11 Best Downtowns In The Pacific Northwest
A good downtown has to work on a Tuesday in February, not just on a August Saturday. That is the test here: enough shops, theatres, restaurants, and reasons to be outdoors that the place runs year-round rather than emptying when the tourists leave. The Pacific Northwest turns out to have an unusual number of them, partly because so many of these towns were built as ports, rail stops, and mining camps, and a street laid out to move freight is the right shape for walking.
These eleven run across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. One is a Bavarian village, one is a fake Old West town built on purpose in the 1970s, and one has its entire downtown on the National Register and a manhole cover declaring it the centre of the universe.
Port Townsend, Washington
Port Townsend spent the 1880s certain it was about to become the great harbour of the Northwest. Speculators threw up ornate brick blocks downtown and mansions on the bluff above. Then the Northern Pacific Railroad stopped at Tacoma, the boom died inside a year, and everybody left.
Nobody returned with money until the 1970s, by which point knocking the Victorians down would have cost more than ignoring them. Port Townsend is now one of only a handful of Victorian seaports listed as a National Historic Landmark district, and the downtown genuinely looks like a town still waiting for a train that is not coming.
Fort Worden State Park sits on the headland above, a decommissioned coastal battery with concrete bunkers, beaches, and the Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum. Silverwater Cafe does what the owners call Northwest Mediterranean cooking, and Nicko's Grotto across the street handles the calamari and pasta. Come in September for the Wooden Boat Festival, when the harbour fills with gaff rigs.
Anacortes, Washington
There are around 150 people standing on the walls of downtown Anacortes and none of them are alive. Since 1978 the artist Bill Mitchell has been cutting life-size figures out of plywood, painting them from historic photographs of actual residents, and mounting them on the buildings where those people worked. A shopkeeper leans in a doorway on Commercial Avenue. A crew poses outside a cannery. You walk past a century of the town's population on the way to lunch.
It is the most unusual thing any downtown on this list has done, and it works because the buildings underneath are the real ones. Commercial Avenue runs a dozen walkable blocks of brick and false-front storefronts on Fidalgo Island, with bookshops, galleries, and the Anacortes Brewery among them. Most people pass straight through on the way to the San Juan ferry and never stop, which is their loss.
Cap Sante Park has the overlook above the marina, reachable by car in five minutes. Mount Erie climbs to 1,273 feet, the highest point on the island, also by road, with views across Puget Sound to the Olympics and the Cascades on a clear day. Washington Park, 220 acres at the western tip, has a loop road and shoreline trails. The Arts Festival takes the whole of Commercial Avenue each August.
Leavenworth, Washington
In the 1960s Leavenworth was a dying timber town that had lost its sawmill and its railway yard. Two businessmen proposed rebuilding the entire downtown as a Bavarian village on the theory that the Cascade backdrop already looked the part. It was a ludicrous idea and it worked completely.
Every building in the commercial core now carries the theming, right down to the signage ordinances, and Leavenworth draws well over a million visitors a year. The Christmas lighting festival in December is the busiest weekend, and the town is frank about the fact that it is all deliberate.
Eat the schnitzel cordon bleu at Andreas Keller, which is family-run and does not pretend to be anything else. The Greater Leavenworth Museum covers the real history, sawmills included. Icicle Creek drops out of the Cascades just west of town and joins the Wenatchee, with trails along both.
Winthrop, Washington
Winthrop pulled the same trick as Leavenworth and did it first. When the North Cascades Highway was about to open in the early 1970s and bring traffic through the Methow Valley for the first time, the town remodelled its entire main street to look like an 1890s Western outpost. Boardwalks, false fronts, hitching posts, the lot.
It has been maintained ever since under a townwide design code, which is why it does not read as a theme park so much as a town that made a decision and stuck to it. Trail's End Bookstore is the anchor, with the Methow running past the windows.
Outside town the Methow Valley holds one of the largest cross-country ski trail networks in North America, over 100 miles of groomed track. The North Cascades Scenic Byway runs west through the national park, and Pearrygin Lake State Park is five minutes out for swimming and camping. The byway closes with the snow, usually by late November.
Poulsbo, Washington
Norwegian immigrants settled Poulsbo in the 1880s because the fjord-like inlet and the mountains behind it reminded them of home, and for decades Norwegian was the working language here. The town calls itself Little Norway and the downtown architecture follows, with Liberty Bay in front and the Olympics behind.
Sluys Bakery is the institution. It has been turning out Poulsbo bread and cinnamon rolls since the 1960s and the queue on a Saturday morning tells you everything. The waterfront boardwalk runs from the marina past Liberty Bay Waterfront Park, and the SEA Discovery Center is a small free marine lab that is considerably better than its size suggests.
Fish Park, just north of the centre, has boardwalk trails through wetland where salmon run in autumn. Poulsbo took second place in a national readers' poll for small-town cultural scene a few years back, which for a town of 12,000 is not nothing.
Astoria, Oregon
Astoria is the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, founded as a fur trading post in 1811, and it still works for a living. The downtown sits at the mouth of the Columbia below a hillside of Victorians, and freighters pass under the Astoria-Megler Bridge close enough to stop conversation.
The Astoria Column rises 125 feet on Coxcomb Hill, wrapped in a painted frieze of the westward expansion, with 164 steps to a view over the river and the forest. Buy a balsa glider at the bottom and throw it from the top, which is the local tradition.
The Columbia River Maritime Museum is the best on this coast, and its centrepiece is a Coast Guard motor lifeboat mounted mid-rescue on the bar, which is the most dangerous river entrance in the country. The Riverwalk runs the working waterfront and a restored trolley runs along it. Sea lions have taken over the East Mooring Basin docks and they are extremely loud.
Cannon Beach, Oregon
Cannon Beach has banned chain restaurants and neon signs, and that single decision explains the whole downtown: weathered cedar, galleries in converted houses, courtyards rather than strip frontage, and not a franchise anywhere. White Bird and DragonFire are the galleries to start with.
Haystack Rock rises 235 feet straight out of the sand at the end of the street. At low tide you can walk to the base, where the tide pools are a protected marine garden with volunteers posted to keep people off the anemones, and in spring there are tufted puffins nesting on the upper ledges. It is one of the most reliable places in the Northwest to see them without a boat.
Ecola State Park sits just north on Tillamook Head with trails along the cliff edge and some of the better whale watching on the Oregon coast. Come in November for the Stormy Weather Arts Festival and the beach is effectively yours.
McMinnville, Oregon
Third Street is routinely named among the best main streets in America and it has the tenancy to back it up: three walkable blocks of independent restaurants, wine bars, and bookshops in brick buildings from the 1880s, with almost no vacancy and almost no chains.
The reason is the Willamette Valley. McMinnville is the commercial centre of Oregon's Pinot Noir country, so the tasting rooms are in town and the vineyards are fifteen minutes out in every direction. The town hosts the International Pinot Noir Celebration each summer.
Two oddities worth the trip. The Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum south of town houses the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' H-4 Hercules, still the largest wooden aircraft ever built, with a wingspan longer than a football field. And every May the UFO Festival takes over Third Street, commemorating a pair of 1950 photographs taken on a farm outside town that have never been satisfactorily debunked.
Ashland, Oregon
A town of 21,000 in southern Oregon runs one of the largest professional repertory theatre companies in the United States. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has operated since 1935, stages around eleven productions a season across three theatres including an outdoor Elizabethan stage, and runs from spring into autumn. The downtown exists in the shape it does because of it.
That means restaurants that open after curtain, bookshops that stock the season, and a plaza that fills at the interval. The Varsity Theatre on Main Street has been showing films since the 1930s and kept its Art Deco interior.
Lithia Park runs 93 acres straight out of the plaza along Ashland Creek, designed by John McLaren, who also laid out Golden Gate Park. There are Japanese gardens, a duck pond, and a great many deer that have entirely stopped being afraid of anyone. The lithia water at the plaza fountain is free, mineral-heavy, and genuinely unpleasant, which is part of the fun.
Sandpoint, Idaho
Sandpoint sits on Lake Pend Oreille, which is over 1,150 feet deep, the deepest lake in Idaho and among the deepest in the country. The Navy still runs an acoustic research station on it, testing submarine designs at scale in fresh water because the depth and the quiet make it the best proxy for open ocean anywhere inland.
The downtown runs along First Avenue a couple of blocks from the water, and it is the real thing: independent bookshops, a brewery, galleries, and the restored 1927 Panida Theater, which the town bought by public subscription in the 1980s to stop it being carved into shops.
Schweitzer, the largest ski area in Idaho, is eleven miles up the mountain. The Long Bridge carries the highway almost two miles across the lake and has a separate pedestrian span alongside it, which is the best free walk in the Panhandle at sunset.
Wallace, Idaho
Every building in downtown Wallace is on the National Register of Historic Places. Not a district within the town, the whole downtown, listed in the 1970s partly as a tactic to stop the interstate being driven straight through it. The highway ended up on a viaduct overhead instead, and the town kept its brick Victorians.
In 2004 the mayor declared Wallace the Center of the Universe, on the reasoning that nobody could prove otherwise, and installed a manhole cover saying so. It is in the middle of Bank Street and people queue to stand on it.
The Silver Valley around it produced more silver than any other mining district in the country, over a billion ounces, and the Sierra Silver Mine Tour takes you underground with a retired miner. The Oasis Bordello Museum occupies rooms left more or less as they were when the last brothel closed in 1988, which was considerably more recently than most visitors expect. The Route of the Hiawatha rail-trail starts nearby, fifteen miles of old railbed through tunnels and over trestles.
What Separates The Good Ones
Three things recur. A decision made and held: Cannon Beach banning chains, Winthrop and Leavenworth committing to a theme, Wallace listing every building to stop a freeway. An anchor that fills the street after dark, whether that is a Shakespeare season, a wooden boat festival, or a bakery queue. And buildings that survived because somebody could not afford to replace them, which is the real reason Port Townsend and Wallace look the way they do.
If you are routing a trip, the Washington group clusters neatly: Port Townsend, Anacortes, and Poulsbo string together on the Kitsap and Fidalgo ferry routes, with Leavenworth and Winthrop over the Cascades. Astoria and Cannon Beach are twenty minutes apart on the Oregon coast, McMinnville and Ashland sit inland on the I-5 corridor, and the two Idaho towns are a four-hour drive apart in the Panhandle. Pick a cluster rather than the whole list.
