Christopher Sandford

Portland has had one of the most turbulent histories of any town in America. At the time of the Great Depression it was as rowdy a riverfront port as Shanghai or Marseille, where some shopkeepers still took their payment in gold, women in tight skirts loitered in doorways on Salmon Street, and loggers drank and gambled away the afternoon.Then Portland enjoyed an economic boom, largely thanks to government shipbuilding contracts, and quickly cleaned up its act. If you happened to have visited from around 1945-65, you would have been struck by the long rows of neat clapboard houses, most with a US flag fluttering out front, and a waterfront area conspicuously free of girly bars and vomit.

SeattleAh, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial for its snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes, and now, too, for its riotous Capitol Hill residential neighborhood where free spirits roam with their feral dogs and semi-automatic weapons. Their little community survives — even flourishes — by handing out free stuff like gas masks from the back of trucks, eating lentils cooked over an open fire, and sustaining each other’s morale by peak-decibel showings of the racially-themed movie 13th. Apparently they’re in it for the long haul.