Portsmouth's Younger Brother is
Big, Tough, Creative & Shy About His Past

We love downtown Portland, Maine and my wife and I have long discussed moving there if Portsmouth gets too cute for words. Portland is bigger and, despite its own gentrification, less manicured and rougher around the edges. There still are a few vacant lots, cheaper condos, unflipped apartments and affordable office spaces.

Compared to our delicate colonial architecture, Portland buildings are monumental with thick elephant-foot foundations, gigantic doors and windows and multiple stories. Many are topped with square observation rooms that offer 360-degree views. Portland itself seems hacked from a ragged hillside like a fortress. With a metro population of 230,000 -- ten times that of Portsmouth – there is more of everything. Portland has more space, more parking, more homeless and poor, more crusty fishermen, more artisans, more opportunity and fewer millionaires.

We make day trips, but every year we spend a weekend in the city, settling into some hotel and wandering the shops and galleries. Decades ago my brother Brian sorted fish on the Portland wharf. Today he is a college professor, and in the intervening years Portland, like Portsmouth, has refined its gritty commercial harbor into a sophisticated mix of boutiques and superb restaurants – without loosing its hardknuckle personality as Portsmouth’s rugged big brother. The two cities even share a lot of the same shop names – JL Coombs, Bliss, Paper Patch, Kennedy Studios, Breaking New Grounds.

Portland, the state’s biggest city, seems to see itself as the Boston of Maine. Augusta, the capital, thinks otherwise. The northerners I know think of Portland, the way Portland thinks of Kittery, which is the way Portsmouth thinks of Seabrook – too close to a foreign border. Portlanders seem to think little of Portsmouth at all.

"You talk a good game in Portsmouth," a Portland businessman once told me. "You demand a lot of attention, but there isn’t much going on there. I see Portsmouth as a good place to stop for a pee on the way to Boston."

Somewhere along the way Portland branded itself as a center for the Arts with the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine College of Arts at the hub. It worked. Last weekend we caught the PMA exhibit on surrealism while a local jazz band played live. There are so many artists and wannabees in Portland that their impact is palpable. Painting and sculpture and music are ubiquitous. This plays nicely against the old Downeast view that culture isn’t much good if you can’t use it to pound a nail. Sure, Portsmouth is artsy too, but not with the same desperate urban Darwinism and commercial fervor.

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