Get Stumped by Our City Trivia

Within a few years of moving to Portland, you start hearing the legends.

The Rose City has the most strip clubs per capita (debatably true), and Forest Park is the largest urban park in the country (actually not true). Then you notice that characters in The Simpsons are named after the streets. If you’ve read our paper more than once, you’ve picked up a few more historical tidbits, like the one about the pub owner who exposed himself to art and then became mayor (RIP, Bud Clark). The list goes on, fun fact after fun fact.

But Elise Schumock likes to go deeper.

Every Wednesday, the former high school Latin teacher hosts a round of highbrow trivia at her establishment, Rose City Book Pub. (She reserves the following day to prepare the next week’s questions. Wednesdays are for trivia, Thursdays are for “going down the rabbit hole in Wikipedia,” Schumock says.) After profiling her trivia night in our recent Best of Portland issue, we had the bright idea to ask her to bring her event to our pages. She kindly obliged with a list of 25 questions meant to challenge and delight.

“They’re stories; it’s not just facts and information,” she says. “It’s the stories that are really vibrant.”

These questions give you not only the chance to test your knowledge of the city, but to win a prize or two, including a copy of our 50th anniversary book and a $50 gift card to Rose City Book Pub.

You have until Wednesday, Aug. 13 to submit your answers below for a chance to win (no cheating by looking things up—we’re trusting you, noble reader).

Warning: You might get stumped a time or two, but that’s part of the educational fun of trivial matters like these. Good luck!—Robin Bacior, Arts & Culture Editor

1. What year did pinball become legal again in Portland?

2. What kind of business was at the corner of Northwest 10th Avenue and West Burnside Street before Walter Powell opened a bookstore? 3. Where were members of Portland’s Japanese American community interned starting in May 1942?

4. Why was a 20,000-square-foot log cabin in Northwest Portland that burned down in 1964 originally built?

5. What is the oldest fountain in Portland?

6. What Portland native won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

7. What could you ride at Meier & Frank’s Santaland until 2005?

8. The Hollywood Library features a mural of the neighborhood as depicted in whose books?

9. What Rose Festival event, started by children in 1917 in response to limited festival offerings during World War I, is hosted by the Hollywood District?

10. What furniture and appliance salesman said, “Free is a very good price”?

11. At which high school was Mr. Holland’s Opus filmed?

12. Which three businesses has the neon “Portland, Oregon” sign on Northwest Couch Street advertised?

13. When Trail Blazers play-by-play announcer Bill Schonely first shouted “Rip City!” in 1971, creating the nickname for the team’s hometown of Portland, what did he originally mean by the term?

14. Portland’s International Rose Test Garden was originally established to protect roses during which war?

15. What object was the grand marshal of the Rose Festival Starlight Parade in 2015?

16. What philanthropist whose husband manufactured canning jars founded a home for orphans and single mothers that became a center that now helps developmentally disabled adults?

17. Where did the penguins stay upon their arrival in 1957 when their enclosure wasn’t ready at what would eventually become the Oregon Zoo?

18. What is the oldest bridge that crosses the Willamette River?

19. Where was the Portland airport before PDX was built?

20. Which two streets in the Alphabet District are named for the guys who flipped a coin to decide the name of Portland?

21. What was Portland’s first topless bar?

22. Vanport, which was destroyed by a flood in 1948 and never rebuilt, was originally developed to provide housing for workers of which wartime employer?

23. Why do so many older houses in Portland have the same black-and-white tile address numbers?

24. What Portlander was the first African American woman elected to the Oregon Senate?

25. What was originally built on Coe Circle where the Joan of Arc statue is located?