Portland Saturday Market

In December 1973, two women artists started knocking on doors in downtown Portland. Sheri Teasdale and Andrea Scharf had a simple pitch: let us start an open-air market where local craftspeople sell handmade goods directly to the public. The city gets a new attraction. The artists get an income. The customers get something they can't find at a store. Win, win, win.

They got a $1,000 grant from the Metropolitan Arts Council. They got a parking lot — the "Butterfly lot," named for the enormous blue butterfly mural painted on its wall — from Portland businessman Bill Naito. And in 1974, they opened the Portland Saturday Market. There was no site plan. Vendors set up wherever they wanted. Fifty years later, it's the largest continuously operating outdoor arts and crafts market in the United States, drawing 1 million visitors a year to the banks of the Willamette River.

Portland Saturday Market is incorporated as a mutual benefit corporation, meaning it exists for the economic benefit of its members — the artisans who sell there. They collectively govern the market, share its costs, and keep all their own profits. A committee of members reviews every new item submitted for sale: if it isn't handmade by the person selling it, it doesn't belong. Period.

The market spent 34 years under the west end of the Burnside Bridge before moving in 2009 to its permanent home at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, with views of the river and Mount Hood on clear days. Today over 300 local artisans — jewelers, woodworkers, fiber artists, painters, printmakers, glassblowers, ceramicists — set up every Saturday from March through Christmas Eve.

In 2024, the State of Oregon designated Portland Saturday Market an Oregon Heritage Tradition, recognizing its 50 years as something genuinely irreplaceable. The arch over the entrance to Old Town — "Saturday Market · Old Town" in gold letters — has become one of Portland's most recognized landmarks.