Mississippi Ave / Boise

The Boise neighborhood — the residential area surrounding Mississippi Avenue — was platted in the 1880s and grew quickly as North Portland developed. The commercial strip along N Mississippi was a working-class neighborhood main street through most of the 20th century.

Like Alberta, Mississippi declined economically in the 1980s and early 90s, which meant rents dropped and the Victorian-era housing stock survived intact — there was no money for redevelopment. When the neighborhood revived, starting around 2000, it did so around an existing architectural foundation that newer neighborhoods had demolished decades earlier.

Mississippi was the subject of Portland's first major debate about gentrification and displacement — community activists pushed back hard against development patterns they saw as pricing out the neighborhood's Black and working-class residents. That conversation shaped how Portland talks about these issues to this day.

Mississippi Pizza has live music on a small stage in the back and a menu that has kept people coming back for two decades. Interurban is a solid neighborhood bar with good burgers and a patio that fills up on warm evenings. The food cart pods in the neighborhood are some of the better ones in North Portland. Prost!, a German beer hall, has become an institution with its massive outdoor biergarten.

Walk the full length of N Mississippi from Fremont to Skidmore. It's about eight blocks and covers a lot of ground: bookshops, vintage clothing, records, ceramics, a kite store, a tattoo parlor, several coffee shops, and more bars than you'll get to in one visit. The side streets — Failing, Shaver, Blandena — have some of Portland's best-preserved Craftsman and Victorian housing.

ReBuilding Center, a few blocks away, is a massive nonprofit warehouse selling salvaged building materials and architectural details — one of the more singular Portland institutions, and a good place to find something strange for your house.