Love Our Arts & Culture Coverage?
You can help fund it!
Joe Streckert is the author of Storied & Scandalous Portland, Oregon: A History of Gambling, Vice, Wits, and Wagers. He writes about books, history, and comics.
It’s the end of the line for TriMet’s oldest MAX trains. On Saturday, April 18, transit fans came to Holladay Park to bid farewell to one of Portland’s oldest forms of public transportation. Attendees got a chance to see a Type 1 car one last time, take pictures, see inside the cab, and write farewell […]
Lloyd Center Mall will close its doors on August 8, 2026. A press release from Urban Renaissance Group, the mall’s owners, announced the official closure date and explained that tenants will have until August 31 to vacate the mall. Tenants learned the closure date this morning in a meeting held before the public announcement. Jumbo’s […]
[What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Transportation issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.] Over fifty years ago, a freeway almost destroyed a large […]
This might be the last year for Lloyd Center. There’s a plan for what’s next, but a community that’s grown in the mall in recent years isn’t happy with it or the process of deciding Lloyd Center’s future. Urban Renaissance, the real estate development group that partly owns the mall, has a vision for what […]
Hamlet can be a lot of things: A sad boy who can’t make up his mind. A philosopher plumbing the mysteries of the human condition. A guy with some really weird feelings about his mom. Simba from The Lion King. In Fat Ham, playwright James Ijames reimagined the prince of Denmark as Juicy, a queer […]
People talked about the mall as a public asset to the community… the trick is that it’s a privately owned and operated building, and it has an outsized negative effect on the outside of it.
This might be the last year for Lloyd Center. There’s a plan for what’s next, but a community that’s grown in the mall in recent years isn’t happy with it or the process of deciding Lloyd Center’s future. Urban Renaissance, the real estate development group that partly owns the mall, has a vision for what […]
A new nonfiction history, Let My Country Awake, explores the complexity of Indian resistance against the British Empire during World War I.
The new pavilion’s exterior is almost entirely glass… reminiscent of an Apple store.
[Find the Mercury‘s 25th Anniversary Issue (in print) near you by using this handy-dandy map, and read all of our anniversary stories here.—eds.] Little known fact: The Portland Mercury takes its name from one of the most notorious weeklies from the dawn of Oregon history. During the latter half of the 1800s, the Sunday Mercury was […]
The films at Portland Horror Film Festival are powered by fake blood, hard work, and sincerity.
In the early 1970s, Portland design reviewers used a miniature (yet massive) model of downtown to consider proposed construction projects. City of Possibility gives Portlanders the rare opportunity to see the 18-foot by 22-foot city in all its glory—along with a bunch of other fascinating models, both literal and conceptual.
Sign up for our newsletter for news recaps, updates, and more!
