Powell’s City of Books

Several years back, Yvonne and I spent a week in Portland with our daughter, Maggie, and Yvonne’s father, Greg.

In those pre-Covid times, we happily rode the light rail around the city (for free!), discovering Voodoo Doughnuts, the Waterfront Blues Festival, and some of the first food trucks we’d seen.

Without question, though, our favorite place in town was Powell’s City of Books, an amazing establishment one block square and two stories high, where we would buy a latté, roam the aisles, browse new and used selections, and somehow always leave with a bagful of books.

During the pandemic, Powell’s, like most bookstores, suffered terrible damage to the business, some of it self-inflicted. Here’s a good New York Times article about the store and its difficult path forward.