Oregon: Portland downtown – The Society Hotel

As Brits we have yet to truly get on board with the Thanksgiving holiday, despite living in the US for 15 years.  It is not helped that most of our immediate family live thousands of miles away! Now that our children have grown up and left home we didn’t really have much of a plan for the holidays, so we decided to head out of town for a few days.

Part of this mini road trip included spending a couple of nights in Portland, Oregon (which is about 150 miles from our home town of Bend, Oregon). As travellers we like to be economical with our money, so we can do even more trips, therefore we were looking for something cheap and downtown.

I had read about the Society Hotel located in the heart of Portland’s China Town. The building was built in 1881 by the Seaman’s Friends Society as a safe haven for sailors.  Several years after The Seaman’s Friends Society opened as a hotel, the business began to dwindle, and the building was eventually rented to the Portland Hospital for one year.  In 2013 a group of entrepreneurs purchased the building with the intention of revitalizing it into something lasting and that would have a positive impact on the area.

The hotel is located in Chinatown and is only a 10-minute walk from the fashionable Pearl District and 20 minutes from the main downtown areas. The area around the hotel is colourful! Across the street from the Society is a well-known club famed for its drag queen shows. There are also a lot of homeless people in the area (as with most big cities nowadays this is a sad problem that we have to get to grips with). All that said it is not a dangerous area and we felt very safe walking around at all times of the day and night.