by Geon, Bryan
Parks: More than 25 developed parks and facilities, including Noble Woods Park, Shute Park (and Shute Park Aquatic and Recreation Center), and Rood Bridge Park; 503-681-6120
Community Publication: Hillsboro Argus, www.oregonlive.com/argus
Public Transportation: TriMet, 503-238-RIDE, www.trimet.org; bus service on many major thoroughfares and light rail service east to Beaverton and downtown Portland
Cornelius
Boundaries: North: Unincorporated Washington County; West: Forest Grove; South: Unincorporated Washington County; East: Unincorporated Washington County; Area: 2.0 square miles; Population: 12,200
Cornelius is perhaps the least-known of Portland’s sizable suburbs; ask the average Portlander what they think about Cornelius, and the response is likely to be, “Who?” (The “who,” by the way, is the colorfully named Colonel T. R. Cornelius, who sounds like a character in an animated 1960s Christmas special but was actually a settler in the area in the 1840s.) It’s not too surprising that Cornelius is not better known; it lacks any major landmarks, shopping centers, significant employers, or indeed regional destinations of any kind, and the city officially proclaims itself “Oregon’s family town,” a motto that is unlikely to garner tons of press. Cornelius serves as both a farm and forest service center and as a dormitory community of commuters to other parts of the region; in sum, it’s a pretty quiet place.
Cornelius
The average household income in Cornelius is lower than in many other Washington County communities, in part because many residents are recent immigrants, but the flip side of the income coin is that housing is less expensive here than elsewhere in the county. Indeed, the median home price is among the lowest in the metro area, in part because of a lack of large, expensive homes to skew the data upward. Moreover, the crime rate is lower than in many other affordable parts of the metropolitan area.
State Highway 8 bisects the city in a couplet of one-way streets. The city has no real downtown, but the city hall and other public buildings are near the eastern end of the couplet, in the historic and recently spiffed-up center of the community. Most of the city’s older, prewar homes are in this area, particularly south of Highway 8. The bulk of the city’s housing stock consists of fairly modest single-family homes, ranging from small cottages (or mobile homes) to ranches and fairly large two-story homes. A fair number of houses painted unusual colors—magenta, chartreuse, purple, and pink, among others—enliven the rather conventional neighborhoods in the southwestern part of the city. Some new developments of large single-family homes have sprung up in the northeastern part of the city, off North 19th and 29th Avenues.
Part of Cornelius lies within the Forest Grove School District (www.fgsd.k12.or.us), while the eastern portion is part of the Hillsboro School District (www.hsd.k12.or.us); the city is considering starting its own school district so that all children from the city can go to the same high school.
Website: www.ci.cornelius.or.us
ZIP Code: 97113
Post Office: Cornelius Post Office, 1639 Baseline St
Police Station: Cornelius Police Department, 1311 N Barlow St, 503-359-1881 (non-emergency)
Emergency Hospital: Tuality Forest Grove Hospital, 1809 Maple St, Forest Grove, 503-357-2173, www.tuality.org; Kaiser Permanente Westside Medical Center, 2875 NW Stucki Ave, Hillsboro, 971-310-1000, www.kp.org
Library: Cornelius Public Library, 1355 N Barlow St, 503-357-4093
Parks: 10 city parks and open spaces; www.ci.cornelius.or.us
Community Publication: Forest Grove News-Times, www.forestgrovenewstimes.com
Public Transportation: TriMet, 503-238-RIDE, www.trimet.org; one bus line, with frequent service to Forest Grove, Hillsboro, and Beaverton
Forest Grove
Boundaries: North: Unincorporated Washington County; West: Unincorporated Washington County; South: Unincorporated Washington County; East: Cornelius; Area: 5.9 square miles; Population: 22,000
Forest Grove lies near the eastern foot of the Coast Range at the westernmost edge of the metropolitan area, 25 miles from Portland. While the city is not entirely unplugged from Washington County’s high-tech economy—Viasystems, a circuit board manufacturer, is the city’s largest employer, with 800 workers—Forest Grove remains an important agricultural service center. In addition to traditional farms and forestland—the city is named Forest Grove for a reason—the surrounding rural area includes several wineries, and even a sakery (SakeOne, www.sakeone.com). In many neighborhoods, farmland is literally just down the street, and the city feels much more like a small town than a suburb in an urban agglomeration of nearly two million people.
The city’s cultural center is Pacific University, chartered in 1849 as Tualatin Academy, which occupies a bucolic (and rapidly expanding) campus in the center of town. The adjacent historic downtown includes several antique stores and restaurants as well as the Forest Theater (www.actvtheaters.com), which shows second-run movies. A farmers’ market is held on Main Street downtown on Wednesday evenings from May through October; during market season, downtown merchants stay open late on the first Wednesday of each month.
South of downtown, the extensive Clark Historic District is filled with old farmhouses, Queen Anne Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, and old cottages; some have been grandly restored, and while others have been neglected, the neighborhood feels a bit like it was lifted from a Norman Rockwell painting. North of downtown, small apartment complexes cluster around Pacific University. Further north, off the road to Banks, a few new multi-story duplexes and triplexes stand among modest ranches and smallish contemporary homes. The western end of town features winding streets and culs-de-sac with some new housing developments; the Coast Range looms scenically just to the west.
Forest Grove
Strip malls and commercial uses dominate the area along Pacific Avenue east of downtown. The most impressive establishment in this part of town is McMenamins Grand Lodge (www.thegrandlodge.com); this former Masonic & Eastern Star Lodge has been restored and converted to the standard McMenamins combo of guestrooms, multiple bars, a movie theater, and a soaking pool.
Forest Grove has several city parks and recreational facilities, including a popular aquatic facility, but the biggest recreational draws are Fernhill Wetlands, a prime bird-watching area in the city’s southeast corner, and Henry Hagg Lake, a favorite swimming and boating destination in the foothills a few miles south of town. Many Forest Grove residents work in Hillsboro, a relatively manageable 20-minute drive away, but others face a long commute to workplaces elsewhere in the metro area. A single bus line runs from Forest Grove east to Hillsboro and Beaverton. There has been some discussion of extending light rail from Hillsboro to Forest Grove, but no firm plans (or, more importantly, funding commitments) have been made. The city is part of the Forest Grove School District (www.fgsd.k12.or.us).
Website: www.ci.forest-grove.or.us
ZIP Code: 97116
Post Office: Forest Grove Post Office, 1822 21st Ave
Police Station: Forest Grove Police Department, 2102 Pacific Ave, 503-629-0111 (non-emergency)
Emergency Hospitals: Tuality Forest Grove Hospital, 1809 Maple St, Forest Grove, 503-357-2173, www.tuality.org; Kaiser Permanente Westside Medical Center, 2875 NW Stucki Ave, Hillsboro, 971-310-1000, www.kp.org
Library: Forest Grove City Library, 2114 Pacific Ave, 503-992-3247, www.ci.forest-grove.or.us/city-hall/library.html
Parks: 9 city parks, including Lincoln Park (with skate park), plus an aquatic center
Community Publication: Forest Grove News-Times, www.forestgrovenewstimes.com
Public Transportation: TriMet, 503-238-RIDE, www.trimet.org; one bus line, with frequent service to Cornelius, Hillsboro, and Beaverton
Outlying Washington County Communities
Beyond the urban growth boundary, past the last office parks and townhouse developments, Washington County remains largely rural, with an economy based on agriculture and forestry rather than high-tech
industry. Several small towns and cities dot the hinterlands; these communities are generally growing in population, in large part because of a minor influx of commuters, but they have so far been spared the indignity of turning into purely dormitory suburbs.
Hazelnut groves and rich farmland surround the city of North Plains (www.cityofnp.org), located just north of the Sunset Highway. This city of about 2,000 people has a diminutive downtown with civic buildings—a city hall, a police station, a fire station, and a new wood-and-stone public library with ceilings made from clear hemlock—along with a couple of taverns, a market, and a hardware store. Other commercial establishments are in strip malls on Glencoe Road, just off the highway. Homes within city limits run the gamut from moss-covered, moldering shacks to developments of large new houses; a few multimillion-dollar estates lurk in the vicinity of world-class Pumpkin Ridge Golf Course just north of town. Many homes in the countryside outside of town have spectacular settings. The city expects to double in population by 2020.
North Plains holds an elephant garlic festival every year. Speaking of stinky things, North Plains is also the site of a large composting facility, which generated terrible odors until it stopped processing commercial food waste in 2013. Now, while parts of town get an occasional unpleasant whiff, the smell situation is much better. North Plains is part of the Hillsboro School District (www.hsd.k12.or.us).
A few miles further west, Banks (www.cityofbanks.org) lies near the eastern foot of the Coast Range, north of Forest Grove. Most businesses, schools, and government buildings, and many houses, are located on or just off the city’s main street (conveniently named Main Street). At the north end of town, huge piles of logs along the railroad track await milling. Most homes within city limits are bungalows or early-20th-century styles, with the significant exception of some large new housing developments in the southern half of the city. Several wineries are nearby, and Banks is also the terminus of the 21-mile Banks-Vernonia State Trail (www.oregonstateparks.org), a multi-use linear trail built on an old railway line, which leads into the foothills of the Coast Range. Despite its small size and tiny population (about 1,900 people), Banks has its own school district (www.banks.k12.or.us).
Scholls
Other rural Washington County communities include Gaston, near Henry Hagg Lake in the foothills of the Coast Range; Laurel, at the foot of the Chehalem Mountains south of Hillsboro; Scholls, an unincorporated, primarily agricultural community on the Tualatin River south of Hillsboro and north of Newberg; the logging town of Gales Creek, in a scenic valley northwest of Forest Grove; and Roy, known for its lavish holiday displays in December, when the entire town is tricked out with light bulbs and ostentatious holiday displays—look for clouds reflecting the glow on the western horizon. Bucolic Helvetia is representative of the rural unincorporated areas in the rolling farmlands north of the Sunset Highway. Public transportation is essentially nonexistent in the rural areas of Washington County.
Laurel
Clackamas County
Portland’s self-appointed tastemakers used to consider most of Clackamas County (with the affluent exceptions of Lake Oswego and West Linn, and especially the portion of Dunthorpe that spills over into the county) a bit beyond the pale, a sort of semi-rural backwater, populated by slack-jawed yokels, that lacked both the urban amenities of Portland and the dynamic economic growth that justified Washington County’s existence. Such derisive nicknames as “Clackistan” were bandied about. (The widely publicized shenanigans of Clackamas County’s Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly did not help to dispel this view.)
Anyone who still clings to this stereotype is behind the times. While many of the outlying areas remain fairly rural and admittedly (and proudly) not especially sophisticated, inner Clackamas County has experienced blistering population growth in recent years, and areas like Damascus are slated to accommodate much of the Portland area’s projected population increase over the next 20 years. Parts of Clackamas County boast some of the highest average home prices in the region, and as for trendiness—well, for what it’s worth, there are now dozens of Starbucks locations in the county, and nary a yokel in sight. Newcomers who once would never have given Clackamas County serious consideration are now settling there in droves. More are coming. You might be one of them.
Southwest Clackamas County
The suburbs of southwest Clackamas County—the area south of Portland and west of the Willamette—have some of Oregon’s highest per capita incomes and most coveted real estate. A few areas, such as much of Wilsonville and the Kruse Way area of Lake Oswego, are regional commercial centers, but most of the land in this part of Clackamas County is devoted to residential (or outside the urban growth boundary, quasi-agricultural) uses.
Dunthorpe and Riverdale
These exclusive unincorporated neighborhoods occupy wooded hillsides, laced by sinuous roads, on the west bank of the Willamette River south of Portland. Although Dunthorpe and Riverdale lie mostly in Multnomah rather than Clackamas County, demographically they are more akin to Lake Oswego, their affluent neighbor to the south, than to Portland. Genteel Dunthorpe (together with the neighboring enclave of Riverdale) is known for large homes on large lots with correspondingly large price tags: A Dunthorpe fixer on acreage might go for a million dollars, if you’re lucky. Home styles range from staid traditional to bold (but usually not too bold) contemporary. Because residents value privacy, properties are often fenced, walled, or hedged off, and many houses are not actually visible from the street. (This is not necessarily a bad thing—not everyone finds five-car garages attractive.) Many of the homes located along the Willamette River have boathouses or floating docks. That said, not every house in Dunthorpe is a splendidly isolated mansion, and there are some ranch-style and contemporary houses that would not seem out-of-place in surrounding communities.
Dunthorpe
The area has its own excellent school district, Riverdale School District (www.riverdaleschool.com), which consistently produces some of the highest test scores and college matriculation rates in the state. Riverdale Elementary School lies squarely in the middle of the neighborhood, off Riverside Drive, but Riverdale High School was built nearby in Southwest Portland (presumably to avoid the significant expense of condemning Dunthorpe real estate). Celebrities who have purchased homes here include various Portland Trail Blazers, actor Danny Glover, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux open-source computer operating system.
Lake Oswego
Boundaries: North: Portland; Dunthorpe; West: Tigard; South: West Linn; unincorporated Clackamas County; East: Willamette River; Area: 11.2 square miles; Population: 36,900
For many newcomers who can afford to live here, Lake Oswego represents the path of least resistance. It is the Portland version of an East Coast old-money suburb: affluent, tidy, woodsy, and generally quiet, with good schools and neighbors who keep the lawn mowed and the hedges trimmed. These features make it one of the most sought-after and prestigious places to live in the Portland area, with prices to match: the average home price here is higher than in any other city in the Portland metropolitan area. This concentration of wealth and (apparent) respectability also make Lake Oswego a subject of mockery in some quarters: “Lake Big Ego” is one of the more printable derisive nicknames you might hear. “Lake O” certainly has its share of multimillion-dollar waterside homes and well-coifed Ferrari drivers, but it is actually more economically diverse than it appears to outsiders. While it’s not a bargain-hunter’s paradise by any definition, Lake Oswego contains a fair number of reasonably affordable apartments and unassuming single-family houses, especially in the city’s western neighborhoods. The city has 21 neighborhood associations, and every last one of them is dedicated to preserving the quality of life in its own little slice of the city.
Lake Oswego centers on a three-and-a-half-mile lake, fed by a canal from the Tualatin River; the lake, officially named Oswego Lake, is managed by the Lake Oswego Corporation (www.lakecorp.com), an association of
lakeshore residents, and is closed to public use. Unauthorized boaters can expect the aquatic equivalent of, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” The original settlement was a center for the iron industry—the ruins of the old iron foundry, the oldest on the West Coast, still stand in George Rogers Park on the Willamette River—but the area ultimately evolved into a community of summer cottages (a few of which still stand) on the shores of what was known until 1913 as Sucker Lake (not a great name from a real estate investment standpoint). Development for permanent housing began after the First World War, and accelerated during the suburban boom that followed the Second World War. Today the city is basically built out, with most development occurring as infill or in nearby unincorporated areas.
Lake Oswego’s pleasant, small-scale downtown, at the northeast end of the lake, features a selection of upscale shops abutting Millennium Plaza Park, where a farmers’ market (www.ci.oswego.or.us/farmersmarket/) takes place on Saturdays from mid-May through mid-October. Nearby Lakewood Center for the Arts is home to a theater (and a theater company) and hosts the annual Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts, held in June. The nearby First Addition neighborhood, one of the city’s first residential neighborhoods, features Craftsman bungalows, English Tudor–style cottages, and other quaint prewar-style homes on walkable (but largely sidewalk-less) streets. With its old homes and grid layout, First Addition would be a good choice for people who love the feel of Portland’s Eastside neighborhoods but want to live in the suburbs. The neighborhood abuts the southern end of Tryon Creek State Natural Area.