Pickleball Courts in Multnomah County, OR

Eleven venues, 59 pickleball courts, one operator, one city. Everything we cover in Multnomah County so far sits inside the City of Portland and is run by Portland Parks & Recreation: six outdoor parks holding 29 free courts, four community centres holding 14 indoor courts at a drop-in fee, and the Portland Tennis Center with 16 outdoor courts available through a summer programme. Every one of the eleven addresses was matched by the Census address geocoder and resolved to Multnomah County, so the county assignment is not inferred from the postcode. What is not here is the rest of the county. Gresham is the second city of Multnomah County and has none of its venues on this page; neither do Troutdale, Fairview or Wood Village. That is not a judgement about them: nobody has checked them yet.

The eleven sites are spread right across Portland rather than clustered, and the spread is legible on the map: two in the north on North Lombard Street (Columbia Park and Pier Park, just under three miles apart, with St. Johns Community Center between them); one in the south-east at Sellwood; two in the inner east at Laurelhurst and the Portland Tennis Center; two more east at Montavilla and East Portland Community Center; two in the south-west at Gabriel Park and Southwest Community Center; and one in the west hills at Hillside. Four of the six free outdoor parks sit in the outer half of the city, which follows directly from the department's own rule that pickleball striping goes where courts are 300 to 600 feet from housing. Space of that kind is easier to find away from the centre. Portland's river also splits the provision in a way worth planning around: everything on this page is on the east side except Gabriel, Hillside and Southwest.

Two gaps, and they are different in kind. The first is geographic: Multnomah County is not only Portland, and no venue outside the city has been checked. Gresham runs its own parks system with its own pages, and until somebody reads them this page understates the county. The second is a gap inside what we have. Portland Parks & Recreation publishes an excellent list and it is still only a list: nothing about lighting at any of the eleven, nothing about parking at any of the eleven, and a surface word at nine of them that names a category rather than a material. There is also everything the department does not run: private clubs, schools, and the courts that appear on player-maintained maps but on no municipal page. A county this size almost certainly has more than 59 pickleball courts. It has 59 that a public body has put in writing.