Portland's Vacant Chuck E. Cheese Turns Into Indoor Pickleball Club

A long-vacant Chuck E. Cheese on Southeast Powell Boulevard is getting a second act as one of Portland’s newest pickleball clubs, a sign that the sport’s growth has reached the point where even dead retail space can become valuable playing space.

Rose City Pickleball is taking over 9120 S.E. Powell Boulevard, near Southeast 92nd Avenue, where construction is already underway on a 12,000-square-foot indoor club with five courts, a pro shop and a café serving beer and wine. Loan Nguyen, the project manager behind the conversion, said she secured a 10-year lease on the building and hopes to soft-open by mid-July.

The site carries a lot of local memory. It first opened in 1982 as a Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre, then became Portland’s only Chuck E. Cheese before closing in October 2020. After the shutdown, the building sat empty for six years, later tagged with graffiti and left to linger as a visible reminder of how quickly old family-entertainment spaces can lose their purpose.

Nguyen said people have thanked the group for keeping the structure standing instead of tearing it down, and that reaction fits the broader appeal of the project. She owns Takara Sushi in Portland’s Pearl District and said her own path into pickleball began after back pain pushed her away from tennis. That personal detail matters in a city where the sport keeps pulling in players who want a lower-impact game that still feels competitive and social.

The location also lands in a part of Portland where access matters. Portland Parks & Recreation says pickleball is one of the fastest growing sports in the country and notes that it offers many places to play both indoors and outdoors. The bureau also says Southeast Portland has the highest number of tennis courts in the city, while demand for pickleball has grown sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic and is driving planning changes, including possible repurposing at some court sites.

For Portland’s amateur scene, Rose City Pickleball is more than a novelty conversion. It is another sign that the sport is mature enough to fill spaces left behind by older retail, draw traffic back to a once-abandoned corner of the city and give players east of Interstate 205 a dedicated indoor option when court time is hard to find.