This is downtown Portland in the early 1860s. This is Front Avenue and looking south. You can see shops and businesses are on the ground floor with offices and residences above. People needed the sidewalks. They very clearly didn't need the street area for moving around. You can see that they just piled all kinds of junk in the street because the street wasn't very important. This is one of the reasons that Portland was called a stump town. That is, we had not taken the tree stumps out of our streets yet.