Seafarers' city ponders heading

Recession buffets effort to save Portland's heritage

Jack D. Humeniuk (background) watched as longshoremen worked to get a tanker underway at the Maine State Pier. (Fred Field for The Boston Globe)

PORTLAND, Maine - To the east stretches Portland's city-owned pier, where a blockbuster proposal for badly needed renovations and development fell through last month. To the west, the main cargo terminal lies dormant. And in the center of this waterfront of erstwhile seafaring renown, the clusters of privately owned piers that link city and harbor exhibit various stages of disrepair and decay, compounded by the woes of the once-thriving fishing and lobster boats they berth.

As Maine's largest city weathers the blows of a deep recession, the port that inspired its name has suffered the worst, and Portlanders are taking a hard look at how to preserve their city's heritage in a world where oceanfront property increasingly takes precedence over the maritime industry.

And while Portland does not want to lose its identity as an ocean port, the question is how a vibrant city of top-of-the-line restaurants, upscale shops, and white-collar businesses should keep its fading marine industries alive.

"Are we going to let this waterfront die or are we going to let people start coming up with ideas to save it?" asked Charles A. Poole.

Poole is well positioned in this soul-searching discussion. His family has owned Union Wharf, Portland's oldest pier, since the city's seafaring heyday in the mid 19th century. His pier extends 1,000 feet from Commercial Street smack dab into the middle of Portland Harbor. He has managed to survive by combining bucket-and-bilge operations with nonmarine businesses on his one pier - something the city as a whole is trying to do with its port.

For all the woes of its waterfront, Portland is doing better than most Maine locales. As of November 2008, unemployment here was 4.7 percent, said City Manager Joseph E. Gray Jr., compared with the Maine average at the time of 6.2 percent. Commercial Street, Portland's waterfront strand, was recently voted one of the country's great streets by the American Planning Association. Upland from the harbor, the red brick buildings and cobblestone streets of the tony Old Port district dazzle sophisticated shoppers and gourmands alike. The Eastern Promenade, just minutes from the center, offers spectacular views of the islands dotting Casco Bay. The city economy is bolstered by the presence of medical services, banking, and educational institutions.

"The strength of the Portland economy is that it's a very diversified economy," Gray said.

Yet city officials, pier owners, merchants, and fishermen agree that Portland needs to maintain its maritime identity. They believe that shipping will continue to matter, and there are not that many 35-foot, federally dredged channels with easy access to the ocean.

Portland Harbor "is a natural resource and we should keep it that way," said Bert Russell, vice president of operations at Portsmouth-based Sprague Energy, which runs a private cargo terminal in Portland. "Once you misuse it, it's gone."

The collapse of the deal to fix the city-owned Maine State Pier cast a stark spotlight on Portland's personality crisis. The pier is where the passengers of the 40 cruise ships expected to dock here this year will disembark. They will step ashore onto a rusted crane platform retrofitted as a gangway; they will walk 1,000 feet past a corrugated metal warehouse, and traverse a section of waterfront before hitting the Old Port.

The plan was to have a developer restore the pier and create an ultramodern terminal with shops and conveniences leading to a welcoming band of hotel space and retail outlets at the entrance to the city. But the deal, worth over $100 million, fell through last month when the prospective developer, Ocean Properties Ltd., became the second company to walk out on the project. Now the city is looking for other ways to either repair the Maine State Pier or build a new berth for cruise ships.

This followed last summer's bad news, the declaration of bankruptcy by Red Shield Environmental LLC, which had been the main cargo company in and out of the city's main shipping facility, the International Marine Terminal. The city laid off most of its waterfront staff; most of the longshoremen who worked the port lost their jobs as well. Although nothing much has come in since last summer, plans are underway to refit the terminal to take in specialized cargo for specific projects, such as wind turbines, said Jack D. Humeniuk, representative of the International Longshoremen's Association. The Maine Port Authority is in talks with the city to take over management and marketing for the cargo terminal, state and city officials say.

On the privately owned piers that host mostly fishing and lobstering businesses, the rickety pilings, uneven surfaces, and silt-filled berths attest to the hard times that have hit those industries. Lobstermen are fighting to stay afloat as the economic crisis has driven down the price of their catch. Fishing vessels have either ceased to operate, sunk by federal restrictions on the number of days they can fish, or sailed on to ports in Massachusetts, which are closer to the best fishing grounds.

In the late 1990s, 350 boats operated out of Portland; today only 70 do, said Bert Jongerden, general manager of the Portland Fish Exchange. He counted off the jobs lost - 50 exchange employees, 300 fish handlers in processing factories, maybe 1,000 crewmen.

Portland, now home to 63,000 people, once rivaled Boston as a seaport. But unlike Boston, Portland has resisted turning over its wharves to the development of office space, hotels, and restaurants. Its one experiment, the construction in the 1980s of cookie-cutter condominiums on Chandler's Wharf, caused a popular uproar that led to zoning laws to prohibit new residences or hotels on wharves. The rules also limit construction on piers, restrict nonmarine businesses to the upper floors of buildings, and allow only those that do not take up space with vehicles or equipment that would disrupt maritime enterprises. Pier owners complain that the rules make it hard for them to make enough money to maintain their wharves.

Now, the city is ready to reconsider some of those restrictions "to allow pier owners a cash flow that would allow them to support these marine-related businesses, especially in a down economy," said City Councilor Cheryl Leeman.

Nick Mavodones, another city councilor, said officials are looking favorably upon proposals by an alliance of private pier owners to relax zoning laws to make it easier to create space for nonmarine businesses, and help owners with such costly maintenance as dredging the waters around their wharves.

Mavodones said the city is even listening to the proposal of the owner of Maine Wharf, who wants permission to build a five-story, $40 million hotel on his pier - the type of project that, for the last generation, has been considered heresy on the waterfront.

"I think the city is starting to think outside the box," mused Poole, of Union Wharf.

Some see Poole's wharf as a blueprint for how the waterfront can survive. Without violating zoning laws, it combines a Japanese restaurant, a gourmet bistro and emporium, a high-end architecture firm, and several other offices with chandlers, trap makers, lobstermen, and other vessels. Poole said the rents help him keep the 5-acre pier in repair and ease the price of real estate for his marine proprietors and dockage for their boats.

Poole, who likes to show off a favorite keepsake, the yellowed deed signed by the original owners in 1793, is optimistic Portland can keep its waterfront alive. "History is on our side," he said, "as long as we have a deep-water port and as long as vessels will come and go and move by water."

David Filipov can be reached at filipov@globe.com.