Look at one of the best-preserved Victorian residential neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest District — also called the Alphabet District for its alphabetically named streets — developed primarily between 1880 and 1910, when Portland was in its first sustained boom and middle-class families were building craftsman bungalows and foursquare houses as fast as lumber could be milled. The neighborhood butts up against the West Hills and the eastern edge of Forest Park, giving it an unusual relationship between dense urban residential development and wilderness: you can walk from a Victorian townhouse to a Douglas fir forest in under five minutes.
The district has maintained its residential character through a combination of historic preservation rules and geography — the hills prevent the kind of commercial expansion that transformed other Portland neighborhoods. The churches, neighborhood schools, and corner commercial blocks that define the Alphabet District's street life are largely intact from the early twentieth century. The Northwest 21st Avenue corridor to your west functions as a secondary restaurant and retail strip that serves the neighborhood without the tourist density of 23rd.
This is one of the neighborhoods where Portlanders actually live the life that the city advertises.