Kenton

Kenton was a company town. In 1910, the Swift meatpacking company established a major slaughterhouse and processing facility in North Portland, and the Kenton neighborhood was built specifically to house the workers — a planned residential community with Craftsman bungalows, a commercial strip, a park, and a school, all designed to be self-contained.

The meatpacking industry declined through the mid-20th century and closed entirely by the 1980s. What remained was a working-class neighborhood with good housing stock, genuine community character, and a location near the Columbia River industrial belt that kept real estate values low enough to preserve what was there. The MAX Yellow Line extension to Kenton opened in 2004 and connected the neighborhood to the city in a way it hadn't been before.

The N Denver Avenue commercial strip is genuinely good in a way that doesn't announce itself. Prost! (the original location) is a German biergarten that has been drawing crowds from across the city since it opened. The Hop and Vine is a wine bar and bottle shop with serious sourcing. Several independent coffee shops and restaurants have filled out the strip without homogenizing it.

The Paul Bunyan statue on N Interstate at Denver — 31 feet tall, installed in 1959 for the Oregon Centennial — is one of Portland's most inexplicable public monuments and beloved for exactly that reason. He wears a plaid shirt and holds an axe. There is no particular connection between Paul Bunyan and North Portland. The neighborhood has embraced him entirely.

Kenton Park, the neighborhood's central green space, hosts the Kenton Farmers Market on Sundays in summer — one of the smaller but more genuine neighborhood markets in the city.