Portland Ace Hotel

Where do you move if you can no longer hack the Hole?

Formerly, those sick of Jackson’s small town ways would move to Boulder, where they could get a mountain fix and a toasted bagel, not to mention a real job that didn’t necessarily involve real estate commissions.

But Boulder is so Y2K. Nowadays, it seems that abandoning the Hole means moving to Portland, Oregon, which attracts reformed mountain-towners like a great big rusty magnet. Portland is the new Boulder. Maybe even the new San Francisco. Here, arty/athletic types can live in a bustling, diverse, culturally rich, leafy burg full of healthy trendaloids like themselves, and actually afford rent. The town is lousy with hipsters, who have all adopted a Metrosexual Bike Messenger fashion sense. Don’t move to Portland unless you’ve got some skinny-ass black jeans, chunky nerd goggles, an assortment of dark-colored funny hats, a Powerbook, and a fixed-gear road bike.

Maybe you don’t care to move to PDX (which is Portland’s airport code, but such a seemingly hip acronym that everybody uses it), but you do want to visit and be immediately immersed in Portland cool. In that case, book a room at the Ace Hotel.

Portland Ace Hotel

Opened in 2007 in the World War I-vintage Clyde Hotel (where Drugstore Cowboy was filmed; how perfect is that?), the 79-room Ace is basically Portland’s hipster dormitory. It’s cheap for a downtown hotel — rooms cost $95 and up (even cheaper if you’re a touring band: coolness pays!) — and has a vintage-army-surplus aesthetic. The wood-paneled lobby looks like it hasn’t changed much from its original, 1912 appearance, except that at one end is a superswank health food restaurant and at the other is a Stumptown Coffee Roasters, the epitome of Portland coffee-hip. In the middle (next to an instant photo booth — ideal for hijinks) is a single, huge, low table surrounded by couches. This is the beating heart of the Ace, where everybody comes to check email, fire off text messages, schedule meetings with art directors, slurp Americanos, and eye each other over their glasses. I have to admit, I felt I belonged, since Jimmy Chin and I were there to shoot a video of rockstar-on-the-cusp Luke Reynolds, and if I was ever going to adopt the persona of a music video auteur, this would be the place to do it. But I doubt I was fooling anyone. My jeans are too loose.

Portland Ace Hotel

Upstairs, in the halls and the rooms, there is some seriously wacky art, painted right onto the walls, giving the whole place a really nice Alice-in-Wonderland-comes-downtown-for-her-fix effect. My own room included an enormous mural of a grumpy rabbit (which made a cool background, we decided, for part of Luke’s video). Down the hall, Jimmy’s room featured oversized diagrams from a sign language manual. He also had a claw foot bathtub. All rooms include futons, rather than beds, covered in wool camp blankets, bedside tables made of apple carts, and lamps made from hardware store clamp lights. There was also the requisite flat screen, a clock radio you could plug an iPod into, and in some rooms, turntables and vintage LPs.

But then, why would you play the hotel’s records when you have an excuse to walk through town with a Macchiato in your hand, some skinny black jeans hanging off your butt, and an old Tom Waits album from Jackpot Records under your arm? Jesus, look at you. You fit right in. Next thing you know, some pallid hottie in a floppy hat and nerd goggles will be asking you directions. Score!

Next time you’re in Portland, give the Ace a shot. For Rocky Mountain yokels, no other place provides such a refreshing blast of urbanity. I recommend it highly.

Portland Ace Hotel