Seacoast History Blog #48
May 28, 2009
The Discover Portsmouth Center is opening for its second year. It is a phenomenal feat. One of Portsmouth’s sturdiest and most useful old brick buildings is now – at least for the moment – being put to the highest possible use. It is the city’s first and only visitor’s center, with a special emphasis on tuning people, newcomers and natives alike, into the historical and cultural highlights of the city. Not everybody gets it yet. And a lot more think that, if the center is open, it must be here forever. But the new DPC, the brainchild of Prof. Richard Candee, is on a trial run only, loaned by the city to the Portsmouth Historical Society in hopes that they can make a go of it. (Continued below)
A Few Words about the Portsmouth Discover Center
Following are the comments, more or less, that I delivered to past and former board members of the Portsmouth Historical Society at a sneak preview of the new exhibit opening this summer at the DPC.
My fellow historians:
I’ve been asked to say a few words today about the Discover Portsmouth Center and to keep my remarks upbeat and brief. And I will – in just a minute. But first, an anecdote or two. The other day my wife Maryellen and I were ordering take-out at Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery. The woman taking orders at the window looked at us – and I want to get her words exactly right – she said, "Would any member of your party be eligible for a senior discount."
Our friend Mary Jo Brown’s daughter Haley said the same thing only better the next day. Haley is four. We had just had dinner at the Muddy River Smokehouse and were walking along Congress Street. Haley was getting a great thrill out of hitting me and hanging all over me and I had forgotten how heavy and loud and powerful four-year-olds are. I took her hand as we were crossing the street, and as I did, she said with a great smile and without any preamble, "You know what? You’re old!"
She was right. I know that because when I walk through Portsmouth these days, I see more ghosts than I do people. I had no plans to spend most of my life here, but I have. I had no plans to write hundreds and hundreds of stories about Portsmouth history, but that’s how things turned out. I’ve come to see the entire world from a Portsmouth point of view. It is my touchstone, my baseline, my secret decoder ring. As I struggle to define it, it defines me.
I wrote my first article about Portsmouth in 1968. I was a bassketball correspondent for West High School in Manchester, NH, covering an away game with the Portsmouth Clippers. My boss was William Loeb, a baldheaded right-wing conservative in a bow tie who published the Union Leader and carried a handgun. My second published article about Portsmouth was a review of a play at Theatre by the Sea in 1973. The tiny theater was in the basement of a grain warehouse on the rough and tumble alley called Ceres Street. I took my date out for a 50-cent beer after the show at what turned out to be a topless bar.
That was the year I moved here, temporarily, and tried writing for a living. Things did not go well. I moved away and tried other things, but I couldn’t do anything but write, and I couldn’t do that anywhere but Portsmouth. If you count that first basketball review, I’ve been writing about Portsmouth for 41 years.
And still I can’t get it right. Since moving here I’ve had four Portsmouth apartments, 10 Portsmouth girlfriends, five downtown offices and 10 employees. I’ve now got one house and one wife. I’ve written over a thousand Portsmouth articles – and I still can’t get my arms around this place.
For years I felt that it was up to me to pull together the whole Portsmouth story into a cohesive whole. I tried it writing books and articles, with Web sites on the Internet, with walking tours, videos, travel maps and with slide lectures. But the history of this city is just too big, too expansive and too rich.
I see now, thanks to Haley and the woman at Bob’s Clam Hut, that I’m never going to finish this job. There is more history now than when I started, and more coming every day. If I were carving Mount Rushmore, my life’s work would add up to one eye, or a chin, or a couple of nostrils. And then I will be gone, and whatever chunk I carved will take its place with the Portsmouth history writing of Nathaniel Adams, Charles Brewster, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Dorothy Vaughan, Ray Brighton, Richard Candee, Richard Winslow and others. And then along will come some kid in his twenties, who will pick up the chisel and start hammering away.
I was looking for a container, a medium, a Dewey Decimal System – for some way to pull this complex story into a neat accessible box. But the story was bigger than me. I knew something was happening when the Portsmouth Rotary kindly presented me with a "life achievement" award. They don’t give those things out to young people. I remember saying at the time that Portsmouth historian Dorothy Vaughan, who died just shy of her 100th birthday, had gotten the job half done. She and others managed to stop Portsmouth from tearing itself apart. She had stopped the clock. Today we’re not only preserving, but conserving, restoring, recycling, reviving, interpreting and promoting history. This city has been analyzed and memorialized in more history books, plays, paintings, exhibits, lectures, clubs, museums and walking tours than most cities 10 times its size.
And finally, as Dorothy Vaughan dreamed, the world is beginning to notice. We’re in all the guidebooks as the ideal walkable cultural city. Recently everyone from the National Trust to National Geographic is singing the praises of the city that saved itself.
The container I was looking for was not a book or a web site. It was a building. Telling Portsmouth stories is a continuum. It shifts and changes with the times, and it is bigger than all the men and women who tell its tales. We come and we go, as do the visitors, like the tides of the Piscataqua River.
And the container doesn’t really hold all the stories. That’s where I got it wrong. It isn’t a library. The building is the map. The building is the place you visit to find your way – by talking to clever people, being inspired by exhibits, watching a video, asking questions and getting directions.
This great old brick building was built in 1810 to be a school. It spent the last century as a public library. Now it is a little of each -- and more. The Discover Portsmouth Center is the portal that leads to a city with four fascinating centuries to explore. It is the way station. It is the place you go to find out where to go.
Being a small part of this place gives me as much satisfaction as writing a hundred stories. If this new institution endures, I will feel less jittery each time I accept a senior discount.
If we can find the money and the people to keep it going, this place will change the way millions of visitors see this city, and the way the city sees itself. I believe it will become, not just the city’s historic hub, but its economic engine too. No other city I know can tell the full scope of the American story better. And for the first time, we have a doorway that connects our past to that future.
Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.
