A Modest Proposal for Portland
Maine's largest city should keep replacing its creepy open spaces with condos.
Some would say I don't even live in Maine, and they might have a case. I live in Portland, which all real Mainers recognize as a foreign enclave, and I hardly ever venture out beyond the city limits. I have deep-rooted fears of the country. When I first came to Maine thirty-odd years ago, I lived in the country, and had some terrifying experiences. Men wearing horrifying orange clothes drove around in pickup trucks with guns mounted over their rear windows. I woke up one morning in November and found a dead deer hanging from a tree in front of my neighbor's house.At night it was pitch black, and silent as death. Even taking a walk in the woods was scary: I'd never heard such noise. Just wind in the trees, as it turned out, but who knew trees could be so loud? So the fact that southern and coastal Maine is rapidly becoming one vast suburb doesn't bother me too much. At least in suburbs people don't decorate their lawns with animal carcasses.
Portland is changing, too, and all for the better in my opinion. True, one does see those ominous pickup trucks on the streets, but they seem to be driven by suit-wearing professionals talking on their cell phones. On the other hand, there are far fewer trees than there used to be since so much construction is going on. Portland, in the midst of creating four thousand new upscale condo units — please excuse the redundancy; of course, there's no such thing as a downscale condo unit — is becoming a real city at last! There are no more of those scary open spaces where wild things like raccoons and skunks (imagine, skunks in a city!) can wander at will. There are no more crumbling docks, no more abandoned warehouses, and no more poor people, or, at least, no more areas of the city that were once euphemistically referred to as "low-income neighborhoods."
Munjoy Hill, once a working-class neighborhood, is now, in the words of one new resident, "an intentional community." Translated, that means it is a community of millionaires, because only millionaires can afford to buy property there, and they come intentionally because Portland is beautiful, clean, safe, and white, though, naturally, the latter characteristic is always subtly masked under the code expression "a good place to raise children."
As for Bayside, the area along Marginal Way between Forest Avenue and Franklin Arterial, the city is planning condo development there, too. The nasty old junkyards are gone, the space is being cleared and leveled, the intentional communards will soon be able to live in elegant high-rise apartments overlooking Back Cove — they find a water view essential, it seems — and another low-rent neighborhood will have bit the dust. Even Parkside, that last bastion of low-income culture, though not being razed, is rapidly becoming gentrified. Evidently, you don't need to build new buildings to make condos; you can just condo-ize the old ones.
Amazingly, even downtown Portland ("downstreet," we used to call it, since it was hardly a downtown in any real sense of the word) is going condo. Now all those scruffy artist-types will have to move out of their "studios" and relocate to Westbrook where they belong. Already there are fewer of the slow, old, intoxicated, and infirm on Congress Street, tying up foot traffic. Granted, they provided local color and local color is important. Come to think of it, maybe the city should kill two birds with one stone and hire some of our welfare-collecting, unemployed actors to pan handle in Monument Square.
It took a while, but finally Portland is embracing its destiny as a faux-urban environment. Portland: The Way a City Should Be. Never mind that it's missing some vital urban components like a diverse population, and a department store for them to shop in. At least there will be more buildings and none of those terrifying open spaces where trees, blowing in the wind, might scare the bejesus out of us.
Which brings me to the pernicious problem of Deering Oaks.
Recently, the news was full of images of a coyote, gamboling about in Central Park. Now we all know that Central Park is as terrifying as Baghdad and should have been paved over long ago, and that, by comparison, our own Deering Oaks is safe as houses. However, we should be able to read the handwriting on the wall: parks are dangerous places; wild animals can find their way to them and gambol about freely; a city is no place for so many trees, especially all in one spot.
Imagine what a creative developer with a fleet of bulldozers could do with that pathetically under-utilized chunk of real estate.
Just imagine.
Portland is changing, too, and all for the better in my opinion. True, one does see those ominous pickup trucks on the streets, but they seem to be driven by suit-wearing professionals talking on their cell phones. On the other hand, there are far fewer trees than there used to be since so much construction is going on. Portland, in the midst of creating four thousand new upscale condo units — please excuse the redundancy; of course, there's no such thing as a downscale condo unit — is becoming a real city at last! There are no more of those scary open spaces where wild things like raccoons and skunks (imagine, skunks in a city!) can wander at will. There are no more crumbling docks, no more abandoned warehouses, and no more poor people, or, at least, no more areas of the city that were once euphemistically referred to as "low-income neighborhoods."
Munjoy Hill, once a working-class neighborhood, is now, in the words of one new resident, "an intentional community." Translated, that means it is a community of millionaires, because only millionaires can afford to buy property there, and they come intentionally because Portland is beautiful, clean, safe, and white, though, naturally, the latter characteristic is always subtly masked under the code expression "a good place to raise children."
As for Bayside, the area along Marginal Way between Forest Avenue and Franklin Arterial, the city is planning condo development there, too. The nasty old junkyards are gone, the space is being cleared and leveled, the intentional communards will soon be able to live in elegant high-rise apartments overlooking Back Cove — they find a water view essential, it seems — and another low-rent neighborhood will have bit the dust. Even Parkside, that last bastion of low-income culture, though not being razed, is rapidly becoming gentrified. Evidently, you don't need to build new buildings to make condos; you can just condo-ize the old ones.
Amazingly, even downtown Portland ("downstreet," we used to call it, since it was hardly a downtown in any real sense of the word) is going condo. Now all those scruffy artist-types will have to move out of their "studios" and relocate to Westbrook where they belong. Already there are fewer of the slow, old, intoxicated, and infirm on Congress Street, tying up foot traffic. Granted, they provided local color and local color is important. Come to think of it, maybe the city should kill two birds with one stone and hire some of our welfare-collecting, unemployed actors to pan handle in Monument Square.
It took a while, but finally Portland is embracing its destiny as a faux-urban environment. Portland: The Way a City Should Be. Never mind that it's missing some vital urban components like a diverse population, and a department store for them to shop in. At least there will be more buildings and none of those terrifying open spaces where trees, blowing in the wind, might scare the bejesus out of us.
Which brings me to the pernicious problem of Deering Oaks.
Recently, the news was full of images of a coyote, gamboling about in Central Park. Now we all know that Central Park is as terrifying as Baghdad and should have been paved over long ago, and that, by comparison, our own Deering Oaks is safe as houses. However, we should be able to read the handwriting on the wall: parks are dangerous places; wild animals can find their way to them and gambol about freely; a city is no place for so many trees, especially all in one spot.
Imagine what a creative developer with a fleet of bulldozers could do with that pathetically under-utilized chunk of real estate.
Just imagine.
- By: Agnes Bushell
