No one passes by Hippo Hardware & Trading Co. on Portland’s busy East Burnside Street without taking a second look. Exterior columns are adorned in inviting hippo motifs. Signs in the window tease “Sorry We’re High,” and regulars remember the time pranksters in 2002’s “Jackass: The Movie” entered the three-story building and were forced to buy a 1940s green toilet they sullied for a scene.

But fewer people are buying the store’s vintage items, dating from the 1860s to the 1960s, said owner Steven Miller, and the doors of the business he started almost a half century ago may have to close.

COVID-19, business competition and lackluster interest are to blame, he said, along with rising costs of rent, utilities and labor. He said his 10 employees give their heart and soul and deserve a living wage and benefits.

Moving to a space smaller than the 30,000 square feet he has now won’t work since he has too much inventory, most of it irreplaceable light fixtures, plumbing, hardware and doors — what the store’s website calls “trinkets, whatnots, and whoziwhatsits.”

He moved once before, in 1990, from side-by-side buildings on Southeast 12th Avenue to the corner building where he is now, at 1040 E. Burnside St. That took 18 months. Miller, 75, said Sunday he won’t move again.

Instead, he invites film crews to pay him to use one-of-a-kind objects like a bin of rusty nails or an eerie-looking front door, as seen in the “Grimm” TV series. Bands can use the store as a backdrop as some have in the past, and design influencers can show off how a Victorian faucet could be the centerpiece of a powder room.

Or something. What Hippo Hardware needs most is a business person, said Miller.

If Hippo Hardware closes, Portland’s history goes away, said Michael Beardsley of Southwest Portland, whose family owned John Beardsley Building Development. He found vintage parts needed to help restore Portland’s 1872 New Market Building, 1906 B&O Warehouse and the 1881 Tillamook Lighthouse, among other projects.

“Steven saved pieces of Portland’s architectural history” and made them available for owners and restorers to maintain historic homes and buildings, “giving them renewed life and purpose,” said Beardsley.

He added that Hippo Hardware is a business and a museum, “a looking-glass into our past and a parts bin for future preservation.”

On Aug. 17, Miller posted on Facebook: “It seems like more of our favorite stores are closing by the day, and we are gutted. It can take just one bad year to be added to that list, and we’re having a bad year.”

He asked people to buy a Hippo Hardware T-shirt. The shirts sold out.

He also asked people to “tell a friend. Write a review. Post a photo or a memory.”