In the fracus of First Friday it’s easy to lose sight of what artists in Portland, and creatives in Maine in general, have in common. We talk about authenticity, respect for materials, an awareness of time and the craft of making as attributes of the Maine brand that Portland’s creative economy embodies. Starting this Friday night, at the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick, (and running through May 19) is an opportunity to see a version of that shared sensibility enacted in the work of five accomplished Portland artists.

 A Thickening Rhythm is a show curated by artist Julie Poitras Santos that brings together work that embraces “slowness.” Of the five artists in the show, Lauren Fensterstock, Carrie Scanga, Ling-Wen Tsai, Deborah Wing-Sproul and Julie Poitras Santos herself, all teach at Maine College of Art (MECA) except Scanga, who teaches at Bowdoin College. The pieces range from Fensterstock’s Colorless Field, a black-on-black expanse of tall “grass,” to Scanga’s Ballast, a lightweight stack of intaglio printed “bricks,” to Tsai’s silent Water & Wind video and Sitting Quietly installation of noise-canceling headphones, to Wing-Sproul’s Intimate Distance, a 24-minute video that explores what it means to be seen, to Poitras Santos’ raven mirror/unravel, a performance for actors wearing feathered wings to the constant sound of rolling dice.

Coleman Burke also has a gallery in Chelsea, in New York and a storefront in Portland. The Brunswick space is in the converted Fort Andross Mill building. The Mill is a bustling hive of creative economy activity similar to the State Theatre building or the old Railroad Terminal buildings in Portland, but with the addition of restaurants, a huge indoor flea market and a Saturday morning farmers market.

Fans of “Slow Food,” will enjoy the pleasures of slow art as well. And the drive from Portland to Brunswick, where Bowdoin is located, is easy and not particularly slow, and good eats are just down the hallway from the gallery at the Frontier Café.

Happy is the city with great architecture. In Portland, that happy list includes the brick edifices along Commercial Street, the varied homes of the West End, the Wishcamper and Abromson buildings at USM, the Observatory, the Victorian houses perched in Deering Highlands, the Art Museum – an embarrassment of riches.

Happy, too, is the city, with great architects. In Portland, we have long supported significant architects, going back to the 19^th Century, with Francis Fassett and John Calvin Stephens and Frederick Law Olmsted (what, you didn’t know? After New York’s Central Park, Olmsted designed Deering Oaks).

Today, the hundreds of members of the Portland Society of Architects (PSA) encourage “…innovation and vision in design and planning” throughout the city. The PSA offers a wealth of programs, from the “Unbuilt Design Awards” to “10 Minute Architect” (a free clinic for anyone thinking about whether they need an architect) to last year’s Symposium on Sea Level Rise and the biannual “Drink’n Crit.”

What is “Drink’n Crit”?  Twice a year, the PSA recreates the student experience of an architectural studio. Only this time around, the students are local professionals who, with some trepidation, present their current projects to the public, as well as a critical review by fellow architects. Unlike an actual charette in architecture school, this event does not involve pulling an all-nighter!

The most recent Drink’n Crit was on March 12^th, at the SPACE Gallery on Congress Street. As guests milled about, talked, and had a beer, four architectural teams were taping drawings and photos of their projects on the walls. The team of jurors was introduced and then, one by one, each team presented its project and listened to the critiques.

The crowd may have been most energized by the team working with the City of Portland to re-imagine the several blocks of Spring Street that bisect much of downtown, past the Holiday Inn and the Civic Center.  Should Spring Street be two lanes wide, instead of four? Become a “bicycle boulevard”? Foster new garden spaces and stairways leading off to other streets?

The suggestions flew fast and furious, and the give-and-take was emblematic of the best of Portland. Some of us worked for the city, some of us worked in the city, some of us lived in the city – but all of us cared deeply about the city, wanting it always to be a better place.

If you, too, want to weigh in on Portland’s built landscape, Greater Portland Landmarks and Maine Historical Society are co-hosting a series of panel discussions about specific streets and spaces demanding our attention (including Spring Street, and our bridges, and our waterfront). Step up to the microphone and state your opinion!

Commercial Street and Wishcamper Center, University of Sourthern Maine, photos by Corey Templeton

Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin went through two years’ worth of business planning, real estate hunting, and city permitting so that dozens of other entrepreneurs won’t have to. Their enterprise, the Portland Flea-for-All, is about to open its doors in 3 stories of a gorgeously wood-beamed former mattress factory in the heart of Bayside.

The Flea-for-All is a flea market for Portland’s craftspeople, yard sale recyclers, and other creators. When it opens for business on the weekend of April 14-15, it will offer a brick-and-mortar presence for dozens of small entrepreneurs for as low as $30 a day for a 6 foot square booth. The market will also sell crafts on consignment, and wall space will be available for artists to show and sell their work outside of a gallery setting.

“We won’t be a typical junk market,” says Erin. “We’re cultivating quality sellers, and a variety of goods — we’ll have furniture, housewares, crafters…”

“The more diverse our vendors, the more people we can bring in as customers,” Nathaniel adds.

“We want it to be a market for every age, style, and budget,” says Erin.

Erin and Nathaniel moved to Portland two years ago from Santa Monica, California. They came here, they say, because they were attracted to Portland’s affordability, its potential to grow, and its entrepreneurial culture.

Finding a space large enough and inexpensive enough for their vision was a big challenge, as was the long slog through permitting and financing the new enterprise. “For a new entrepreneur, it was often hard to find the right path through the process,” says Erin. Still, after nearly two years’ worth of groundwork, “at least we know now that we’re really ready. The fun stuff lies ahead.”

The Flea-for-All finally found a home in a former mattress factory between Preble and Elm Streets in Bayside, a former industrial neighborhood that has been the target of City Hall’s economic development initiatives for the past decade. They give their landlord, Tod Dana, a lot of credit for supporting their idea and sharing their entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

The market’s front entrance is just steps away from the western terminus of the new Bayside Trail (Kiley and Baldwin want to offer special incentives to shoppers who arrive by foot or by bike) and the new-ish Trader Joe’s. Bayside Bowl is a block away in the opposite direction. A string of empty lots alongside the trail, where a railroad yard used to be, may soon start sprouting high-rise apartment buildings. And their next-door neighbor is Portland Architectural Salvage, a business that seems to share the recycled-value aesthetic that the Flea-for-All aspires to.

“There’s good growth around here, a lot of potential,” says Erin. “I think we got here at the right time.”

Portland Flea-for-All will be accepting applications from potential vendors on a rolling basis, but if you’re interested in getting in in time for the grand opening weekend in April, you should fill out their handy online application by this Friday, March 16th.

Photo: Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin, founders of Portland Flea-for-All, on the top floor of the future market space. Photo by Christian MilNeil.

The Black Keys played the Portland Civic Center Tuesday night and it’s fair to say that Maine was rocked. Beyond being another inspiring duo that shows how much you can do with so little, the band is a great example of a “minimum viable product” gone viral.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP for short) is a tech term usually associated with apps that, in the words of Seth Godin, is “The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world and see how people react to it, then improve from there.” There are many good things about this approach. You don’t sit around thinking and perfecting in isolation. You try to distill your idea to its essence, build the best version of it you can quickly and put it out there. The downside, as Godin points out, is that, “With enough patience and push and consistent enthusiasm, these products have a shot at crossing the threshold [into viability]. But if the mindset is ‘see what works and do it more,’ you’ll often discover yourself giving up long before that happens.”

The Black Keys didn’t give up. Childhood friends from Akron, Ohio, Dan Auerbach plays guitar and vocals and Patrick Carney play drums. Up until this tour, that was it, just the two of them on stage. They formed the group in 2001, and recorded their first album in Carney’s basement the following year. They toured frequently, playing small venues and building a fan base. They also started to make some real money licensing their rough, riff-heavy tunes for advertising. In 2006 they signed with Nonesuch (either a minor major label or a major minor label depending on how you look at it), but it was not until 2010 with their album Brothers that they really sold a lot of records.

Assuming you do stick with it, the minimum viable product model has many benefits. The immediacy of The Black Keys’ music comes from them having identified the irreducible components of rock and roll (the beat, the guitar, the rough vocals) and pushed them hard. There’s something refreshing and direct about their approach. There are no blind alleys or self indulgent solos—everything is in service of the song. Along the way they’ve updated blues vocals and redeemed heavy metal guitar tone for a new generation of alternative rock fans. The music before their set was Otis Redding and after Led Zeppelin. This says a lot about the intergenerational nature of their appeal, but the crowd on Tuesday night was heavy on twenty-somethings.

And although Auerbach is singing all the songs, it is Carney that is responsible for their propulsion. A tall man behind a standard rock drum kit, the effect is of an oversized child at play. It’s like on the web, all the great content in the world won’t get you anywhere without traffic, and in rock and roll, the drummer is the traffic.

At the end of their set, Auerbach (not long on patter, but verbose compared to Carney who wasn’t even miked) said, “We’re definitely coming back. You guys are great. This has been our best show in a long time.” We’re sure they say that to all their “minimum viable cities,” but Portland will hold them to it.

Admittedly, it hasn’t been much of a winter here, or anywhere else in North America. But Portland, Maine does occupy the northern latitudes, which means that we get snowstorms, even in a globally-heated world. This week, March came in like a lion and dropped a foot of snow over the city.

Some people gripe about the winter weather. But a lot of us (the author included) love it. On snow days, schools are closed, and so are many offices. It’s the perfect opportunity to hunker down for a day of compulsory relaxation.

Or you can head outside. In 2010, Outside magazine named Portland the best “adventure town” in the east, thanks to the abundance of outdoor recreation within day-tripping distance of the city. For skiers, there are big mountains like Saddleback and smaller, more affordable areas like Mount Abram, and then there are the miles of groomed nordic skiing trails at Pineland Farms, just 20 minutes up the road in New Gloucester, Maine.

But even when driving is terrible, there are numerous ski trips you can make within city limits.

On the Eastern Prom, a short hill that’s popular for sledding can also be skied, from the end of Congress Street to a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean. There’s also a shorter, steeper pitch through the trees next to the playground. The slope between the street and the ocean is short and not terribly steep, but how many ski runs end on a beach? Even though it’s only in the 20s, on a sunny day you can still manage to get a suntan.

The Eastern Prom area is also good for cross-country skiing. It’s about a mile from the abandoned railroad trestle to the north and around to the Portland Company complex to the south, and finding a few lines of untracked powder on the hills in between.

Skiers less concerned with scenery can find a slightly bigger hill on the other side of town, at the Western Prom. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is also visible from the top on clear days, which lends this ski run more of an alpine flavor. It’s also longer and steeper, although you’ll have to watch out for the plowed walkway that traverses the hill in switchbacks. This is a good place to ski off into the sunset at the end of your workday (as my wife Jess is doing in the photo at the top of this post).

On the other side of Back Cove, the city parks and recreation department has been building a terrain park on the hill in Payson Park for the past several winters, thanks to donated equipment from some of the state’s big ski areas and local enthusiasts. The hill even has snowmaking equipment to keep it going through snow droughts.

On the outskirts of the city, several large parks and open spaces host extensive trail networks for cross-country skiing. My favorite places include the Fore River Sanctuary (where you can ski along the edges of Portland’s biggest salt marsh), and the Riverside Golf Course, where volunteers from the Portland Nordic Ski Club groom trails for skate-skiing (they ask for a small donation, but it’s a bargain).

So if global warming’s got you down, there’s no need to burn gallons of petrochemicals to get away to the mountains – ski Portland instead!

Photo: Jessica skis the Western Prom. Photo by Christian MilNeil.

Maine may have the dubious distinction of being the least racially diverse state in the nation, but that factoid obscures the real diversity to be found in Maine communities like Portland, and does a disservice to the very real contributions that minorities have made to our city and state.

As a seaport, Portland has attracted international immigration for centuries. Although some of Portland’s earliest African Americans arrived here as slaves (Maine was a part of Massachusetts, which didn’t outlaw slavery until 1783), many came here of their own free will, as mariners who settled down after voyages from homes in the West Indies and Africa.

Though freedom for blacks may have been common in colonial Portland, racism was also common. In the early nineteenth century, the city’s African American citizens wrote a letter to the city’s clergy to complain that they felt unwelcome in local churches, and that they would therefore form their own congregation. In 1828, they consecrated the Abyssinian Meetinghouse, which stands to this day on Newbury Street at the base of Munjoy Hill.

For decades, the Abyssinian was a community center for Portland’s African American citizens. In addition to hosting worship services, it was also a school, a stop on the underground railroad (with convenient access to Canadian-bound ships in the harbor), and a lecture hall for famous abolitionist speakers like Frederick Douglass.

Today, the Abyssinian is still standing, the third-oldest African-American meetinghouse building in the entire nation. As was one of the only structures in the city to have survived the great fire of 1866, and as a crucial incubator for Maine’s abolitionist movement, it is easily one of Portland’s most valuable historic sites.

Still, after its congregation dissolved at the end of the 1800s, the building was turned into a tenement house, and was nearly lost altogether to abandonment by the end of the 20th century. That’s when a band of concerned citizens — some of them descendants of the Abyssinian’s congregants — formed the Committee to Restore the Abyssinian, which has been raising funds for a complex and delicate building restoration effort that was profiled a few years ago in the New York Times.

My wife happens to be one of the preservation carpenters who’s been able to work on the project (the most recent phase of reconstruction restored a new reproduction of the historic facade, completed last winter). You can read a lot more about the restoration process on her company’s blog, which she happens to write.

Another recent effort to illuminate Portland’s African American history comes from the new Portland Freedom Trail, a series of markers scattered around downtown sites to call attention to prominent leaders, sites, and events in Portland’s underground railroad and abolitionist movement.

The plaques, which were installed in 2007, blend mundane details of nineteenth-century life with the amazing drama of slavery and freedom in the years before the Civil War. The First Parish Unitarian Church at the head of Union Street, for instance, is a quiet and stately building today, but its Freedom Trail plaque tells of the time, in 1832, when 2,000 people convened there to hear William Lloyd Garrison speak, and of a pro-slavery riot that occurred there a decade later when another abolitionist denounced New England’s role in perpetuating and profiting from southern slavery.

You can find many more amazing stories on the Portland Freedom Trail’s self-guided walking tour brochure.

Top image: at the opening of the Portland Freedom Trail. Photo by Ramona du Houx, from the Maine Democrat magazine. Lower image: the Abyssinian Meetinghouse in 2011, courtesy of the Portland Daily Sun.

Three o’clock in the morning is when a city is most still, most calm. One day’s activities have ended and the next day’s have yet to begin.

New York City may never sleep, but Portland does close its eyes for a bit in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., the first thing one notices is the lack of people and traffic. When else can one experience Congress Square, or Longfellow Square, or Monument Square, with no vehicles passing through, none at all?

A few nighthawks are around, of course. Allison, at the reception desk at Maine Med’s Emergency Center (17 patients have been checked in since midnight). Kevin, working the 4 p.m.-4 a.m. shift in his taxi near the Eastland Hotel. Josh, behind the counter at the all-night Irving station on Commercial Street. And the police. And the street-sweepers. And the baker rolling out dough at Standard Baking.

But in general, on a mild Wednesday night in February, town is tranquil. Down by the water, no boats are yet moving in or out of the docks. The Casco Bay Line’s ferries are quietly moored under a crescent moon – it’s still a few hours until the first ferry departs. Even Becky’s Diner is empty.

At 3 a.m., the town’s statues reassert themselves. In Longfellow Square, the seated poet gazes down a quiet Congress Street. Outside the Nickelodeon Cinema, the lobsterman statue has a usually busy intersection all to himself.

Most office buildings are dark, but the refrigerated trucks keep up their hum here and there, and the B&M Baked Bean plant seems active. Then, as the hour hand moves towards four, a few more cars appear, a few more people hurry down the streets, a few more lights flicker on…and a new day starts.

Photos by John Spritz

A few weekends ago, sociologist Eric Klinenberg published an essay in the Sunday New York Times in which he shared his observations about Americans who live alone (there are more single-person households now than at any other period of history):

“Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.… ”It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction… living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.”

Today is Valentine’s Day—and though many of our holidays don’t look fondly on people who would prefer to be by themselves, this one lays the guilt on particularly thickly. If you live in Portland, though, you’re not alone in being alone.

Many of our one-person households are people over 65, and either widowed or divorced. And Portland is just the place for them! This past fall, AARP magazine highlighted Portland as one of its Top Ten Affordable Cities for Retirement, citing our low cost of living and social opportunities.

And just last week, Men’s Health magazine “undertook a nonpartisan examination of the data on datable citizens: the ratio of single women to single men, the percentage of college-educated women, the percentage of gainfully employed single women (all from the Census), and the number who work out.”

The feminist headline writers at Men’s Health named the report “Where the Babes Are.”  The number one spot for “most eligible women,” according to this demographic analysis, was Washington, DC.

But squeaking in at the #2 spot was none other than Portland, Maine! It must be all of our workout-obsessed AARP readers.

Then again, it might be all the lesbians. The same 2010 Census data that Men’s Health looked at also revealed that Maine has more same-sex couples than all but six states. “South Portland and Portland have become particular hot spots for gay couples, the statistics show, outpacing Boston, Cambridge and other gay-friendly cities,” a Portland Press Herald report revealed.

Side note: gay couples aren’t single, obviously, but something about the presentation of the “Where the Babes Are” report — maybe it was the mudflap girl illustration? — makes me suspect that the quantum statisticians at Men’s Health neglected to do the math to subtract out the population lesbians from their “eligible women” accounting. If so, we may soon find wandering packs of Bros roaming our city, searching in vain for the eligible women, scouring magazine racks for the last precious copies of Maxim…

At any rate, no matter how eligible or single you may be, have a happy Valentine’s Day.

A recent report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation makes the case that renovating our existing buildings usually offers greater environmental savings and benefits than building new structures from scratch, no matter how much eco-bling they might feature. The virtues of recycling apply to buildings as much as they apply to our newspapers and food packaging.

One of Portland’s greatest characteristics is the richness of its  architecture. Since 1866 (the year of the Great Fire), the city has been transforming its buildings for new uses, while also making room for well-designed contemporary renovations and infill buildings.

This hasn’t necessarily been an easy thing to do: until quite recently, Portland seemed intent on throwing away its architectural assets. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Portland, like many other cities, was tearing itself apart, bulldozing tightly-knit neighborhoods to make way for expressways and white-elephant civic buildings that turned out to be as sterile and unimaginative as the pencil-necked bureaucrats who commissioned them.

Luckily, the destruction was limited. And like the phoenix that rises on the city’s seal, an important new civic organization rose from the rubble of urban renewal: Greater Portland Landmarks, an organization of historic preservationists, architects, enlightened planners, and civic leaders that has been advocating for better architecture in the City of Portland since 1964.

As an organization, Greater Portland Landmarks spearheaded tactical restoration projects (like the 1978 rescue of the Hay Building in Congress Square) and lobbied for the city’s strong historic preservation ordinance that mandates high-quality architecture in the city’s historic districts.

Preserving historic architecture doesn’t merely make the city look better. It also keeps our city authentic, by reminding us who we are and where we come from. Brick warehouses in the Old Port district that once stored the seafaring cargo of Portland’s ships today house highly-educated workers trading in the new commodities of the 21st-century global economy. The Abyssinian Meetinghouse, a major base of operations for the abolitionist movement and the underground railroad, is currently being restored after decades of abandonment to help promote the amazing but little-known history of Portland’s early African Americans.

All over the city, buildings that had been denigrated as “slums” by clueless engineers of the 1970s are worth millions of dollars today. By encouraging us to value the city’s rich architectural history, preservationists have literally added billions of dollars’ worth of economic value to the city’s buildings and neighborhoods. And not coincidentally, the city’s revived sense of historic preservation and architectural design have paralleled its revival as a cultural center and business hub.

In 2008, the Maine state legislature passed a new tax credit to jump-start more historic preservation building projects throughout the state. So, in spite of the recession, Maine’s downtowns have gained beautiful new spaces like the lofts and offices at the Hathaway Creative Center in Waterville (formerly the shuttered shirt factory that inspired Richard Russo’s Empire Falls), new affordable apartments for seniors in the North Berwick Woolen Mill, and the new VIA Agency headquarters in downtown Portland (pictured at right).

It turns out that reusing buildings is “green” in the economic sense as well as in the ecological sense.

Top photo: Munjoy Hill and Portland Harbor seen from the Portland Observatory, by Christian MilNeil.

Ballet dancers and machine automation? A reference, perhaps, to the famous Dada film Ballet Mécanique? Nope, just the next networking mashup that is 2 Degrees Portland.

Calling all artists, professionals, entrepreneurs, and locals of all kinds invested in Portland’s creative economy. The place to be this coming Thursday, February 16, is Kepware, 400 Congress Street in Portland. That night, from 5:30-7:30 pm, the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) is sponsoring the first 2 Degrees Portland event of 2012. And dancers from the Portland Ballet will be there previewing excerpts from their upcoming production of Giselle.

If you’re not familiar with MTI, you should be. Since 1999 they’ve been promoting and supporting Maine’s technology sectors with grants and assistance. From start-ups to established innovators, companies throughout Maine—many right here in Portland—have grown and flourished because of MTI. (One of those local companies, by the way, is Kepware itself, a leader in automation software, helping sophisticated machines talk to one another.)

And just what is “2 Degrees Portland”? It’s a year-old program that connects people already living here with those who want to live here, or are newly arrived. As Creative Portland’s Jen Hutchins notes, “One reason people love this community is because it’s two degrees of separation, not six.”

On the 16^th, Portland newcomers will have the opportunity to connect with the creative community, and those who are established here can network with each other.  So, if you’re an engineer or a designer or a chef or an actor or a programmer or a photographer or a scientist or a…  you get the point.  The way to cross-pollinate is 2 Degrees Portland, and the place to do it is at Kepware on February16.