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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

The dance floor rides on rockers and ball bearings - dancers describe it as floating on clouds, and it may be the last of its kind in America. The Crystal Ballroom, at 1332 West Burnside Street in Portland, opened in January 1914 as Ringler's Cotillion Hall and has been making the city move for over a century. The origin is delightfully scandalous: dance instructor Montrose Ringler built the third-floor hall in an era when Portlanders could still be arrested for dancing the tango, and the Polic.....

Swedish churchgoers built it, longshoremen ran their union from it, and in 1987 it poured Oregon's first legal pint in a movie theatre - the Alamo Drafthouse credits the model as an inspiration. The Mission Theater, at 1624 NW Glisan Street in Northwest Portland, is where the McMenamins theater-pub concept was born. The building has lived three lives: dedicated in 1912 as the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant Church - the congregation stayed 42 years - it passed to the burly dockworkers of t.....

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, .....