It was 2002 and Kelsey Bunker was looking for a project. She was a newly divorced stay-at-home mom who, in her words, “had to get back to work.” She’d studied to become a lawyer, but wasn’t eager to step back into the courtroom. A friend, the real estate broker and developer Tod Breslau, had an idea that sounded more fun. What if they rehabbed a downtrodden motel on East Burnside? They imagined something relatively inexpensive yet modern, Portland’s answer to the Standard on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip or the Phoenix Hotel, a revamped motor lodge next to San Francisco’s famed Fillmore music venue. Bunker was no hotelier, but figured she’d hire experts along the way, as a lawyer might. The DIY spirit of possibility many Portlanders look back on wistfully was in full bloom. A wave of hotels designed around an indie-rock moment was mounting, hotels designed to reflect and appeal as much to locals as they did tourists. “The idea of opening a hotel seemed easy at the time,” she says. “I was completely naive.”

Yet Bunker and Breslau managed, and their Jupiter hotel opened in October of 2004 (Breslau sold Bunker his equity in the company in 2021). Over the past 20 years, it’s become a fixture of the rapidly changing lower Burnside neighborhood, one that witnessed, participated in, and often facilitated its shift from a strip of by-the-hour motels into “LoBu.” Mercifully, that trendy moniker went out of fashion with the term “hipster,” but the neighborhood has continued to ride the zeitgeist. More cultural force than lodging accommodation, the Jupiter cast an atmospheric spell only a certain breed of hotel can conjure over the scene. It brought clientele to nearby restaurants, retail shops, and performance venues, all the while shaping its own identity around its influential neighbors.

To mark the Jupiter’s 20th anniversary, Bunker is throwing a free block party from 1 to 6:30pm September 28, complete with music and food from Portland legends. But more than that, the party is something of a microcosm of the Jupiter’s past two decades, celebrating the ways the community it helped cultivate transformed the neighborhood—and the city—into a cultural destination.

Blitzen Trapper, the Portland band founded in 2000 (they were called Garmonbozia till 2003), played innumerable shows at the hotel’s former partner music venue, the Doug Fir; and the band will return to East Burnside to headline a day-long lineup of five bands playing on an outdoor stage, including local favorite DJ Anjali & the Incredible Kid. MidCity SmashedBurger and Straightaway Cocktails will park around the stage, on a closed off stretch of Ninth Avenue. And the social collective Let’s Be Friends is hosting 30 vendors for a BIPOC makers and artists market, filling the entire second floor of Next, the Jupiter’s sibling hotel across the street.

Countless factors affect a neighborhood’s cultural tides. But good luck convincing any 2004 Portlander worth their Chrome bag that the city’s most widely renowned restaurants would eventually set up within a few blocks of this spruced-up motor lodge. Union Jacks, the longstanding strip club half a block east, may have been the area’s biggest landmark. When Bunker applied for a liquor license in 2004, the OLCC balked: “The police have been out there 89 of the last 91 days,” they told her. The Jupiter’s predecessor, the Continental, was the center of a very different scene. Infamously filled with narcotics, it was also the site of a murder in the late ’80s that put an exclamation point on the block’s heavy crime rate; it was one of five murders at the Continental in the 1980s.

The Jupiter is of course not solely responsible for creating the hotbed that “LoBu” has become. But it’s more than a witness. In line with the hotels in other cities that made up their mood board, Bunker and Breslau wanted to create a piece of the existing scene that Portlanders would actually go to, not just a fancy hotel for out-of-towners. In a very ad hoc fashion, that’s exactly what they did. After hosting a gay softball team’s party in the mid-2000s, word got around to the larger queer community, and the Jupiter began to show up on lists of gay-friendly hotels. They also put on short-lived but influential events in the aughts, like the art fair Affair and the food festival Indulge. As a so-called incubator, it hosted a tattoo parlor, a modeling agency, and Spartacus sex toys for extended pop-ups. And who was booking rooms? Less “young professionals than emerging indie-rock ingénues,” the New York Times wrote in a 2005 review. All of this was possible, Bunker says, because her hotel has remained independent: “We can—I—can make those decisions on a case-by-case basis.”

That agility goes both ways: the Jupiter has proven just as capable of hosting A-list celebrities as throwing scrappy local events. Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg (separately, though who knows?) have reportedly “partied” at the Jupiter. “I do remember when Jenna Bush [Hager, the former first daughter] was there,” Bunker says. “Because, you know, Secret Service.”

After the Jupiter opened, the neighborhood slowly began to change; esteemed neighbors trickled in. A humble bistro helmed by an untested 25-year-old chef—Le Pigeon—opened in 2006. Rontoms opened the same year, giving the cooks somewhere to hang out after work. Noble Rot moved to its iconic rooftop perch two years later. Beloved Thai food cart Nong’s Khao Man Gai opened its chicken and rice brick-and-mortar on the block in 2014. Four years after that, Hey Love, regularly listed as one of the best bars in the country, opened within the Jupiter Next when Bunker and Breslau expanded across the street, the same year Le Pigeon opened its sister wine bar, Canard. What else? Kann, Jackie’s, Scotch Lodge, and most recently, Soho House.

Before the Jupiter flipped the Continental, hotels of its caliber were relegated to the West Side. But notably, in terms of modern cultural cachet, there wasn’t much at all: the Ace didn’t open in Portland until 2006; the Hoxton and KEX were both more than a decade later.

The Jupiter carried its malleable posture into the pandemic, partnering with Le Pigeon to serve socially distanced tasting menus as room service and collaborating with the county to temporarily contract out rooms to combat the housing crisis. “We’ve done everything,” Bunker says, “bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, graduation parties, bachelorette parties, wakes, proms, weddings, funerals.” What the gritty-luxe duality the Jupiter and its mod sibling, Next, have achieved isn’t the first thought the phrase “boutique hotel” conjures. But the modest scale and human touch it entails, Bunker says, is what’s kept her operation something of a people’s hotel. “A lot of what we do is for the human person,” she says, “the normal person.”