Volcanic activity and the massive Missoula floods flatten much of what is now Portland's east side, later fostering neighborhoods on a grid that promotes community. Native people related to the Chinook and Multnomah tribes live, hunt, trade and fish along the Willamette River and Johnson Creek for more than 7,000 years.
1830s: A Hudson's Bay fur trapping company employee stakes the first claim among European settlers in Southeast Portland. John McLoughlin, also with Hudson's Bay, later takes over the estate.
1846: The "Big Burn" destroys acres of forest spreading out from Mount Scott, leaving grassy tracts attractive to settlers.
1850: McLoughlin sells land to James B. Stephens, who designates today's Hawthorne Boulevard, then a dirt road called U Street, as the southern boundary of East Portland.
1853: Stephens launches Stark Street Ferry to transport East Portland agricultural goods, such as apples from Mount Tabor, to Portland and beyond.
1862: Stephens donates land on U Street between Ninth and 12th avenues to J.C. Hawthorne for the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, which soon employs 1 in 5 East Portlanders. The street becomes Asylum Avenue.
1870s: Railroads are introduced, fueling further settlement and expansion.
1883: The hospital closes and the land becomes a park. It takes another five years before Asylum Avenue is rechristened, and takes the Hawthorne name.
1887: Morrison Bridge is completed, launching an East Portland building boom. A year later, the street car runs from downtown along Hawthorne and eventually south on Southeast 50th to Lents. Glencoe Park and Crystal Springs Park are platted. Four years later, William Sargent Ladd plats Ladd's Addition with a criss-cross grid and adds streets, sidewalks, utilities and parks.
1891: Portland annexes East Portland, followed by Sellwood two years later, developing the city into a collection of distinct enclaves with their own business districts and personalities. Streetcar lines fuel development and define neighborhoods.
1894: Reservoirs are completed on Mount Tabor, one of two extinct volcanic cinder cones in Southeast. The other is Powell Butte.
1905: Oaks Amusement Park opens on the river in Sellwood, drawing 350,000 visitors the first season. It remains a favorite today.
1910-1912: Hawthorne Bridge opens. Portland annexes Lents, with its town center at Southeast Foster Road and 92nd Avenue.
1913: Pietro Belluschi designs St. Philip Neri Catholic Church (2408 SE 16th Ave), serving a growing community of Italians. Many Italians establish truck farms that supply "Produce Row" -- fruit and vegetable wholesalers in the riverside industrial district. Rinella Produce and Gatto & Sons Fruit are among several still operating.
1924-1925: The city's first zoning code defines four zones. The first gas-powered bus runs on East 39th Avenue. The Sellwood Bridge opens, followed a year later by the Burnside and Ross Island bridges.
1927: Bagdad Theater is erected at Southeast 37th and Hawthorne.
1936: Hawthorne streetcar tracks are paved over to accommodate automobiles, signaling the decline of the streetcar era. Fred Meyer builds its first grocery at Southeast 36th and Hawthorne.
1964: Interstate 5 opens, running along the river's eastern bank and later fueling endless debate about moving it farther inland.
1960s: Developers such as a young Joe Weston raze homes to build small apartment complexes, such as The Mel-Grace at Southeast 25th and Taylor, named for his parents. Inner Southeast was heavily zoned for apartments, reflecting the notion that families of means move to the suburbs.
1968: Inner-Southeast activism ignites. Southeast Uplift neighborhood association launches to fight proposed Mt. Hood Freeway that would zoom through to the suburbs. Group also confronts developers, tipping the balance from homeowners to renters.
1970: People's Co-op opens in a former Italian grocery (3029 SE 21st), exemplifying hippie sensibilities. It's been expanded, remodeled and is going strong.
Early 1970s: Radical fugitives Susan Saxe and Kathy Ann Power, not long after involvement in a Brighton, Mass., bank-robbery-turned-murder, are rumored to stay briefly in inner Southeast. Police arrest Saxe in 1975. Power surfaces in 1993, living as Alice Metzinger in Corvallis.
1976: The Mt. Hood Freeway proposal officially dies. Activists claim triumph for fighting suburban flight, strengthening close-in neighborhoods.
1980s: Outer-east-side unites. Residents make a bid to create the City of Columbia Ridge east of Interstate 205. Instead, Portland and Gresham annex what was called midcounty.
1989: Many Chinese immigrants, post-Tiananmen Square, begin settling in outer Southeast, shifting the center of Portland's Chinese community from westside to eastside. Ukrainians and Russians start coming after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. More immigrants, notably Vietnamese, Korean and Mexican, follow.
1991: Outer Southeast residents protest the Midcounty Sewer Project's high cost to homeowners. The issue symbolizes a "stepchild" relationship many feel with Portland as well as an independent spirit.
1992: Sunnyside Neighborhood board member Floyd Landrath proposes a "hemp enforcement-free zone." Board majority votes no at packed meeting in January 1993. Neighbors accuse Landrath of trying to create Haight-Ashbury North.
1996: Old Belmont Dairy in Sunnyside is redeveloped into housing and a Zupan's market as close-in neighborhoods beyond Hawthorne turn upscale. Nonprofit City Repair Project launches to build community with gathering spaces such as a plaza at Southeast 33rd and Yamhill.
1998: Woodstock Elementary School launches a Mandarin Chinese language immersion program, which becomes the first kindergarten-to-college program in the country.
2002: Michael Bortin, owner of Zen Hardwood Floors and living near Hawthorne, is arrested in connection with the 1975 Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery and killing in suburban Sacramento. Bortin is later sentenced to six years in prison.
2003: The City Council's green light to "skinny houses" on small, infill lots reshapes outer Southeast with what critics view as mish-mash high density that erodes community.
2004: Historic preservationists defeat the city's plan to bury the 100-year-old Mt. Tabor reservoirs in a post-9/11 security move. Separately, vandals hurl Molotov cocktail at a new Starbucks on Southeast Division at 20th amid gentrification. Interstate 205 proves dividing line in 2004 elections. East of I-205, a majority says no to gay marriage and taxes, cheers property rights and barely musters a majority for Bush-challenger John Kerry in the presidential race.
2005: County brings disaster relief to Hurricane Katrina evacuees at the former Washington-Monroe High School in Buckman. Lents relaunches its farmers market as younger residents work to revitalize the area. Plans for I-205 light rail fuel development hopes.
2007: Southeast is at the heart of sustainability and redevelopment movements from housing to food as immigrant communities expand cultural mix. Southeast 82nd Avenue overtakes Chinatown in Northwest Portland as the main Chinese business district.
Sources: City of Portland; The Oregonian; Historian Chet Orloff; Asian Health and Service Center; www.wikipedia.com; U.S. Census data; Time magazine
-- Erin Hoover Barnett