Posts By Christian MilNeil
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Working in Portland
Just What Bayside Has Been Waiting for, the Portland Flea-for-All!
March 13, 2012 / / 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.
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Living In Portland
Ski Portland!
March 3, 2012 / / 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.
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Living In Portland
The Abyssinian Meetinghouse and Portland's African-American History
February 27, 2012 / / 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.
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Living In Portland
Valentine's Day Special: All Our Single Ladies
February 14, 2012 / / 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.
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Living In Portland
Recycled Since 1866: Portland's Green Buildings
February 8, 2012 / / 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.
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The Arts
Portland's SPACE Gallery: Art as a Civic Institution
February 1, 2012 / / A couple of months ago, I had an idea for an art project: I could use the Google Search API to filter through the 27,400 Image Search results for watercolor paintings of Maine's Monhegan Island, sort them by their dominant hues, and rearrange them in an grid to create a pointillist approximation of a Monhegan Island scene. There were two strikes against this idea ever seeing the light of day: first, I've never considered myself an artist, and second, I was only a novice at the programming languages I would need to pull the necessary data from Google's servers and put the mosaic together.
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Working in Portland
131 Washington Gets Kickstarted
January 12, 2012 / / Early last month I went to see local bands AWAAS, If and It, Glass Fingers, and the Sunset Hearts play at 131 Washington Avenue, an abandoned print shop at the base of Munjoy Hill. It's not the kind of place that you'll see on Chamber of Commerce brochures, but it's cheap, and the venue's neighbors — the windowless Sahara Club, a state parole office, and an overgrown hillside empty lot — don't complain if the music's too loud.
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Living In Portland
A Harbor for Ideas: The Portland Public Library
January 6, 2012 / / “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.