One neighborhood, several local names

Northwest District is the useful umbrella for this guide. The City's neighborhood boundary runs from West Burnside north toward Nicolai and St. Helens Road, with I-405 and the Willamette River on the east. Its irregular western side reaches the Forest Park edge and follows the Cornell and Westover area. That includes more than the familiar shopping streets: Willamette Heights and the riverfront edge are part of the larger neighborhood.

Alphabet District, Nob Hill and Slabtown describe different aspects of this place. They are useful for orientation, but they do not have interchangeable boundaries. A Northwest Portland mailing address also covers much more territory than Northwest District. Use the City's neighborhood map when an address sits near an edge.

Alphabet District: the street names and the historic area

Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders and the sequence northward make the alphabet easy to notice. The compact blocks are another enduring part of the neighborhood's early layout. NWDA's history traces the southern and eastern grid to John Couch's nineteenth-century land claim. Those short blocks still let a commercial avenue and a residential side street sit very close together.

The Alphabet Historic District is a specific designation within the larger neighborhood. Its boundary is irregular, generally between Burnside and Lovejoy and NW 17th and 24th Avenues. The designation is more precise than the casual use of “Alphabet District”; being on an alphabet street does not establish a property's historic status.

Nob Hill: storefronts, porches and apartment courts

Nob Hill is closely associated with NW 21st and NW 23rd and their surrounding residential blocks. Travel Portland's Northwest/Nob Hill guide describes Victorian houses adapted for shops and restaurants. The change in building use is visible in the neighborhood's character: a raised porch can belong to a business, while a brick apartment entrance may sit a short distance away.

The City's district plan distinguishes the hard edge of the old streetcar commercial corridors from side streets softened by shallow gardens, trees and entrance courts. That is a more useful distinction than treating every nearby address as the same setting. A residence above storefronts, a courtyard-facing condo and a detached house can share a few blocks while relating very differently to the street.

Slabtown: an industrial history with a newer residential layer

The name predates today's development. The City's historical appendices connect Slabtown to workers' cottages near the riverfront mills, where cast-off wood slabs supplied fuel. Industrial expansion later displaced much of that housing. Surviving smaller buildings now sit within an area that also contains larger residential and mixed-use developments; the older cottages and newer blocks tell different chapters of the same story.

Slabtown's informal extent varies, as Travel Portland notes. Here it describes the northern and eastern mixed-use part of Northwest District, rather than a second official neighborhood boundary. A development advertised as “Slabtown” still needs its address, ownership type and surroundings checked individually.

West toward Wallace Park and the heights

The neighborhood becomes more residential toward Wallace Park at NW 25th and Raleigh and the western hills. Willamette Heights belongs within the City's Northwest District boundary, with a distinct hillside setting near Forest Park. It should not disappear from an umbrella search simply because the guide also discusses the flatter Alphabet and Slabtown blocks.