 So welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming out. It seems like Landmarks has the rainy afternoon before the lecture syndrome this time. My name is Hilary Bassett. I'm the executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks. I'd like to welcome you here tonight. And to remind you that Landmarks' mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We are having a very busy year at Landmarks. Currently, one of our exciting initiatives is to work out on Forest Avenue. And we've just been working with the Woodford Corner Neighborhood Association, a new group to build awareness of the historic resources out on Forest Avenue and off Peninsula of Portland. We're also training new docents through the Portland's History Docents Program, who are going to be doing guided tours of the Observatory, US Custom House in Portland, which if you haven't seen already is quite spectacular on the inside, and also of the State Street High Street neighborhood. School tours are being booked for the Observatory, and that opens on May 28th, so lots is cooking. Now, I'd like to take a minute to thank the Portland Public Library for making the space available for us this evening. And also to remind us tonight, we have a hard deadline of 7 PM because there is this very special exhibit here of a Shakespeare portfolio, which if you haven't seen is a really remarkable opportunity to see that manuscript. I'd also like to thank CTN Channel 5 for filming the lecture. So if you'd like to catch it again, you can watch it on CTN. And I'd also like to recognize the Greater Portland Landmarks staff, Alessa Wiley, Julie Larry, Amanda Larson, Sean Hunt, and Maggie Perkins for all their good work. And also especially to thank Ruth Storey who is with us this evening. Ruth has been the organizer of this lecture series, and she's done a remarkable job, so I want to thank her again as well. And also to invite you to, on April 19th, our next lecture will be by Kathleen Sutherland on the Women Who Saved Portland's Architectural Heritage. Now our speaker tonight, Libby Bischoff, is Associate Professor of American History and the Department Chair at the University of Southern Maine. She has her bachelor's, master's, and PhD from Boston College. And her area of specialty is 19th century American culture, and she specializes in the history of photography, especially photography in Maine. She has just published a new book along with Susan Danley and Earl Shuddleworth on Maine Photography, A History, 1840 to 2015, so that is hot off the press. And she's co-curated an exhibition called Maine Modern's Art in Saguinland, 1900 to 1940 at the Portland Museum of Art with Susan Danley, and also an exhibition on the photographer Chen Sineta, Stanley Emmons at the University of New England. Libby teaches a variety of introductory and upper level courses in the history major, including history of Maine, photographing American history, American popular culture, and a variety of seminars. And her other research interests include Maine history, modernism, how friendship informs cultural production, and 19th century New England women writers. So I'm very happy to welcome Libby Bischoff. And thanks everybody for coming out on this rainy March evening. It's Maine's birthday. It's Maine's 196th birthday today so we can celebrate that in advance of the bicentennial in 2020. As Hilary mentioned, I'm a 19th century cultural and social historian. So when Ruth asked me to be a part of this series and I knew I wanted to kind of live in this time period, historians like to stay within their specialties as you might imagine. I wanted to talk about Portland's relationship to a national movement at the turn of the century, the city beautiful movement. And this was a movement that was attractive for me to talk about because it's one that tended to communicate its ideas visually as well as in print. And one of the things I really emphasize in my own teaching, and in fact I have class tonight after this, a senior seminar on visualizing history. I really like to train younger historians and students to use the built environment, to use photographs, to use maps, to use all sorts of things as resources and move away from text. Not that I don't like text. It's terrific. But I think we can expand our knowledge of the past by broadening the ways in which we look at it. So throughout our time together tonight, we'll look at a lot of different maps and postcards and photographs. And those will help us kind of visualize the implications of this movement. I will talk a little bit about the origins of the city beautiful movement, the significance of that movement in America and then spend the remaining time on how that movement manifested itself in Portland, Maine. And certainly one can't even begin to talk about the city beautiful movement and the extension of Portland's park system without acknowledging the contributions of James Finney Baxter, five term Republican mayor of Portland, first from 1893 to 1897 and then again in 1904 and 1905. And the periods in which Baxter was mayor coincided almost exactly with the height of the city beautiful movement. So he is to borrow a 21st century term very much on trend in the 1890s and 1904 and 1905 with what he's thinking about in terms of really putting Portland on the map as an attractive residential city. And so his vision is really gonna be a key part of our discussion together this evening. And I'll put in a plug for many of my lovely museums and libraries and organizations that I use to help gather these images, the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine. It's fantastic resource on Portland and Maine history and then also the Maine Historical Society where I gathered a lot of these images as well. So I'm gonna ask you to humor me for a moment as I read a description of the city of Portland that's found in the 1937 Great Depression era works progress administration, Maine guidebook called Maine a Guide Down East. And my reasons for doing so will soon become clear and I'll ask you while I read this description to kind of pay attention to P.E. Beers is really interesting map of Portland, Maine and vicinity from 1934 right around the same time period. And I find it, I'm not a cartographic historian. I love maps because I love visuals. And so I'm terrible at directions. It's the one thing I wish I inherited from my father that I did not. So I'm a terrible reader of maps as getting place to place but a very eager reader of maps for what they can communicate to us about the sense of place. So I thought it was really interesting that Beers in this picture, what his pop outs of Portland, his choices were, right? So he chooses Longfellow's house. He chooses the Back Cove and Baxter Boulevard and he chooses City Hall. And then he chooses lighthouses and things like that and other parts of the map. As you listen, notice how the words really echo the geography of the city. Portland, Maine's largest city in Cumberland County seat holds the economic and commercial key to a vast territory extending north and east to the Canadian boundaries. At its feet lies Casco Bay with its 365 islands, one for every day in the year, a miniature New England Aegean. Portland itself, the language is great. Portland itself was almost an island and even now access to the city without passing over water is possible only from the Northwest. The metropolitan area clustered on an arm of land shaped like a saddle is almost entirely surrounded by the waters of Casco Bay, Back Cove and the Four River. Lying between the two elevations crowned by the eastern and western promenades at opposite ends of the city, the central section of the city extends along a sagging ridge in general east and west direction. Tall elms and other trees line the streets and shade the city's 26 parks. Portland owes much of its attractiveness to these trees that in the summer, apologies I'm doing this for landmarks, that in the summer hide its architectural deficiencies and make up for some of the ill effects of overcrowding. Because of its geographical position in the state, Portland is the shipping port and railroad terminus as well as the Gloucester of Maine. I know that's how you all refer to the city. I live in Portland, the Gloucester of Maine. Large ships from European and South American countries in the Orient and smaller coasting vessels meet in this harbor. Three railroads enter the city, not anymore. Maine's highway travel almost without exception touches Portland before spreading fan-wise to other sections of the state. During the tourist season, the city is the hub for a vast resort region and by air and water, rail and highway, vacationists pour into the city and then by a dozen divergent routes make their way to summer homes and playgrounds to the north and east. And because Portland is the chief city of Cumberland County, one of the most densely populated sections of Maine, it is also of considerable political as well as commercial strength. And if you'll stop a bit to think about this thickly detailed description offered by the Federal Writers Project authors, you'll come to realize that this description really emphasizes the city's geography, its natural beauty, its commercial potential and success and of course its parks. And I wanted to open with this 1937 description because I think it would have really greatly pleased James Finney Baxter to hear the city described in this way because this narrative really represents the culmination of what he worked for as mayor during the era of the city beautiful movement, a residential and commercial and decidedly not an industrial city. Tree line streets, beautiful vistas, a park system residents could be proud of, a transportation center and not least of all, a hub of tourism. Throughout the nation in the latter decades of the 19th century residents bore witness to a period of rapid industrialization, massive immigration, economic panics, labor crises and extreme urbanization. While the constantly changing technology and the fast-paced innovation excited many Americans, it gave still more reason to pause, wondering what we were losing as we headed into the 20th century. Many people feared a loss of traditional moral values as well as feared the rapid pace of the changes that were occurring because the rapidness of the change left little time for adjustment. These years also saw the advent of, get ready for this list, the telephone, the phonograph, the moving picture camera, the cash register, the electric iron, the light bulb, the capability of mechanically reproducing photographs, skyscrapers, the zipper, the ferris wheel and many others, many things which we take for granted. But these decades also witnessed the overgrowth of cities, crowded tenements, public health and sanitation crises and greatly increased crime rates. So as you can see with these photographs of New York City that were taken by Jacob Reis who was a journalist who was initially a police beat reporter in New York, he was an immigrant himself from Denmark. And he took these views of New York City in 1890 in support of his book, first came out as a series of articles and Scribner's and then was published in and of itself called The Other Half Lives. And so when you're kind of looking at these images of a crowded New York, overrun tenements, dirty streets, no lights, poor sanitation, you begin to see some of the visuals that led to the argument for the city beautiful. And this is not necessarily what Portland was faced with. Portland had some slums and in fact many of them were located down by the Eastern prom, some sort of touching the shore down there. But Portland wasn't trying to embark upon the city beautiful as a response to teeming overcrowded tenements, right? It's more about creating a city that a certain type of people would want to move to. The city beautiful movement was really a product of its time, it was a reform minded response to the many problems inherent in modern American city life as well as the product of a particular event. And you can see it up here. The 1893 Grand Columbian Exposition or the Chicago World's Fair, which marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus's entrance into a new world a year late. And architect Daniel Burnham's French Bazaar inspired neoclassical white city in court of honor that you can see up here on the screen was free from the problems and the blights of modern urban life because it was temporary. It was a model city, a white city, a shining beacon of what Americans could do our showcase to the world of technological prowess. And it was no accident that this fair was held in Chicago. Chicago bid very heavily for this, beating out New York and San Francisco and Boston and other cities because Chicago in and of itself was an up and coming city. And so even though this fair occurred in the midst of a huge financial panic, more than 28 million Americans and citizens of the world came through its gates in six months, 28 million. So in terms of getting people on board with a vision of what an American city could be, this white city, this temporary city, you certainly had a captive audience. And so a series of interrelated goals really emerged from the fair itself for the city beautiful movement. The city beautiful movement at its height between 1900 and 1910 were really arguing for the following. First and foremost to beautify cities, to make them more aesthetically pleasing to residents and visitors through urban planning, public art, parks, monuments and buildings. They also wanted to enhance residents' civic pride. And finally they wanted to do all this in an effort to also improve the morals of the public. And you really can't overlook this aspect of the city beautiful movement. It was very important during the progressive era. And so at its core, this is really a middle class, upper class movement with benevolent ideals, but it was also prescriptive. And so sometimes some of the strongest criticisms of the movement and its goals and how it tried to manifest them came from the lower classes who didn't see the same benefits from a beautiful archway that others did when maybe it would have been better if you could have put some sewage treatment into the tenements or add some fire escapes that worked. So not everyone is really looking for the same thing here. Proponents of the movement believed that careful urban planning and well-balanced buildings and public green spaces could heal residents and they could impose order on growing industrial cities. Beautifully planned and designed cities could be agents of uplift and of social change. Frederick Law Olmsted and other proponents of the movement argued that, quote, beauty created a positive environment capable of influencing human thought and behavior. If you lived in a city beautiful, you would take pride in a city beautiful and you would behave accordingly or so they thought. Cities who engaged in public planning during this movement worked to boost their reputations as a good place to live and a good place to work. This was especially true of Portland's kind of foray into the city beautiful movement. Then interestingly and now, right? This is very much a part of our present current argument. Live here, work here, yes, life is good here, right? It's not enough to just get people to come in, we're trying to get people to stay. Baxter was doing that too. And so the city beautiful movement spawns hundreds of civic improvement leagues, friends groups, public art commissions and resulted in a ton of new civic centers and transportation stations, especially railroad stations around the nation. Sanitation reforms were a hugely important byproduct of the focus on sort of architectural unification and the beautification of cities, but they were a byproduct, right? So as we're cleaning up the cesspool that was the back cove and trying to make the boulevard, it's not the total focus to get the sewage out of the way, it's more to build the boulevard, but if we're also sending the sewage further out to sea, that's a good byproduct as well. And probably the most important legacy of the city beautiful movement is that it gave birth to a modern American discipline, that discipline of city planning. City planning, urban planning is a direct outgrowth of this movement. By 1900, there was a landscape architecture program at Harvard. So when you're getting something that becomes such, it's both grassroots and top down, but when Harvard's adding a major in it, you know that it's sort of sticking around for a while, right? And they feel like, okay, if people are gonna engage in this, then we need to teach professionals how to do this. But it also doesn't come out of nowhere. There's a heavy interest in European models of city planning and beautification, particularly the modern transformation of Paris at the hands of Baron Haussmann in the mid-19th century. It's just a beautiful impressionist painting by Pizarro of the Avenue de l'opera in 1898. And you can see the wide boulevards, the fountains, the parks, the buildings, right? There's places to move, there are places to see and be seen. I mean, Paris is completely transformed from a medieval to a modern city in the mid-19th century. But the city beautiful movement is also influenced by the parks movement in Europe and America that grows in the mid-19th century, exemplified by Calvert Vos and Frederick Law Olmstead's 1858 Central Park. This is just a plan of Central Park in 1875. Vos and Olmstead put their plans forward in 1858. The city beautiful movement on one hand, necessitated government intervention, be careful what you wish for, right? Into city planning and building to a larger extent than what had really previously existed in the United States, while at the same time, leaders of the movement almost universally advocated for the role of these experts, right? People trained in planning professional landscape designers who would come in at the service of a mayor or a city council or a friend's group or an improvement society, and help plan these things out scientifically. This was not done in a haphazard way. One of the most outspoken leaders of the movement, Charles Mulford Robinson, was a newspaper writer and reformer from Rochester, New York. And he described the movement as, quote, a joyous and earnest new crusade for beauty of town and city. It is a crusade, and people take this up like it is a crusade. He wrote a very popular 1901 book called The Improvement of Towns and Cities that really started to function almost as a manual for civic groups and city officials who were interested in beautification. Because if the movement was to succeed on a national level in towns and cities, it was going to take collaboration, cooperation between these civic improvement societies, between governments, but most importantly, it was also going to take public buy-in. These projects don't get funded in and of themselves. A lot of them get funded with public tax dollars, right? So the city beautiful movement is a cultural movement, but it's shaped and reshaped in towns and cities across America. It looks a little different, depending on where you're gonna go. Two national organizations, the American League for Civic Improvement and the American Park and Outdoor Association gave the movement some national direction and cohesion, but just to kind of emphasize collaboration, these groups actually merged into one. They became the American Civic Association in 1904. The first time in a fully kind of realized way that the city beautiful ideology was put into place in America after the Chicago World's Fair was in Washington, D.C., with a redesign of the city's core. And so what you see up in front of you is called the McMillan Plan of 1901. And it was put forth by the Senate Park Commission. It's named for Senator James McMillan of Michigan, who was the principal backer in the Senate of the Park Commission. The impetus behind the redesign of Washington was actually the city's centennial, right? So Washington is designed in a grid based on the plan of Pierre Longfaw, and they weren't trying to redo what Longfaw had done, but they looked at the massive growth of Washington and they looked at some of his plans that were better suited to the 18th and early 19th century rather than to the 20th. And so interestingly enough, the Parks Commission members nearly to a person cut their teeth on the Chicago World's Fair. So the chief architects were Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gorans was also on it and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was also on it. And all of them worked on the World's Fair and then they also had people like the authors Henry Adams, William James, and Henry James, and others. So in terms of the nation's capital that we recognize today, the plan included the addition of Union Station just north of the capital. It included the Lincoln Memorial, a memorial to early presidents that eventually became the Jefferson Memorial and probably most significantly a mall that was lined with major educational and cultural buildings, which are now the National Gallery and the Museums of the Smithsonian Institution. So before this plan, before this kind of city beautiful made real, none of this actually existed in Washington DC and you can see it, you can plan, see the plan for the mall, you can see how orderly it radiates out. But what's interesting when they put this forward, they knew they were gonna have to get all this, not only public but political buy-in. When you redesign the nation's capital, you're reckoning with so many audiences. So they actually put together watercolor renderings of most of what they were proposing and they held a huge art exhibit, where they invited people to come in and really look at this but they also produced really interesting maps. So everything in very light green are the Eggston Parks in Washington DC at the time and anything in dark green is what they were proposing. So all that dark green is proposed lands set aside for parks and notice that it's a system. This is a hallmark of Olmsted. It's a park system. They're interconnected. You can get from one to the other. That's what he will do in Boston. That's what he's going to also try to do in Portland. This is one of their projection watercolors for the mall, right? So you can see that laid out. But if you look at it, it's directly from the Chicago World's Fair. That's the court of honor. That's the statue of the Republic. That's what they're proposing for Washington, right? So you're really seeing where these ideals come from and I'm a visual person but what really helped me visualize this were photographs of the model for before and after. And these are hard to see except when you just look in the middle. If you look in the middle of the top one which is Washington as it existed before the plan, there are some parks but you look at the bottom. Straight line, right? And look at all the buildings around the mall. That's the vision. Well, what people don't always realize when putting these visions into reality, there were other things there besides trees and pavement and dirt when they're redesigning these cities. You're sometimes removing people from homes. You're sometimes changing where businesses are located. You're changing people's patterns of living but they're really arguing that this is all from the best. And on the bottom right-hand corner of that first map, that plan that you saw, they deliver their rationale for doing this. This is a plan for the location of public buildings which the government must from time to time erect in any case. Buildings which however beautiful in themselves would fail of their highest effect if scattered about the city in a haphazard fashion. Whereas if located in relation to one another and provided with the proper setting, they would combine in harmonious and consequently beautiful whole. That's the city beautiful movement. It's not haphazard planning. It's integrated collaborative thoughtful system level planning. This is the proposed site of the Lincoln Memorial that comes out of that plan. Not all aspects of the plan are put into place. Many were but the plan remained and remained still. The guiding document for city planning in Washington DC. Burnham, the architect of this plan carries on his support for the city beautiful movement. And in 1909 became the architect of another full scale city restructuring that's also kind of the textbook case study of the movement itself which was the redoing of the city of Chicago. The changing of the avenues, the straightening in some parts of the river. They completely redid downtown Chicago. So what about Portland? Well, the city beautiful movement in Portland really rests with this individual, the honorable James Finney Baxter who lived quite a long life, 90 years from 1831 to 1921. He was born in Gorham, but really raised and came into his own in Portland. He made his money in Portland's nascent, Maine's really nascent canning industry. He was a banker. He was a historian and a philanthropist. He was president in his lifetime of the Portland Society of Art, the Portland Library and the Maine Historical Society. Try to imagine one person doing all of those things these days. But he became mayor of Portland for the first time in 1893. And he was 62 years old. And I think that's important. He wasn't a young man. He had made his money. He had raised his children. He had traveled Europe. He had put together a library. He was an active historian. He wrote poetry and prose. He really came into the mayoral race as a Republican, but also really out of civic duty and obligation. He wasn't trying to be a career politician at 62. He had already had a career. And he garnered recognition in New England and then later on outside of New England as an early proponent of the city beautiful movement that was beginning to take shape. He recognized as many did Portland's tremendous beauty. So here's a Charles Codman painting that's at the Portland Museum of Art of Dearing Oaks in 1828. I mean, even before it was a park. It's really lovely. So he recognizes this beauty, but he wished to enhance it in the physical built environment. And he wanted to do this through the creation of a park system, not through the creation of a bunch of individual parks, not just by setting aside land, but by putting a system into place. And he wanted to do this while he focused on economic growth. And he wrote later on in his life about his initial year in the mayor's office, having seen the principal parks in this country in Europe and realizing their great public importance as well as the paucity of our own achievements in this regard. I resolved to do all in my power towards the creation of a park system for Portland. And although Portland, as I mentioned, didn't really have the same level, the same scale of issues as larger cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago, Baxter actually hoped in his city planning and in his embrace of the city beautiful to prevent some of these problems. This is where he gets into trouble sometimes. He wants Portland to remain primarily a commercial and residential city. He does not want the city to turn towards large manufacturing ventures. And he's outspoken, right? He makes his vision for Portland clear in so many forums, right? He puts it in his inaugural addresses. He makes frequent speeches. He writes off beds to the newspapers. But in 1895, early on in his life as mayor, he wrote an article called The Story of Portland in New England Magazine. It's a 21-page heavily illustrated article. And it takes readers through Portland's history back to the Ice Age. He's a good historian. And it really is grounding the context, right? So in the Ice Age, this is what happened. And he takes you right up into the city's present under his leadership. And the final seven pages of this article, so fully a third of this article is about Portland's growing park system, one of the hallmarks of his tenure in office. And so the article itself is really instructive on Baxter's vision and his embrace of the city beautiful movement. So he's writing to this New England audience. While Portland is well situated for many kinds of manufacturing industries requiring small plants, it can never become a large manufacturing center. A commercial and residential city, however, is the best kind of city. And this is what Portland is to be. Hence, to extend her commerce and to make her attractive for residents will be the aim of her citizens. The latter can be accomplished by beautifying and adorning her streets and by enlarging and improving her park system as far as possible. That we have entered upon an era of park building in America, there can be no doubt. For we see evidence of it on every side. Indeed, it is generally admitted that no city with any claim to enterprise is worthy of existence, which does not provide its inhabitants with generous park privileges. It's been well said that a man may as well do without lungs as a city without parks. Nor are parks now built for the rich alone. Here's the hard sell. As in bygone times, but for the poor also who are confined a large portion of their lives within narrow limits and to whom an opportunity, however brief, to breathe pure air and enjoy the beauty of green lawns and umbrageous walks is a boon of incalculable value. So after he brings you along and he attempts to get you to see this vision, he then launches into a history of Portland's public spaces which culminates in a plea to readers for the cleaning up of Bat Cove and the making of a boulevard around it. He says, with this park completed and connected with the promenades and during oaks, Portland and its suburbs will offer advantages for residents unequaled by any city in New England. He echoed the sentiment in the closing sentence of his article when Portland Shelf completed her park system adorning herself within as she is already adorned without. No city on the continent will match her as a residential city. He's got quite a vision, right? He's not. It's really, you know, watch out. So throughout his time as mayor, he really, the businessmen really usher him into power because he plans to kind of expand commerce. He is not anti-economic development and he is certainly not anti-commerce. He's anti-large factory. So he's able to successfully, he and others, go to Washington and get permission to expand the work in waterfront, to dredge the harbor and deepen it and add more wharves. He encourages railroads. He personally funds some of them and he wants to increase summer tourism and his vision is remarkably consistent over the course of a decade. But again, parts of these are very hard to sell to the people of Portland who like the parks. They like the parks. But the money that he wants to spend and where he wants to spend it is sometimes difficult to bring them along. And you know, when you start making adornments that the city funds to widen streets and put in new gardens and you start on your own street, then people begin to sometimes ask questions which is one thing that he did. So in 1905, he's so for this, right? So imagine being so in favor of an idea that he writes a little book. He publishes it. It's called The Park System of Portland. In 1905, it reads as a manifesto. He dedicates it to the people of Portland. He printed it with maps and sent it out to every resident of Portland at his own expense, right? He is absolutely campaigning for these things. And he kind of is culminating argument in that piece which is a great read. He says of the city, Portland must now enter upon its finishing period if it would become the city beautiful to which all cities aspire. It must not only have its well kept streets and all other necessary belongings of the city, but beautiful mansions with well kept grounds, public buildings of architectural importance, art galleries, statues, fountains, public squares and gardens, parkways, playgrounds and parks. We have seen that in the development of the city, streets and sewers occupy the chief place of importance. And so they must continue to do. Though as more affluent conditions are attained, a proper proportion of the public revenues must be devoted to uses which appeal to the higher nature. He's totally a proponent of the city beautiful movement. Yeah, yeah, we'll clean up the sewers. I know it smells, right? Maybe it shouldn't drain directly into those mudflats near your house, but they're not near my house. So this is part of the argument, right? That he's saying as Portland becomes more affluent then we have to look more affluent. And in turn, we will start attracting more affluence. And so from the outset, Baxter really looks to Boston. He meets quite often with Boston Mayor Nathan Matthews and he also meets significantly with the Olmsted Landscape Design Team that was responsible for Boston's Emerald Necklace of Parks. Both Baxter and Boston's mayor believe that well-designed and well-situated parks could attract wealthy and sophisticated new residents into the city. And sadly, but also completely predictably, right? That Baxter's bias towards Portland's elite is evident in much of his work to beautify the city, but it also accounts for how many times he kind of missed the point of the criticism he sometimes faced and tried to counter through his endeavors to build the boulevard around Back Cove in the mid 1890s and to clean up the sewage. It has been said that parks are luxuries for the rich to enjoy. This is a grave error. The rich, who constitute but a very small population of any city, are the least benefited by them, for they're practically independent of them. In the summer, they go to the country or the seaside while nine-tenths of the people are confined to the city. To these, the public grounds are a necessity as well as a delight. Besides, every dollar expended upon such ground goes into the pockets of laborers and contributes to the support of their families. Hence, they should favor every undertaking to make them suitable for public enjoyment. This is an argument that only someone who's rich can make. We, the rich people, don't need these parks, we just leave, right? We just, it's not really convincing a lot of the working class democratic constituency. In fact, turning them against him. So, what of these parks in Portland and the ones that he sort of helped make what they are today? The city of Portland established the commission of cemeteries and public grounds in 1885. And there were three park commissioners. And the park commissioners mainly oversaw these following parks. So, Lincoln Park, which was built in 1866 after the fire. The Eastern Promenade, which the city acquired partially in 1828. The Western Promenade acquired partially in 1836. And Deering's Oaks acquired partially in 1879. Portland purchased the Fort Allen Park site, which is adjacent to the Eastern Promenade in 1890. And Fort Summoner, a plot on Monjoy Hill that overlooks Deering and the Back Cove right around the same time. It's notable that all these lands belonged to Portland before Baxter became mayor. He added to them greatly. He added to Deering's Oaks, right? He was able to get more land. He certainly did a lot with the Back Cove and he secured much more land for both the Eastern and the Western prom. And so you can see that manors are practical, right? As you know, and it wasn't a hard sell after the great fire of 1866 featured here to build the Lincoln Park, right? To leave an open space in the middle of all these buildings. So maybe if there was another fire, everything wouldn't burn again, right? That was part of the impetus behind it. And so you can see how it's plotted out. It was named after the martyred President Lincoln. Portland was very much in favor of this. And it's a beautiful park, right? From its outset, adorned with fountains, beautiful elms, benches, the elms sadly, most of them die of Dutch elm disease later in the 20th century. The park gets shortened a little bit with Franklin arterial so they don't always keep all the land. But Lincoln Park is very popular and particularly popular with summer visitors. But if you imagine sort of historic like early 20th century Lincoln Park here and then think of all its uses in the 21st century, I mean imagine a few years ago when it was the site of Occupy, Portland, right? Parks get very different uses. And so the active setting aside of public lands for parks where municipal decisions with support from citizens occurred before Baxter. The city's chief civil engineer, William Goodwin, who was responsible for vast improvements to the promenades and the design of Deering Oaks over the course of his 20 year tenure, retired in 1892, right before Baxter comes in. But by the end of Baxter's own civic service to Portland, he had added 34 more acres to Portland's public parks, including extending the Oaks, the Eastern and Western proms. He secured land down to the water. He secured Bram Hall's Hill. And he bought small parcels. He didn't raise tax rates to accomplish this expansion. He did things in trade. People got kind of long-term tax breaks if they donated the land. And he was able, because of his own stature in the community and among the more wealthy business people, to convince people to donate land. I mean, he single-handedly sort of strolled the back of and secured most of the land that would front that. And part of his argument, at least to the wealthy who were giving this land or selling it at a greatly reduced rate, was that invest in this and your property values are gonna go way up. And they do. I mean, it was a smart argument. But his largest, you know, his main goal was to reform the land around Backhove. And when he was mayor in 1904, and again for the last time in 1905, this is when he starts really getting after this. He takes his whole city council and municipal kind of workforce down to Boston to tour the Emerald Necklace, right? He engages the Olmstead brothers, then the sons of Frederick Law Olmstead who are working in Brookline to produce plans for Portland, one for the park system that you see here. And so you can see, like that green that you saw on the Washington DC map, it's a system Eastern and Western proms, Deering Oaks, and then the Boulevard, the green Boulevard that would somehow connect all of it together. He asks them to put together a general plan for the Eastern prom in 1905, which they do. You see it's laid out, it's landscaped, not heavily. And then the Western prom, which looks different and certainly incorporates the hospital and things that already exist there. What's interesting is though, even though all of these things don't come to fruition, certainly the Backhove doesn't come to fruition for a long time, these plans continue to guide the city and their work on parks over the years. So there are playgrounds, there are open spaces. As the years go on, there are more baseball fields, there are more tennis courts. As leisure pursuits and practices change, so do the parks have to change with them. By the end of Baxter's own civic service, he hadn't managed to do what he really wanted to do. He could not get the city behind the complete kind of project to remake the Backhove and to put in the Boulevard. And one of the reasons why he couldn't get the political capital to do that, because he would continue to go around the city making speeches about how we don't need large factories in Portland, he could have stopped there. But he continues, we don't need large factories in Portland because then immigrants come in. And they're the ones who need the parks and they're uneducated and he makes all of these really anti-immigrant statements, which just completely loses the constituency he needs. To really lay out the public funds to build these parks. And I don't think he does a lot of this maliciously. I mean, I think in many ways he's a man of his time, he has a very particular vision from Portland. But his vision for Portland from a very elite perspective does not jibe with the lived experience of Portland for many other people. And so he tries to do the Boulevard project in 1895, in 1897 he loses the election and when he becomes mayor again and gets the Olmstead brothers to do this, almost everything that the city is producing at this time is focused really heavily on park rhetoric. And as an historian, believe it or not, some of the most interesting things to read to gather all kinds of information are annual reports. They seem like they would be really dry and in writing them they are in fact really dry. They are town reports, annual reports are fantastic sources of the kind of detail that you sometimes are very surprised by. So in 1905, when Baxter was focused on getting the support, the annual report of the commissioners of cemeteries and public grounds was written by then commissioners J.P. Jordan, A.W. Smith, and Edward Noyes. And it's really interesting and I don't think a coincidence that in 1905 when they're really trying to get this passed, they decide to include in the annual report a brief history of Portland's public parks since 1828. And they say, our department has been fielding a lot of inquiries about this parkland and when we got it. They were fielding a lot of inquiries because Baxter was trying to spend more money than people were like, what do we already have? So they gave a full history and they say that part of the survey is meant as evidence to support the many challenges of the constant care and the maintenance of what they call pleasure grounds. And they really make a point of noting that current appropriations don't allow for much new work in the parks beyond maintenance. That's what they're trying to tell people. Your tax dollars are, yeah, they're hard at work in this land, but we've got to maintain it and it's expensive, the fences, the ball fields, the playgrounds, the overlooks, the benches, cutting the grass, someone has to do all of these things. And they said, the playgrounds in Deering Oaks have been used more in the past season than ever before. The children's playgrounds should be enlarged this season and we shall have to add new paraphernalia to accommodate the increase in patronage. The ball grounds are in good condition and much used. But they spend a bulk of their discussion in this report on this beautiful park and this is a lovely hand-painted glass lantern slide from the collections of the main historical society. And it's 1893, it's a little bit before the report but you get the idea and it will certainly illustrate this well. So they took pride in a new section of the park that was recently graded and surrounded by 900 feet of iron fence. And then they hinted at the importance of these parks to the growth of the tourist industry. And this is a big part of how Baxter saw Portland's development. This addition to Fort Allen Park has been a favorite spot for our summer visitors on account of the shade trees growing there under which the commissioners have placed seats for the use of the public. There is no other place in our park system so much used as Fort Allen Park. I might surprise you in today. I don't know if that statistic would remain that true. From this point our beautiful harbor is seen at its best and our summer tourists will sit for hours and watch the ever-changing view made possible by the shipping in the harbor. One August day during the past summer the writer of this report met a party of tourists at Fort Allen Park consisting of a father, a mother and a young lady daughter. They seemed very much interested in our harbor and asked many questions in regard to the different points of interest. I found they were from the West and not used to saltwater scenery. After answering their many questions which, by the way, were noted down by the young lady, I bade them goodbye. In the afternoon about two o'clock I had occasion to visit Fort Allen Park again and much to my surprise I found the same party there. I told them I was much pleased to find that the view was so interesting to them that they had returned to it again after lunch. When the gentleman turned and said to me, do you know, sir, we got so interested in watching the shipping and the steamers that we forgot all about lunch until it was too late to return to our hotel for it. So we thought we would spend the afternoon here. It's so interesting that you would find that anecdote from a parks commissioner in annual report. I mean, that full quote comes right from that annual report because they're trying to say, listen, these are for you but they're also for tourists. Again, not always the best arguments to make with manors. Yeah, it's great if you like it but it's really for the people from away. But these reports and testimonies really weren't enough. And so people were turned off by the rhetoric and it didn't get finished until work resumed on the back cove in 1913. You could traverse it by vehicle in 1917. And very fittingly, I think Baxter then in his 80s was in the first car to ever drive the full length of the boulevard, right? So they kind of brought him back and recognized his influence. He died in 1921 at the age of 90 and the boulevard was named in his honor and remains so today a vital part of Portland's park system. Greatly improved in this century by Portland trails and other organizations. Percival P. Baxter, James Finney Baxter's son and governor of Maine, they sort of ever outdoing each other. I mean, he gives Maine this park system and then Percival gives Maine Kitaden. So, you know, a little bit of a competition there. But he wrote a lovely short bio of his father for the Maine Writers Research Club, which is a group of women historian researchers upon his death in 1921. And this is what he writes of his father. Both as mayor and as a citizen, he did all in his power to beautifully improve his city. His outstanding civic accomplishment was the laying out in beginning of the boulevard around back cove, recently appropriately named Baxter boulevard. From 1893 until his death in 1921, he never lost his fate or interest in this improvement. Criticized and condemned, accused of self-interest and abused in public and private, unfalteringly kept at work on his favorite project. In his heart, he knew it was right and that ultimately his fellow citizens would see it as he did. So it was today this boulevard is the city's chief natural attraction and the citizens are planning to erect thereon a memorial to his memory. And they did and four years later in 1925, when they dedicated the Baxter Memorial, Percival was there again. And he said to him Portland was the ideal city. His lot has been cast here and he wanted to do his part in making it both beautiful and prosperous, a well-balanced city where the artistic and practical were harmoniously blended. Portland has had a noble past. Its future is in hour making. It is the one spot we love above all others. There should be no rest until this city leads, not alone in material prosperity, but also in its artistic, moral and spiritual environment. So the son definitely carried on his father's legacy and you can see pieces of this legacy in these beautiful photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company. See the Western Prom in 1904. And again here on the Western Prom, 1910, Deering, 1904. And you can start to see some of the hallmarks of what's already there, right? The house for the ducks. It's a different house now, but it's still there. The fountains, the way it's laid out for enjoyment. And I think what's particularly interesting are the later Portland postcards from the 1920s and 1930s that feature all the exact things that Baxter wanted to put in place. So you get views of Fort Allen Park, right, lovely views. And then you see the changes in people motoring over time and why these promenades were so important. You can go see that same view in Deering Oaks today. The duck house. A view from the air, very modern, right? You can see how well-planned it is. You can see the Western Prom. And again, and you can see the treeline streets and then Baxter Boulevard. So I think to close, Portland Landmarks, 17 years ago, put out a wonderful book called Bold Vision, The Development of the Parks of Portland, Maine. It's a terrific resource for anyone who wants to dive deeper into this topic. But it was an important project in the sense that it really invites the reader to move beyond taking a park's heritage for granted and asks in the introduction. At the end of the 20th century, we have a system that's largely intact from what was fashioned previously. Our challenge is, what do we do with it? And this book project took shape from a series of lectures right around the same time that Portland Trails was founded in 1991. It was coming into its own. The city was making a new open space plan. And so they were really focusing on quality of life for residents and visitors. What about 2016? Lectures on Portland's history that are part of a series like this one. Also, I think, have to invite attendees to apply the lessons of the past to the present and to look back for inspiration and what not to do. Contemporary Portland, how Maine does a city, yes, life's good here, is filled with placemakers, innovators, startups, immigrants beginning life anew and is dealing with 21st century problems of job creation, diversification, and affordable housing. And in an era laden with technological advances like the 19th century that are supposed to bring us closer together in virtual communities and with social media, they also increasingly drive us apart. So I think now more than ever before, it's really important for different generations to connect with physical green space and each other for communities to continue to connect in these places. And we have to do it before the younger generations forget how to do this. In an era of impermanence, of pop-up parks, of instant gratification, we have to reconnect and inspire connections to the past so new generations will really help work to preserve the built environment, right? No one's gonna work to preserve anything that they're not invested in, that they don't see as important, that isn't an integral part of their daily life. So we are the one, it's really our responsibility to be the custodians of the legacies that the people from the city, beautiful, kind of left to us, right? That built the forest, city, beautiful, the way it is. And we need to continue to innovate off that. So thank you. I went as quick as I could. Hillary, are we good? I think we've got five minutes. They were very serious about getting out at exactly seven o'clock because of the folio. I will happily answer your question, sure. How does evergreen cemeteria, some of the other parks, all go through an insula, come into play? Oh, they come into play through kind of a parallel movement. So at the same time you have the parks movement, you have the green cemetery movement. So really inspired by Mount Auburn Cemetery down in Cambridge, that's when you also start to get garden cemeteria. So these are extensions of city parks really meant for taking walks and respectful contemplation and picnics. And it's interesting, people in the 19th century were actively doing that, right? They did not feel uncomfortable at all, kind of walking and communing in the cemetery because they were in some ways closer to their dead and had very different mourning practices than we did. That falls off a little bit in the early and mid 20th century as people don't see cemeteries as parks and places to move around, but then has kind of picked up again. So it's definitely part of the garden cemetery movement that's part of the parks movement right before the city beautiful. So it definitely fits into that plan. And in Portland, the same people who were responsible in the 1880s for the parks and the cemeteries were in one department. So it relates in that way too, where it was the same people, the same commissioners that were overseeing them. Anybody else? Think hard. Yeah, anywhere. Go ahead. As intrigued with, you're putting out the two points of argument that caused his backlash which was for the rich folks in the other being the immigrant aspect which is very topical issue today, but he was so right on both. I mean the tourist aspects is recognized a basic thing, one of the greatest currencies that people, cities can do is make it attractive for tourist powers. Right, and that's the direction Maine was going. So I mean, he was very much in with the Board of Trade. He's right on point. Totally, and also he's coming about rich folks. I mean, it's so true. I was in New York, Battery City Park, and it was incredible, seeing the breadth of diversity of folks using this incredibly well sculpted, whoever designed it was sort of the instead of our day. And so when you can't go to the Hamptons, right? Or elsewhere? Or we'd get on a cruise ship or whatever. And it was being used by folks who are totally blue collar type folks. And it occurred to me that whatever Billionaires, Governor Bloomer, or Mayor Bloomer, could not be enjoying this splendor of his place in the Bermuda that he flies to for weekends. Then the average person who works at a restaurant is incredible, New York. And it's immediate, yeah. And it's an immediate escape. You can go there for five minutes, you can go there for 10, and the Olmsteads really believed any time you spent there, looking at the pond, communing with nature, taking a few deep breaths would set you back up to go back out into your world. In last point, and a comment, but somewhat to the question, Brooklyn's dealing with this current issue with their waterfront park, that every public official has tried to prevent a new housing development going on, except De Blasio, the mayor, is the single elected official who wants to chew up green space to put a housing project. When they could so much more easily put more housing by just giving height easement or amendments in different parts of the world. And he's harkening back to urban renewal in a different day in the 20th century where people were quite willing to do that, even in Portland. We lose part of Lincoln Park to the Franklin arterial. I think you're probably glad we have the Franklin arterial, right? Trying to drive around the city. But it's always a give and take, and it's the stewards and custodians of the city and organizations like Portland Landmarks and people who are interested in preservation and who are gonna stop that. Right, and there is, right in Portland, right across from the landmarks on Spring Street, the green space, that's thought that should be turned into housing. I think that'd be a terrible loss to build out more to the footage. Except if you have nowhere to live. I mean, that's where it becomes the real tension. Yes. To achieve housing by just giving more height in other places where they're already structured. So it's very relevant to what we are today. He's sought to, I think we have to go. You do not wanna get shakes if you're angry.