Portland Audio Tour

Highlights

• Reed College

  Picture the edge of one of the most intellectually serious and deliberately unconventional colleges in the United States. Reed College was founded in 1908 on the bequest of Oregon Trail pioneer Simeon Reed, and from its earliest years it defined itself in opposition to conventional higher education: no athletics, no fraternities or sororities, no letter grades on transcripts until students ask for them, mandatory humanities thesis for all seniors.

• 
  Powell's City of Books

  Powell's City of Books, in front of you, may be the most beloved bookstore in America. Powell's City of Books occupies an entire city block on West Burnside Street and contains an estimated one million new, used, and rare books spread across nine color-coded rooms on multiple floors.

• 
  Pittock Mansion

  Henry Pittock built the house in front of you, at the highest point in residential Portland, to announce that he had won. Pittock arrived in Portland in 1853 at the age of fourteen, reportedly walking the final segment of the Oregon Trail after his wagon train's oxen gave out.

• 
  Tom McCall Waterfront Park

  One of the great acts of civic reclamation in American urban history lies under your feet. For forty years a four-lane elevated expressway called Harbor Drive ran along the west bank of the Willamette River, separating downtown Portland from its waterfront as effectively as a wall.

• 
  Portland Japanese Garden

  Many Japanese garden designers and scholars consider the garden you are in the finest Japanese garden outside of Japan. The Portland Japanese Garden was established in 1967 on land in Washington Park, designed as a gesture of reconciliation and cultural exchange between Portland and Japan in the years following World War II, when the forced incarceration of Portland's Japanese American community — one of the largest and most established on the West Coast — had fractured the relationship between the city and Japan that Japanese immigrants had spent decades building.

All 40 stops

• Pioneer Courthouse Square (Downtown)

  Notice the brick-paved square Portlanders call their living room, sitting at the geographic and social heart of the city.

• Powell's City of Books (Downtown / Pearl District)

  Powell's City of Books, in front of you, may be the most beloved bookstore in America.

• Pearl District (Northwest Portland)

  Twenty-five years ago the blocks you are walking through were a grid of warehouses, rail yards, and light industry that few Portlanders had reason to…

• Burnside Bridge (Downtown / East Side)

  Under your feet runs the line that defines Portland.

• Old Town (Old Town / Chinatown)

  Old Town, the oldest commercial district in Portland, holds the blocks where the city was founded and where its most complicated history unfolded, and you…

• Skidmore Fountain (Old Town)

  Bronze and granite have occupied this corner since 1888, and the fountain in front of you is the oldest public fountain in Portland.

• Portland Saturday Market (Old Town / Waterfront)

  Since 1974 the largest continuously operating open-air arts and crafts market in the United States has run every weekend right where you are.

• Tom McCall Waterfront Park (Downtown Waterfront)

  One of the great acts of civic reclamation in American urban history lies under your feet.

• Portland Art Museum (Downtown / South Park Blocks)

  Ahead of you is the oldest art museum on the Pacific Coast.

• Multnomah County Central Library (Downtown)

  Portlanders have treated the building in front of you as a civic temple since it opened in 1913.

• Pittock Mansion (West Hills)

  Henry Pittock built the house in front of you, at the highest point in residential Portland, to announce that he had won.

• Nob Hill (Northwest Portland)

  Portland's Victorian-era elite built the neighborhood you are in when they wanted to get away from the waterfront commerce and into elevated respectability.

• NW 23rd Avenue (Northwest Portland)

  Trendy-Third is the nickname this street has carried since the 1990s, with a mixture of affection and self-aware irony, and you are on the most…

• Northwest District (Northwest Portland)

  Look at one of the best-preserved Victorian residential neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest.

• Alberta Arts District (Northeast Portland)

  Alberta Street, under your feet, tells one of Portland's most complicated stories about art, community, and displacement.

• North Mississippi Avenue (North Portland)

  Look at a street that completed one of Portland's most self-conscious neighborhood transformations in the early 2000s.

• North Portland (North Portland)

  Visitors rarely see the part of Portland you have reached, and residents treasure it precisely for that reason.

• St. Johns (North Portland)

  Until 1915 the ground you are on belonged to the independent city of St. Johns, incorporated in 1903 and annexed by Portland over the objections…

• Cathedral Park (North Portland / St. Johns)

  Feel how this park, beneath one of the most beautiful bridges in America, earns its name.

• SE Division Street (Southeast Portland)

  Southeast Division Street, under your feet, put Portland on the national food map.

• Hawthorne District (Southeast Portland)

  Feel how this street has been Portland's counterculture corridor since the 1960s, when the neighborhood around Hawthorne Boulevard first attracted the artists, students, musicians, and…

• Ladd's Addition (Southeast Portland)

  Picture one of the most unusual neighborhood plans in the United States, right here.

• SE Belmont Street (Southeast Portland)

  Feel how this is one of the most characteristic streets of everyday Portland — not a tourist destination, not a food media darling, but the…

• Clinton Street (Southeast Portland)

  Clinton Street, where you are now, is the quieter, more residential layer beneath Portland's celebrated food scene.

• Sellwood (Southeast Portland / Sellwood-Moreland)

  Sellwood, the southernmost neighborhood of Portland proper and the river town you are now in, was an independent city until 1893 and has kept a…

• Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge (Southeast Portland)

  Wetland stretches away from you here at the edge of Oaks Bottom, the largest urban wildlife refuge within Portland city limits, 163 acres in the…

• Reed College (Southeast Portland / Eastmoreland)

  Picture the edge of one of the most intellectually serious and deliberately unconventional colleges in the United States.

• East Burnside (Inner Southeast)

  East of the river, the stretch of Burnside Street you are on serves as the transition zone between inner and outer southeast Portland and has…

• Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden (Southeast Portland)

  Your eyes find one of the finest collections of rhododendrons and azaleas in the world, in a garden that embodies Portland's identity as the Rose…

• Sunnyside Neighborhood (Southeast Portland)

  Farmland became Sunnyside, the neighborhood you are in, between 1890 and 1920, one of Portland's original streetcar suburbs, built once the electric streetcar lines made…

• Buckman / OMSI Area (Inner Southeast)

  Industry once ran this stretch of the Willamette riverfront, and the zone you have entered in inner southeast Portland, anchored by the Oregon Museum of…

• Kerns Neighborhood (Inner Southeast / Inner Northeast)

  Kerns, the neighborhood you are in, is one of the inner east side districts that occupies the territory between the major commercial corridors — between…

• Old Town Chinatown (Old Town)

  Once the second-largest Chinatown on the West Coast filled these blocks, and you are in its historic core.

• Portland Japanese Garden (West Hills / Washington Park)

  Many Japanese garden designers and scholars consider the garden you are in the finest Japanese garden outside of Japan.

• Lan Su Chinese Garden (Old Town / Chinatown)

  Lan Su Chinese Garden, in front of you, is the most authentic Chinese classical garden in the Western Hemisphere.

• Forest Park / Wildwood Trail (West Hills)

  Feel the edge of the largest urban forest in the United States.

• Irving Park (Northeast Portland)

  Seven acres of green have anchored the residential neighborhood surrounding Irving Park since the 1890s, and you are in one of Northeast Portland's foundational neighborhood…

• Lloyd District (Northeast Portland)

  During the 1960s Portland's first suburban-style commercial development rose across the river from downtown, on land the Lloyd family had accumulated over decades, and you…

• Eastmoreland (Southeast Portland)

  Your eyes rest on one of the finest examples of early twentieth-century planned residential development in the Pacific Northwest.

• Oregon Zoo / Washington Park (West Hills / Washington Park)

  Washington Park, the 410-acre West Hills green space you have climbed into above downtown, holds an unusual concentration of Portland cultural institutions: the Oregon Zoo…

How it works