A luxury apartment investment by the Bronaugh family was perfectly timed. The Italianate-style Bronaugh Apartments were built in 1905, right as Portland's population boomed. Today, the three brick buildings are owned by

, a nonprofit, affordable housing development and management company.

--Janet Eastman | 503-799-8739

jeastman@oregonian.com

Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

A spacious, new form of multifamily dwellings, called

showed up in Portland a year before the city's biggest promotional campaign, the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Millions of people, lured by Portland's months-long 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, saw the newly spruced-up city and many decided to stay, causing an unprecedented need for housing.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

One of the city's first apartment complexes survives: The Bronaugh Apartments buildings were designed in 1905 in the Italianate style at Southwest Morrison Street and Southwest 15th Avenue.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Bronaugh Apartments in Goose Hollow were built as an investment for Araminta Payne Bronaugh, the wife of Judge Earl Clapp Bronaugh (seen here in a 1939 press photo).

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The buildings at 1424 and 1434 S.W. Morrison St. and 716 S.W. 15th Ave. replaced two Bronaugh family's homes. The family was prominent in Portland social circles for generations. This 1959 photo shows Mr. and Mrs. George E. Bronaugh (left) at the Empress Golf Tourney with Mrs. S.A. Leahigh.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The family's investment in multifamily housing in 1905 paid off. The city enjoyed an economic boom and the population exploded from 90,000 in 1900 to nearly 250,000 in 1910.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Three generations of the Bronaugh family owned the apartments for a half century, except during the troublesome years between 1926 and 1929.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The three, brick masonry buildings have three floors. Originally, there were two long, luxury apartments on each floor.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Bay windows were supported by brackets or fluted Corinthian columns.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Balconies and exterior fire escapes were created with elaborate iron railings.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Records don't reveal the architect or designer, but James Isaac Marshall was the builder.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The property is listed on the

under the Hyland, Olive and Ellsworth apartments, which are the names of the three, tight clustered, almost identical buildings.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

During the Depression, the once-spacious elongated "railroad flats" were subdivided into 83 smaller units.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Architect Carl H. Wallwork re-designed the buildings to create almost five times more apartments, but he retained as much of the woodwork and the main halls as possible.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Skylights draw natural light into the stairways.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Bronaugh Apartments, one of Portland's first apartment houses, has been refurbished into modern, subsidized-rent housing.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Formal rooms once had egg-and-dart decorative trim as still seen today in the Pittock Mansion. But at the apartments, the plaster fleur-de-lis patterns and other ornamentation might have come from catalog-ordered molds.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Bronaugh is owned by REACH, a nonprofit affordable housing development and property management company that started in 1982.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Bronaugh is a subsidized apartment building and home to low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Rents might range from $753 to $896, however, resident rents are based on income and generally may not exceed 30 percent of a household's adjusted monthly income. Any remainder costs associated to the rent is supported by the subsidy.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

There are specific eligibility criteria to live in these buildings, including a wait list to contact when there is a vacancy.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Renovations to the buildings, which have studio and one-bedroom apartments, included seismic upgrades.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Bathrooms have accessible features such as roll-in showers, handheld shower heads and grab bars.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Some bathroom have shower-tub combinations.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Original stained-glass windows have been lost over time.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Portland's early 1900s "apartment houses" offered trophy addresses and luxe amenities to a surge of discerning urban dwellers.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The downtown Bronaugh Apartments are close to Pioneer Courthouse Square and MAX trains.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Read more about the historic Bronaugh Apartments listed the

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

See more of Portland's most beautiful apartment buildings: Wander through this gallery of important and surviving apartment buildings that rose from the pre-1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition days until the Depression. The photo is of the lion that guards the 1922 Ambassador Apartments at 1200 S.W. 6th Ave.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Read more: Learn why the East Coast idea of luxury living in a classically designed building caught on here in "The Apartment House in Portland, Oregon" by Ed Teague, director of branch libraries at the University of Oregon. This is the Tudor Revival-style Ambassador Apartment, which was built downtown in 1922.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Check out this other historic building: Northwest Portland's 1911 Trinity Place Apartments at 117 N.W. Trinity Place were designed by architect William C. Knighton of Knighton & Root in the the Tudor Revival style. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Walter W. McMonies, who owns the Trinity Place Apartments, says many of Portland's classic apartment houses survived the "indifference" of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and were revived In the 1980s by investor developers.

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Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Here's another one of Portland's beautiful historic apartment buildings: The 1909 Admiral Apartments began as a luxury multifamily building on the fashionable South Park Blocks. After decades of decline, it was revived and converted into subsidized housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities who enjoy living in the Portland Cultural District. Apartments are small, but so are the rents.