Portland Neighborhoods: NW 23rd Ave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whenever I work with clients moving to Portland from LA, the first place I take them is NW 23rd. It’s Portland’s version of San Vicente or Larchmont –– a strip of mostly fancy schmancy stores and restaurants that was the main draw back before there were other main draws like Division, Mississippi, Alberta, Lake Oswego, and other neighborhood villages.

As you can tell from the address, NW 23rd is 23 blocks from the Willamette River, which is just over a mile (blocks in Portland are shorter than they are in a lot of other cities). In between, you have non-stop interesting stuff: NW 21st is kind of the Clinton to 23rd’s Division (see my post on Division here, and on Clinton here). They’re super close, but different enough that people who live there tend to identify with one or the other.

Then there’s the Alphabet District, where you can’t get lost because the avenues are numbered and the streets are alphabetical. (Cool Portland fact: the streets are named after city founders. Other cool Portland fact: If you watch or watched The Simpsons, a lot of those names will look familiar. Matt Groening is from Portland.)

An awesome old house.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Interesting stuff between NW 23rd and the river. After the Alphabet District, you have Slabtown, the Pearl District, Chinatown, and Old Town. I’ll be writing posts on each of these sections down the road.

Right around NW 23rd, you’ll find a lot of condos, but head west a bit and you get into houses. Amazing old houses, built mostly in the early 1900s.

Not an awesome old house. An awesome new one.

The street is kind of ideally located. The Portland Streetcar moseys through, connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the city. But it’s actually walking distance to downtown in one direction, the Pearl District in sort-of another, and Forest Park in the another.

NW 23rd used to be distinctive in that it was the only cosmopolitan area of the city. It has a Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Lush, Gap, Ben & Jerry’s, and some other big name stores. “Real” Portlanders like to cop an attitude about that because the city likes to defiantly support local businesses, but with Salt and Straw, Blue Star Donuts, Stumptown, Ace Hotels, and a lot of other local businesses going national and even International, it’s harder to draw the distinction anymore.

And other neighborhoods of the city have let some of those big name national brands leak in.

A wall of chocolate at The Meadow.

But there are some things along NW 23rd that you can’t find elsewhere in Portland. One is St. Jack, a French Bistro where they make two things that are worth the hike all the way from my house: the chicken liver mousse which is, I’m serious, a $%&*!! revelation and a drink called The French Pearl that I swear tastes like sipping springtime. Another is Kornblatt’s Deli, the only (unless you count newcomer Kenny and Zuke’s) Jewish deli in Portland.

Just off NW 23rd at the north end you have St. Honore, a  bakery that looks like something out of an old French movie and Kenny and Zuke’s Bagelworks, where the bagels are actually good. Really good. Better than most of the bagels I had when I lived in New York good.

Look at all the whiskeys at the Southland Whiskey Kitchen! We’re gunna be here for a while…

Oh, and this is cool! Every September, the Vaux’s Swifts stop off on their annual migration to spend the night in a chimney at Chapman Elementary School (1445 NW 26th Ave). Head over there any day of the month just before dusk and join thousands of Portlanders who think sitting on a blanket on the grass and watching birds fly into a chimney is more exciting than any Miley Cyrus concert.

I’ll be there. Look for me. Afterward, we can head over to St. Jack.

Portland Neighborhoods: Clinton

Remember Manhattan back in the 40’s and 50’s, when you could walk a block and go from one neighborhood to another one that was totally distinct?

Me neither.

But I’ve heard stories. And when I used to live there, you could still find vestiges – little reminders that the German neighborhood you were in butted right up against the Italian neighborhood a couple of streets over.

Who needs a gallery? Put your art on a fence ….
….on a telephone pole ….
….even on your house.

Portland has a lot of that. More subtle than in New York, but places where there’s a real difference in the personalities between two areas. Colonial Heights is different from Ladd’s Addition. NW 21st is different from NW 23rd. Hawthorne is different from Belmont, which is different from Stark, which is different from Burnside. And Clinton is different from Division.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” plays every Saturday night. Not making this up.

I’ve already gone on about Division (click here to reread my extremely informative and even vaguely accurate post), but to recap: 1) Freeway, 2) no freeway, 3) hippies, 4) fancy restaurants, 5) hipsters.

Clinton is a block away, but where Division was originally kind of an industrial cut through, Clinton began life totally residential. So even though the same hippies bought houses in both Clinton and Division for pennies on the dollar when the government abandoned its plan to build a freeway into downtown, neighborhood stuff got (and gets) emphasized on Clinton a lot more. To the point that today, cars get to drive on division; bikes own Clinton.

Clinton is what the city calls a Designated Bike Boulevard, which is defined as “low-volume and low-speed streets that have been optimized for bicycle travel through treatments such as traffic calming and traffic reduction, signage and pavement markings, and intersection crossing treatment.” Clinton has speed bumps, signs, DUI catchers (little roundabouts in intersections), even special street signs with cute little bikes on top – all that and more. In fact, just try to drive a car down the street. You can’t. There are spot where cars are actually forced to turn off.

When old homes are torn down in Clinton, they’re usually replaced by new homes. On Division – and did I mention that Division is seriously only a block away? – when old homes get torn down they’re usually replaced by multi unit housing.

I haven’t actually been to this place yet. We should go.

Like most of the neighborhoods in Portland, Clinton is its own little village. In and just off of the stretch between SE 20th and SE 26th you’ve got your pizza place (Hammy’s), a breakfast place (Off the Waffle), a diner (Dots, which is surprisingly good), an artsy brasserie (La Moule), another artsy brasserie (Jacqueline), and a kajillion other places to eat and drink and watch the parade of bike commuters on their way to and from work. There’s a fancy grocery store (New Seasons, which is really on Division, but like I said, a block away, and actually more connected to Clinton), and a food co-op (People’s Food Co-Op on SE 21st and Tibbetts).

You also have two optometrists, a boutique that sells kid stuff …even two real estate offices.

Which you really don’t need to bother with. I mean, you have me, right?

For a complete Portland bike map, click here.