Portland (Oregon)/Eastside

Eastside is the part of Portland east of the Willamette River.

Understand
The Eastside encompasses three of the six official sectors of Portland:
 * North Portland, bounded by the Willamette River to the west and Williams Avenue to the east. Going toward the Columbia River, the eastern boundary becomes irregular after Williams dead-ends.
 * Northeast Portland, east of Williams and the Willamette, and north of Burnside Street.
 * Southeast Portland, east of the Willamette and south of Burnside.

Hawthorne Blvd, which runs east-west across the river from Downtown, has a broad selection of shops including a menagerie of vintage goods at the House of Vintage and the ornate Bagdad Theater Pub, and is a center of the counter-culture/bohemian community which is dissipating to make way for a variety of upscale businesses. The nearby Belmont Street is also worth a visit if you are in the neighborhood, with a similar - if smaller - array of shops and attractions.

Located along Broadway and Sandy Blvd northeast of downtown, Hollywood is a commercial district for the nearby neighborhoods and home to the Hollywood Theater, a historic non-profit theater with an ornate facade showing a variety of independent, second run, and classic films as well as original programming and interactive events. There is also a popular Saturday farmers market in the neighborhood during the warm months.

To the north of the former between MLK Blvd and 30th Avenue, Alberta Street has much the same feel as Hawthorne Blvd; a counter-culture/bohemian community that's becoming popular with yuppies. Alberta is home to Last Thursday, said by many locals to be the alternative to First Thursday in the Pearl District and also featuring wine tasting and gallery openings, along with street vending and performance artists. The neighborhood between Alberta Street and Broadway is known as Irvington, and contains many historic Craftsman homes.

Other neighborhoods to explore include: St. Johns in North Portland featuring the gorgeous St. Johns Bridge, Mississippi Avenue, quaint Sellwood, Inner Southeast a loosely defined neighborhood where bars and music venues have been cropping up amidst the industrial landscape, Foster-Powell, East Burnside and Stark, Division and Clinton Street, and North Williams.

Get in and around
See Portland (Oregon) for getting in from elsewhere in the city. You can also get in from Vancouver across the Columbia River in Washington state. Some Vancouver bus lines cross into Eastside Portland; #60 to Jantzen Beach Center and Delta Park/Vanport, #65 to Parkrose/Sumner Transit Center and #67 to the airport. From each of those, you can switch to a MAX train to get further into Eastside (and on to other parts of Portland).

The international airport is in this part of the city.

Places across the Willamette River can be accessed on foot (almost all bridges have sidewalks) or streetcar from Downtown or parts of the northwest. The orange MAX line takes you to the southern parts of the Eastside along the Willamette River.

The other MAX lines take you from Downtown and Chinatown across the Steel Bridge. From there, the yellow line continues north along the North Interstate and North Denver Avenues up to the Expo Center. The green, red and blue lines go east along the Banfield Freeway to the Gateway Transit Center. From there they fan out; the red line north to the airport, the blue line further east to Gresham, and the green line south to Clackamas.

There's also a fairly dense bus network (network map) taking you to places where rail-based public transit won't.

With long distances between places, driving can almost certainly also a good option.

Budget