Hawthorne District

Hawthorne District runs along SE Hawthorne Boulevard roughly from SE 12th to SE 50th Avenue, with the densest concentration of shops and restaurants between 30th and 40th. It's a lived-in, walkable neighbourhood strip rather than a designed tourist district — the places here are open because they make sense for the neighbourhood, not because they were planned around visitor patterns.

The key stops: Movie Madness Video (a video rental shop that still operates, somehow, and houses a film props museum), Powell's Books on Hawthorne (the large branch of the indie bookshop empire), and numerous cafes and Thai restaurants that are reliable and inexpensive. The district connects directly to Ladd's Addition, a historic neighbourhood laid out in a rose-wheel pattern, and to the Clinton Street bar strip a few blocks south.

things to do neighbourhood
A story
SE Hawthorne Boulevard has been Portland's counterculture street since the 1960s, when the mix of cheap rents and proximity to Reed College made it a gathering place for students, artists, and the early hippie community. That character has softened over the decades as rents rose, but the strip retains more independent businesses per block than almost anywhere else in Portland: used bookshops, vintage clothing, Thai restaurants, coffee shops, and the kind of bar where the bartender knows everyone.

Other places in Things to Do