In the 1960’s - 70’s there was a parrot in the lobby of the hotel that used to great people.  The owner that purchased the hotel in 1966 named the hotel after the parrot as it was quite famous in Portland.  When guests would come in, the parrot would make funny comments and occasionally swear.  Quite colorful in both plumage and its vocabulary.  The new owner then named the hotel after the bird.  (The story of the parrot is true but NOT the reason for the name.  (The current owner’s grandmother lived in the hotel from ~1970-1980 and remembers visiting even before the purchase of the hotel and the parrot was always greeting people when entering the hotel, too young to remember the parrot’s “colorful” greetings but true.)

The REAL story which confirmed by the former owner is that He was a dedicated fraternity brother with the Psi Chi fraternity.  That fraternity has a song about a man name “Phillip Spencer” that was wrong charged and convicted of mutiny in the late 1800’s.  He was later exonerated after death.  To honor that person and because he liked the name, the former owner decided to name the hotel after him.  The owner was based out of Seattle and partially due to the distance and lack of communication, when he came to Portland on one of his trips to see the progress of the renovation of the “Nortonia,” he noticed that the Marketing team had developed all the wrong materials.  They had made a mistake and misnamed the hotel “The Mark Spencer Hotel.”  Given that all or most of the materials had been produced and it was too far along, he decided to forego the name of “Phillip Spencer” and stuck with The Mark Spencer Hotel name.