Portland built its dance-music flagship in a Central Eastside warehouse. 45 East, at 315 SE 3rd Avenue, is the city's dedicated electronic music venue - a two-storey converted industrial building, capacity around 600, where exposed brick and old metal framework meet concert-grade lighting rigs, LED walls, lasers and a sound system tuned for the low end that the programming demands. The calendar is dance music wall to wall: house, techno, trance, bass, drum and bass, dubstep and hard dance, with.....

A Spanish-Colonial picture palace anchors Portland's Alberta Arts District. The Alberta Rose Theatre at 3000 NE Alberta Street opened on 6 May 1926 as the Alameda Theatre - a 600-seat atmospheric cinema by architect Walter E. Kelley for the Seltzer siblings' local theatre chain, its auditorium styled as a Spanish-Colonial courtyard under a Mediterranean tile roof, with a ten-piece orchestra playing the opening night and a Wurlitzer organ installed from the Highway Theatre in 1928. The movie era.....

Portland's last movie palace became its symphony hall - sign, Wurlitzer legend and all. The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall at 1037 SW Broadway opened on 8 March 1928 as the Portland Publix Theatre, a 1.5-million-dollar Italian Rococo Revival palace by Rapp and Rapp, the nation's premier theatre architects; opening night queued for hours to see the Greenwich Village Follies, hear a 46,500-dollar Wurlitzer and watch a silent comedy beneath crystal chandeliers and French-museum furnishings. Renamed .....

Fire dancers have spun on this corner every Sunday night for a quarter of a century. Dante's at 350 West Burnside Street, at the corner of Third Avenue in Portland's Old Town, opened in February 2000 under owner Frank Faillace and quickly became the city's definitive anything-goes nightclub - a red-lit room where a metal show, a burlesque revue and a full variety spectacle can share the same week's calendar. The building carries a century of history, its storefronts documented back to the Jorgen.....

A purpose-built home for stand-up in inner southeast Portland, Helium Comedy Club is part of a respected national chain that has brought top touring comedians to the city. Situated on Southeast 9th Avenue, the club offers the classic comedy-club experience of an intimate showroom, table seating and a full bar, and it has become one of Portland's principal destinations for live comedy since opening its doors. The venue is designed around its showroom, a tiered space that seats several hundred gu.....

Portland's nationally envied comedy scene has a specific address to thank: this club, more than any other room, gave the city's comics a weekly paying stage and built the ecosystem around them. Helium Comedy Club, at 1510 SE 9th Avenue just off Hawthorne Boulevard in the Central Eastside, opened in 2010 and remains the anchor venue of stand-up in Oregon. The main showroom seats 275 across 3,000 square feet of tiered tables with full food and drink service; around it operate the 85-capacity 9th .....

No bar, no booze, no age limit - just a PA, a marquee and the conviction that hardcore is for the kids. High Limit Room, upstairs at 720 SE Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland's Central Eastside, opened in summer 2025 as the city's dedicated all-ages home for hardcore, punk and DIY shows - a 250-capacity room built by the scene it serves. The founders are the team behind 777 Booking - Chip Sneed, Kieran Harden, Stephen Cameron and Andrew Le - Portland's hardcore promotion crew, who took over the fo.....

Two friends spent nine months gutting an auto-parts warehouse because Portland had no room for the electronic music they loved - twenty years later their club is the city's dance-floor institution. Holocene, at 1001 SE Morrison Street in the Buckman neighbourhood of inner-Southeast Portland, opened in June 2003 and remains the city's essential music-and-arts nightclub. Founders Scott McLean and Jarkko Cain built the 5,000-square-foot space themselves in the old Best Auto Parts warehouse: soarin.....

Tucked into a historic basement in downtown Portland, the Jack London Revue is one of the city's most distinctive live-music venues, a subterranean room devoted to jazz, soul and an eclectic mix of sounds. Located beneath the Rialto poolroom on Southwest Fourth Avenue, the intimate space has built a reputation as a destination for serious music in a relaxed, supper-club-style setting that feels worlds away from the street above. The venue is a small, atmospheric room holding a few hundred peopl.....

Portland's hardest-working stage opened on the Fourth of July 1917 and has carried every era of the city's cultural life since: opera, Broadway, ballet, rock tours and presidential speeches, all in one building on Clay Street. Keller Auditorium, at 222 SW Clay Street downtown, is the 2,992-seat workhorse of the Portland'5 Centers for the Arts - 3,034 with the pit rows in. The building began as the Municipal Auditorium, designed by New York architects Freelander and Seymour with Portland's White.....