Construction recently began on the six-story, 223-room Pearl District Residence Inn by Marriott in Portland’s Pearl District, the first hotel in this shopping and dining area bordering downtown. The property will feature a restaurant and bar and a landscaped courtyard, and is shooting for LEED Silver certification when it opens in early 2014.
Travel Portland recently launched a new website designed to address the needs of meeting planners. The site’s re-engineered hotel/venue search tool enables planners to easily filter potential meeting locations, hotels and off-site venues based on their criteria; see results on a Google map; view full venue details; and even save a tentative list of locations that they can bookmark or share with colleagues. According to Travel Portland, the site has radically improved the look, feel and accessibility of information useful to planners via showcasing the unique advantages of Portland as a meeting location, and streamlined the interface so planners can quickly hone in on the facts they need to make decisions and sell the venue to their own audiences. Now planners can quickly and easily see how Portland compares to other meetings destinations, submit an RFP, contact a Travel Portland staff member and perform in-depth research on individual properties in a new and easy-to-use format engineered specifically for them.
In 2001, the city began operating the Portland Streetcar, which travels through downtown from Portland State University to the Nob Hill neighborhood via the popular shopping and dining neighborhood known as the Pearl District. A project to expand the line to the city’s eastside was completed in fall 2012, adding 3.3 miles and 28 stops to the original line. The extension line crosses the Willamette River at the Broadway Bridge and heads south through the Lloyd District, Rose Quarter (home to the Rose Garden Arena), Oregon Convention Center and the Central Eastside neighborhood before making a stop at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.