A few years ago, the American Planning Association highlighted Portland’s Commercial Street, which runs alongside the harbor from Merrill’s Marine Terminal in the west to the Old Port district in the east, as one of America’s “Great Streets.”. On the inland side of the street are a typically downtown mix of vegan bakeries and high-end tailor shops, offices and hotels: a vibrant and varied mix, but not all that much different from the rest of downtown Portland.

But on the other, waterfront side of Commercial Street there are fish processing facilities, chandleries, and lobster pounds, and a couple (relatively) inexpensive seafood dives. This is the city’s legendary “working waterfront,” where some of the city’s most valuable real estate — with downtown proximity and stunning harborfront views — has been set aside for low-rent marine industries like boat repair, fishing, and seafood processing.

Over the years, lots of developers have wanted to displace Portland’s lobster boats with condos and hotels, which, they promised, could have brought dozens of millionaires downtown and pumped new tax revenue into City Hall.

Instead, the city has repeatedly made it clear that new development that’s incompatible with marine industries is not welcome here. While policies have evolved over the years, the goals remain the same: to preserve affordable berths for working vessels, and affordable workspace and warehouses for the businesses that support them.

As a result, we don’t have gated communities on our harborfront. And contrary to the rueful promises of the slick tanning booth enthusiasts who tried to build luxury hotels and apartments on the water, our economy really hasn’t suffered for it.

Quite the contrary: because the waterfront is still a place where people can find hard work, and lobster boats, and great seafood fresh off the boat, the city as a whole is much richer. I was reminded of the working waterfront’s value once again last week, when the Chicago Tribune ran a travel piece about Portland that highlighted our “still-working waterfront where gulls squawk and circle overhead.” The article continues:

“It’s not so difficult to have that old charm when your town’s engine is what it was when founded in 1786: the docks. Portland’s long, salty docks still teem with stacks of lobster traps, the hulking ships that catch the nation’s seafood, and businesses boasting, ‘Fishing Maine waters for over 100 years.’ They’re open and free for your perusal and offer classic no-frills dining spots such as J’s Oyster, which serves fish straight out of the ocean and appears to have been redecorated approximately never during its 36-year existence.”

The working waterfront makes Portland unique: it makes our city worth visiting, and it enriches the lives of everyone who lives here. Here, in the heart of our city, is a place that attracts visitors and residents alike to engage with and appreciate the value of our oceans, and the people who work them. The working waterfront is a pure and authentic expression of our city’s hardworking, egalitarian spirit.

Photo: Hobson’s Wharf, by Flickr user Timothy Valentine.

At the turn of the millennium, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, which observed that a successful community relies on successful community organizations and civic participation. “Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities,” Putnam wrote.

It’s hard to argue with that. But Putnam also took the view that, because Americans in general were becoming less and less active in organizations like the Rotary and bowling leagues (hence the title), our nation’s civic life was on the wane — making our communities more vulnerable to social and economic ills.

I don’t really share Putnam’s pessimism — even if bowling leagues and Rotary clubs aren’t as popular anymore, I’m confident that Americans are finding new ways to engage with their communities. Then again, I say that from my privileged position as a resident of Portland, which is a community of remarkably accessible civic institutions.

Almost immediately after I moved here, nearly six years ago now, I joined the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and started a blog dedicated to improving the city’s built environment. That, in turn, introduced me to people who helped me land my first full-time job here, and it put me on (usually) friendly terms with people from City Hall and various environmental organizations.

It’s not unusual for me to see our congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, out on the First Friday Art Walk, or to have a quick chat with one of my state legislators at the farmers’ market or the coffee shop. But easy access to local elected officials is only a small part of Portland’s civic life. The city has an abundance of volunteer committees and organizations that are dedicated to improving the city’s economy, environment, and the quality of life for its residents, from trade-oriented networking organizations to advocacy groups to social clubs.

Here’s a (very) incomplete bullet list of ready-made networks that are ready to make a newcomer feel at home, by empowering them to improve our community:

• The League of Young Voters – whose “Portland 101” series introduces people (of any age) to the workings of municipal government.
• The Telling Room – the volunteers at this nonprofit include many of Portland’s writers and journalists.
• SPACE Gallery – sign up as a volunteer to meet new buddies in Portland’s music and visual arts scenes (and get free admission to shows).
• AIGA Maine – this is a good network of Maine-based graphic designers and freelancers. They also put on periodic events, from cocktail hours to business seminars.
• Portland Society of Architects – for anyone in the building or design trades. Don’t miss their next Drink ‘n Crit.
• The City of Portland Boards and Committees – which offers up unpaid but influential positions in municipal Boards of Commissioners and Task Forces (including the Historic Preservation Board, the Public Art Committee, the Land Bank Commission, and many others). Check for vacancies here around the beginning of each month.
• League Night at Bayside Bowl – it may sound frivolous, but (like most of these groups) Bayside Bowl mixes good times with good citizenship: the owners are a state senator and a former ACLU attorney, and they host a nonprofit benefit night every Monday. Robert Putnam would feel right at home.

Photo: City Hall, by Corey Templeton. You can find many more photos of Portland on Corey’s Portland Daily Photo blog.

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

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.

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”

— Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

In the center of downtown Portland lies Monument Square, a memorial to the city’s Civil War veterans and a prominent public space where the city’s Arts District, business district, and the Old Port converge.

And occupying pride of place in the city’s most prominent square is the newly-renovated main branch of the Portland Public Library.

I’ve always believed that a city’s civic strength, egalitarianism, and confidence as a community are reflected in the quality of its libraries. Naturally, we have a great library here in Portland: the building’s geographic prominence reflects its importance as a cultural and educational resource for the entire southern Maine region.

Some of the things you’ll find there:

• The excellently curated Lewis Gallery — this month’s program includes a photography show sponsored by the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
• Lunch-hour readings from local authors and evening film screenings in the Rines Auditorium.
• The Portland Room, home to the library’s special collections, including rare books, an archive of Maine’s newspapers and magazines, old maps, photographs, and other ephemera. The Portland Room also hosts an impressive collection from the famous Anthoensen Press and Thomas B. Mosher Press, which together established our city as an important center for printing and publishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
• An excellent children’s library, with daily programs and readings for young children, and the new Teen Library, which lends video games, hosts study sessions and game nights, and sports a generous collection of graphic novels and YA literature.
• And last but not least, a sun-filled reading room in the front of the building facing Congress Street and Monument Square — a great place to meet people, take advantage of the free wi-fi, read the local papers, or just watch the city pass by.

The Portland Public Library is currently soliciting donations for its annual fund, which purchases new materials above and beyond what would be possible with taxpayer contributions. Visit their secure webpages to give.

Photo courtesy of the Portland Public Library

How many times do we actually ask you to do anything on this blog? Our tone is usually more of an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of Portland or a suggestion of someone you might be interested in meeting. We’re not really about action items—but here’s one!

At this month’s Portland Greendrinks event, on the second Tuesday (January 10) at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (561 Congress Street) Sean Sullivan from Bowdoin College will be filming for a video about career opportunities in Maine. He will be asking people their name, what they do in Portland and why they love living and working in Portland (and Maine). The footage will be used first for a video “to entice Bowdoin, Bates and Colby students to attend the Maine Based Employers Career Fair (prevent the brain drain!), which Bowdoin is putting on to feature opportunities available in Maine.” But since this also fits in rather neatly with the mission of Creative Portland, we will probably find uses for the footage of Portland-loving people too.

For extra incentives (and to highlight sustainable transportation in Portland), Sean has procured 3 free bike tune ups from Allspeed Cycles (that will be distributed at random to participants) and a discount code (for all participants) that waives the membership fee and gives $10 worth of free time from UCarShare ($35 value).

And for all you architects and interior designers out there, the event is co-sponsored by SMRT, the 125 year old Portland based architectural project management company.

So please, help Maine, help Portland and come to Greendrinks with a face and a soundbite to let the world know why you love Portland!

Much of what makes Portland such a cool city derives from the first half of our name. We are a port, perched on the Atlantic Ocean. Because of that, we are utterly unlike, say, Waltham or Austin or Chapel Hill. With ports come piers and wharves. Facing the waterfront from Portland’s Commercial Street, you can count ten wharves from left to right, each with its own character. So as we prepare to ring in the New Year, lets sing out the praises of these fingers into the sea:

1. Maine State Pier is the most heavily used, since it houses the Casco Bay Lines, whose ferries link Portland to islands across Casco Bay. Come here to watch boats pulling in and out, as seagulls wheel overhead.
2. Next door is Maine Wharf, a true working pier. It’s home to businesses such as Morrison’s Maine Course (wholesalers of seafood specialties), Chase Leavitt (maritime services since 1854), the water taxi (to get a private lift across the bay) and the sea tow (to get your boat back to port when you run out of gas).
3. Custom House Wharf houses Sea Bags, where old sails are recycled into beautiful tote bags, and The Porthole, which many claim has the best breakfast in town. But it’s most known for Harbor Fish Market, perhaps the finest of its kind on the East Coast. “Iconic” + “Maine” = “Harbor Fish Market.”
4. To its right is Portland Pier, a curious mix of J’s Oyster House, small law firms, some condos – and New Meadows Lobster, at the far end.
5. Beside that is Long Wharf. Hardly a wharf, this is more of a huge parking lot, with an adjacent marina and DiMillo’s Restaurant, a converted car-ferry-turned-high-end-eatery.
6. Chandler’s Wharf is exclusively upscale condominiums. You probably don’t come here unless you live here.
7. Widgery Wharf is the real thing, unchanged for decades, chockablock with lobster boats, lobster traps, lobster processors, and a smell to remind you how authentic a town Portland really is.
8. Adjacent is Union Wharf, perhaps the most diverse along the waterfront. You’ll find the Maine Life Raft & Inflatable Service Company, an architecture firm, lobster businesses, the Nine Stones Spa, and the Maine Responder, a large vessel dedicated to cleaning up oil spills if/when they occur (she spent five months in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010).
9. Like the other piers, Merrill’s Wharf has lobster boats tied up along its perimeter. But it also has a warehouse recently gutted and refurbished to house one of the state’s largest and most venerable law firms, Pierce Atwood.
10. Portland Fish Pier (aka Merchants Wharf), the last in the line, is a mega-pier that is home to, among others, the Harbor Master, the Portland Fish Exchange (where daily auctions set the price for seafood locally),  social investment non-profit Coastal Enterprises, and the offices of U.S. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree.

A world unto themselves, Portland’s piers and wharves, sometimes unnoticed and uninvestigated, are your gateway to this unique city by the bay. Make a New Year’s resolution to visit them all.

Photo of Merrills Wharf by John Spritz

When people think on innovation and creativity, they tend to think big. And there’s been no one bigger on our minds in those departments lately than Steve Jobs. For everyone intimidated by Jobs’ formidable accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker offers a bit of a revisionist spin: Jobs was a tweaker.

In The Tweaker, Gladwell writes, ”Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him… and ruthlessly refining it.” Jobs himself admitted that his gifts were more combinatorial than generative, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Stepping into the time machine, Gladwell cites an article by the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr to explain why the industrial revolution began in England. Britain, they say, had a “human-capital advantage—in particular, … a group they call ‘tweakers.’ They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.”

Now what has this all got to do with Portland, Maine? Well, I spent last weekend at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden trying to get a handle on how the creative economy and the innovation economy are intersecting in Maine. For that reason, I focused on the break out sessions that featured innovative companies and technologies, and I was not disappointed. I came away with the feeling that some of the most impressive innovations did not involve inventing ground-breaking technologies but in crafting creative ways of delivering existing technologies.

One of the most moving and impressive presentations was by Jon Calame of Thermal Efficiency Eastport during the “Risking Energy Revolution” panel. Calame is an internationally award winning architect with a background in historic preservation. He is passionate about architects’ responsibility to make buildings work for people—especially in challenging times in northern climes. Driven perhaps by the thought that historic buildings can’t be preserved if the people living in them can’t afford to heat them, Jon has taken on the urgent problem that the British have named “Fuel Poverty.” Jon has relocated himself and his family from Portland to the tiny city of Eastport (population about 1,500), which is indeed the easternmost city in the continental United States. Thermal Efficiency Eastport is a long-term project to demonstrate how applying “proven fuels, equipment and structural upgrades … in all kinds of buildings [can yield] clear, measurable advantages.” The real tweak in the project is not some new kind of furnace or insulation, but the packaging of economic arguments that will allow these retrofits to be financed and broadly available to the entire town.

Yes, that got the attention of all the bankers out there! The creative and innovation economies need creative financing. They also need people who can look at technologies and put them together in new ways. And finally, they need people who can tell compelling stories about these innovations to help attract customers and capital, retain workers, inspire students and generally connect the dots. And all of these are jobs for tweakers! Maine has lots of them and Portland is particularly dense in finance, marketing, design and story telling.

The lesson of Steve Jobs for Portland and the creative economy is not only the first part—the obvious part—of his advice to graduating Stanford students, that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” It’s in the second part, the tweaking part, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. … you’ll know when you find it.”

In a world of uncertainty, why celebrate risk? Why put everything you have into a crazy idea with only the barest beginnings of a plan? Ask that to Corey, Tyler and Seth, above, when they leave Love, The Bus in LA and fly back to Camden to be among the keynote speakers at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden on November 4 and 5th. In the case of Tyler Dunham, Seth Brown, and Corey McLean, these three “lifelong friends, filmmakers, and adventurers from the coastal town of Lincolnville, Maine (pop. 2,042). …[are] brimming with optimistic energy and a desire to accomplish something epic.” So they converted an old schoolbus into a grease-powered, web video road trip mobile and have been travelling around the country raising money to fund projects for community organizations and uploading the results in real time. If they can do all that, what else can they do?

And that’s just the point. The creative economy, the innovation economy, the experience economy—these are all expressions of the fluidity required by this crazy world—call it the improvisation economy. The Juice Conference is dedicated to bringing together a wide range of creative, innovative thinkers who have figured out how to put their ideas into action. Speakers and panelists include Maine heavyweights like Governor Angus King, Eliot Cutler and Roxanne Quimby, art world luminaries like Louisa McCall, Donna McNeil, and Eric Fischl and technological innovators like Kerem Durdag, John Ferland and  Steve Page. Portland’s creative economy is well represented by Ben Sawyer, of Digital Mill, Josh Broder of Tilson Technologies, Paul Dobbins, of Ocean Approved, Stephanie Volo of Planet Dog and Jaime Parker of Portland Trails.

One of the highlights of the conference is the pitch contest with $150,000 in financing to the winning business plans. (The deadline has been extended to Friday, October 28, so there’s still time to apply). If you’re not up for facing the “shark tank” in the pitch contest, they also have a short film contest (the deadline to apply is also now this friday.) Putting business plans and people who think about making business plans in front of investors and experts about those businesses is exactly what Juice is trying to do. And if your plan sounds like a mystery bus ride, what start up these days doesn’t?

Maine is full of smart people doing interesting things, but we may all be a bit too independently minded for our own good. That’s why conferences like Juice (and TEDx Dirigo) and places like Portland are so important. As the innovation economy spreads out through Maine, Portland has a role to play as a place to bring people together, to develop stories, to share a great meals, to cross-pollenate and propagate. Josh Broder of Portland’s Tilson Technology was just named to MaineBiz’s Next List for 2011. In the article he predicts that certain parts of the economy are poised for significant growth, “especially in those industries with strong ties to the creative economy. ‘American centers of innovation are our capital—the companies coming from technology, software and social media,’ he says. ‘All of those new things require significant infrastructure, and we’re the infrastructure provider.’”

And the same could be said of Portland. If risk is the juice of the Maine’s creative economy, Portland is it’s glass.

Photo from Love, The Bus

Getting in and out of Portland by air has always been easy, but with the opening of the new terminal at the Jetport it’s become kind of thrilling. It’s still a short drive to get there with very little traffic and the parking flow and capacity has been improved, but beyond the convenience, the newly expanded airport now feels like a place. The main component of the new structure is a blue, glass-skinned box. The generic “modern-ness” of this form is actually a head fake for the soaring geo-thermally heated space within.

But let’s back up. Even the large, letter spaced sans serif signage on the blue box announce “there are designers here.”  And when you get out of the long hallway that leads from the curbside drop off area to the new terminal, the space opens up dramatically and your eyes naturally go to the ceiling. The ceiling is genius, both as architecture and branding. What you see is an engineered 21st century interpretation of the Maine camp vernacular with massive beams and cross-bracing mixed with some Maine shipbuilding steelwork. All at once it reads as wood and steel, as craftsmanship and design, as tradition and innovation, as technology in the service of comfort. All these things we associate with Maine and with Portland all artfully morticed together in the service of keeping the snow out. The press release from the architectural consultancy Gensler that managed the project provides a lot of detail on the materials used, the upcoming LEED certification and  Voluntary Airport Low Emissions (VALE) grant used to fund the geothermal system.

When you drive away from the airport now at night you see the glowing green light of a massive LED wall sculpture in the main terminal space—another surprise that belies the glass box. If there is any criticism to be leveled about the architecture as experience it would be that it is perhaps a more inspiring experience for departing passengers than for new arrivals who still find themselves exiting through the low-ceilinged older terminal.

So the Jetport has doubled it’s gates and improved its passenger flow, but equally if not more important, they have taken the often generic form of the airport and created a space that feels uniquely like you’re in Portland, like you’re in Maine, and it’s a little different here.

Bonus fact from wikipedia: A survey conducted in June 2011 by travel web site Cheapflights found PWM to be the most affordable airport in the region (beating Manchester and Logan), and the third most affordable in New England (behind Bradley and T. F. Green).