UO > Community Profile > Portland, Maine

“This is where I want to be the rest of my life.”

So decided Mark Publicker, MD, when he interviewed in Portland. After positions in New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC, he knows a good place when he sees it. “From a physician’s perspective, Maine is a wonderful change. We’re held in high regard in the community, which is not the case in every other city.”

Now the director of Mercy Hospital’s Recovery Center in this city on the rocky coast of Maine, he’s found an opportunity to research causes and cures for patients hooked on everything from alcohol to heavy drugs. And he finds Portland itself “a refreshing change from life in a highly transient city to one with a long history of community and a great deal of civic pride.”

Some might consider Portland off the beaten track. But in fact, it seems to be a place, as the old cowboy song has it, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, at least judging by testimony from Publicker and other physicians here.

“I have the world’s best patients,” says Ann K. Skelton, MD. “Most have been with me all the years (15) of my practice.”

Now the chief of family medicine for Maine Medical Center (MMC), the state’s largest hospital, Skelton grew up 30 miles away in Lewiston and was educated exclusively in New England. The local scenic beauty mesmerized her, and she now owns a home on the ocean. But such advantages as “low crime, little traffic, and great


	“I have the world’s best patients,” says Ann K. Skelton, MD. “Most have been with me all the years (15) of my practice.” The chief of family medicine for Maine Medical Center, Skelton grew up 30 miles away in Lewiston. The local scenic beauty mesmerized her, and she now owns a home on the ocean. ©2006 KEVIN BRUSIE

restaurants” have played important roles in keeping her here.

Portland residents’ approach to life is no small factor, either. “There’s a strong work ethic,” she says, “but not crazy devotion to work.”

According to James Glazer, MD, “This is a city that has the best of all possible worlds,” including restaurants and leisure activities. “But it’s small enough so that it has affordable housing, good schools, low crime, an Eastern corridor location, and outdoor recreational opportunities.”

Glazer is the director of MMC’s Human Performance Laboratory, which specializes in elite endurance athletics and improving training methods. As a doctor for four area school and college teams, he’s understandably sports-oriented and takes advantage of Maine’s outdoor opportunities from skiing and mountain biking to sea kayaking, one of the area’s most popular outdoor activities, along with all other types of boating.

There’s good reason for the latter. Maine’s largest city is a broad collar of land curving around one body of water (Back Cove) to the north and sitting on the wide Fore River, which becomes Casco Bay, gateway to the Atlantic. An early Indian name for it was Machingonne, meaning Great Neck, Great Knee, or Great Elbow, depending on the translator. The latter two nicknames still pop up occasionally, but “The Neck” lost out in 1786 when the city got a more respectable name, although incorporation didn’t come until 1820.

Another peninsula on the south side of the Fore River is a popular residential area. The towns of South Portland and Cape Elizabeth are an easy drive from the city, thanks to the Casco Bay Bridge. A second bridge crosses Back Cove from Portland proper to U.S. Highway 1, which goes north to Canada. A closer stop, though, is Freeport, where the huge L.L. Bean store anchors a cluster of emporia that amounts to a shopping addict’s mecca.

When Roger Inhorn, MD, arrived in Portland two years ago as Mercy Hospital’s chief of oncology and hematology, he and his family settled in Cape Elizabeth. He had vacationed in Maine in the early 1990s during residency and fellowship in Boston and “had always been fond of the Portland area.”

While building their home, the family rented a place on the beach. “My kids had never seen the ocean before. They were blown out of their minds when they could walk out and be right there,” he recalls. Now three of the four (10, 8, 6 and 4) are in public schools, which the couple had scoped out before moving. “A lot of people here seem very committed to the school district,” he says. Among after-school sports, he’s especially pleased that his 10-year-old is in a learn-to-ski program, since the mountains are almost as close as the sea. They’re fond of the community in general: “We’re charmed by Cape Elizabeth,” he says.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the renowned poet who grew up in Portland, called his city a jewel by the sea. “It’s a huge boating and sailing community,” says Barbara Whitten, the president of the Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Besides private boating, there are seal-watching adventures and tours of the bay with stops at several of the Calendar Islands, almost as thick as fallen leaves in Casco Bay. “We like to make the count 365, even if there are more, so we can say there’s one for every day of the year,” says Whitten.

You can take catamaran trips to Nova Scotia and “triangle trips” by car ferry to Bar Harbor, Nova Scotia, and back. Or follow one of the Maine Island Trails, complete with overnight camping on an island. For a genuine appreciation of the crustacean that made Maine famous, Lucky Catch Cruises offers lobstering adventures in the bay. Passengers haul in their own traps, rubber-band the claws and buy their catch at the wholesale price.

Seven area lighthouses and three maritime museums testify to the region’s nautical heritage. Portlanders are especially proud these days that their waterfront district is a working port, which sparked the city’s original prosperity, as well as a tourist magnet of quaint shops and bistros.

In earlier times, ships laden with timber and fish sailed out of this deepest harbor north of Boston, returning with molasses, sugar, rum, and coffee. Today, Portland is New England’s largest tonnage seaport, the second largest oil port on the Atlantic, and third largest fishing port, although fishing has had its ups and downs. “It’s still very strong, but not as strong as before,” says Godfrey Wood, the president of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce. But there are no discouraging words about the state’s best-known catch. According to the Maine Lobster Promotional Council, almost 90 percent of America’s lobster comes from Maine waters.

Some 30 major cruise vessels call at the port of Portland every year, but the city hopes to attract the biggest of the big with a new passenger terminal, “Ocean Gateway,” and a $16 million shopping/hotel/parking complex.

Portland prospers today as Maine’s financial, health-care, real estate, and educational center, but its residents’ strong sense of independence recently led an Inc. Magazine writer to comment, “This city and state were made for entrepreneurs.”

Wood, who came here from Boston 12 years ago to start a business, says, “Entrepreneurship has a long history here, probably because people who are positive or creative or adventurous come here to live. They’re the kinds of people who have the courage to do it.” There’s plenty of proof at the waterfront alone, a once-seedy wharf-and-warehouse domain. It became a fertile draw in the 1970s for artists and photographers, including Peter Macomber, whose contract as a catalog photographer for L.L. Bean keeps him and 16 employees busy full time. This specialty was nonexistent in the area when he arrived in 1972. Macomber has also inspired a dozen other self-starters who now have nationwide accounts in niches such as digital work and large-format color photography.

The dean of entrepreneurs, though, was probably Leon L. Bean himself, whose massive Freeport store anchors a catalog business reaching into millions of households worldwide. In line with its original mission of selling sporting goods and clothing, L.L. Bean offers newcomer programs in kayaking, fly casting, archery, and clay shooting at its Outdoor Discovery School.

Food fun

One of Portland’s wharves is now home to DiMillo’s, a former car ferry in its second life as an enormous restaurant serving seafood galore—with harbor view from every table.

But Skelton is quick to cite some of her gourmet favorites in other areas of town, such as Fore Street with its wood-fired oven and turning spit, which she says, “brought good bread to Portland.” She also mentions Street & Company, 555, and Hugo’s. Among Hugo’s entrées: “Rob’s Love Affair with Cod,” the New England staple prepared four ways. An upscale immersion also awaits guests at the White Barn Inn, an 1800s farm turned into a resort with decidedly un-pioneer prices in nearby Kennebunkport.

One popular fun-and-food destination is Bull Feeney’s, where Irish camaraderie has held sway, in one form or another, and inspired a tradition of hospitality to immigrants since John A. Feeney opened a grocery store (as a front for a saloon) soon after arriving from the Emerald Isle in 1878. Feeney helped other Auld Sod brothers find job and homes, study for citizenship, and register to vote. Two of his sons, who briefly operated the saloon themselves, changed their names to Francis Ford and John Ford and went on to immense Hollywood fame. The city honors favorite son John with a statue near the restaurant. He directed, wrote, or appeared in 145 films; Francis was involved in 99.

Today Portland has become a designated U.S. refugee resettlement location. School superintendent Mary Jo O’Connor reports that 59 languages are spoken in the public school system, which has a full staff of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers. “As people come in from Sudan, China, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and other countries, they’re processed through an intake center where multilingual advisers help them to get established,” she says. At the center, children are also tested to determine their proper school placement.

The school system also offers an interesting array of programs, including a new “expeditionary school” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The curriculum incorporates “active learning, character development, and teamwork,” which is achieved with, among other features, meaningful field trips and plenty of time to absorb important concepts. Says one teacher, “We give kids time to think about big ideas, go out into the world to get more data and develop a solid understanding of scientific principles.”

The Gates’ funding came on the heels of the dramatic revamping of the once failing Helen King Middle School that had become a national expeditionary pilot site. Today King students, who live in one of Maine’s most racially, ethnically, and economically diverse neighborhoods, outscore the rest of the state’s students in writing, math, and science—and equal other schools in reading and social studies.