America's most liveable weird city — where 700+ food carts cluster in permanent pods, Powell's Books is the world's largest independent bookstore, and the slogan 'Keep Portland Weird' has been taken seriously enough to maintain a DIY culture that resists franchises with genuine conviction
Portland (650,000; metro 2.5 million) is the largest city in Oregon and a city with a genuinely distinctive character in the American urban landscape — eccentric, self-consciously progressive, heavily tattooed, and relentlessly food-obsessed. Portland's 700+ food cart pods (concentrated outdoor markets of mobile food vendors with permanent locations) represent the world's densest concentration of independent food businesses in any US city and have pioneered food offerings from Korean fusion tacos to Ethiopian injera to Taiwanese scallion pancakes. Powell's Books (1600 W Burnside St, occupying…
Portland was founded in 1845 and named by a coin flip between its two founders — Asa Lovejoy (from Massachusetts) and Francis Pettygrove (from Maine) — over whether to name it after Boston or Portland (Pettygrove won). The city grew as a timber and grain port, and the Willamette River was the commercial artery that connected Portland to the Pacific Ocean trade routes. The 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition drew 2 million visitors and established Portland as a major Pacific Northwest city. Portland's dark chapter includes the largest KKK membership of any American city in the 1920s, dr…