pictures.

Over the last few weeks I photographed the closing of Hannah Bea’s Poundcake & More. It was a honor and a joy to spend time with Miss Anita and Saan and a surreal moment to watch a father and daughter say grace over the last meal ever served at the restaurant - ending a chapter in community history. Thank you for looking.

The last customers left three hours earlier and the clock read 11 p.m., yet Anita Smith still bustled around the kitchen doing what she does best.

Smith, owner of Hannah Bea’s Poundcake & More, was baking a few last rounds of her famed pastry before she closed for good. She was cooking all the ingredients she had left, cooking everything she wouldn’t be able to carry off with her.

As she worked, Smith bemoaned the fate of the business named after her mother and former mother-in-law, a neighborhood spot that fell victim to Oregon’s faltering economy, Portland’s black diaspora and her own lack of business acumen.

Smith had ambitious and even noble plans when she opened almost seven years ago. She would build a soul food place that catered to people of all colors. She would bridge the gap between old and new Portland. She would make a profit and a difference.

Instead, she owes taxpayers $143,000 — money they may never get back.

The rise and fall of Hannah Bea’s, a saga that ended July 3 after several weeks of advance mourning, last-minute strategizing and frenzied late-night baking, shows just how tough it is to balance Oregon’s past and future on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

read the rest of Anna Griffin’s story