out of his pocket, then ran into the restaurant, and they had to chase it around and bribe it with a piece of pizza to get it to hand the weed back.
I said, ‘Did you give it back to the customer and seat them? Or did you send them on their way, pot being illegal?’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, we gave him his weed back and we seated him. Of course.’
You also mentioned some of the Organ Grinder owners were pretty flashy back in the restaurant’s heyday.
The money people behind the Organ Grinder were the Forchuk brothers, Paul and Jerry. The Forchuks had this vacation house in Hawaii at Black Point, and Paul liked to entertain. That house got used by famous people, including Burt Reynolds and Carol Burnett.
Jerry was somewhat eccentric, and he liked to collect Rolls-Royces and was a helicopter pilot. He would even land his helicopter at the restaurant and pick up people there for tours of Mount St. Helens. He would land his seaplane at Rooster Rock and give joy rides to nude sunbathers.
The Forchuks also started Earthquake Ethel’s in Beaverton, which was the largest disco north of San Francisco and west of the Mississippi. They were just as packed as the Organ Grinder. They had to install sound dampening technology around the building because they would simulate an earthquake with their sound system a few times a night. The screens would drop down and show disaster movie footage, and they had transducers under all the tables so the tables would shake with thumping bass, and your drink would go sliding along.
Why did the Organ Grinder close?
You’ve got what I call the rise of the robots: the Chuck E. Cheeses and ShowBiz Pizzas with their animatronic entertainment. And it’s kind of ironic because the theater pipe organ itself was originally created as a labor saving device, where you would replace an orchestra with one musician, and now the one performer is being replaced by robots. And then you have video arcades, you have home video gaming, you have Malibu Grand Prix or Bullwinkle’s with the go-karts.
The Chuck E. Cheese franchise at the time was out on the west side, so it wasn’t directly competing with the Oregon Grinder. But then the franchise owner won the largest Megabucks jackpot in Oregon history at that time, and rather than retiring or going to Europe, he decided to open a bunch more Chuck E. Cheeses, including one within a mile of the Organ Grinder.
Also, transportation and land use changes. When the I-205 freeway opened, all of the evening commuter traffic that used to be on 82nd Avenue shifted over to the freeway. And so the eyeballs seeing the restaurant and going “I should take the kids there tonight” just went away because you’re driving home on the freeway.
What’s the state of pipe organs like today? Some of the pipe organs in Portland, like at the Hollywood Theatre and the Oaks Park skating rink, are turning 100.
There has been death and destruction all around. It’s gonna be a recurring theme in the movie. The best place to go and see one was Cleveland High School, but that building is slated for demolition this summer, and the organ came out over spring break. One person I interviewed looked right at the camera and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you bluntly, it’s not a dying art form. It is a dead art form.’ But then he went on to basically say that means we get to remake it however we want.
One of my interviewees is with a popular YouTuber in England named Sam Battle. He’s got close to a million subscribers now; it’s called Look Mum No Computer. He would design synthesizers, and he would do wild things like animating Teletubbies and making a Torture Me Elmo. He fell into having a pipe organ that was basically being thrown away, and he knew absolutely nothing about organs, but he got a couple of million views fixing it up. It does all kinds of wild things, where you can play it over the internet, you can hook it up to synthesizers, you can smoke through it.
But people have learned from his videos that these things are basically free when they’re getting demolished, and hey, I could tinker with one in my garage. So there might be a whole new generation just thanks to him.
I think there’s a hunger now for things that are real, that are not AI, that you get your hands on, you know? Everything from the popularity of vinyl records to people fixing up old pinball machines. There’s really a hunger for the analog.
Pipe Dreams and Pizza Crusts is expected to release fall 2026-spring 2027. Check out related videos and more information at pipedreamsfilm.com.