EUGENE, Ore. — As a boy in the late 1950s, Terry McDonald watched as workers built an 80,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in an industrial neighborhood on the west side of Eugene.
Long after childhood, McDonald felt an affinity for the factory, where American Steel once fabricated heavy-duty logging equipment until the timber industry waned in Oregon.
Now, as the executive director of the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul, McDonald has made a career of turning other people's castoff goods into cash to support low-income housing and the charity's other anti-poverty initiatives. He easily imagined a creative reuse for the midcentury factory, a space flooded with natural light from paned-glass windows high above the manufacturing floor.
