The Park Blocks are a quiet civic miracle. Twenty-four blocks of planted park, a chain of one-block green squares running north–south through downtown Portland, with elms and lindens that have been there long enough to lock arms over the path. They were a single continuous park when the city was platted in 1852, then got chopped up by streets and a department store. Most of them survived. The canopy still reads as one corridor from PSU to the Pearl.
For a lunch walk in July, the Park Blocks beat almost any other route in the city — including the waterfront, which is open to the southern sun and gets uncomfortable by noon. The picks below all stay on the blocks for as long as the geometry allows and bail to a covered cross street when they don’t. Coolest stretch is between Salmon and Pine; the south-end blocks around PSU have a bit more sky.