Black and white photo postcard of the Imperial Hotel in Portland, Oregon — the eight-story Romanesque Revival commercial building at a downtown corner, its arched upper windows and ornate stonework catching the flat Pacific Northwest light, awnings shading the ground-floor retail. Built in 1894, the Imperial was one of Portland's landmark downtown hotels during the city's great commercial expansion at the turn of the century, hosting travelers arriving by train at Union Station a few blocks away. A traveler named R.A. Grammon posted this in April 1908, writing to a young woman in Peoria County, Illinois, in the lurching grammar of someone mid-journey — passing through Salem, finding Portland a "nice town," tired of train life, but soldiering on.

• Caption: Imperial Hotel, Portland, Ore.
• Publisher: Knight Drug Co., Portland, Ore. (printed in Germany)
• Postmark: Portland, Ore., April 23, 1908
• Status: Posted