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.....

The LPGA has been coming back to the same Portland riverbank for half a century. Columbia Edgewater Country Club at 2220 NE Marine Drive was established in 1924 as Columbia Country Club, and its eighteen holes opened on 11 July 1925 - the seventh eighteen-hole course in Portland - designed by Arthur Vernon "A.V." Macan, the Dublin-born architect who became the premier course designer of the Pacific Northwest's golden age, with more than sixty designs and renovations including Seattle Golf Club a.....

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.....

A Baptist church became a recording studio so intimate that leaving mid-set meant catching the performer's disapproving eye - 85 people, entrance through the restaurant next door, past an Airstream trailer. Mississippi Studios, at 3939 North Mississippi Avenue in Portland's Boise neighbourhood, opened in 2003 and was rebuilt into one of the city's most respected venues in 2009. The founder is a working musician: Jim Brunberg opened the studio on a then-empty street - tumbleweeds, by his account.....

David Bowie played the first concert with Nine Inch Nails opening, two weeks after the doors opened - and the building has anchored Oregon sports and entertainment ever since. The Moda Center, at 1 Center Court in Portland's Rose Quarter, opened as the Rose Garden on 12 October 1995. The arena was Paul Allen's project: the Microsoft co-founder and Trail Blazers owner drove the 262-million-dollar replacement for the 12,888-seat Memorial Coliseum, financed through a public-private mix including 1.....

The twin glass spires are not decoration - they are light wells, funnelling daylight into the building's core, and one of them houses the world's largest Foucault pendulum. The Oregon Convention Center at 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Portland's Lloyd District opened in 1990 as the largest convention facility in Oregon. The design came from Portland's own Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects: an 85-million-dollar precast concrete and brick building whose bimodal plan answered an oblong, .....

A live entertainment venue in Portland, Oregon, the Paris Theatre programs concerts, burlesque shows, cabaret performances, and special events in one of the city's most distinctive nightlife spaces. Portland's independent entertainment scene is among the most vibrant on the West Coast, and the Paris Theatre adds a theatrical, cabaret-style dimension to the city's diverse club landscape. The venue reflects Portland's reputation for eclectic, boundary-pushing live entertainment, drawing audiences.....

The name upgrade was astronomical pedantry done affectionately: the North Star Ballroom became Polaris Hall, the formal term for the star itself. The 1930 building at 635 North Killingsworth Court in North Portland, an event hall since the 1920s-era roots of the neighbourhood, was purchased in 2017 by Jim Brunberg and Kevin Cradock, the owners of Mississippi Studios and Revolution Hall. The room is a 4,500-square-foot vintage ballroom - hardwood floors, 15-foot ceilings, warm-toned walls and a .....

James Beard and Linus Pauling both went to school in this building; the auditorium where they sat assemblies is now the stage. Revolution Hall at 1300 SE Stark Street in Portland's Buckman neighbourhood occupies the 1924 auditorium of Washington High School, a brick landmark that closed with the school in 1981 and sat mostly vacant for three decades. The school - founded in 1906 as Eastside High and rebuilt after a fire - was purchased in 2013 and its 113,000 square feet converted to offices an.....

The owner told his sound engineer he wanted the best-sounding room in Portland, and rebudgeted the whole project when the answer was "not with these speakers." The Get Down opened in April 2022 at 615 SE Alder Street, Suite B - a 400-capacity basement venue inside the historic Melody Event Center in the Central Eastside industrial district. Founder Blake Boris-Schachter's answer to what the room would book was simple: primarily stuff you can dance to - and the space was engineered around that b.....