Portland's name was settled by a coin toss. In 1845 Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove flipped a copper penny; Pettygrove won two of three throws and named the clearing after his native Portland, Maine. The river had already decided everything else. Timber wharves, grain terminals and dry docks followed the water, and a Portland river cruise lunch still traces the same working channel that built the city. The Willamette runs 187 miles from the Cascade foothills to its confluence with the Columbia, and its final stretch is the reason Portland is called Bridgetown. A dozen spans cross the water inside the city limits. The Hawthorne Bridge, opened in 1910, remains the oldest operating vertical-lift bridge in the United States. The Steel Bridge, finished in 1912, is the only bridge anywhere with two decks that lift independently of one another. Tilikum Crossing, completed in 2015, carries light rail, buses, cyclists and pedestrians, and no private cars at all. Downriver, the seawall of Tom McCall Waterfront Park stands where a six-lane expressway ran until 1974. Portland tore out the freeway and gave the bank back to the water. Passenger vessels returned to that reclaimed bank in the 1990s. The Portland Spirit, launched in 1994, is a 150-foot, three-deck ship built for dining under way, with galleys that plate meals while the hull is moving. Its berth sits beside Salmon Street Springs on Naito Parkway, a few minutes' walk from the Morrison Bridge ramp. From the water the city presents an order it never quite shows from the pavement: the Marquam Bridge's steel truss overhead, Ross Island's cottonwoods to the south, the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge beyond, and on clear summer days Mount Hood standing at 11,249 feet above the eastern rooftops. Willamette River lunch cruises follow this southbound arc almost invariably, turning near Ross Island and returning with the current. The appeal is not novelty. It is continuity. Portland river cruise lunch tickets are, in effect, admission to a working waterway: the same channel that floated Douglas fir to San Francisco in the 1880s now carries midday tables past the Hawthorne's counterweights. Departures run from 1010 SW Naito Pkwy, and the fleet operates seven days a week. Portland river cruise lunch tours draw travellers who want Portland's riverfront landmarks read to them in sequence rather than assembled from street corners. Demand holds steadily through the dry months of July and August, when the river keeps the light until late. The Willamette, for the length of a meal, becomes the main street it originally was.