Today, Portland, Oregon, is a city of majestic bridges crisscrossing the deep swath of the Willamette River. A century ago, riverboat pilots would have witnessed a flurry of stevedores and longshoremen hurrying along the wharves. Situated as the terminus of sea lanes and railroads, with easy access to the wheat fields, sawmills and dairies of the Willamette Valley, Portland quickly became a rich and powerful seaport. As the city changed, so too did the role of the sailor--once bartered by shanghai masters, later elevated to well-paid and respected mariner. Drawing on primary source material, previously unpublished photographs and thirty-three years of waterfront work, local author Barney Blalock recalls the city's vanished waterfront in these tales of sea dogs, salty days and the river's tides.

As Portland has grown and changed, so has its architectural landscape. Once prominent landmarks have disappeared--the Marquam Building collapsed during 1912 renovations, the massive chamber of commerce building became a parking lot and the Corbett Building became a shopping mall. The city skyline was shaped by architects like Justus F. Krumbein and David L. Williams, only to drastically change in the face of urban renewal and the desire for modernization. Discover the stories behind some of Portland's most iconic buildings, including the Beth Israel Synagogue and the first East Side High School, both lost to fire. Join historian Val C. Ballestrem as he explores the city's architectural heritage from the 1890s to the present, as well as the creative forces behind it.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, and for decades thereafter, Oregon had the second largest Chinese population in the United States. In terms of geographical coverage, Portland�s two Chinatowns (one an urban area of brick commercial structures, one a vegetable-gardening community of shanty dwellings) were the largest in all of North America. Marie Rose Wong chronicles the history of Portland�s Chinatowns from their early beginnings in the 1850s until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1940s, drawing on exhaustive primary material from the National Archives, including more than six thousand individual immigration files, census manuscripts, letters, and newspaper accounts. She examines both the enforcement of Exclusion Laws in the United States and the means by which Chinese immigrants gained illegal entry into the country. The spatial and ethnic makeup of the combined "Old Chinatown" afforded much more contact and accommodation between Chinese and non-Chinese people than is usually assumed to have occurred in Portland, and than actually may have occurred elsewhere. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey explores the contributions that Oregon�s leaders and laws had on the development of Chinese American community life, and the role that the early Chinese immigrants played in determining their own community destiny and the development of their Chinatown in its urban form and vernacular architectural expression. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey is an original and notable addition to the history of Portland and to the field of Asian American studies.

In the hardscrabble early days of Portland's seaport, "shanghaiing" or "crimping" ran rampant. The proprietors of crooked saloons and sailors' boardinghouses coerced unwitting patrons to work on commercial ships. Shanghaiers like James Turk, Bunko Kelley and Billy Smith unashamedly forced men into service and stole the wages of their victims. By the 1890s, these shanghaiers had become powerful enough to influence the politics of Astoria and Portland, charging sea captains outrageous fees for unskilled laborers and shaping maritime trade around a merciless black market. For nearly a century, the exploits of these notorious crimpers have existed mainly in lore. Now historian Barney Blalock offers a lively and meticulously researched account of these colorful and corrupt men, revealing an authentic account of Oregon's malicious maritime legends.

Today, Portland, Oregon, is a city of majestic bridges crisscrossing the deep swath of the Willamette River. A century ago, riverboat pilots would have witnessed a flurry of stevedores and longshoremen hurrying along the wharves. Situated as the terminus of sea lanes and railroads, with easy access to the wheat fields, sawmills and dairies of the Willamette Valley, Portland quickly became a rich and powerful seaport. As the city changed, so too did the role of the sailor--once bartered by shanghai masters, later elevated to well-paid and respected mariner. Drawing on primary source material, previously unpublished photographs and thirty-three years of waterfront work, local author Barney Blalock recalls the city's vanished waterfront in these tales of sea dogs, salty days and the river's tides.

Tucked away in the northwestern frontier, Portland offered all the best vices: opium dreams, gambling, cheap prostitutes, and drunken brawling. In its early days, Portland was a combination rough-and-ready logging camp and gritty, hard-punching deep-water port town," and as a young city (established in the late 1840s) it developed an international reputation for lawlessness and violence. In the early 1900s, the British and French governments filed formal complaints about Portland to the US state department, and Congressional testimony from the time cites Portland as the worst place in the world for crimping. Today, tours of the alleged Shanghai Tunnels offer Portland visitors a taste of that seedy past."

Portland Hill Walks features twenty-four miniature adventures stocked with stunning views, hidden stairways, leafy byways, urban forests, and places to sit, eat, and soak in the local scene. The revised and updated edition offers five new walks in addition to the well-loved classics, with new contemporary and historical photos and easier-to-follow directions. Whether you feel like meandering through old streetcar neighborhoods or climbing a lava dome, there is a hill walk for every mood. New walks take you up to Willamette Stone State Park, across the St. Johns Bridge, down to the South Waterfront (with a ride on the aerial tram), along a stream in Gresham, and up Mounts Talbert and Scott. Portland is a walking city, and Portland Hill Walks will inspire you to enjoy it to its fullest!

A shocking true chronicle of some of Portland, Oregon’s most infamous criminal cases—from its wild roots as a frontier town to post-war 20th century. Here are some of the most horrifying crimes that made headlines and shook Portland, Oregon. The brutal Ardenwald axe murders. The retribution killings by Chinatown tongs. The fiendish acts of the Dark Strangler. In this compelling account, author JD Chandler chronicles the coverups, false confessions, miscarriages of justice, and the investigative twists of Portland’s sordid past. From the untimely end of the Black Mackintosh Bandit to the convoluted hunt for the Milwaukie Monster, Murder & Mayhem in Portland, Oregon is a true crime account that acknowledges the officers who sought justice and remembers the victims whose lives were claimed by violence—all while providing important historical context.

Welcome to Rowayton, a vibrant community nestled on the shores of Long Island Sound and encompassed by the city of Norwalk, Connecticut. Great steamships once delivered thousands of visitors daily to Roton Point to enjoy one of the premier amusement parks on the eastern seaboard. Roton Point was also home to the nation's oldest continuously operated multi-hull racing club and was the birthplace of the winged sail design for C-class catamarans. In this collection of vignettes, rumrunners, a missing two-hundred-foot steamship, a national scandal and the notorious "Long Island Express" hurricane of 1938 that almost destroyed Roton Point all introduce readers to a grand time in New England history.

The Pearl District, located in Portland's northwest province, was originally home to timber, lakes, and streams and was occupied by Native Americans. With the arrival of pioneers, its landscape gave way to an industrial scene, which quickly included the railroad. Trains delivered countless cars into what would become the Pearl District. They were first divided up in the railroad yard, and then switch engines transported the vehicles to the doors of local trade buildings.As industry moved out to the suburbs, the need for large rail yards and their storage facilities was greatly reduced in the Pearl. This opened the door for redevelopment of the district, which first began along NW Twenty-third Avenue and spread into the adjacent warehouses and rail yards north of Burnside, between NW Fourteenth Avenue and the Willamette River. Over the last 25 years, the former industrial landscape has transitioned into a dynamic residential and commercial neighborhood known as the Pearl District.