- [Narrator] Portland has hills, lots of them, and before city planters gave us the tram to get around, they gave us stairs.

- [Laura Foster] It strikes me that I'm about to climb a mountain.

You know, this is a really steep staircase, one of the steeper ones.

- [Narrator] All right, you're thinking, "They're just stairs.

Where's this story headed?"

Well, Laura Foster is a historian by trade, and she's found enough stories in these steps that she's writing a book about them.

- [Laura] They are a part of our civic history that no one else...

They're not on maps, that's what I just love about 'em, is that they're sort of, you know, uncharted.

And it's sort of like this instant zip line up the hill into a... Often, the neighborhoods look quite different at the bottom, than the top of a staircase.

- [Narrator] Laura's hiked nearly every one of Portland's 180+ public stairways, and she's uncovered plenty of little known and forgotten tidbits of history.

Take the Westover neighborhood, where steep stairways connect huge flat terraces that are only here because a developer hauled in a gold mining water cannon a century ago.

- And so he had this idea that because the rock here was not solid basalt like it is in some parts of the West Hills, he would be able to direct a water cannon, and directing it in a cannon-like hose at the hillside, and it would just sleuth away the rocks, and the trees, and the mud, and everything, and that's how they graded out this neighborhood.

This one's not quite as long, I don't think.

- [Narrator] The half dozen or so stairs in this neighborhood will take your breath away, both because they're a burly climb and because a century of landscaping has beautified what was a clearcut hillside in the Tualatin Mountains.

- Oh, and look at that.

It's so pretty.

This is one of the prettier ones in town, I'd say.

And there's actually a house right on the staircase.

- [Narrator] In the age before cars, people wanted to live either on or near the stairs because they were the quickest way to downtown and to the city street cars.

Now that cars and roads have made stairways more a luxury than necessity, living within window tapping distance of passing pedestrians isn't always embraced by homeowners.

This home is the proud exception.

- [Laura] And I see somebody's property like this, where they're so obviously enjoying living here, you know?

And getting the most out of it.

This makes you feel good.

- [Narrator] If you have a mountaineering mindset, and after a few stair climbs, you probably will, stairs are like mountain trails, connecting great viewpoints and interesting features.

- There's a bench up here.

- [Narrator] But oddly enough, these trails are unmarked, and even the largest public stairways sometimes hide out of view.

- I think that they should not be signed.

You know, everything is made so clear in life, it's kind of fun to have some mystery, but there's still an element of discovery when you see it and there's not a sign saying, "Stair this way."

- [Narrator] Each of Portland's stairways were built at different times for different reasons.

Some are strictly functional, and frankly kind of ugly.

Others were lovingly laid down, only to be nearly lost to the winds of change.

- I really like the way these stairs are sort of being reclaimed by nature.

They're letting some of them kind of return to what I call kind of poetic decrepitude.

- [Narrator] These stairs once led visitors into Portland City Park.

They were eclipsed in the 1930s, when a grander stairway was built at the new entrance on Park Place, and so it was that the old stairway fell into disrepair.

A crack opened up and a seedling sprouted in the middle of the steps.

This is that seedling today.

In this part of the park, roads and stairs lead to clearings that used to hold exhibits from the old City Zoo.

But that doesn't explain all the stairways.

- Here's the old original Park Road back from 1870s, 1880s.

And then here, we have a stair of mystery.

It just doesn't go anywhere, and it's so beautiful, the way it kind of flows out of the hillside.

It widens at the bottom, almost like a river mouth.

- [Mother] Use those legs.

- [Father] Legs.

Legs.

- Oh, there's somebody doing your ballet.

- [Narrator] Now we ask most people where to find Portland's best stairway, and this is where they'd point.

The Washington Park steps are well traveled, but here, again, the history underfoot is less well-known.

- We're on a staircase that's probably from the WPA era, the 1930s.

It has that kind of classic WPA look to it.

It was intended to be home sites.

In the 1890s, a developer came in and terraced off this steep hillside, so you had these flat levels and then a steps down to another flat level, and those were all to be roads and home sites.

They didn't know it at the time, but they were digging an old landslide.

- [Narrator] That landslide is still moving.

To find evidence, you only have to go to the tennis courts above the rose gardens.

- [Laura] If I drop the ball here, you can see pretty dramatically, how the land is dropping away to the southeast.

- [Narrator] Long story short, an unstable hillside made a better place for a park than a home.

So where houses were supposed to be, we now have roses and tourists.

Now, Portland's boosters want every visitor to stroll these elegant stairways.

What they don't advertise is this little gem.

- So we're standing right here on Southwest Arthur, right below Naito Parkway, and this is the area that used to be called South Portland.

And right here across the street, are some remnants of some very old homes, some of them are from 1875, 1876.

- [Narrator] It was a pedestrian neighborhood then.

But in the 1950s, urban renewal came to town, and the once walkable neighborhood was severed by high speed roads and elevated parkways.

People were told to basically get in the car, or else... - [Laura] And so the question was, well, we had a pedestrian culture, what are we going to do with these pedestrians?

Well, the solution was to stick 'em underground, and so we have this lovely tunnel here.

The only people I ever see in here are people that are actually kind of living in it.

And this is just, to me, a really great symbol of where we stood as pedestrians, 50 or 60 years ago.

- [Narrator] We can blame the ghost of urban planners past for this one, as well as for what happened in Linnton.

The stairs leading up from Highway 30 used to link people living on the hillside to a bustling downtown below, but only a sign remains to mark where downtown was bulldozed in the 1960s, to make room for this four lane highway.

- [Laura] What I like about Linnton is it's sort of hidden.

People drive through it on their way to Sauvie Island, but if you just wander up there, you'll see sort of a different sort of neighborhood than what is typical for Portland.

- [Narrator] Here, 107th Avenue isn't even a road.

107th is possibly the only street in Portland that is actually a stairway.

- And the character of it changes as you get further away from Highway 30, it gets more and more rural, and it hasn't changed that much.

So this is the end of 107th, so the end of the staircase, and then we're going to walk down towards Linnton School.

So if you lived in one of these adjoining houses, you'd just pop out of your house, hit the staircase, and be at work in five minutes at a lumber mill, or maybe a smelter down here, or the horse cannery.

So it was really a great pedestrian culture.

- [Narrator] When Linnton's mills closed and downtown vanished, so did the kids that used to climb these stairs on the way to the old Linnton School.

- [Laura] You can just about hear the shouts of the kids as they would run up the stairs, maybe knowing that the bell was about to ring and they were going to be late, taking the steps two or three at a time.

- [Narrator] Developers have since turned the school into condos, but they left an interesting part of the school's history intact.

- The building is actually built backwards.

It was supposed to face, of course, out to Highway 30 and the view, but the architect didn't realize what the site was like when he drew up the plans, and so it turned out it was just easier and less money to build it facing up the hill.

So this is the back of it, and you can still see the old baseball backdrop.

- [Narrator] The other story beneath any stairway in Portland is, of course, geology.

At Mount Tabor, you're stepping on a volcano.

The West Hills, that's a fault line.

But at Alameda Ridge, the story is the Missoula floods, a monstrous ancient flood that laid down a ribbon of rocks and sand along what is now Fremont.

15,000 years later, 11 stairways along this ridge give Lisa Gearing and her son Skylar, a daily workout.

- [Skylar] There are 98 stairs, and I know that because every time we walked home from school, we'd count the stairs going up, and every time it was some random number, each time it was different, and then we finally stopped at 98.

- [Narrator] There are stories in these stairs, and Laura will spend her summer hiking and collecting those stories for a book she's planning on the stairways.

Some stories will make the cut, others we're not so sure about.

- And I was sitting on some stairs, just waiting to talk to whoever might use them.

So a man was running up the stairs and I asked him to stop, and I said, "Hey, have you ever seen anything interesting on the stairs?"

And he said, "Well, sometimes I've seen rats on them."

"And how about anything else?"

And he said, "Yeah, one time I saw a deer on the stairs."

And I said, "Really?

What was it doing?"

And he goes, "Well, it was going up."

That was it.