Portland, Oregon

Portland, the largest city in Oregon, is located on the Willamette River roughly 6 miles above its confluence with the Columbia River. Although the metropolitan region now includes six counties, the initial point of settlement on the west bank of the Willamette remains its downtown core. The city quickly grew to be the major commercial gateway for the Willamette and Columbia Valleys. Along with growing electronics and information industries, its economy continues in the 21st century to depend substantially on international trade and on the provision of commercial, business, and professional services of a hinterland embracing Oregon, southern Washington, and parts of Idaho. After developing in ways similar to those of other regional cities for its first 120 years, it has implemented a series of governmental and policy innovations since 1970 that have made it stand out as an unusually well planned metropolis.

When first claimed and platted in 1844 to 1845, Portland was located halfway between the Hudson's Bay Company operations at Fort Vancouver to the north and the young Oregon City to the south. It got its name when cofounder Francis Pettygrove (from Portland, Maine) won a coin toss with his partner, Asa Lovejoy (from Boston, Massachusetts). As was true for many 19th-century towns, Portland grew because it was able to fend off rival Willamette River with superior transportation connections. It benefitted from being the head of navigation on the Willamette for oceangoing vessels, as well as from the early construction of roads which made it the most economical shipping point for Oregon wheat to feed hungry California gold miners in the 1850s.

Portland merchants looked inland in the 1860s, developing steamboat and rail lines to supply the mining regions of Idaho and Montana. After the Civil War, the city drew much of the wheat and livestock trade of eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, as well as the lumber trade of the lower Columbia. In the early 1900s it had a substantial manufacturing sector devoted to processing regional raw materials into flour, packed meat, woolen goods, lumber, and furniture. One consequence of its economic situation was the development of one of the nation's largest skid road districts to serve single male workers between jobs and work seasons.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Portland had large immigrant communities from China, Japan, and Scandinavia, and smaller Italian, Croatian, and Polish neighborhoods. Although little remains of these older ethnic neighborhoods, recent immigration has led to identifiable concentrations of Korean, Mexican, and Southeast Asian immigrants. In total, whites in 2000 made up 77.9 percent of the metropolitan population, blacks 6.6 percent, Asians and Pacific islanders 6.7 percent, Native Americans 1.1 percent, and mixed-race individuals 7.7 percent. Hispanics, of any origin, were 6.8 percent of the total.

In 1905, the city sponsored the Lewis and Clark Centennial. This first world's fair on the West Coast coincided with the onset of rapid growth from 1905 to 1913 and again during World War I. The boom transformed downtown Portland and fueled the shift of population to new streetcar suburbs on the east side of the Willamette.

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