Best of the City Small Group Walking Tour

Best of the City Small Group Walking Tour

3 departures, 3 routes: 10 a.m., 1 p.m. & 4 p.m.

Start at DIRECTOR PARK

Our downtown Portland tours are engaging, well-paced and colorful: the Best of the City! It’s a weird city, but there are stories in every building, park and brick. We’ve organized our city’s best things in a few different walking tour routes.
*10 a.m. History of Architecture & Parks*

Much of Portland’s history can be told through the buildings and street layouts including the prioritization of parks in the city center. It’s not a dry history: full of back-room deals, early deaths and greed; and then there were hippies!
*1 p.m. Urban Art & Pearl District*

How did Portland become the 1st city on the West Coast with a fine art museum? And how did it develop into a hotbed for modern artists?
* 4 p.m. Weird Portlandia*

We’ll walk through Portland’s bizarre and strange past and present, exploring the history of weird icons like Darcelle XV and Voodoo Doughnut.

We keep groups to 12 or fewer for intimate, personal tours

Itinerary
This is a typical itinerary for this product

Stop At: Director Park, 815 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97205-3084

All tours start at DIRECTOR PARK. We'll meet you on the chess board near the corner of SW Park (8th Ave) and Taylor Street.

Duration: 1 minute

Pass By: The Portland Building, 1150 Southwest Fifth Ave, Portland, OR 97204

From cast iron-fronted buildings to the grandly disastrous post-modern Portland Building, we trace our history through architectural choices our city planners made.

Stop At: Mill Ends Park, Southwest Front Avenue and Taylor Street median strip of SW Naito Parkway, Portland, OR 97204

The world's smallest park is not just a quirky photo opportunity -- it's really a much larger story of the way the waterfront changed and how we continue to believe in magic.

Duration: 5 minutes

Stop At: Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Front Avenue, Portland, OR 97205

From wetlands that harbored salmon, to harbors that sheltered ships, to a Chinatown, to a six-lane highway, to a federally-funded destruction, we'll talk about how Portland's waterfront has changed in 200 years, and see how beautiful it's become today.

Duration: 10 minutes

Stop At: Pearl District, 404 NW 10th Ave # LL1, Portland, OR 97209-3184

On our 1 p.m. "urban art and the Pearl District" tour we’ll learn how Portland went from a city of ornate churches to gritty artists working out of abandoned warehouses — and then, to today, with beautiful galleries, furniture stores, and million-dollar condos.

Duration: 30 minutes

Stop At: Voodoo Doughnut, 22 SW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97204, USA

Nothing explains Portland's modern culture better than why hundreds of people stand in line each day for relatively average doughnuts with titillating names.

Duration: 5 minutes

Pass By: Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St 1005 W Burnside, Portland, Oregon, Portland, OR 97209-3114

Portland is a city of readers and writers, and nowhere do the faithful servants of words prefer than Powell's Books, the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. We'll talk about why Portland loves books so much and how, in a world of short attention spans, we still spend hours the stacks.

Stop At: Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Ave Broadway between Morrison and Yamhill, Portland, OR 97204-1410

No tour of downtown Portland, or history of the city's relationships with hippies, would be complete without a visit to Pioneer Courthouse Square. From its past as the center of education to the drive to keep out the "dirty hippies," we'll learn how and why this square has never been far from the minds of Portlanders and the city's visitors.

Duration: 10 minutes

Stop At: South Park Blocks, Southwest Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97201

Much of Portland’s history can be told through the buildings and street layouts; most importantly, the prioritization of parks throughout the city center. We'll walk through the park blocks and learn why they were laid out this way; and what the park blocks' designer didn't do before he died.

Duration: 10 minutes