As you quietly turn the corner of NW Lovejoy Street and 11th Avenue in a Portland streetcar, it’s easy to forget you’re in the American West. The sleek and spotless Czech-built railcars look just like the light-duty trains that glide past the Colosseum in Rome, or through the narrow streets of Geneva. Outside the window you see pristine “green-built” condominiums, clusters of hunched-over bicycle commuters and the graceful arcs of Fremont Bridge stretching into the distance—a view that appears to have more in common with a modern European city than a once-muddy clearing in the Oregon fir trees known simply as Stumptown.

Though Portland was incorporated in 1851, it missed out on the growth spurts—the Klondike Gold Rush, the Microsoft boom—that rapidly stretched Seattle. As a result, Portland has been left with considerably more room to grow, and more time to figure out how. The city has boldly declared its priorities in shaping a vibrant and livable downtown, limiting metropolitan development and encouraging public transit projects like the streetcar and the new aerial tramway serving the hilltop campus of Oregon Health & Science University.  Over the last 15 years, the once gritty Northwest Triangle, just a block north of downtown, has been revived as a residential quarter, the gleaming Pearl District—a dense enclave of loft apartments, street-level cafés, eclectic boutiques and a thriving community of art studios and galleries.

Every month, the Pearl District comes aglow during the First Thursday art walk. Dozens of galleries and ad hoc exhibition spaces prop their doors open until late into the evening, offering food and entertainment to a surprising mix of young and old, who crowd the sidewalks and browse fine art of every description. But even during normal business hours, the spacious galleries of the Pearl District are welcoming.

While you’re in the Pearl, find out what’s playing at the newly refurbished Portland Armory. This century-old, crenellated fortress was recently remade into a dramatic new home for the much-lauded Portland Center Stage theater company.  If nothing suits you there, your time hasn’t been wasted—the city’s crown jewel, Powell’s City of Books, is just two blocks away. The self-proclaimed largest new and used bookstore in the world is a wondrous labyrinth that sprawls over three floors and covers a full city block.

To see Portland as it once was, visit the Old Town blocks that hug the western edge of the Willamette River, just east of the Pearl District. Here, on the original town site, tenderly preserved 19th-century cast-iron facades still line the narrow, angled streets. Even European visitors tend to describe this part of town as “European.” 

Also in Old Town, but beneath the streets, are Portland’s legendary Shanghai Tunnels, a warren of subterranean passageways. Though some believe they were built to connect the storerooms of 19th-century pubs and hotels to the riverfront docks, their actual intent was to hijack unwilling seamen for the long passage across the Pacific. During Prohibition, the tunnels served as a convenient and easily escaped location for speakeasies—which catered to a particularly tenacious local thirst, as it is plain to see from the large collection of pubs in Old Town.

If the vast number of Oregon-made beers hasn’t already tipped you off, menu items like “Strawberry Mountain Beef Burger with Tillamook Cheddar” should tell you how obsessive Portlanders can be about their local foods. You can witness what drives this fervor at the Saturday morning Farmers Market, held on the shady South Park Blocks near Portland State University. Throngs of people arrive early to browse the stalls for tender pea shoots, cherries from their favorite orchard or fresh-picked morels sold by the wild-mushroom hunter. In part, it’s another effect of the city’s urban-growth boundary: Keeping farms near the city means that farmers can easily make the short trip into town—and develop relationships with their devoted consumers.
 
After foraging in town, take a breather in a more familiar sort of Oregon landscape. Less than a 15-minute drive up West Burnside Street, with the river at your back, lies the dense green cathedral of Forest Park. At 5,100 acres, it’s the largest wooded city preserve in the United States, and a playground for Portland’s fanatical trail runners and mountain bikers. Some 70 miles of trails wind among towering Douglas firs and fern thickets.

For those who prefer their natural serenity more cultivated, the West Hills also hide two of the Northwest’s most extraordinary gardens. Wander the stone-and-moss paths of the tranquil Japanese Garden or take in the profusion of color and perfume in Portland’s International Rose Test Garden, just across the street. In May, right before the city’s annual Rose Festival (May 31–June 10 this year), the garden’s 10,000 shrubs explode with brilliant hybrid blooms. Plants are brought here from around the world to assess their quality in these favorable growing conditions: wet, mild winters that protect the roots and clear summer skies that bring out the full splendor of their bloom. It’s no surprise that people thrive here, too.