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Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People
Abbott (urban studies and planning, Portland State U.) has written extensively about Portland, Oregon and other cities in western North America. Here he replaces his brief 1985 history, long out of print, with one that draws on another generation of research and writing, and extends across a second centennial divide. His topics include Stumptown, growing up and settling down, the [1905 World] Fair and the city, the [Second World] War and after, and Portland looks forward. He includes old and new photographs and other illustrations, all in black and white. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 8, 2024
Since moving to Portland I’ve read a few histories of the city and this one is the best, although I’m maybe realizing stumptown’s history is simply not that interesting.
Portland has mostly been run by corrupt, racist mountebanks looking to feather their own nests, like most cities, but none of them seemed to have the dramatic flair of, say, Peter Minuit, let alone a Marion Barry or a Budd Dwyer.
Portland has mostly been run by corrupt, racist mountebanks looking to feather their own nests, like most cities, but none of them seemed to have the dramatic flair of, say, Peter Minuit, let alone a Marion Barry or a Budd Dwyer.
April 12, 2026
This book is a compact, big-picture history of the city that tries to answer a deceptively simple question: how did this particular patch of soggy ambition on the Willamette turn into modern Portland? Abbott’s basic move is to track the city across three broad eras, showing how economics, geography, politics, and waves of newcomers kept reshaping what Portland thought it was, and what it actually became. The result feels less like a dramatic historical novel and more like sitting down with an urban historian who has very strong opinions about street grids, port facilities, and the consequences of boosterism.
The best part is how cleanly Abbott frames Portland as a place that keeps reinventing itself without ever fully escaping its origin story. The river matters, the region matters, and the city’s relationship to the rest of the Pacific Northwest matters. Abbott is good at explaining how Portland’s fortunes have always been tied to being a connector: moving goods, moving people, moving ideas, and sometimes moving the goalposts of what counts as “Portland” as the metro area sprawls outward. He has a knack for making civic choices feel like plot points. A port here, a rail connection there, a planning decision somewhere else, and suddenly you can see the outline of the city we live in, like a slow-motion photo developing in a tray.
I also appreciated the tone. It is readable without feeling like it is doing jazz hands to keep your attention. Abbott can be dry in a “professor who brought you a cookie but still assigned 80 pages” way, yet he keeps things moving. When he talks about growth, planning, and political shifts, he usually gives you enough context to understand why people at the time thought they were being brilliantly sensible. That is a comforting reminder, because it means future historians will look at us and think, “Aw, they tried.” If you enjoy seeing the skeleton under a city’s personality, this book is satisfying. It makes Portland feel less like a quirky vibe and more like the accumulated consequences of decisions made by real humans with budgets, anxieties, and the occasional civic ego trip.
Now for the not-so-fun parts. If you come to history craving vivid characters, scandal, and scenes you can smell, Abbott is not really serving that meal. This is a structural history, and it often reads like a guided tour of systems: economy, governance, land use, regional influence. That is useful, but it can also feel like watching a very informative slideshow about pipes. You end up understanding the plumbing of the city, but you may miss the messy kitchen life happening above it. I found myself wishing for more street-level texture, more everyday voices, more of the city as lived experience rather than civic organism.
Related to that, the book can feel a bit top-down. When a city spans three centuries, you cannot do everything, but I sometimes wanted a fuller reckoning with who benefited from Portland’s choices and who got flattened by them. Big narratives about growth and planning can quietly skip past communities that were displaced, excluded, or ignored, unless the author makes an explicit effort to keep them centered. Abbott does address conflict and change, but the emphasis leans toward institutions and broad trends. If you are the kind of reader who keeps a mental checklist that says, “Yes, but what about Indigenous history, what about racial exclusion, what about neighborhoods carved up by infrastructure,” you may find yourself doing some supplementary reading.
A smaller gripe: because the book is organized around long arcs, it can occasionally feel like it is sprinting through fascinating moments. Portland’s history includes plenty of oddball chapters and civic drama, and Abbott sometimes gives you the significance without lingering on the weirdness. I wanted him to pause, point at a particular episode, and say, “Look at this. This is peak Portland.” Instead, he tends to move on, because he is building a framework, not a scrapbook. Depending on what you want, that is either disciplined or mildly heartbreaking.
Overall, this book is a good map. It does not romance the terrain, but it helps you understand why the roads go where they go and why certain choices keep echoing. It is a smart, steady guide to how Portland became Portland, complete with the city’s recurring habits: optimism, anxiety about identity, periodic reinvention, and the belief that planning will save us, or at least make the mess more aesthetically pleasing.
The best part is how cleanly Abbott frames Portland as a place that keeps reinventing itself without ever fully escaping its origin story. The river matters, the region matters, and the city’s relationship to the rest of the Pacific Northwest matters. Abbott is good at explaining how Portland’s fortunes have always been tied to being a connector: moving goods, moving people, moving ideas, and sometimes moving the goalposts of what counts as “Portland” as the metro area sprawls outward. He has a knack for making civic choices feel like plot points. A port here, a rail connection there, a planning decision somewhere else, and suddenly you can see the outline of the city we live in, like a slow-motion photo developing in a tray.
I also appreciated the tone. It is readable without feeling like it is doing jazz hands to keep your attention. Abbott can be dry in a “professor who brought you a cookie but still assigned 80 pages” way, yet he keeps things moving. When he talks about growth, planning, and political shifts, he usually gives you enough context to understand why people at the time thought they were being brilliantly sensible. That is a comforting reminder, because it means future historians will look at us and think, “Aw, they tried.” If you enjoy seeing the skeleton under a city’s personality, this book is satisfying. It makes Portland feel less like a quirky vibe and more like the accumulated consequences of decisions made by real humans with budgets, anxieties, and the occasional civic ego trip.
Now for the not-so-fun parts. If you come to history craving vivid characters, scandal, and scenes you can smell, Abbott is not really serving that meal. This is a structural history, and it often reads like a guided tour of systems: economy, governance, land use, regional influence. That is useful, but it can also feel like watching a very informative slideshow about pipes. You end up understanding the plumbing of the city, but you may miss the messy kitchen life happening above it. I found myself wishing for more street-level texture, more everyday voices, more of the city as lived experience rather than civic organism.
Related to that, the book can feel a bit top-down. When a city spans three centuries, you cannot do everything, but I sometimes wanted a fuller reckoning with who benefited from Portland’s choices and who got flattened by them. Big narratives about growth and planning can quietly skip past communities that were displaced, excluded, or ignored, unless the author makes an explicit effort to keep them centered. Abbott does address conflict and change, but the emphasis leans toward institutions and broad trends. If you are the kind of reader who keeps a mental checklist that says, “Yes, but what about Indigenous history, what about racial exclusion, what about neighborhoods carved up by infrastructure,” you may find yourself doing some supplementary reading.
A smaller gripe: because the book is organized around long arcs, it can occasionally feel like it is sprinting through fascinating moments. Portland’s history includes plenty of oddball chapters and civic drama, and Abbott sometimes gives you the significance without lingering on the weirdness. I wanted him to pause, point at a particular episode, and say, “Look at this. This is peak Portland.” Instead, he tends to move on, because he is building a framework, not a scrapbook. Depending on what you want, that is either disciplined or mildly heartbreaking.
Overall, this book is a good map. It does not romance the terrain, but it helps you understand why the roads go where they go and why certain choices keep echoing. It is a smart, steady guide to how Portland became Portland, complete with the city’s recurring habits: optimism, anxiety about identity, periodic reinvention, and the belief that planning will save us, or at least make the mess more aesthetically pleasing.
Read
December 23, 2022Solid chronology of Portland and its place in the Northwest, beginning in the 1800s onwards. I read the second addition who’s last chapter added new details on the climate of the 2010s and beginning of 2020s after the pandemic and social unrest, for example. If you want to know how this town developed, its unique aspects, positives and negatives with pretty objective coverage, this does a good job.
July 24, 2024
We moved to Portland 3 weeks ago so I thought I would educate myself about where we now live. I thought this was a nice compact history, though as these often go it was so detailed for the 1800-1940s and then sped through the rest of the more recent decades. I did read an updated version that did have a little bit about the 2020s. However, 1 glaring omission: what about the Mount St. Helens eruption?!
January 21, 2020
An honor to hear Carl Abbott discuss his book. Historian and “urbanist”, Carl was a professor in PSU’s Urban Planning program. Portlanders should read this book to understand the history of Portland neighborhoods. It isn’t a dense read- a nice overview of how/ why Portland evolved into the city we know today.
August 8, 2024
If you're interested in urban history or Portland, Oregon this is the book for you. Abbott writes well and presents the city of Portland clearly and with a lot of interesting facts about not just the history but also the people who influenced the history of the city. This was a fine read. I would highly recommend it to my fellow readers.
September 5, 2022
I recently moved to Portland. Having been very attached to the history of my hometown of Buffalo, NY, I felt an obligation to familiarize myself with the history of my new city. This book gave me just the sort of concise overview I was looking for.
January 10, 2025
DNF. I love history, and I love dry books about history. But this book was written in such a bizarre, rambling way that I couldn’t connect the dots from one paragraph to the next. And, for being about a very niche historic topic, it felt oddly surface level.
December 13, 2017
The best general survey of Portland history currently available. Excellent essay at the end of th book on additional resources for researching Portland's history.
May 7, 2018
Overall a solid survey of Portland history.
September 2, 2022
Quick, easy-to-read overview of Portland’s history.
February 19, 2024
An informative book about my home town, always an interest of mine - especially the past, that equation that brings us to the present moment: the sum of all parts.
Carl Abbott provides a well-organized chronological look at the piece of earth we now call Portland, situated in the county of Multnomah (as in the territory in which the Multnomah native peoples lived prior to the take over by incoming mixed populations), in the state of Oregon.
It is fascinating to drive over land, through communities and compare writings, photographs, and changes over hundreds of years. The land hangs in, suffers us to stay (mostly) and in most cases simply carries on, its myriad citizens (human and animal) reshaping it with every wave of migration, settlement, abandonment and then recycle. We worry about our own times, and all the details of them, and yet the land underneath us is as ancient as ancient is. Blows my mind.
Robust endpapers referred me to Jewel Lansing's book on the same topic, so more to come.
Carl Abbott provides a well-organized chronological look at the piece of earth we now call Portland, situated in the county of Multnomah (as in the territory in which the Multnomah native peoples lived prior to the take over by incoming mixed populations), in the state of Oregon.
It is fascinating to drive over land, through communities and compare writings, photographs, and changes over hundreds of years. The land hangs in, suffers us to stay (mostly) and in most cases simply carries on, its myriad citizens (human and animal) reshaping it with every wave of migration, settlement, abandonment and then recycle. We worry about our own times, and all the details of them, and yet the land underneath us is as ancient as ancient is. Blows my mind.
Robust endpapers referred me to Jewel Lansing's book on the same topic, so more to come.
June 25, 2025
Like knowing more about the place I live. Succinct summary of major events and fun extra tidbits.
September 11, 2025
Well paced history of a city I now call home.
Read
March 26, 2013I thoroughly enjoyed this history of Portland. He takes if from who was living on (what became) Sauvie Island before Europeans showed up to the present day in a slim book. It's a fast read, yet he still manages to work in a lot that I didn't know. There are Wobblies, the KKK, artists, longshoremen and immigrants. it's interesting seeing the city's character emerge. I knew bits and pieces about Portland's history, but this put it into context and added more detail. He's managed to work in the Lovejoy columns, and my favorite Oregonian, Marie Equi. Sadly, I guess there wasn't room for the story of her horsewhipping a man in The Dalles that refused the promised raise to her lover, the school marm.
August 18, 2012
Well done local history. It fills in a lot of gaps in what I've
seen since I moved to Oregon. I like knowing Sandy Blvd, outside my door,
was already on the map in 1852 in recognizable shape. I came too late to
see Tom McCall in action, but like his style as shown in comments about
the need to control the spread of the city for second homes for the two-home
families--or, as he called them, "grasping wastrels of the land." He apparently
had a way with words, or a good speech-writer, or both.
seen since I moved to Oregon. I like knowing Sandy Blvd, outside my door,
was already on the map in 1852 in recognizable shape. I came too late to
see Tom McCall in action, but like his style as shown in comments about
the need to control the spread of the city for second homes for the two-home
families--or, as he called them, "grasping wastrels of the land." He apparently
had a way with words, or a good speech-writer, or both.
Read
July 1, 2015Learned a great deal about my home town.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews