Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine

Acknowledgments

[ xiii ] Acknowledgments  An author owes a debt of gratitude to many people. This book originated as my presidential address given in St. Louis at the 2003 biennial meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). That address explored Portland, Maine’s Parkside neighborhood. I next studied another Portland neighborhood, Bayside, before examining the impact of Model Cities in shaping the Forest City. From there I turned to the city as a whole, and the role, inspired by Longfellow, that beauty and tourism played in making Portland. The University of Southern Maine, and the Muskie School, where I have been a visiting research professor since 2000, generously supported this project in diverse ways. Not only did the school provide travel funds, but the graduate courses that I taught there in Housing and in Historic Preservation helped deepen my understanding of both the city and its long history. Student research projects focusing on places such as Munjoy Hill and the city’s Jewish community proved extremely useful. A Muskie School research grant and a Muskie graduate assistant, Sara Devlin, proved invaluable. Sara did time-consuming and deeply appreciated research for me at the Maine Historical Society, combing through year after year of Portland’s Board of Trade Journal and copying key articles. Professor Kent Ryden of USM’s New England Studies Program invited me to teach a summer course on Portland History; doing so further broadened my knowledge of the city. New England Studies faculty Donna Cassidy and Joseph Conforti, and the USM History Department’s Joel Eastman, all distinguished scholars, shared their great knowledge and insight about Portland and its history. I also thank the Muskie School’s Anne Edwards, who did yeoman service in taking a three-hundred-page manuscript, rife with typos, undecipherable endnotes, and other nonconforming features and producing a presentable, publishable manuscript. The staff of USM’s Glickman Library always cheerfully helped me. My research took me to many other libraries as well, including USM’s Osher Map Library, which adjoins the Glickman. There Yolanda Theunissen and her staff helped me with historic maps of Portland and its region. I found their collection of early guidebooks for automobilists especially useful. At the Portland Public Library I worked closely with Abraham Schecter, the librarian in the Portland Room, whose always friendly demeanor and wide knowledge of contemporary Portland history made working there not only enjoyable but very rewarding. Likewise, the staffs of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College, the Folger Library at the University of Maine in Orono, the Maine State Library and Archives in Augusta, the Boston Public Library, the Gorham Public Library, the Edmund Muskie Archives at Bates College, the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, and the Frances Loeb Library at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design graciously assisted me with important collections and my requests for books, records, and other documents. As usual, the capable staff at the Library of Congress, especially Jeffrey Flannery, proved very helpful and friendly. Over the past decade I have spent many hours at the Maine Historical Society, located next to the Longfellow House on Congress Street in Portland. I did considerable research in that venerable institution and also across the street in the basement of the old Benoit’s Department Store building, to which the society moved its collections during major renovations in 2009–2010. The extremely knowledgeable, accommodating, and friendly archival staff of the society, Nicholas Noyes, William Berry, and Jamie Kingman Rice, made research—as always, but especially during that difficult period—highly enjoyable . Dani Fazio at MHS provided extensive help and guidance in my search for illustrations. No history of Portland could be possible without the society’s loving stewardship of Maine and Portland history. I also found a rich trove of Portland history in the library of the Portland Planning and Urban Development Department, where, despite their busy schedules, Lee Urban, Alex Jaegerman, William Needelman, and Deb Andrews found time to afford me access to their historic records and to answer questions. In the midst of my Portland research in 2007 I chaired the biennial meeting of SACRPH in Portland, cohosted by USM and Portland’s Planning Department, to which I owe much of the success of that meeting. Both Deb Andrews and State Historic Preservation Officer Earle Shettleworth Jr. have served on the board or in other leadership roles of Greater [ xiv ] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Portland Landmarks...