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Laid Back City Slickers

By: Steven Rinella

If Portland, Oregon wasn't such a cool and vibrant town, large portions of the population might face treatment for dual-personality disorder. While the half-million residents of Portland live in an unmistakably urban landscape, they for the most part renounce the city-lifestyle that goes with it. Portland is Oregon's largest city and a bustling Mecca for the Northwest's business and art scenes, but walking around town you'd swear the place is inhabited solely by sandal-and-fleece-clad granolas with large, friendly dogs and a daily schedule that includes little more than a long walk in the hills outside town followed by a evening bike ride around town to sample some local micro-brews. The Portland urbanites' embracing of all things back-to-nature is noble, too, when you consider that the forces of nature nearly stopped Portland in its tracks on May 18, 1980, when Mt. St. Helens erupted to the north and buried the city in a heap of volcanic ash. Undeterred by this inconvenience the city has grown steadily ever since, all the while maintaining a natural, easy-going aesthetic that seems to beg apology for being a city at all.

Portland's easy, contemplative pace is nurtured in large part by some awesome city planning and visionary state governing. Oregon was the first state to enact a bottle deposit bill and, in the 1970s, legislators took action to guarantee that property owners cannot infringe the public's access to beaches. In another move to enhance the lives of the citizenry, Portland enacted a 1% tax on all building in the city to go toward public arts projects. Portland also harbors the largest and smallest parks enclosed in any United States city. The smallest is only about two feet long, the creation of a journalist who wanted a little patch of green outside his office window. Now a park, the green patch is roped off between two pillars. In all, the city has 37,000 acres of parks, which are operated by 25 different government agencies.

Portland sits 75 miles inland from the Oregon coast, 637 miles north of San Francisco and 172 miles south of Seattle. The Columbia River flows just north of the city and the Willamette River runs right through downtown. Portland is made up of five districts; the city is divided north and south by Burnside Street, east and west by the Willamette River. Williams Avenue cuts off the northeast corner, which is a district known simply as "North." The Southwest district is the city's hub, encompassing the downtown area. The heart of the hub is a downtown mall area that is closed to traffic, a nice touch that will hopefully be the future of most American cities. The Northwest district includes much of historical Old Town and is also where most of the students enrolled in Portland's several universities and colleges live. Folks craving the radical, hip, or avant-garde elements of urban living can find what they're looking for along the back streets of this district. The Southeast district is a less well-to-do residential neighborhood. The best ethnic food in the city can be found along the main roads, and older, smaller homes line the side streets. The North and Northeast are chiefly residential with a scattering of small, quiet parks.


Portland is home to one of the nation's best public transportation systems, the Tri-Met bus system. It weaves together the five districts with an easy-to-use, inexpensive operation that makes leaving your car outside town a must. As far as accommodations go, as Portland becomes more gentrified the prices of everything go up. There are still some cheaper downtown hotels if you can get a room, but fancy, high-dollar hotels are the norm in the city.

Food is where you find it, meaning that you can't tell much about the quality of the vittles by the neighborhood you find them in. Some of the best food, ethnic and otherwise, might just be housed in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant next to a secondhand store. Portland's access to nearby fresh fish markets makes it a good bet for seafood. And many of the bars and taverns have serviceable grub, too.

Portland has about anything you'd find in a city twice its size, but they have something you won't find in any other city in America: The country's largest bookstore, Powell's Books. New or used, if Powell's doesn't have it you can assume that nobody's written it yet.

Portland's Sight-seeing, historical, and general-things-of-interest opportunities are too numerous to cover at all efficiently. Just a brief perusal would have to include the Portland Art Museum, which has a great exhibit of Pacific Northwest Native American art. The Oregon Historical Society Museum and Library stores photographs, artifacts, and records of Oregon's past 200 years. Four separate theaters make up the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. The largest, the Civic Auditorium, is a 3,000-seat, modern, glass fronted building that puts on performances in opera, ballet, and occasional jazz and folk concerts. Old Town used to be the destination of choice for drunken sailors and rabble-rousers visiting from distant lands, but now provides a little more mellow eating and shopping scene. And the Northwest Film and Video Center screens classic and off-beat flicks, a nice refreshment from the commercial, unintelligent, "blockbuster" slop that is showing every night on every town's main street.

And the list goes on. Whatever you want to find you probably won't have a hard time. It's a city of great possibilities, allowing its residents to have the best of urban living while dressed like they're spending the weekend at a Rocky Mountain ski resort. So dress down and hit the town.

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