I was in Portland for several weeks in the summer of 2004 to volunteer at the Rock N' Roll Camp for Girls (link 1), teaching 8-year-olds how to DJ.  This map was created by the girl who hosted me (and whom I had the pleasure of hearing sing over the piano most evenings).  In addition to the extremely rewarding experience of working with the creative and excited minds at the Camp, I also discovered that people in Portland are unique in the way they create their maps - "north" is almost never simply "up." Below is a paraphrase from my article in Providence's "Crosswalk" journal which continues on this subject :

"There are certain conventional ways in which we are swayed to orient ourselves, the most common being North as depicted going “up” on the page, with East to the right, and so on. This northern-priority tendency is commonly believed to tie into the compass which pulls toward magnetic North, and reinforced by standard projections which place the Northern Hemisphere of the world as the central focus (an attribute which many believe is a bias and instigator of a superiority complex). This tendency is so strong that nearly all of my maps conform to it. There were, however, a few interesting anomalies – my favorites being from Portland, Oregon, created to guide me from the house I was staying at to a camp I volunteered at, Forest Park, downtown, and other places of interest.

People I’ve met from Portland have a very ‘special’ way of orienting themselves, which is reflected in both maps that I’ve received from there. While taking for granted that the top of the page meant “North,” my first map has Southeast in the top right corner. Portlanders divide their city into quadrants, with the Willamette River, which runs North to South as the division between East and West, and a centrally located main street (Burnside Ave.) to be the other divider. This is all fine and good, except that I didn’t realize that when they draw maps, they portray the river to run East to West, instead of the direction that it ‘actually’ runs. As a result, for a solid five days I believed I was staying at a friends house in Northwest Portland when really I was in the Southeast. Imagine my disorientation when the sheet was finally pulled from over my head. "

this story is continued and reinforced in portlandmap2.