PORTLAND, Ore. -- Bike lanes and streetcars, craft-beer breweries and coffee roasters, green spaces and green buildings - this trendsetting city enjoys its clean, healthy, and easygoing lifestyle.
And then there's its quirky side - with a capital Q.
This is a city that was named by a coin toss, whose sea captains beefed up their crews by shanghaiing sailors, and that attracted tourists with a "monstrosity of art." Today, it boasts the world's smallest park - about the size of a manhole cover. And a Chinatown with no - zero - Chinese residents.
It all starts with Voodoo Doughnuts.
"When you're talking quirky, you're talking Voodoo," says Herb Spice, the quirky guide of a Quirky Portland tour.
The cash-only, takeout-only doughnut shop opened seven years ago, "mostly for people with hangovers after the bars closed," Spice says. "They'd get Pepto-Bismol doughnuts, Robitussin doughnuts, Nyquil doughnuts," till the FDA said medicine couldn't be used as an ingredient. The legacy lives, though, with the shop's Pepto-Bismol pink boxes.
Spice opens a box of assorted "classic" doughnuts, including the "blood-filled voodoo doughnut" - a rectangular, chocolate-iced doughnut with arms, red-iced eyes and mouth, and a pretzel stick in its belly.
"Think of someone you don't like or who's done you wrong," Spice says, chuckling. "Then push down the pretzel, and if the voodoo doughnut bleeds [raspberry jelly], see how that person's doing in a few days."
The other signature doughnut is the bacon-maple bar, known as "Breakfast in Vermont." Since TV chef Anthony Bourdain gobbled one on his show, "No Reservations," in 2007, the shop has stayed open 24/7, often with a line 30 deep.
Voodoo Doughnuts also provides legal wedding ceremonies, but couples who don't want to get married at a bakery can walk a few blocks to the 24-hour Church of Elvis. They just need lots of quarters to keep the ceremony going on the TV behind the window.
Nearby, the gateway to the section marketed as "Old Town Chinatown" is larger than San Francisco's, decorated with 78 dragons, 58 mythical characters, and two golden lions.
"Our Chinatown is missing something that every other Chinatown in the world has," Spice says. "Chinese."
The district does have the Lan Su Chinese Garden and the House of Louie Chinese restaurant, but Chinese residents live across town, Spice says.
It's 'The Simpsons'
As we stroll toward the neighboring Pearl District, Spice points out the 200-foot-long blocks - less than half the length of a New York City block. City founders Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove recognized that shorter blocks meant more higher-priced corner lots.
It was Lovejoy, from Boston, and Pettygrove, from Portland, Maine, who wanted to name the new city after their respective hometowns. To break the impasse, they flipped a coin three times, and Pettygrove won twice. Today, the "Portland Penny" is on display at the Oregon Historical Society.
Yet the city has a Boston look, which attracted the TV series "Leverage" to film here (Spice regrets missing the audition for the bartender's role). There's also a "Simpsons" connection, thanks to the show's creator, Matt Groening, who grew up here. Sideshow Bob Terwilliger, Mayor "Diamond" Joe Quimby, Ned Flanders, Kearney, and Montgomery Burns are some of the characters named for city streets or locations.
The Pearl District has been transformed in the last 15 years from factories and warehouses to art galleries, chic shops, fashionable restaurants, and modern residences. Yet its history has been retained, led by fixtures such as Powell's City of Books, which claims to be the largest independent bookstore in the world, and Henry's 12th Street Tavern, on the site of a brewery that produced beer for more than 140 years.
Call him quirky, but Spice shuns Henry's and its more than 100 beers on tap because the owners got the name wrong - it's on 12th Avenue. Not to worry, there are 31 other breweries in the city and six more in the metro area, leading to Portland's self-proclaimed title: Beer Capital of the World.
Since we're in the "free rail zone," we wait for a Euro-designed streetcar to the Cultural District. A digital readout connected to a GPS tells us exactly how many minutes till it arrives. Mass transit also includes a modern light-rail system, an aerial tram, buses, and the Washington Park & Zoo Railway. And Amtrak runs in and out of Union Station.
Go by bike
But the most enjoyable way to get around is by bike, thanks to the 300 miles of bike lanes, paths, and boulevards - and accommodating drivers.
Our guide notes that the environmentally conscious city has 106 buildings that are Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certified, ranking Portland in the country's Top 10. He points out INDIGO, one of its newest buildings - a 23-story, high-efficiency glass tower of offices and apartments topped with wind turbines and solar panels.
In the Cultural District, filled with performing-arts theaters and museums, Spice shows us two other green features - parking spaces with power outlets for electric cars, and Zipcars, mostly hybrids, that cost account holders $7 to $11.50 an hour.
Portland's littlest attraction is the "World's Smallest Park" - a circle of flowers about two feet in diameter in the middle of a parkway's access road.
As Spice tells it, in the mid-1940s, the city dug a hole for a utility pole but never finished the job. The sight so irked the Oregon Journal's Dick Fagan - who wrote a column, "Mill Ends" (the term for scraps at lumber mills) - that he planted flowers in the hole.
Naming his little plot Mill Ends Park, Fagan, an Irishman, wrote about a colony of leprechauns who lived in what he dubbed the "World's Smallest Park." The park was dedicated on St. Patrick's Day 1948 and hosts annual festivities to this day.
