Portland was nearly named Boston. In 1845 two settlers flipped a copper penny over a muddy clearing on the west bank of the Willamette, and Francis Pettygrove of Maine won two throws out of three. The river settled everything after that. The Willamette runs 187 miles north from its forks near Eugene, and the city occupies its final dozen, where the current slows and deepens enough for oceangoing hulls. Wheat, timber and salmon moved downstream toward the Columbia. The waterfront hardened into a working edge of docks, derricks and steam ferries. Portland sunset cruise tours now trace the same channel those cargo boats used, though the freight left decades ago. The crossings came next, and they explain the nickname Bridgetown. More than a dozen bridges span the Willamette inside the metropolitan area. The Hawthorne Bridge, opened in 1910, is still the oldest operating vertical-lift bridge in the United States. The Steel Bridge, completed in 1912, carries two decks that lift independently of one another, a configuration found nowhere else. The Broadway Bridge followed in 1913. Downstream, the St. Johns Bridge raised two Gothic towers 400 feet above the water in 1931. Seen from mid-channel rather than from a sidewalk, they resolve into one continuous machine of arches, trusses and counterweights — the most recognizable Portland landmarks the city has. The west bank was itself a highway within living memory. Harbor Drive, six lanes of arterial traffic, sealed downtown off from the water until 1974, when Oregon became the first state to tear out an urban freeway outright. Tom McCall Waterfront Park opened on the vacated ground in 1978. Salmon Street Springs began throwing its jets in 1988. The seawall beneath them dates to 1929, raised after the flood of 1894 put the downtown streets under several feet of river. That reversal, from roadway to promenade, is why a Willamette River evening cruise makes sense at all: a city that turned its back on the water spent a generation turning around. Geography supplies the rest. Portland sits at 45.5 degrees north, roughly level with Venice, and its summer dusk descends by degrees instead of dropping. Light crosses the seawall, catches the underside of the Marquam Bridge deck, and settles finally on Mount Hood, 11,249 feet of stratovolcano standing 50 miles east. Because the Willamette flows north — unusual among American rivers — the downtown skyline sits broadside to the departing sun rather than in front of it. On the east bank the USS Blueback, the last diesel-electric submarine the Navy commissioned, lies moored at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, black against the glass towers opposite. Photographers understood this alignment in the ferry era. A Portland sunset cruise tour is simply the most direct way to stand inside it.