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

Portland was visited by an amazing creative duo last night in the form of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Their performance at the State Theatre was a riveting testament to how collaboration works and a sustenance to creators of all kinds engaged in the hard work of making authentically original products.

Gillian and Dave have played Portland many times over the years, but they joked about how the places they performed all seemed to close shortly thereafter. The last time they played the State it was in a state of dangerous disrepair, with the balcony all but falling down, and they despaired that they might be killing another beloved Portland venue. So Gillian was clearly pleased to be able to say of the renovated State, “I like what you’ve done with the place,” and declare that their Portland spell has been broken.

Although they maintain that a backstory is not necessary to appreciate art, there is a little bit of a backstory to this tour that illuminates the significance of what we were seeing last night. I go into more detail about it in a recent Forbes.com post (Hard Times: The Creative Teamwork of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings), but the gist is that their latest album, The Harrow and the Harvest, is their first in eight years. That’s about the length of time it took them to produce their first four albums, so clearly there was some difficulty.

“Gillian Welch” is a full songwriting and performing partnership between Welch and Rawlings, and apparently for seven of those eight years the songs didn’t flow. They kept writing and performing the whole time, but the songs either weren’t good enough or didn’t feel like part of a larger whole. The quality control on the first four albums was superb and they must have doubted whether they would ever be able to add to the canon again.

Fortunately, working together on Dave’s first solo album, Friend of a Friend, followed by a long road trip last winter for Nashville to California broke the writer’s block and the new material is every bit as strong as what came before. That’s not to say happy. They have referred to the album as “ten kinds of sad,” (it only contains ten songs!) and slow and sad is indeed their mode of choice. But you leave each song with a sense that sadness has been explored to its fullest, consumed and laid to rest, and that creates a sense of uplift.

And uplifting, too, is their performance style, intertwined yet restrained, respectful bordering on ecstatic. It’s a great example for all creative teams to see how strength can speak to strength, one “plussing” the other (to borrow a term from Walt Disney adopted by Pixar) without either stealing the show. To a Portland audience filled with artists, entrepreneurs and innovators of all sorts it was fuel for the fires of our perseverance. Long may you run.

Photo by Mike McCaw

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).

SPACE Gallery—or just “SPACE”—is a mainstay of the First Friday Art Walk circuit here in Portland, Maine. This downtown nonprofit arts organization also functions as a hub for the city’s most mind-blowing concerts. Shows this year included Dan Deacon, Titus Andronicus, and my favorite, The What Cheer! Brigade, a 19-piece marching band that played Balkanesque beats while snaking impishly through a dance-crazy audience. Throw in events like the four-day screening of Matthew Barney’s epic The Cremaster Cycle, pornstar Annie Sprinkle’s disquisition on “eco-sexuality,” and a live storytelling series called SLANT, and you’ve begun to taste the SPACE mission: to provide a venue for what is contemporary, emerging, and unconventional.

A room that frequently approaches critical mass with sweaty dance parties certainly limits its full potential as a gallery. Installations in the ilk of Dale Chihuly would not be safe near a mosh pit! For many of us, that tension between art and livability gives SPACE its special flavor. Executive Director Nay May describes it as both the gallery’s “greatest strength” and the “biggest challenge” he’s had to navigate over the years. On July 1, and for the first time since opening in 2002, SPACE will move beyond the one room operation. They’ve usurped an adjacent property in order to have more—ahem—space. 50% more on the floor, 75% more on the wall, to be exact.

“SPACE Gallery annex” will form a dynamic duo with the main room and will moonlight as an all-purpose performance venue. In the words of May, “The dire need in this case was for us to allow some projects more room. This separate space will give us a chance to do some projects, installations, etc. that don’t coexist with other things the way we need most things to coexist in our current space.” The first annex exhibit (I was instructed to use lowercase “a”) will run from July 1 to August 5. It’s a drawing show of New York-based artists who work in various media and explore the shapes, textures, and lines of memory. For more information on “Elia Bettaglio, Selena Kimball and Tatiana Simonova: Drawings” click here.

The extra breathing room also means SPACE will be more amenable to working with local businesses and organizations. They’ve occasionally rented out the main floor for fundraising events and the like. The annex will offer Portland more opportunities to bring communities together within the walls of our creative imagination.

So thank you, SPACE, for giving us more of you! We’re looking forward to what happens next.

Above photos on left: Elia Bettaglio’s drawing “Magnifying Glass”. On right, Tatiana Simonova’s drawing “Eventuality 1.” Both artists will be featured along with Elia Bettaglio in the annex’s opening exhibit.

Will South Portland soon become a hotbed of Hollywood-like activity? Maine is a visual paradise—from its billboard-less highways to attractively zig-zagging coastline (which, when you stretch it to full length, measures longer than California’s). No wonder people came here to film flicks like In The Bedroom and The Cider House Rules. But moviemakers have mostly spelunked into our territory to get good film footage, then headed elsewhere to complete the project. They’ve had no capacity to produce their films in-state, as we lack a large-scale commercial production studio.

A few months ago, Maine hoped a guy named Bill Ferrell would follow through on his promise to build two giant soundstages in Camden, which would have made the cozy seaside village the state’s first cradle of the film production economy. Those plans have gone awry, and now South Portland’s city council has snatched the fumbled baton.

Their vision is interesting: transform the vacant South Portland Armory into Maine’s bastion of TV and film production. Starting June 1, South Portland (SoPo) will lease the estimated 10,000 square foot building, which it purchased for $650,000 in 2006, to Fore River Sound Stage. The lease has a buy option, and the base rent is a surprisingly low $550 per month. There are no toilets yet, and major repairs will need to be made since the building has crumbled during its three years of vacancy. Beginning in December, 60 percent of gross rental receipts collected by Fore River will go to directly to South Portland, which will reinvest 40 percent of that money into the building’s renovation. The city council voted unanimously on the contract, but the deal’s naysayers argue SoPo has gambled on Fore River’s ability to turn a profit and boost the creative economy.

The leader of Fore River, Eric Matheson, is an art director and production designer who has worked on Hollywood films such as Amistad and The Cider House Rules. According to Keep Me Current, Matheson plans to invest “a couple of million dollars” into renovations so that the upcoming studio can cater to major motion-pictures, and he said, “Our intention is to purchase the building, through our investors, and as soon as we can possibly do that, we will.” Find more details on the negotiations in the Portland Press Herald.

The armory is one of the first buildings you see after crossing the Casco Bay Bridge from downtown Portland into SoPo. Local jobseekers from both towns will have easy access: Set designers. Stage crews. And Paparazzi? Plastic surgeons? If all goes according to plan, the Portland area may be introduced to small doses of a culture as foreign to Maine as palm trees.

Photo of South Portland’s armory by Current Publishing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Planning for a volatile future requires either nimbleness or the commitment of resources vast enough to cope with any eventuality. The thing is, though, that developing nimbleness now can save a huge chunk of those vast resources later. Such is the approach of the Portland Society of Architects and the City of Portland to the threat of coastal inundation posed by global warming. Longstanding coastal communities, like Portland, whose boundaries have been defined through generations of tidal fluctuations are in an advantageous position over our southern (and particularly South Asian) counterparts whose unplanned rapid expansion have put them on the front lines of projected rising sea levels in this century. Nonetheless, Portland is confronting the problem head on by bringing together the creative, business and  municipal communities to explore the issue in depth.

The PSA is sponsoring Sustainable Portland By 2030: Rising Tides, a two-day symposium on sea level rise, on Thursday and Friday next week (May 12-13). There will be a Rising Tides panel and reception hosted by the City of Portland at The Ocean Gateway Terminal (14 Ocean Gateway Pier) on Thursday from 4:30-7:30 pm, followed by a continental breakfast and topic driven ‘What’s Next?’ discussions, hosted by DiMillo’s Floating Restaurant (25 Long Wharf) on Friday from 8:30-11am.

Panelists on Friday will include Sam Merrill, Director, New England Environmental Finance Center, Muskie School of Public Policy; Christophe Tulou, Past Director of the Resilient Coasts Initiative; and Kristina Hill, Chair of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia. They will address potential physical and economic impact of sea level rise in Maine, how governments and industries are responding to sea level rise, and an overview of mitigation strategies around the world. The “What’s Next” event on Friday about will encompass discussions about the challenges and opportunities presented by sea level rise in terms of public policy, infrastructure and design, finance and insurance and (what we’re all about at LiveWork Portland) the cultural implications.

Complete details are on the PSA’s event poster as well.

Photo of The Ocean Gateway Terminal by Kirk Rogers

The opening of Base Camp Gallery last week in Portland was as much about the fact of a new alternative art space as it was about the work that was shown. Everybody there was clearly having a good time and it seemed to me that the real art at play here was social. This is not to diminish the work, much of which could easily be hanging in any number of downtown galleries, but rather to elevate place-making to its rightful place. The place in question is a large warehouse, once used for distributing beer, and now the auxiliary space of a couple of well-established Portland entrepreneurs, a machine shop and an interesting smattering of younger creatives. The entry way looked like an art installation at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, with a lineup of Mercedes and modern furniture mashed up against a sound system and bar (another way of distributing beer). The autos turn out to be part of a bio-diesel conversion project, but no matter, they were fun to look at and added to the cocktail chatter. The overarching theme of the space and the crowd was, in fact, conversational. The artworks to each other, the art to the space, the implicit conversations between the different tenants of the warehouse, and of course, the sizable crowd that came to see what it was all about.

Another kind of conversation will be happening on Tuesday, April 5th. The Maine Center for Creativity will be hosting “From Imagination to Innovation: Maine Participates in Lincoln Center Institute’s Imag’nation Conversation.” This is one of fifty such events that the Lincoln Center Institute has been holding in every state that will culminate in an Imagination Summit in New York this coming July. These conversations are designed to get people talking about “how imagination is a prerequisite for success in the 21st-century global economy [and how] now more than ever, we must teach imagination in our schools and nurture it in our communities.” The keynote speaker for the Maine conversation will be Rockland artist Eric Hopkins, joined by Daniel Bouthot, Habib Dagher, Carol Farrell, Aaron Frederick, Andy Graham and Karen Montanaro, moderated by Patsy Wiggins. The event goes from 4 to 8pm, at Hannaford Hall at the Abromson Center on the USM Portland campus ($20 to attend; $5 for USM students; RSVP is required).

There has been a lot of discussion during the past months (and particularly in the past weeks) about the role of public art in Portland and in the State of Maine in general. The Portland Museum of Art will be holding a free public forum: “Whose Art is It?” on Friday, April 8 from 12-1:30 pm. The discussion will use the removal of the The Maine Labor Mural Cycle in Augusta as a springboard to address the status of public ownership of public art. “Participants will include: Mark Bessire, Director of the Portland Museum of Art; Sharon Corwin, Director and Chief Curator of the Colby College Museum of Art; Christina Bechstein, Sculpture Professor and Director of Public Engagement at Maine College of Art; and Chris O’Neil, Government Relations Consultant for the Portland Community Chamber. Invitations were extended to Governor Paul LePage, who is unable to attend and to artist Judy Taylor [who painted the mural cycle], who has respectfully declined.”

Last fall, proposals for benches for the new Bayside Trail were unveiled to the public to no great acclaim: “Art should be something you feel passion for,” said committee Chairman Jack Soley. “At the end of the day, we felt most of the entries were simply too pedestrian, and we’re not looking for that. We could buy benches from a catalog if that’s what we were looking for.” From what I saw of the proposals, some of them were quite well crafted and others too self-consciously “artistic.” But, to return to the idea we started this post out with, the relevant “creativity” here is not personally expressive, but social. One of the most successful comparable projects in recent years has been the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The seating is indeed functional, but beautifully designed. Most importantly, people use it! The High Line offers many places for people to stop and relax and socialize. The seating has helped to make the space into a place. With luck, this is what the Public Art Committee had in mind when they decided to reissue the challenge: “To Artists, Designers, Landscape Architects, Architects and other interested parties: The Public Art Committee of Portland, Maine has issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) from artists and designers, or teams of artists and designers, to create functional art in the form of seating along the new Bayside Trail in Portland. The RFQ is available for download on the Portland Planning and Urban Development Department web site. The deadline for submission of a qualifications packet is 3:00 p.m., Thursday, April 28th, 2011.” The Public Art Committee also requests that you please forward this post along to other artists or designers who might be interested in submitting qualifications for this project.

Making places for creativity to happen is just as important as the tangible products of creativity itself. The creation of new places like Base Camp and the Bayside Trail adds to the collective happiness that we feel in Portland.

Five or ten years in the making, depending on how you count it, the Bayside Trail is now a reality. There will be a public Ribbon Cutting on Thursday, August  19th,  4-6  pm at the Elm Street Plaza to celebrate the event. Mayor Nicholas M. Mavodones and US Congresswoman Chellie Pingree will be in attendance along with other community leaders that have been working to make Bayside one of Portland’s up and coming neighborhoods. According to the Munjoy Hill News, “The one mile trail has transformed a 13.2 acre corridor that runs parallel to Marginal Way through the Bayside Neighborhood into a ribbon of green that will connect the Eastern Prom with Deering Oaks Park.” This may be overstating it a bit, because although the trail has been completed (hence the ribbon cutting) there is still $1.6 million more fund raising to be done so the landscaping phase of the project can be completed next year. The Portland Public Arts Committee (PPAC) has just posted an RFP for an artist to design benches for the trail, due on August 26th31st. In the meantime, enjoy a walk, run or bike ride through the new public space.

Rights of Way, a blog devoted to “better streets and public spaces in Portland, Maine,” has discovered a schematic map of Portland, Maine’s streetcar network, as it was in 1916, beautifully rendered by a German Wikipedia contributor. The Straßenbahns (streetcar lines in German) trace the familiar traffic patterns that still flow through Portland: Congress Street from the Old Union Station to Monument Square, north on Forest Avenue to Woodfords Corner and south across the bridge to Knightsville, in South Portland. Rights of Way covers all the local politics surrounding public transport in Portland and beyond, including the development of the Franklin Street “Boulevard”. Their homepage links to a definitive Google Map of Greater Portland Bike Routes, and a recent post offered a really useful map showing how to bike from Portland to all of the beaches within an hour’s ride in South Portland, Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough. Portland Green Streets shares the mission by “giving people the nudge, the incentive, and the experience to develop new green commuting habits.” If you see a lot of people walking, biking, carpooling and taking public transportation, wearing something green and enjoying “freebies” and discounts from local business on the last Friday of each month in Portland, chances are you are seeing Green Streets Day in progress. These efforts take a page out of environmentalist Bill McKibben‘s playbook as described in his brilliant new book Eaarth (yes, that’s right, two “a“s) where he argues that small, local actions on a large, coordinated scale is the only method of change that will allow our lives on earth to remain livable. The Greens Streets concept started in Cambridge, and has spread through Massachusetts to Portland, Ohio and England. Oh course, the environmental impact of one green-shirted day a month in a handful of cities is slight, but the habit of action, engagement, of taking to the streets together, is a worthy goal in itself, and one that paves the way for a sustainable future.