Portland's Airport Carpet Became So Famous It Led a Parade

In 2015, a roll of old airport carpet was named grand marshal of a parade that draws more than 325,000 spectators. The carpet came from Portland International Airport (PDX) in Oregon, where a teal floor designed in 1987 had built a genuine cult following, with more than 20,000 pictures on Instagram under #pdxcarpet by late 2014.

It started with a practical problem. Staff were tired of the constant click of shoes and suitcases on hard terminal floors, so the Port of Portland hired the local firm SRG Partnership to design something softer. According to Portland Monthly, co-designer Jon Schleuning toured at least five other airports first and found them as utilitarian as subways, carpeted in beige and oatmeal tones. One, he said, had picked its color to hide dropped cigarette butts.

SRG went the other way, choosing blues and greens to feel like the Pacific Northwest. The pattern of thin purple, blue and red lines and small dots scattered over teal is an abstract map of the airport's crossing runways as air traffic controllers see them from the tower at night. The first of it went down in 1988, and by the early 1990s acres of it covered the terminal.

For about two decades it was just a floor. Then, in the smartphone era, Portlanders began a ritual: photographing their own shoes on the carpet when they flew out or came home. A local man named Jeremy Dunn, who designed a pair of carpet-patterned socks, told the New York Times that the picture was less about the design than about the feeling of being back home.

The love affair peaked when the airport decided to replace it. The worn, stained carpet, about 13 acres of it, was swapped for a darker green design in a project of roughly 13 million dollars, starting in January 2015. Fans flooded the Port with requests for leftovers, and it offered local businesses free bundles of 1,000 square yards of the old material. Pieces ended up for sale around the city, while the pattern spread to socks, T-shirts and bike helmets.

That spring the Rose Festival made a roll of it, nicknamed PeeDee, grand marshal of the Starlight Parade. At the announcement, reported by the Portland Tribune, the roll arrived escorted by officers of the Transportation Security Administration, wearing googly eyes, a PDX cap and an airplane seat belt. Officials said 15.9 million passengers had walked on it in 2014 alone, an airport record.

Pop culture followed. In May 2015, Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard released a PDX carpet edition of his first Adidas signature shoe, and in 2022 the team unveiled City Edition uniforms with a sash based on the carpet's pattern.

The story has a happy ending. When the airport's rebuilt main terminal opened in August 2024, about 6,000 square feet of the teal design were back, in seating areas before security. According to The Oregonian, it is newly made from a sample of the original so the color and pile height match, and it takes 24 weeks to manufacture, roughly three times as long as the green carpet.

Few places can say their best-known landmark is something people walk on. Portland can, and travelers still stop to look down before they board.

Sources: Portland Monthly (2013); The New York Times (2014); The Oregonian (2015); Portland Tribune (2015); The Oregonian, Lillard shoe (2015); NBA.com (2022); The Oregonian (2024). Cover: old and new PDX carpet, 2015.