Neighborhoods

PDXplained: What Do You Want to Know About Goose Hollow?

📸: Whitney Gomes What’s up in Goose Hollow “I once heard that Lincoln HS’s student newspaper is the oldest one west of the Mississippi that’s still printing,” Scott asked us. “Is that true?” The short answer is “probably.” Lincoln High School turned 150 years old this year, making it “one of the oldest high schools […]

/ May 20, 2019

Neighborhood Spotlight on St. Johns

St. Johns might be a Portland neighborhood on paper, but to our friends on the peninsula, it’s really a town of its own. Located deep in the “fifth quadrant,” St. Johns hasn’t lost the blue-collar identity it gained as a hub for lumber and manufacturing jobs in the early 1900s. Dive bars like Slim’s are […]

/ May 9, 2019

How Gentrification is Changing St. Johns

📸: Phil Desveaux “What population(s) originally lived in St. Johns, and are those communities suffering now as a result of gentrification?” —Leah Drew That’s the winning question from our latest PDXplained voting round. Here’s what we learned, starting from the very beginning: The area now known as St. Johns was originally inhabited by members of […]

/ May 7, 2019

The Place in Portland Where Pro Wrestling Is Still Going Strong

THE NEIGHBORHOOD: St. Johns / Portsmouth THE PLACE: Blue Collar Wrestling live streams online and you can also find the shows at the Holocene, if you can snag a seat to watch the action. Blue Collar Wrestling is now ten years old, and its marquee matches have featured WWE stars like Roddy Piper and The Honky […]

/ April 10, 2019

PDXplained: What Do You Want to Know about St. Johns?

In our next installment of PDXplained, we’re exploring Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood.

/ April 3, 2019

Neighborhood Spotlight on the Pearl District

Powell’s Books. The Brewery Blocks. Bougie artisan coffee. You know that side of the Pearl District, but did you know the Pearl is also home to a circus education program? Or that it’s a hub for subsidized affordable housing? Or that it used to look like this? For our latest neighborhood spotlight series, we discovered the Peruvian roots […]

/ March 28, 2019

PDXplained: Why Isn’t Lower Albina an Official Portland Neighborhood?

(📸: Library of Congress, via the Volga Germans in Portland blog) ALBINA’S ORIGIN STORY About a century before neighborhood associations even existed, Albina was incorporated as an independent city — separate from the neighboring cities of Portland and East Portland. Albina’s earliest non-native residents were pioneers who claimed free land from the U.S. government and […]

/ February 25, 2019

Neighborhood Spotlight on Lower Albina

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That famous Faulkner line has always rung true in our city, but it’s especially true in Lower Albina, a historically black neighborhood in Northeast Portland where gentrification and urban renewal (aka “urban removal”) have displaced thousands of residents and transformed the community. In honor of Black […]

/ February 25, 2019

The Albina Vision is a 50-Year Plan—But It Starts Now

WHAT: The Albina Vision is a community-led effort to revitalize a district that was once the heart of Portland’s black community. The plan calls for building nine city blocks of affordable housing and community gathering space, and capping the I-5 freeway that displaced thousands of families in the 1960s — but the project is about […]

/ February 20, 2019

The Church that Stood Strong

WHAT: Lower Albina has seen a lot of change over the last 50 years, but one constant through it all has been the Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church, which will celebrate its 75th birthday next month. The church has withstood decades of gentrification and displacement, and its members today span multiple generations. WHY IT MATTERS: […]

/ February 14, 2019

Spotlight on Portland’s Sunnyside Neighborhood

Sunnyside might be best known for its trendy bars and boutique shopping, but there’s a lot more to this Southeast Portland neighborhood than Belmont and Hawthorne.

/ January 14, 2019