Sunday strolling around sunny Portland

 

Sunday 1 June 2025

We had an early start in order to meet for a walking tour to discover Portland - always a good orientation - and to our surprise we were the guide's only clients, so we had a super discursive tour where we could ask lots of questions and he could take us off the usual tour route to show us bonus interesting locations. Leo was a really nice anti-Trump guy despite the man bun and the slight whiff of BO, and we learned a lot about the city. Plus he took us to a really good French-style bakery called St Honore to get coffee before we started.

Some architectural stuff. Portland is notable for its relatively short blocks - this was a wheeze by the city's planners in order to sell more valuable corner properties. Its nickname is Stumptown, after the number of stumps left after trees werre felled to make way for buildings, and the wide sidewalks were created in order to allow ladies wearing hooped skirts to promenade without incident. In the late 1960s, the Clear Vistas initiative capped the height of buildings (there are far fewer skyscrapers than say Seattle) and deemed that people should be able to have an uninterrupted view of five blocks in any direction. This is helped by many of the buildings having white terracotta fascias, though Portland also has a lot of buildings featuring decorative cast iron mouldings (second only to NYC), which apparently you could buy easily and cheaply by mail order in the early years of the last century when much of the city was developed. Some of the theatre/cinema buildings are especially attractive, with lots of neon!

One of the most beautiful buildings we visited was the Meier & Frank building - apart from the Muji shop on the ground floor, it's also home to the lovely Nines Hotel. 

Inside, there was some fantastic art, some of it the result of a public art initiative that dictates that for every new development, 1% of costs should be devoted to including public art. The hotel has some cracking pieces, and it also has a lovely rooftop fusion restaurant called Departure, where we ended up eating later that day - pricey, but excellent.

Currently much of the public art in the city is inspired by the annual Rose Festival (it's known as the Rose City). This annual celebration of the fragrant one came about when Portland's kind of First Lady (afraid I forgot to write down her name) set about saving rose varieties via cuttings from Europe, which may otherwise have been extinguished by trench warfare in WW1.

Portland came to prominence as one of the end points of the Oregon Trail, when settlers from the east sought pastures new (literally, land). A fabulous mural on the side of the Historical Society features two explorers who came from St Louis Missouri (to take advantage of something called the Louisianna Purchase) and the young native American woman they recruited as their translator and guide. Sacajewa married York, their black general factotum, and became the first woman in the state of Oregon to vote in 1808. (They're beneath their white masters in the mural below.)

Another prominent woman is Portlandia, who features on the Portland emblem and is the queen of commerce. There's a huge, magnificent modern sculpture of her atop the entrance to the city's administration building. The sculptor, Raymond Kaskey, based her on his wife who was a pro tennis player, and doesn't allow images of her to be reproduced for commercial purposes as he has the copyright - even though public money made her. She's the second largest copper repousse statue in the US, after the Statue of Liberty, and is waxed annually. This makes her bird dropping and weather proof!

Initially Portland contained 10 men to every woman. This made women especially vulnerable to unwanted male attentions in public, so Chapman Park was created as a women-only public space at that time, and even the gingko trees encircling it are the female of the species. There are a number of squares in the city known as parks (though Director park actually doesn't have a single blade of grass present) and Pioneer Square right in the centre is an amphitheatre-style hub for food carts, and is a place where people can meet and hang out, play Connect4 or table tennis, or listen to music. 

It's also a place where homeless people congregate, though not in large groups. As in Seattle, we were rather distressed by the numbers of poor souls wandering around with their entire lives in shopping trolleys, or shouting at no-one in particular as they staggered down the street. Leo assured us that support programmes had been set up, but with mental health and dependency systems being underfunded and too little, too late, the battle was being lost. Certainly there was no evidence of a Streetlink presence. Again, we weren't hassled and there were very few people begging for change, but I have to say that what we saw in the US and to some extent in Vancouver was far worse than in the UK.

After parting company with Leo, we had an iced coffee in a place that had a Halloween vibe, then went to the Art Museum which features a restored version of Monet's Water Lilies and had a lovely exhibtion of Japanese prints and ceramics (lots of Japanese shops and eateries in the city). It's in the process of expanding to include a Rothko wing as the city seems to be claiming him as its own as he lived in Portland for 10 years after his family emigrated there from Latvia and before moving to NYC. It also had an exhibition of psychedelic posters from the 60s and 70s which weren't really to our taste as the style is very repetitive and most of them featured idealised and sexualised images of women.

We then headed to the small but perfectly-formed Chinese garden which is a little oasis of tranquility. We got separated initially as Lucy got straight on to a tram (called a light rail there!) which she rightly believed to be going where we needed, and in my hesitation the doors shut so I had to catch her up. 

We moved on to the Portland Wine Bar where we enjoyed sampling more Willamette region wines, and got chatting to some friendly locals (one of them had visited friends in Crystal Palace more than once - of course!) who recommended Departure as a place to eat, and there we went to enjoy a brilliant view, more delicious wine and for me, some very tasty halibut.

We had booked to see the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Portland Centre Stage in the Armory building. It was a nice space and the seats in the balcony were fine at $25, but the director had obviously been inspired by the NT production of the show last year and decided to camp it up to the max. The set and costumes were lovely, but it was as subtle as a flying mallet and just a bit too hysterical and screechy. Lucy snuck out early and after a few nod-off moments I decided to do the same at the interval- it had been a long day. My self-congratulation at finding the bus stop was somewhat marred by Mr Google giving me the long way walk home on alighting (I had lost GPS) and ending up a bit lost in the dusk - thankfully I only took one wrong turn, and the area we were staying felt very safe so I didn't panic. The pic below is the bus which has a glowing red interior at nightime - weird.

I was also delighted to be asked for directions by two young guys in a car while waiting for the bus, and on apologising for being a visitor so not having a scooby, they asked where I was from and on replying London, the retort was "that's the greatest city in the world, but welcome to Portland!"