Fircrest

Stretching east from Interstate 205, east Vancouver’s Fircrest Neighborhood offers a variety of housing with plenty of parks and open space. Its ranch-style houses with spacious lots and tightly packed contemporary houses are less than a mile from schools, shopping centers, and office parks.

This rectangle-shaped neighborhood’s northern boundary runs 1½ miles along Northeast 18th Street from an I-205 overpass to Evergreen High School. Its southern boundary runs a similar distance along from the interstate’s Mill Plain Boulevard exit to a cluster of two- and three-story office buildings at the corner of Mill Plain Boulevard and Northeast 136th Avenue, where you’ll find health care providers Kaiser Permanente’s Mill Plain One health clinic, law offices like the Three Rivers Law Center, and government agencies like the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation Business Center.

Like most of eastern Vancouver, Fircrest was farmland until the mid-1960s when I-205’s construction started and offered the area a direct link to east Portland and the Portland International Airport. A quick trip to the Powerlines U-Pick Farm on Northeast 18th Street, which grows peaches and strawberries under the Bonneville Power Administration’s high-voltage transmission lines, offers a taste of what the area was like back then. The neighborhood quickly filled in with single-story ranch-style houses and two-story split-level houses built during the 1960s and 1970s. These houses sit atop larger lots that range from 8,000 square feet to more than a ¼-acre, so they have enough space for a well-manicured front lawn, a fenced backyard, and a handful of bushes or flowering trees.

Newer subdivisions like Crown Estates and Cascade Crest have moved into the neighborhood over the past few decades and added a variety of contemporary houses built right next to one another on 4,000- to 6,000-square-foot lots that barely have enough room for a driveway, let alone any space between neighbors. Regardless of their age, these single-family houses typically fetch $350,000 to $550,000, which matches what you’d find in some of the neighborhoods on east Portland’s periphery. A handful of apartment and condominium complexes with two-bedroom units that fetch $250,000 to $350,000 also call this neighborhood home.

Fircrest is full of winding suburban streets shaded by several stands of mature Douglas fir trees that have stayed in place since its time as a farming community. Very few of these streets have sidewalks and even fewer run across the neighborhood from the interstate to Northeast 136th Avenue or Northeast 18th Street to Mill Plain Boulevard. This has a lot to do with the fact it’s interrupted by large patches of open space like the high voltage transmission line corridor on Northeast 18th Street or the 80-acre Evergreen Memorial Gardens Cemetery on Northeast 112th Street that’s been in business since the early 1950s. This cemetery is a popular place for neighborhood residents to go for a walk, often with their dogs, as are the walking paths that cut through the 5-acre Fircrest neighborhood park and the 30-acre LeRoy Haagen Memorial Community Park. Both parks feature open fields and small playgrounds for children. The LeRoy Haagen Memorial Community Park also butts up against the city’s Firstenburg Community Center, where you’ll find a large indoor pool with a play structure for children, a gymnasium, a climbing wall, and a fitness center.

Children who live in Fircrest will attend Fircrest Elementary, which is at the center of the neighborhood between the cemetery and the Fircrest Neighborhood Park. They’ll move on to Cascade Middle School and Evergreen High School, both of which are just outside the neighborhood’s northeast corner at the corner of Northeast 136th Avenue and Northeast 18th Street. These three schools are managed by Evergreen Public Schools, the third-best school district in Clark County, according to Niche.com. Cascade Middle and Evergreen High Schools are about half a mile north of the WinCo Foods grocery store and the Ichi 18 Teriyaki restaurant on Northeast 136th Avenue. The Mill Plain Walmart and a cluster of restaurants that includes Abhiruchi Indian Cuisine, Birrieria Carlos, Final Draft Taphouse, I Heart Gyro, and Youskyme Teriyaki are on the opposite side of the neighborhood at the intersection of I-205 and Mill Plain Boulevard.

These restaurants and the other amenities you’ll find within a quick drive of Fircrest make this east Vancouver neighborhood a great place to call home.

Written By

Mac Mclean

Photography Contributed By

John Othic

Video By

Luke Mancari