Visitors rarely see the part of Portland you have reached, and residents treasure it precisely for that reason. North Portland occupies the peninsula between the Willamette River and the Columbia Slough, a geographic circumstance that gave it a separate character from the rest of the city for most of its history. The peninsula was home to shipyards, dry docks, and steel mills that made North Portland an industrial district through the middle of the twentieth century, with a working-class residential population that included the largest concentration of Black Portlanders during the segregation era.
The collapse of the industrial base in the 1970s and 80s left the area economically depressed and then gradually attracted the same cycle of disinvestment, artistic discovery, and gentrification that reshaped so many other Portland neighborhoods. North Portland today contains some of the city's most dramatic geographic contrasts: the industrial working waterfront of the peninsula's west side, the leafy residential streets of Arbor Lodge and Kenton, and the fishing boats and maritime businesses of the Columbia River frontage at its northern tip. St. Johns, the neighborhood at the peninsula's apex, was an independent city until 1915 and still functions with a distinct community identity.