Walk down A Avenue this month and you'll find the storefront at number 37 dark, a sign taped in the window explaining the obvious in the vaguest possible terms. Closed for renovations. No date. No contractor's name. No hint of what comes next. For a shop that has scooped ice cream and flipped burgers in downtown Lake Oswego since 1985, that kind of silence reads differently than it would for a business two years old.
Most people walking by already know the backstory, because it played out in public over the span of a single week in September. What they don't know yet is what the sign is actually standing in for.
Two Days in September
On September 1, owner Stan Prentice told his staff at the Lake Oswego Creamery that rising costs meant he'd need to close. Two employees, Jazmine Sullivan and Amanda Ulam, didn't want to let that be the ending. They launched a GoFundMe with a goal of $50,000 to buy the business outright and keep it running under new ownership.
Ulam, who has spent summers watching Lake Oswego students work their first jobs behind that counter, put the stakes plainly to the Lake Oswego Review: "We just have our regulars we absolutely love, so we want to keep it open." She described customers who'd been coming since childhood now bringing their own kids in for the same booth, the same menu, the same soft serve.
Forty-one years is long enough that a place like this stops being a business in the ordinary sense and starts being a landmark people locate other things by. That's usually what a GoFundMe for a beloved local spot is betting on: that enough people who grew up on its ice cream will chip in enough dollars to buy it a future.
This one didn't get the chance to prove or disprove that bet. By September 3, just two days later, Sullivan and Ulam announced they were refunding every donation and ending the campaign. Their statement, posted to social media and reported by Your Oregon News, didn't blame the community. It thanked them, and then closed the door: "Regrettably, it has become evident that this dream is not within our grasp." The same day, the shop's doors closed too, with that "closed for renovations" sign going up almost immediately after.
The Number That Wasn't the Real Obstacle
Here's the thing about $50,000 raised through small local donations. It's a meaningful vote of confidence. It is not, in most cases, a purchase price for a restaurant, its lease, its equipment, and the working capital to run it through a slow winter. A goal that size was never going to be the whole transaction. It was seed money, a down payment on credibility more than a down payment on the business itself.
So when the campaign folded within two days, the fastest explanation isn't that Lake Oswego didn't care enough. It's that the gap between what community goodwill can raise quickly and what it actually costs to take over an operating restaurant in this town right now is wider than a GoFundMe page can close.
That gap has a visible shape if you look at what's happened to commercial real estate a few blocks away. In January 2025, Oswego Village, the retail center at 11 S. State Street anchored by Whole Foods 365 and Next Level Burger, sold to the Canadian firm Sagard Real Estate for $44 million. The seller, Asana Partners, had paid close to $34 million for the same property in 2018, according to reporting on the sale. That's roughly 29 percent appreciation on one downtown-adjacent commercial property in about seven years, on top of a comprehensive renovation the seller had already funded.
That single sale doesn't set the rent at 37 A Avenue. But it's a useful marker of where commercial property values in Lake Oswego's core have been heading, and it helps explain why "rising costs" isn't a vague complaint from a single owner. It's the environment every small operator downtown is running a business inside of, whether they own their building or lease it. A diner and ice cream counter runs on thin margins by design. A downtown that keeps getting more valuable as real estate doesn't automatically get easier for that kind of business to survive in. Often it gets harder, because the math around the space itself keeps changing under a menu of five-dollar scoops.
Reading the Sign Correctly
"Closed for renovations" is a phrase businesses reach for constantly, and it isn't necessarily misleading. Sometimes it's true in the most literal sense. But when it goes up on the same day a very public sale attempt just collapsed, and the outgoing employees say plainly they're "not authorized to speak on behalf of the current owner," the sign is doing a different job. It's holding a placeholder over a question nobody involved has answered yet: what happens to this building, this lease, this name, next.
That's not a knock on anyone involved. Prentice hasn't said he's selling to someone else, walking away entirely, or reopening under his own management once whatever renovation is or isn't happening wraps up. Sullivan and Ulam have said, explicitly, that they can't speak for him. The honest state of things right now is that nobody outside that ownership conversation actually knows, and a sign in a window isn't required to resolve uncertainty. It's just required to explain why the lights are off.
What the past two weeks did make visible is something about downtown Lake Oswego that's easy to miss when everything's open and the sidewalks smell like waffle cones in July. A shop generations of families treat as a fixture doesn't run on nostalgia. It runs on a lease, a staff schedule, and margins thin enough that a jump in costs can turn a forty-one-year run into an open question within two days. The same downtown that makes this a place people want to raise kids in is also getting more expensive to operate a small business inside of, and those two facts sit right next to each other on the same block.
What Comes Next Is Still Unwritten
Nobody at this point can honestly tell you whether the Lake Oswego Creamery reopens under Prentice, changes hands quietly to someone else, or becomes something else entirely at 37 A Avenue. What's clear is that the sign in the window is standing in for a decision that hasn't been made public yet, and that the speed of this particular collapse says more about commercial real estate pressure downtown than it does about how much this town loves its ice cream shop.
If you've lived here long enough to remember your own first summer job on that side of A Avenue, you'll be watching that storefront as closely as anyone. And if the last two weeks have you thinking more broadly about what's shifting in downtown Lake Oswego, or about your own plans in a market where property values keep moving even on the blocks that feel most unchanged, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this town closely. Lisa Hanna Properties has spent more than three decades doing exactly that. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's actually happening in this market, block by block.
