Picture one of the most unusual neighborhood plans in the United States, right here. Ladd's Addition was laid out in 1891 by William Sargent Ladd, a Portland banker and former mayor, on land he owned south of the city. Rather than following Portland's standard grid, Ladd designed a neighborhood built around diagonal boulevards that converge on a central rose garden, with four additional rose gardens at the intersections of the diagonals and the surrounding streets.
The result is a neighborhood that is genuinely disorienting in the most pleasant possible way: streets meet at odd angles, blocks are triangular and trapezoidal, and navigation requires abandoning the cardinal directions that orient you everywhere else in the flat east side. The rose gardens at the center and corners of the neighborhood have been maintained continuously since the 1910s and bloom in late May and June with hundreds of rose varieties, drawing visitors who navigate into the neighborhood by accident and then stay. The houses in Ladd's Addition are largely craftsman bungalows and colonial revivals from the 1910s and 20s, well-maintained by homeowners who know they live in something rare: a planned neighborhood that actually worked, that has maintained its character and its gardens for a century and a quarter.