UO > Community Profile > Portland, Maine

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Portland hospitals have also gone the extra mile to welcome newcomers such as Somalis, who make up 20 percent of immigrant patients. For example, Maine Medical Center’s manager of interpreter and cross-cultural services, Dana Gaya, has developed special “double” hospital gowns that allow Muslim women to maintain their modesty.

MMC and Mercy have become hubs for medical care in northern New England. “The specialists here are as good as you can find anywhere. They practice here because they love to live here,” says Wood of this local health-care industry.

As the region’s third largest employer, MMC, whose origins date to 1872, blends teaching programs and a research institute with its original patient-care mission. For Skelton, it’s pleasing to know that “There’s a nice mix of medical students, residents, and practitioners without some of the politics. It’s an academic institution, yet not part of a medical school.”

There is no medical school in Maine, but the 500 attending physicians who double as faculty members hold academic appointments at the University of Vermont. There is a school of osteopathic medicine at the University of New England in Biddeford.

The location of her office is a real bonus for Skelton. “Family Medicine is located in a beautiful facility that opened in 1999 about three blocks from a walking path around Casco Bay,” she says. The path is part of a thousand-mile “green belt” trail around the city.

MMC is currently adding a building for women’s and infants’ services at its main campus and expanding its emergency, obstetrics, and newborn departments. The hospital started its own certified nursing assistant program in 2000. Ninety percent of its 310 graduates now work at MMC.

MMC is the state’s sole location for certain specialties, such as brachytherapy. A new high dose rate (HDR) therapy has reduced three week-long treatments to two outpatient treatments in one week—and ended the need for patients to travel to Boston for the long procedures. MMC has also received a Medal of Honor from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in recognition of its organ procurement efforts. Its donation rate is 82 percent, compared with the national average of 55 percent.

The Maine Medical Center Research Institute includes centers with basic and clinical projects related to vascular medicine, regenerative medicine (primarily stem cell research), clinical and translational research (applying basic science to actual patient treatment), psychological research, and outcomes research. Outcomes research is needed to determine how to best apply new therapies to individual patients, the Institute’s director, Ken Ault, MD, points out. He cites such specific-to-research programs as the availability of coated stents to patients at least three years before they were approved by the FDA. Other projects include angiogenesis research, studying mechanisms used by cells to form embryos, and identifying and treating children at risk for developing schizophrenia. “We cover the spectrum from fairly exotic molecular biology to very practical research that directly benefits patients,” he says.

Each research group is small, Ault admits, but a new strategic plan is under way to double the programs in five years. The lure of Maine will be important. “Previously, researchers would come for a visit and tell us that they wished MMC had the research facilities that would work for them because they loved the lifestyle. Now we do have the needed facilities to attract outstanding scientists.”

Mercy Hospital, Portland’s second oldest, began in 1918 as Queen’s Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Mercy to care for patients during the world’s cataclysmic flu epidemic. New quarters in 1943 provided 150 beds, and a new wing in 1952 earned it an appraisal as one of America’s most modern hospitals. An aquatic and rehabilitation center opened in 1999. It’s now about to build a $66 million, 130,000-square-foot facility overlooking the Fore River, with another project on the drawing board.

In addition to traditional services, Mercy focuses on behavioral health through its New England Eating Disorders Program and The Recovery Center, the state’s largest inpatient and outpatient drug and alcohol addiction program. Each year, more than 1,600 patients are hospitalized, and at least 12,500 receive varying levels of outpatient treatment. The center is currently participating in national clinical trials of buprenorphine as an alternative to methadone for treating the 14-to-21-year-old age group.

Living on the edge of the sea wasn’t always so good for the immigrants who began arriving soon after its first European resident, Christopher Levett landed with a party of 10 in 1623. One of Levett’s men, Walter Bagnall, was killed in 1631 by Indians. The natives repeatedly threatened and attacked later arrivals and in 1690, virtually destroyed the settlement. A treaty reached in 1727 finally brought security to the area.

Portland would withstand and recover from Revolutionary War bombardment, two Indian massacres, and destruction by fire—four times. The worst fire, in 1866, prompted city leaders to adopt the motto, “Resurgam,” meaning “to rise again,” like a phoenix from the ashes. Many decades later, writers of a 1940 city guide would comment, “There is a sturdiness and ruggedness about the vari-colored vistas that make understandable the undaunted nature of the early settlers now written into the characters of their descendants who wrest a hard sustenance from this region of rocky soil and stormy seas.”

The residents’ undaunted nature resurfaced when an economic downturn made its malicious mark on Portland’s landscape. Downtown prosperity had plummeted as business tenants abandoned one building after another, until the last downtown department store, Porteous, pulled out in 1991. By then, the vacancy rate had risen to a dismal 40 percent.

To survive, Portland needed to renew its identity. “We brought in people from all over the country,” remembers Liz Darling, the city’s marketing and communications director. “They said, ‘You’ve got this beautiful gem. You already have the infrastructure; just come up with a plan.’”

City officials decided to pursue the arts, turning the downtown part of Portland’s long, long Congress Street into a “port” for artists and designers of all kinds—jewelry, clothing, furniture, and graphic—some of whom had engineered the waterfront district’s renewal but were now being driven out by the high-end gentrification that followed.

Enticed by cheap rents on Congress, the new “refugees” began moving in. Today this arts district includes the artists, a law firm catering to creative businesses, and a string of antique shops that attract shoppers from around the country. The Museum of Art is nearby, as are offices and venues for several arts organizations. The Maine College of Art became the downtown crown jewel when it moved into the vacant 100,000-square-foot Porteous building.

Today, of America’s mid-sized cities, Portland has the third lowest vacancy rate—three percent. The creative community accounts for 5,300 jobs. “You don’t see a national chain downtown,” reports Darling. “Instead, there’s entertainment, excitement, something different, including some 2,000 events every year and Friday night art walks that bring out thousands of people.” Big box stores are found at the Maine Mall in South Portland.

The city’s cultural atmosphere has been a special gift for Inhorn, who has been playing the viola ever since his father informed him, as a child, that he’d be the fourth member of the family’s string quartet. In Portland, he’s hoping to join one of several informal musical groups, and he enjoys listening to a nationally renowned Celtic fiddler who lives not far from the hospital. In fact, the town fabled for fresh lobster and laconic duffers with Down East drawls holds its own with music, art, and theater offerings, including symphony, opera, and ballet.

There are unusual events, such as The Little Festival of the Unexpected, featuring readings of works by new playwrights, and the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ. This huge pipe organ was installed in the rebuilt city auditorium attached to City Hall in 1908 after yet another horrendous fire. It was commissioned by a son of Portland, Philadelphia publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, Cyrus H.K. Curtis. His middle initials honored a renowned musician and teacher, Hermann Kotzschmar, who was with the Curtises when Cyrus was born. Today organists from around the world perform several concerts each year, and there’s also a special evening of silent movies with organ accompaniment.

Today’s thriving economy notwithstanding, green means more than the color of money in Portland. Exhibit A is the green belt trail, one legacy of a turn-of-the-century (1900) mayor who spurred development of hundreds of acres around the city for parks and recreation. More recently, in 2003, conservation-oriented Portlanders enthusiastically responded to an offer of free bikes from Bicycling magazine to demonstrate alternative transportation as a way of cutting back on fossil fuel use. Fifty residents (out of 250 applicants) who received the two-wheelers pedaled 12,000 miles in a three-month period. A welcome “side-effect”: They burned off 750,000 calories. Their success brought calls from 20 other small cities also interested in the program.

Even the weather, which could be a deterrent for “sissies,” is less severe than most people expect. Winters are mild compared to the Midwest, reports Darling, but newcomers shouldn’t come without warm duds. “People think we’re Eskimos, but we’re not.” g