Portland Heights, Rerouted: What Changed On The Hill This Summer

The orange sign showed up on Marquam Hill Road sometime in March, easy to miss if you were driving but impossible to ignore on foot: Towhee Trail closed, slope unstable, do not enter. If you've spent enough weekends on the Council Crest loop, you probably know the spot. If you haven't been up there since spring, you're about to find out that the trail you assumed would always be there quietly stopped being an option five months ago.

That closure is one of three changes reshaping how people who already live in Portland Heights move through their own neighborhood this year. None of them involve a new building or a zoning fight. They're smaller than that, and more useful to know: a trail rerouted by a landslide, the neighborhood's own playground fenced off for a rebuild, and a storefront on Vista Avenue that used to sell antiques and now pours cocktails. Put together, they say something specific about this stretch of the West Hills in 2026. The neighborhood itself hasn't changed. The paths through it, and the ways you spend an afternoon in it, have.

The Sign On Marquam Hill Road

Portland Parks & Recreation's trail closures page has carried the same update since March 13: the Towhee Trail is closed from Marquam Hill Road to the Marquam Trail because of a landslide, and Fairmount Road above the slide is closed too, since the slope may still be unstable. That's not a detour around a fallen tree. It's a segment that connects two of the most-used trails on the hill, gone for the length of an entire hiking season, with no reopening date posted as of this writing.

If you've done the full Marquam-to-Council-Crest loop that stitches together Towhee, Flicker, and Warbler, you already know that route is broken this year. But the loop that Friends of Marquam Nature Park still lists on its own trail guide, starting at the shelter on SW Marquam Street and climbing the Shadyside Trail before switchbacking up the Marquam Trail proper to Council Crest, never touches the closed section at all. It's not a workaround someone invented in response to the slide. It's simply the other loop, the one that gets less foot traffic because Towhee used to be the more direct option.

A few practical notes if you're headed up this month:

• Stay on the Marquam Trail's main switchbacks from the SW Marquam Street shelter. Towhee is impassable, not just inconvenient.
• Don't try to drive around the slide either. Fairmount Road above it is closed to vehicles, not only hikers.
• The off-leash run near SW Council Crest Drive and Greenway Avenue is untouched. Only the approach changed, not the destination.

The workaround isn't a secret route. It's just the loop nobody used much when Towhee was still open.

Friends of Marquam Nature Park, the volunteer group that has maintained these trails since the park's 1983 dedication, merged with Forest Park Conservancy in 2023. That's worth knowing if you're the type who reports downed branches or checks trail conditions before a run: the organization behind the maintenance has changed hands even if the trail names haven't.

The Fence Around The Playground

If you've walked or driven past Portland Heights Park on SW Patton Road this summer, you've probably noticed the construction fencing where the play structure used to be. That's not a maintenance patch. Portland Parks & Recreation has hired a contractor to rebuild the playground at the park, and the project page confirms that existing play equipment, benches, the picnic table, the drinking fountain, and the sidewalk near the small playground are all coming out to make room for new, more accessible equipment.

The park itself is small by design. It opened in 1945 on land the Portland Heights Playground Association had been raising money for since the 1920s, and it still carries that neighborhood-built-it feel: two lighted tennis courts, a softball field, a seasonal soccer field, and a playground that had gone as long as it could on equipment past its functional life. Most of the park stays open during construction, but tennis court and restroom access are affected while crews work, and the city is telling residents to expect the project to run three to four months with a fall reopening in mind.

This isn't a city project imposed on the neighborhood from downtown. It's a partnership with the Portland Parks Foundation's Everybody Plays campaign, and the park has hosted a Community Play Day with local groups pitching in, among them Lincoln Youth Little League, Free Arts NW, Friends of Hoyt Arboretum, and the Heightscream Ice Cream Truck. If your kids have a favorite slide at that park, it's already gone. If you've been wondering why the tennis courts are harder to book this month, now you know.

The Space That Used To Sell Antiques

Vista Spring Cafe has held its corner at Vista and Spring, directly across from Ainsworth Elementary, since 1993. Former servers John Walker and Jason Bonfiglio bought the place from its original owners in 2005 and kept it exactly what it always was: wooden booths, an Italian-American menu that doesn't try too hard, no reservations, and a line out the door on a Friday night.

This spring, that same ownership took over the space next door at 2430 SW Vista Avenue, formerly home to The Heights Antiques & Consignment, and turned it into a bar and lounge called The Heights. It opened for good by mid-summer, and the reporting on it from Bridgetown Bites and WhatNow describes darker wood, a mosaic floor, and a small chandelier, a deliberate shift from the cafe's family-pizza-night register toward something built for a longer evening.

What matters here isn't that a new bar opened. Bars open and close constantly. What matters is that the same two people who've run the neighborhood's one reliable pizza place for two decades decided the corner could support a second, different kind of night out, right next door, without anyone having to leave Vista Avenue to get it.

One more Vista Avenue date worth knowing, even though it technically belongs to the neighbors down the hill: the Vista Bridge, the arched span that carries Vista Avenue over Jefferson Street and is the route most Portland Heights residents actually drive or walk to get anywhere else, turns 100 this month. Goose Hollow's neighborhood association is marking it with a Vista Bridge Street Festival on the bridge deck itself, August 30 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The bridge has carried Vista Avenue traffic since 1926, and it's the same crossing that once carried the streetcar line up to Council Crest before the rails came out in 1950.

What Actually Changed

None of this is a story about a new building going up or a rezoning notice. It's a story about the ordinary infrastructure of living somewhere: the trail you take without thinking, the park you assume will look the way it always has, the corner you walk past on the way home. All three got quietly redrawn this year. The trail lost a segment to a slide that's been closed since March with no fixed end date. The neighborhood's only real playground came out for a rebuild that won't be finished until fall. And the antiques shop that had been there for years became a second act for a restaurant that's been anchoring the block since before a lot of current residents moved in.

If you've lived on the hill a while, you probably already sensed one or two of these shifts without having the full picture. If you're newer to Portland Heights, this is the version nobody hands you when you move in: not the history plaque, but the actual state of the paths, parks, and corners right now, in August, with a trail that isn't coming back this season and a playground that isn't back yet either.

If the hillside ever has you thinking further ahead, whether that's a view-focused search or just curiosity about how Portland Heights stacks up against the neighborhoods below it, we've written about how Portland Heights compares to Downtown for buyers weighing a view home. And if you want a closer look at the neighborhood itself, from the streets to the parks to the buildings, our Portland Heights guide is a good place to start.

For now, though, this is just what changed on the hill. Reroute the loop, keep an eye out for the new playground this fall, and say hello to the new bar next door to the pizza place that's been there longer than most of us have lived here.

Questions about the West Hills market, whenever they come up? Erika Wrenn is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.