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Portland

By Daniel Leventhal | Published July 3, 2022

The Northwest – Portland

This is the second-to-last post in the Pacific Northwest series.  We will visit together the City of Roses:  Portland, Oregon.

Most of these photos are from the epic 2015 Washington-to-Oregon-to-California drive, but there are also a few from some even earlier walkabouts in Portland during prior visits.  You can tell which ones are from these other visits – I had better luck with the fickle Oregon weather, and the sun was shining a bit more! 

We’ll start out in the historic center city at the South Park Blocks which are a very pleasant 12-block greenspace (and city park) stretching north from the campus of Portland State University.  In the latter part of the 19th century the South Park Blocks had become an elegant and prestigious residential district lined with mansions and churches. Today, besides being the home of Portland State it is part of the city’s Culture District.  It borders the Portland Art Museum and the Oregon Historical Society and is close to the city’s Concert Hall.

There’s a lot of public art in the park.   Shemanski Fountain (also known as Rebecca at the Well) dates back to 1926.  Until very recently two handsome statues, one of US President (Theodore) Roosevelt on a horse (1922), and one of US President Lincoln (1927), were also situated in the South Park Blocks; I include some photos in the set. Don’t look for them on a walk through the South Park Blocks now. They were both toppled in riots in October 2020.  The damaged statues are no longer in the park and (last I checked) their fate is still undetermined. 

I started this blog out in 2016 driving the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first coast-to-coast highway which was named after Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. For me he is one of the greatest presidents in US history. Statues honoring Lincoln abounded in the public spaces of the cities and towns I visited as I drove that historic road through America’s heartland.  Sadly, here it is six years later as I wind down this travel blog, and I am writing about a city in which a Lincoln statue has been ignominiously vandalized and then removed and seemingly banished by the authorities – the last thing I found on this is that in 2021 Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council board approved a recommendation not to restore the Lincoln and Roosevelt statues to the South Park Blocks and has made no decision as to what happens to them and other historic public art removed from Portland public spaces (including a statue of the first US President, George Washington) that apparently does not conform to 21st century sensibilities. What a crazy world these days – it’s all a little hard for me to process.

I digress, as I am wont to do. Back to our Portland tour. There’s a lot of surviving historic architecture in Portland’s compact downtown, as you will see in the set below – even some fine art deco, and readers of this blog know by now how much I like deco. Readers have surely also figured out that I like historic movie theaters, and there are plenty of those in Portland, too.

The Willamette River cuts through Portland (bisecting the city into east and west sides), with a river walkway by some very historic bridges, among other things.

No visit to Portland is complete without a stop at legendary Powell’s Books which claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.  Fittingly, on my visit to Powell’s in 2015 I bought a copy of William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 classic, Blue Highways.

There are some very attractive residential neighborhoods in the city.  I especially liked the Ladd’s Addition Historic District, in southeast Portland, and have included several photos from a walk around that lovely neighborhood with my friends.  No shortage of roses around there!

Next and final post for this series and the blog:  the Oregon coast to California.

In the meantime, please join me exploring Portland.

To those of you celebrating, have a great Fourth of July holiday.  Happy birthday, America!

Click on (or tap) an image to expand it (and use the arrow to the right on an expanded image to go through the set, if preferred over scrolling down in the post).