Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine

Chapter 4. City Growth, City Problems, City Beautiful, 1893–1915

[ 101 ] CHAPTER FOUR  City Growth, City Problems, City Beautiful, 1893–1915 Atourist on a sunny day in 1890 atop the Observatory on Munjoy Hill, gazing out over sparkling, sail-studded Casco Bay, might easily have basked in the beauty of the place. Prevailing southwesterly winds whisked away the relatively little sulfurous smoke from the Portland Company foundry. Bayside alone suffered the noxious stench wafting at low tide from the Back Cove’s polluted flats and emanating all day from the cove’s tannery, slaughterhouse, and stoneware manufactory. Like all late nineteenth-century American cities, Portland exhibited the growth pains attending urban industrialization. Beneath the stunning hilltop vistas lurked many of the same urban problems found in larger and more notorious cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and even New York: housing decay, immigrant poverty, crime, insanitation, and, of course, the machinations of the political machine. For many late nineteenth-century Americans the sheer density of the big city, the clatter and clamor of its congested narrow streets, and the evidence of squalor, provoked alarm at the uncomely character and quality of modern urban life, and the impotence of politics to uplift the other half and produce a safer, more salubrious environment for the growing middle class. Turn-of-the-century reform embodied the nation’s great outrage at these distressing shortcomings of urban industrialization. It was a rancor expressed by a highly diverse segment of Americans, from businessmen like Portland’s Baxter to middle-class teachers, lawyers, ministers, physicians, social workers, [ 102 ] CHAPTER FOUR and other professionals, as well as clubwomen, union leaders, and even some ward politicians. Despite its modest population, 36,425 in 1890, and the unpretentiousness of its industrialism, Portland exquisitely illuminates the varied economic and aesthetic concerns of the Progressive movement as it unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Portland had early spawned a brand of Yankee reform focused largely on the Social Gospel concern for human brotherhood and for the physical and moral well-being of the less fortunate. It also emphasized honest, efficient government in which the best men would serve the whole city, rather than the narrow, corrupt needs of a few machine-controlled ethnic wards. Finally, it reflected the civic improvement, civic art, and city beautiful side of urban reform, the urge to better the appearance and livability of the emerging metropolis . Accordingly, Portland reformers espoused aesthetic as well as social and economic reform, the efficient delivery of street, sewer, water, park, and other infrastructural services, and the adornment of the city with decorative street lamps, horse troughs, and monuments. Undergirding Portland’s largely Yankee-led reform movement lay deeper cultural undercurrents manifest in the life of James Phinney Baxter, the central actor in the drama of late nineteenth-century Portland reform (see fig. 11). Baxter, like many in the city’s Yankee establishment, endeavored to restore Portland’s earlier moral and creative energy. He fought to recapture the lost spirit of Portland’s fabled Augustan Age when proud Yankee entrepreneurs like John Poor built railroads, when John Bundy Brown refined shiploads of West Indian molasses into sugar, when majestic Portland-built ships ruled the seas, and when a youthful Longfellow wandered Deering Woods thinking “long, long thoughts.” By 1905, this reform impulse, magnified by the diverse concerns of a host of other social and political reformers, morphed into the Progressive Movement focused even more rigidly on making Portland and its government efficient. That movement—aimed at parks, street paving, sewers, and other forms of city beautification and public health—underscored the Forest City’s increasing dependence on tourism as an economic driver.1 On a smaller urban scale, Portland harbored some examples of execrable, congested housing conditions similar in places to those found in Boston’s Fort Hill and Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Although post-fire ordinances dictated brick building construction in the downtown fire area, by 1880, weak code enforcement in the Irish Gorham’s Corner area and dense residential construction in other neighborhoods peripheral to the downtown had resulted in block City Growth, City Problems, City Beautiful [ 103 ] after block of frame, usually clapboard, one-and-a-half-, two-and-a-half-, and three-and-a-half-story gable-end structures housing three, four, or sometimes six or seven families.2 Indeed, most of Portland’s working-class neighborhoods—Munjoy Hill, Gorham’s Corner, and Bayside—consisted of two- and three-story gable-ended houses...