Longview

Longview, which was founded on the site of an 1805 Lewis and Clark encampment, is the largest planned community in the United States after Washington, D.C., but it's so well put together that it looks anything but planned. For one thing, the city isn't laid out on the familiar grid system, but has a roundabout where the civic center is located, surrounded by curving streets that are crossed by diagonal roads (which creates a somewhat out-of-kilter grid). To top it off, there's Lake Sacajawea, a former oxbow of the Cowlitz, that's part of a city park that encircles about one-third of downtown. Downtown itself is cut off from the Columbia River by a rather grungy industrial district and port. A 1,200-foot-long, 195-foot-high bridge, built in 1950, crosses from here to the Oregon side of the river.