The City of Roses, as natives of Portland, Oregon like to call it, has a long and honorable history of crime and corruption, starting as far back as the post-Civil War frontier days, leading into the mobster-infused decades of the twentieth century when prohibition, prostitution, gambling, and hard drugs besieged the town. The so-called Great Portland Vice Scandal of 1956-57 spilled into national politics, with hearings before the Senate Rackets Committee. When the '70s rolled around, members of the police narcotics squad were caught red-handed perpetrating nefarious deeds. This Northwest city, known best today for its punk rock and hipster comedies like Portlandia, was once overrun with corruption and foul play. Rose City Vice reveals a city where the cops are putting drugs back on the street, maybe even committing murder. The city council is high on coke, and the mayor is carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with 13-year- old schoolgirl while under surveillance by the vice squad. It's 1970's Portland and blackmail is in the air.

Everyone's favorite cute little city on the West Coast just got a whole lot darker.

Dark Rose reveals the fascinating and sordid details of an important period in the history of what by the end of the century had become a great American city.

Portland's biggest dirty little secret: The untold story behind the Great Portland Vice Scandal of 1956-57.

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist Winner of The Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction Award-winning short stories from the author of The Danish Girl and Pasadena “Passion for us all will remain a troublesome thing.” The Rose City combines a collection of unforgettable characters with Ebershoff’s trademark emotional insight and intelligent prose in seven stories about young men and boys as they discover and rediscover themselves in a world that never really works out as planned. Often tragic but lacking in despair, The Rose City delves into the tribulations of youth, identity, sexuality – and longing for something just out of reach. Written with compassion and truth, these stories present characters who live at the margins of the world at the moment they take their first steps toward acceptance and love.

Tucked away in the northwestern frontier, Portland offered all the best vices: opium dreams, gambling, cheap prostitutes, and drunken brawling. In its early days, Portland was a "combination rough-and-ready logging camp and gritty, hard-punching deep-water port town," and as a young city (established in the late 1840s) it developed an international reputation for lawlessness and violence. In the early 1900s, the British and French governments filed formal complaints about Portland to the US state department, and Congressional testimony from the time cites Portland as the worst place in the world for crimping. Today, tours of the alleged Shanghai Tunnels offer Portland visitors a taste of that seedy past.

As Portland has grown and changed, so has its architectural landscape. Once prominent landmarks have disappeared--the Marquam Building collapsed during 1912 renovations, the massive chamber of commerce building became a parking lot and the Corbett Building became a shopping mall. The city skyline was shaped by architects like Justus F. Krumbein and David L. Williams, only to drastically change in the face of urban renewal and the desire for modernization. Discover the stories behind some of Portland's most iconic buildings, including the Beth Israel Synagogue and the first East Side High School, both lost to fire. Join historian Val C. Ballestrem as he explores the city's architectural heritage from the 1890s to the present, as well as the creative forces behind it.