Portland
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7correct to beat the crowd
This Portland trivia quiz has 48 free questions with answers and covers the Oregon city from the 1845 coin toss that named it to Portlandia, Voodoo Doughnut and 'Keep Portland Weird': the rivers and bridges, Forest Park and the rose gardens, Powell's City of Books, the Trail Blazers, Timbers and Thorns, Mount Hood and Timberline Lodge, the Vanport flood, Nike's roots in the suburbs, and the Simpsons characters named after its streets. A handful of questions cover the older Portland in Maine that lent the city its name. It is written for locals who think they know Stumptown, transplants still learning it, and anyone running a Pacific Northwest round at trivia night. Easy questions cover the nicknames and landmarks; hard ones get into funiculars-worth of detail on bridges, mayors and lava fields. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference such as Wikipedia or an official site, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Portland got its name in an 1845 coin toss; which city's name would it carry if Asa Lovejoy had won?
Boston
Boston lost the best-of-three toss: Francis Pettygrove won and named the town after Portland, Maine, and the copper cent the two founders flipped is on display at the Oregon Historical Society.
Q 02Portland sits at the confluence of the Columbia River and which other river?
Willamette
The Willamette cuts the city in two on its way north to the Columbia, which is why Portland needed so many bridges that it is nicknamed Bridgetown.
Q 03Portland's nickname 'Stumptown' came from what?
Tree stumps left in its streets
Tree stumps left in its streets gave the name: the 1840s town grew so fast that firs were felled quicker than anyone could clear the stumps away.
Q 04Portland planted roses along its streets for a 1905 exposition honoring whose journey west?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark's centennial was the reason for the planting: the roses were meant to charm the fair's visitors, and the 'City of Roses' name took hold afterwards.
Q 05Pioneer Courthouse Square, built in 1984 on the site of a downtown parking lot, is affectionately known as what?
Portland's living room
Portland's living room was a parking lot for 30 years after the grand Portland Hotel came down in 1951; locals helped pay for the square by buying bricks inscribed with their names.
Q 06Powell's flagship bookstore, which fills a whole Portland block, goes by what name?
City of Books
City of Books is barely a boast: the flagship covers about 68,000 square feet, and a pillar at its door tells visitors, in Latin, to buy the book, read it, enjoy it and then sell it.
Q 07Mill Ends Park, a two-foot circle in a Portland street median, was said to be home to what?
Leprechauns
Leprechauns: columnist Dick Fagan planted flowers in a hole left for a light pole in 1948 and wrote that it held the only leprechaun colony west of Ireland; Guinness long listed it as the world's smallest park.
Q 08The Portlandia statue is the second-largest hammered-copper sculpture in the US after which one?
The Statue of Liberty
Only the Statue of Liberty is a bigger hammered-copper figure, yet Portlandia is rarely seen on souvenirs: sculptor Raymond Kaskey kept the copyright and has threatened to sue over her image.
Q 09Which Portland doughnut shop briefly sold NyQuil doughnuts until the health department warned it to stop?
Voodoo Doughnut
Voodoo Doughnut dropped the cold-medicine doughnuts after the warning but kept its other stunt: couples have been legally married in its Portland shops.
Q 10The 'Keep Portland Weird' slogan was borrowed from which other US city?
Austin
Austin's slogan began as a buy-local campaign; record-shop owner Terry Currier brought it to Portland in 2003 after a friend at Austin's Waterloo Records urged him to try it.
Q 11Which Portland park spans over 5,000 acres and holds most of the Wildwood Trail?
Forest Park
Forest Park stretches along the Tualatin Mountains with more than 80 miles of trails, so hikers can walk from the edge of downtown into native forest without leaving the city.
Q 12The International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park was set up to protect what?
European hybrid roses during WWI
European hybrid roses during WWI were at risk from the bombing, so newspaper editor Jesse Currey persuaded Portland to shelter them, and English growers began shipping plants in 1918.
Q 13Which children's author set her Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins books around Portland's Klickitat Street?
Q 21Tilikum Crossing, opened across the river in 2015, is unusual among big US bridges because it bans what?
Private cars
Private cars are the one thing barred from Tilikum Crossing, which carries trains, buses, streetcars, bikes and walkers; its name, Chinook Jargon for 'people', honors the region's first inhabitants.
Q 22Cathedral Park sits beneath Portland's St. Johns Bridge and is named for the bridge's towers in which style?
Gothic revival
David Steinman's 1931 bridge is Gothic revival down to its pointed-arch piers; aviation officials wanted it painted in black and yellow stripes for a nearby airfield, but the county chose green.
Q 23The Boring Lava Field beneath Portland takes its name from what?
A nearby town
Beverly Cleary
Beverly Cleary grew up in the Grant Park neighborhood, where fans raised the money for bronze statues of Ramona, Henry and his dog Ribsy in a sculpture garden.
Q 14Which center led the Trail Blazers to their only NBA title?
Bill Walton
Bill Walton was Finals MVP in 1977: his team lost the first two games in Philadelphia, then won four straight, in only the franchise's seventh season.
Q 15In the 1984 NBA draft the Trail Blazers picked Sam Bowie second overall, one spot ahead of which player?
Michael Jordan
Portland took Bowie second and Chicago grabbed Michael Jordan third, behind Houston's Hakeem Olajuwon; the Blazers repeated the pattern in 2007, taking Greg Oden ahead of Kevin Durant.
Q 16Portland's 'Rip City' nickname began as a Trail Blazers announcer's shout after what?
A long-range shot
A long-range shot by Jim Barnett tied the mighty Lakers in the team's first season, and announcer Bill Schonely blurted out 'Rip City!' for reasons he could never explain.
Q 17What does the Timbers' mascot Timber Joey do each time the team scores?
Chainsaws a slab off a log
Timber Joey chainsaws a slab off a log after every Timbers goal, and the slice is presented to the scorer after the match; he inherited the chainsaw from Timber Jim in 2008.
Q 18The Timbers won their first MLS Cup in 2015 by beating which Eastern Conference champion 2-1 on its own field?
Columbus Crew
Columbus Crew goalkeeper Steve Clark dallied on a back-pass and Diego Valeri charged it down to score after 27 seconds, then the fastest goal in an MLS Cup final; Valeri was named the game's MVP.
Q 19The Portland Thorns' recognised supporters' group goes by what name?
Rose City Riveters
The Rose City Riveters began in 2013 when a 13-year-old fan decided the new women's team needed a supporters' group of its own; on match days they take over the stadium's north end.
Q 20Portland's Steel Bridge, opened in 1912, is the only US double-deck bridge whose decks can each do what separately?
Lift straight up
Lift straight up: the lower rail deck telescopes into the road deck, so small boats can pass without stopping the traffic overhead, and only big ships need both raised.
A nearby town, Boring, gave the volcanic field its name, and one of its extinct cinder cones, Mount Tabor, was already a Portland park when workers dug up the cinders that showed it was a volcano.
Q 24Which snow-capped volcano, Oregon's highest peak, forms the backdrop to Portland's eastern skyline?
Mount Hood
Mount Hood is no relic: its last major eruptive period began in 1781, and federal scientists rank its threat potential as very high.
Q 25Which Oregon mountain lodge supplied the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980)?
Timberline Lodge
Timberline Lodge asked Stanley Kubrick not to use its real Room 217 in case guests refused to sleep there, so the film's haunted room became 237, a number the lodge does not have.
Q 26What destroyed Vanport, briefly Oregon's second-largest city, on Memorial Day 1948?
A river flood
A river flood burst a railroad embankment hours after officials had told residents 'You will have time to leave. Don't get excited'; 15 people died and the city was never rebuilt.
Q 27Which school grew out of the Vanport Extension Center, dubbed 'the college that wouldn't die' after a 1948 disaster?
Portland State University
Portland State University began in 1946 as classes for returning veterans in Vanport; left homeless two years later, it carried on in a disused shipyard before settling downtown.
Q 28Which industrialist's wartime shipyards drew so many workers to Portland that he built the city of Vanport to house them?
Henry J. Kaiser
Henry J. Kaiser's yards needed homes faster than Portland could supply them, so he built his own: begun in 1942, Vanport became the largest public housing project in the country.
Q 29Which tech founder dropped out of Portland's Reed College but stayed on to sit in on a calligraphy class?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs said that without that class the first Macintosh would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
Q 30Portland's bronze four-bowl drinking fountains are named after which lumber baron who paid for the first 20?
Simon Benson
Simon Benson gave $10,000 in 1912; local lore says the teetotal timber baron wanted to keep loggers out of saloons at lunchtime, though another tale credits a girl crying for water at a parade.