Feel how this street has been Portland's counterculture corridor since the 1960s, when the neighborhood around Hawthorne Boulevard first attracted the artists, students, musicians, and political radicals who defined the Portland aesthetic long ahead of fashion. Hawthorne runs east from the base of Mount Tabor, the extinct volcano in the middle of Southeast Portland, into the bridge approaches near the Willamette. The street's character is a palimpsest of Portland's countercultural decades: used record stores and vintage clothing shops from the vinyl revival sit beside cafes and bookstores that have been here since the 1970s, which sit beside food carts that arrived last year.
Powell's Books on Hawthorne is a separate store from the mothership on Burnside, more neighborhood-scaled and just as essential. The Oregon Conservatory of Performing Arts, the independent movie theaters, and the density of music practice spaces in the blocks around Hawthorne represent a creative infrastructure that has kept the street's character intact through repeated waves of real estate pressure. Hawthorne is also the access point for Mount Tabor Park, whose summit offers a panoramic view of Portland from a volcanic crater that last erupted approximately three hundred thousand years ago.