Alberta Arts District
If it’s the art scene you’re looking for, go to the Alberta Arts District, which lies farther to the northeast of Downtown Portland, a fair way across the Willamette River, centered on NE Alberta Street. For here you’ll find a diverse neighborhood, with studios and galleries generously sprinkled among barbershops, cantinas, shops, boutiques and restaurants, upon which a growing number of the city’s artists have descended.
A good time to visit NE Alberta is during the festive Art Walk on the last Thursday of every month, when art is liberally displayed, and viewed and sold, in galleries and even on sidewalks. There is usually also street entertainment on Art Walk nights.
Hawthorne District
This is the Haight-Ashbury of Portland, located east of Downtown and the Willamette River, along SE Hawthorne, between SE 26th and SE 39th avenues. Here the counterculture lives on, like the 70s never ended: incense, smoke and bead shops, used records and CDs stores, knick- knacks from the East, used and tie-dyed clothing, acoustic guitars and conga drums, used books, funky eateries, cafés and coffee shops... The scene is both out-and-out hippie as well as hippie-chic, with much of the activity centered around the intersection of NE 37th and Hawthorne.
Here, too, to soak up the atmosphere, park your car and walk around, for the pedestrian traffic can be just as interesting as the shop wares and snatches of 70s music.
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