 Thank you very much for coming today. My name is Hillary Bassett. I'm the executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks. And I have to say, landmarks folks are really hearty folks, because you all have braves and really tough weather tonight to be here. Landmarks mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. We've had a very busy year. We started out this fiscal year with very record attendance at the Portland Observatory. Over 12,000 people attended the observatory this summer, which is 2,000 more than we've ever had. We have been working on putting together a new website. We've got some other educational programs in the works that you'll be hearing about. And of course, development is heating up in Portland, so we've been in City Hall quite a bit. So I think our theme this evening, the entrepreneurs, is very appropriate to this time in Portland's history. Having said that, I'd like to call your attention to a sheet that's on your chair. Tomorrow night is a very important public hearing about the Portland Company complex. The redevelopment is being considered by the Portland City Council tomorrow night. So those of you who are Portland residents, we encourage you to participate and to encourage the preservation of Building One. I'd also like to invite any of you who are not yet members of Greater Portland Landmarks to become a member. Landmarks does all kinds of programming focused on historic buildings and architecture, tours and programs at the Portland Observatory, research, surveys, all kinds of things related to historic architecture. And we'd love to have you. I'd also like to thank some key players here. The Portland Public Library has provided the space to us as partners to CTN Channel 5, which is our community TV station. This is going to be aired on the community TV, so you can watch it again to catch all the good information. And then also to please consider a donation to cover the costs of putting on the lecture series this year. I'd also like to mention a few of our staff members. Alessa Wiley, who is in the back of the room, is our manager of education programs. Julie Larry, our director of advocacy is here. She's in the back. Amanda Larson, our director of development, is standing near the door. And two others who aren't here, Sean Hunt and Maggie Perkins. They are the folks that bring you all the good things from landmarks. And then I especially want to mention a volunteer who has gone above and beyond the call of duty. That is Ruth Story. She's in the red. Ruth is an amazing woman. She has put on the lecture series for a number of years for us. And they're better and better every time, so I want to give a hand to Ruth. Now our speaker tonight is Lincoln Payne. Lincoln is a maritime historian. He's the author of five books, and he's done more than 50 articles, reviews, and lectures on maritime history. And I just want to show you his most recent book. Just to show that Lincoln is able to take on amazing and wonderful tasks like the entire history of maritime history and civilization. So this is of the world and civilization. So we are extremely lucky to have Lincoln as a resident of Portland. He's also written a book called Down East, A Maritime History of Maine, Ships of the World, and Historical Encyclopedia. And I love this one, Beyond the Dead White Whales, Literature of the Sea in Maritime History. He was former guest curator of the Norman Morse collection of ocean liner materials at the Osher Map Library. And he serves on the board of the Maine Maritime Museum and the Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center for children. So it's with great pleasure to introduce Lincoln Payne. And Lincoln happens to be my neighbor as well. So that's even better. But thank you. I just want to say that Ruth's story came up to me earlier and said, I want you to know that if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here. And I assured her that if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be here either. So if you're wet, don't blame me, blame Ruth. But I do appreciate your turning out for what could be an interesting evening, I hope. Not dull, anyway. So the title of this talk is The Entrepreneurs, Architecture and Maritime Enterprise in 19th Century Portland. And I just want to re-emphasize what Hilary said, which is that I am a maritime historian. I'm not an architectural historian. I'm not an urban historian. I don't know much about either of those subjects. And everything I do know, I learned basically since Ruth asked me to speak here. But I do know, because I grew up in New York City, that when it comes to architecture, Americans have generally little appetite for nostalgia. And the more economically aggressive a community is, the more likely it is to destroy its past, to make way for a short-lived present. And this is why so many lavish homes in places like Beverly Hills are bought as teardowns, regardless of the effort and usually enormous expense required to build them. So new entrepreneurs want to make their own imprint. But chances are great to excellent that theirs will not be a lasting impression, because their successors are no more likely to honor their memory than they were to honor the memory of those who came before them. And as I said, no place illustrates this more sharply than New York, and especially Manhattan, which was settled first by Europeans in 1625, but where the oldest building only dates to 1765. So the first 160 years of Anglo-Dutch settlement in Manhattan have been completely obliterated. Now when it comes to architecture, relative poverty can be a great preservative. If you make no money, you can't afford to build new things, and you have to husband your meager resources carefully. And then again, if you have too little money, you can't afford even rudimentary maintenance, and everything falls apart. So there's a sort of fine balance that we have to achieve. And when you throw in Yankee persimmony in places like Portland, you can find a lot of old buildings to actually look at and contemplate and think about. Now apart from the sheer aesthetic pleasure of looking at old buildings and the way people used to do things, regardless of whether they were actually any better or any worse, architecture and its affiliate arts are a powerful lens through which to look at the past. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei offers a concise explanation of why. To work on architecture, he says, you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. And it's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. And then you have a lot of criticism about how it works. Tomorrow's meeting. So tonight, I want to talk about some Portland landmarks in terms of 19th century society, its entrepreneurs, its politicians, and its bureaucrats, and how they combine to build much of the city we know today. My focus is on Portland's maritime element, which is perhaps paramount importance for the city for most, if not all, of the 19th century. And to begin, I want to set the stage. When the English first settled on the peninsula, which the indigenous Akassisco called Machigani in 1633, the harbor and the river were really invaluable for their access to white pine trees, which the English desperately needed for masks for their ships, for the Royal Navy, particularly during their long run of wars, especially with the Dutch at the mid-century. But basically, for most of the 1600s, and actually for the 1700s and into the first 15 years or so of the 1800s. Now, this made the focus of their effort a little bit more inland, further up the Forre River, the mighty Forre River, which runs for all of about three and a half miles. I canoeed it this summer. It was a great undertaking. And so they built this house for the guy in charge of the mass trade called the Tate House, because his name was Tate. And this was built in 1750. And it's the oldest building I understand in Portland. Again, I'm not an architectural historian, so I read that somewhere, and I accept it as true. Now, although there were other towns further along the coast, Portland was the most important in what is now Maine thanks to its deep water port and its really access to the sea. Now, the downside of this ready access to the sea through all of those islands, particularly in an age when ships were generally smaller and had shallower draft than they do now, is that it's very easy to attack. And during the American Revolution, Portland took the brunt of their reprisals for an attack on a British ship in Machias of all places when the crew of HMS Kanko, laid waste to the city, helped and abetted by looters from inland towns who had nothing to do with the British. They just didn't happen to like the townings. So this is Portland in about 1776. And there are a couple of these maps. These were made by Rosemary Mosher in 2001 for an exhibit at the Osher Map Library. There's a whole sequence of them, and I picked out a couple of them. But you can see this is an overlay of what Portland looked like in 1776, superimposed on what it looks like as of 2001. And you can see a lot of stuff has been filled in. And over the last however many years that is, 200 and something years, and actually going back all the way to the 1600s, we've done a really great job of mucking up. It was a beautiful natural peninsula. And I don't hear anybody complaining about greater Portland earth marks. But anyway, there it is. We'll see this fill in gradually over the course of the evening. Now the first, Congress's first public works project was to complete construction of Portland Headlight. And in case any of you who've never actually been to Portland before this evening, this is Portland Headlight, which was completed in 1791. And the results were really phenomenal because by some accounts as late as 1787, there was not a ship owned in town, according to one writer, but seven years later there were 80. And another initiative that helped increase Portland's access to the hinterland was the opening of Tukey's Bridge in 1796, which was paid for by subscription and which saved about three miles going around Back Cove, which was a good deal bigger than it is now. Somebody pointed out that it's three miles around Back Cove, but the savings in distance is actually a little longer than that because you actually have to go all the way to the Fort River side. Now, Tukey's Bridge was named after a guy named Tukey, who was the toll keeper, and he had a tavern on the Portland side of the bridge. And they actually abolished the toll and he kept collecting it anyway for another couple of decades until they finally said, okay, enough's enough, you know, you're paid off. So anyway, there was another bridge built in 1806. This is During's Bridge, which basically runs across a little spit of land which was an outlet from During Pond and During Oak's Park. And essentially what that pond is now is the Hannaford parking lot. And that road is Preble Street, but it's completely obliterated. So, and while we're at it, I'll just point out on these maps because I've got this laser thing and I've always wanted to use it. This is Tukey's Bridge here, which is 1796. The During Bridge is right about here. There was a Vaughn Bridge here, which was the precursor to Route One, I guess. Then somewhat later in the 1800s, there was a bridge, what year was it? 1828. There was a bridge to South Portland and that was added on to in the 1850s if they put a train track down across it at which point it was known as the Gridge Iron of Death. Then it was the million dollar bridge and now it's the many, many million dollar bridge. And the reason I bring up all these bridges is because they're very important for two reasons. One, obviously they hinder navigation, which is a problem if you happen to be, if you own boats or shipyards up in these waters. But at the same time, they also facilitate communication with the interior and the hinterland and so they provide a boost to trade and I think it's in those, in that connection that we have to think about bridges. Now any discussion of the residential architecture of 19th century Portland has to begin with the house built by the merchant Hugh McClellan on State and High Streets, now known as the McClellan Sweathouse and part of the museum. And it makes sense chronologically because the three-story mansion was built in 1800, 1801, but it also makes sense because the world was changing along with the century. Ms. Bill Barry writes in his unpublished study, The Revolutionary McClellands, earlier architecture on the peninsula and in Sterrad water where the Tate House was was based on compact forms arranged around a centered chimney. The resulting tight ring organization of smallish rooms was snug, well heated and admirably suited to creating the greatest amount of livable space using the least amount of materials. This form also reflected the inescapable struggle for survival in a hostile environment. And by the early federalist period, Portland had moved well beyond mere subsistence and if Maine was still part of Massachusetts and on its way to becoming one of the most prosperous ports on the East Coast, both European and American visitors praised it in increasingly flattering terms. Traveling through town from the North in 1796, the Duke de la Rocheco described Portland as this small though handsome town of about 300 houses which may contain about 2,300 souls. In the previous six years, Portland's exports had more than doubled in value from $74,000 to $150,000 and the growth continued unabated. A decade later, Yale's president, Timothy Dwight, wrote, no place along our route hitherto could for its improvement be compared with Portland. Few towns in New England are equally beautiful and brilliant. Its wealth and business are probably quadrupled. Now granted, Dwight's frame of reference was New Haven but it's still, you know, it's a very nice thing to have said about Portland at the time. Now among the leaders of this economic growth was the Scots-Irish McClellan clan whose American progenitor had landed in Casca Bay in 1728. Bryce McClellan had two or three acres of land on Falmouth neck around York and high streets, built himself a wharf, worked primarily as a builder and also moonlighted as a constable, a surveyor, a color of fish, a tithing man and a fence viewer. I haven't figured out what a fence viewer does but it sounds very relaxing. And by the turn of the century, the merchant shipping company of Joseph McClellan and son was the largest shipowner in Maine and was energetically involved in trade with the West Indies, South Carolina and Liverpool. So in 1801 and 1802, Cue McClellan and his brother Stephen built two splendid new mansions up the hill from their grandfather's house and across the street from one another. The McClellan Sweat Mansion on Spring Street, which is this one, and facing it from across high street, the building now occupied by the Cumberland Club. Both of these were designed and built by John Kimball Sr., who was one of the most accomplished house rights of the day. And both were three-story buildings. Cue's was the first three-story brick house in town and they had hip roofs, which I add because I don't really know what a hip roof is but I figure you're all architectural people and so you don't know that it had a hip roof. So anyway, the large numerous windows, 14 on the south-facing front facade alone admit a huge amount of light and exude a confidence on the part of the owner. Now as built, the windows on the first and second floor were the same height, the third story was always shorter but those on the ground floor were lengthened to the depth they are now in the 1830s. That is the Cumberland Club. Oh no, I'm sorry, it's the Cumberland Club. My mistake, the Cumberland Club is coming up. So another native portlander who is probably as well known, if not more famous, as any of the McClellands at this point was Edward Preble. He was a US Navy officer who had captained the USS Constitution during our war with Tripoli in 1801, 1805, he was there for 1803, 1804. And his influence was so marked that his junior officers, many of whom went on to distinguish themselves in the War of 1812, were known as Preble's boys. But anyway, Preble retired to Portland and he was commissioned to build eight vessels for the US Navy in Clay Cove, which is an area that's been filled in at the foot of Franklin Arterial. But he also commissioned a young architect named Alexander Parris to build him an extensive dwelling. It wasn't quite this extensive, but it was on the corner of Congress and Preble Streets. And unfortunately, Preble died in 1807 before the house was finished. But it testifies to his stature in the community that his pallbearers included Hugh McClellan and another otherwise unidentified Captain McClellan. Now, Preble's widow, Mary, lived in the house and after her death, it eventually became the Preble House Hotel, which is, I think, what is seen here. And then in 1924, the building was torn down completely to make way for the Chapman Building, better known as the Time and Temperature Building, down the block and across the street. Now, there's a very nice elevation of this drawing, elevation drawing of this in Laura Sprague's Agreeable Situations, which I unfortunately was not able to get a copy of, but it shows a somewhat distinctive, I'm not sure exactly how much of this incorporated the original fabric of the Preble House. Now, the Preble House is probably the most famous of Alexander Parris's Portland buildings, but even before he built that, Parris designed a house for Richard Hunnawell, who had taken part in the Boston Tea Party before the Tea Party was taken over by the Mad Hatter, and he served in the Revolution and as a county sheriff. And then in 1800, President John Adams recommended him for the office of surveyor and inspector of the revenue for the Port of Portland, an extremely important position at the time, and one that paid well enough for him to afford this house at 156 State Street, now known as the Hunnawell-Shepley House or simply as the Portland Club. And although Parris went on to a distinguished career in Richmond, Virginia, and finally Boston, following Preble's death, he spent two years in Portland overseeing the construction of Port Preble, named for the Commodore, and which is on the grounds of the Southern Maine Community College, and then Fort Scamble, across the Maine shipping channel from Fort Preble on House Island. Now, one upshot of the Trappolitan War was that the Mediterranean was now more or less safe for American shipping, at least for North African corsairs. And merchants were riding high on the proceeds from an international trade that spanned the globe. Several months before Preble's death, retired shipmaster Lemuel Moody had took it upon himself to arrange for the construction of an 82-foot-high octagonal observatory on Monroe Hill at the eastern end of the peninsula. With an aid of a high-powered telescope, observers could see incoming ships as they neared the port, and with a system of flags could signal their approach to agents and owners along the Port River waterfront a mile away, which would save time in organizing your affairs before the ship came in. And observers were also able to keep an eye out for any ships in distress. Now, at this time, and well into the second half of the 19th century, Monroe Hill was largely devoid of buildings seen in this painting by Charles Codman from 1829, entitled The Entertainment of the Boston Rifle Rangers by the Portland Rifle Club in Portland Harbor August 12th, 1829. This was made on the occasion of an encampment by resident and visiting militiamen on Mount Joy, otherwise known as Mun Joy Hill. And Codman appears to have been standing around what is now Congress Street about a block or two in this direction, for he includes the new battery, which is down there on the right here, which is located near Adam Street at the base of Kellogg, more or less across the street and up the hill from Hamilton Marine. There's another picture of the observatory probably from the 19th century. Now by this time, 1807, Portland was the sixth largest port in the States. Merchants like the McClellands had profited from the country's neutrality during the Napoleonic War between France and Britain since the 1790s. However, notwithstanding American's insistence that they were neutrals and had a right to trade what and where they chose, both the English and the French disagreed and US ships were routinely subject to arrest, their goods were subject to confiscation and their sailors were routinely dragged into involuntary service, mostly in the Royal Navy. Now merchants tended to view this as the price of doing business, but smarting over the country's inability to protect its citizens. And despite the merchant's strenuous objections, Thomas Jefferson imposed a catastrophic embargo that threw an estimated 55,000 people out of work nationwide and caused a national depression. To give you a sense of the scale of the impact of this, import duties received in Portland crashed from $342,000 in 1806 to less than $38,000 the next year. And by the end of 1807, 11 commercial houses, including Joseph McClellan and son, had gone bust. And the McClellan family's fall from grace was slow, not that slow, but inexorable. Fortunately for us, however, John Kimbell Sr.'s construction proved far more durable than the McClellan fortune. Stephen sold his house in 1810 and Hugh was forced to transfer his to creditors in 1815. They in turn sold it to the Portland bank, which ironically enough Hugh McClellan and a cousin had founded. And two years later, the McClellan house was purchased by Captain Asa Clapp, one of the most distinguished mainers of his day and somebody whose family essentially took up where the McClellans left off. Now Asa never lived there, but his son and daughter-in-law, Charles Quincy Clapp and Julia Octavia Wingate Clapp did for about 10 years. An architect and land speculator, Charles Q. Clapp left his mark on Portland in the form of more than 600 real estate transactions and a slew of building projects, some of which we'll see later. More particularly, he's the one who lengthened the first floor windows of the McClellan house so that they were longer than those on the second floor, and which I think probably gives it the illusion of being taller than it probably seemed when it was first built. Now in 1832, Charles and Julia sold their house to Julia's father and moved into the house he built next door. But following the death of her mother and her husband, Julia moved back into this house. And then in 1880, her heir sold the house to Lorenzo de Medici Sweat, one of my favorite names in Portland. Although Moses Arastus Sweat his brother comes close second. And then his widow bequeathed the house to the Portland Society of Art, which is now the museum. Now interestingly, this sort of inbreeding of Portland society was not confined to the people. And in 1957, the McClellan house here was fitted with two Alexander Paris designed mantel pieces that had been salvaged from Commodore Preble's house. Replacing ones that had been lost in an earlier renovation of this. So following the embargo, the repeal of the embargo in 1808 trade rebounded a little bit, but it wasn't really until after the War of 1812 that Portland's trade achieved its pre-embargo health. But thereafter, the trajectory for Portland and the city was generally fairly uninterrupted. And when Maine attained statehood in 1820 and for a good while after that, Portland was one of the busiest ports in the country. And among the most important trade goods were lumber exported to and molasses imported from the Caribbean. It was a symbiotic, if not altogether, healthy relationship. Now the Caribbean islands have been deforested to make way for plantations and a slave economy. And molasses was the key ingredient in rum, which was consumed in prodigious quantities, especially in Maine, which by some measures had the highest per capita consumption of rum in the country. Now writing at mid-century, the Napoleon of Temperance, the one-time mayor of Portland, Neil Dow, recalled, I think I have seen nearly an acre of punchings of West India rum at one time on our wharves just landed from our ships. All this time, seven distilleries in Portland were running day and night. Dow, it will not surprise you, helped to enact prohibition in 1851, the so-called Maine law. But long before that, temperate advocates had targeted sailors for reform. So in 1826, people eager for sailors' spiritual rehabilitation announced plans to build the Mariners Church. And as a religious newspaper noted, it is a building reared for the moral and religious instruction of a much-neglected but valuable and interesting class of the community. Now a few things suggest to me that the primary advocates of the Mariners Club, including the representatives of five different churches, were not themselves entirely sober. And move that seems to run counter to Christ's throwing the money lenders out of the temple, this Greek revival Mariners Church combined secular and spiritual functions with abandon. And for many years, it was the largest commercial building in the city. The bottom floor was diverted to a market and shops. The second floor held a nautical bookstore, a clothing store, library, and a schoolroom. And the third floor was home to the Portland Marine Society, which is now on the campus of Southern Maine Community College, a nautical school, and finally, on the third floor, a 40 by 65-foot chapel. Large enough, perhaps, but hardly well-placed to attract any but the most devout churchgoers. Strangers still, and I haven't checked this myself, I'm relying completely on written sources, there are no 90-degree corners on the outside of the Mariners Church building. And no two sides are parallel to each other. So the building's footprint was apparently not the only thing that was crooked. The building was chiefly brick, but on the facade, the marble was supplied by the warden of the state prison in Thomaston, who was later accused of overcharging at a pretty hefty rate. He charged 60 cents a foot for the granite, whereas the Bunker Hill Monument, being erected around the same time, was charged only 12 cents a foot for the same stuff. And the Mariners Church was built in a period of transition from the native federalist style of architecture to Greek revival. And when it was built, it was bounded by market fore and molten streets, as it still is, but its bottom floor opened directly onto commercial wharf and long wharf. And it was only hemmed in on that side when Commercial Street was laid out in the 1850s and three new buildings were erected there. The church was foreclosed on in the 1837 panic, and Asa Clap, who had previously bought the McClellan house, purchased the building shortly thereafter. The Clap family held onto the building until 1934 when it was sold to the C.H. Robinson Paper Company for use as a warehouse. And you can see that their billboard or painted sign on the building behind is still there. I don't think the company's still there, but somebody's going through an awful lot of effort to advertise for them. And then in 1970, a changed hands again was put on the National Register of Historic Places and became a focal point for the revival of the old port where, as the Mariners Church banquet center, it is now home to a pool hall and restaurants. And so it perpetuates its builder's original intent, which was to serve a valuable and interesting class of the community. Now, concurrent with the Mariners Church project was another infrastructure project that was emblematic of the age in the United States, which is the digging of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal to link Portland with the hinterlands of Oxford County about 50, 70 miles away. In the end, the canal only reached as far as Long Lake, just shy of the Oxford County line. But its demise can be attributed to the fact that it was an expensive and laborious undertaking. There were 28 locks, each of which had to be manned. And before I go on, I just want to point out that this green thing is the actual root of the canal, which was dug just inside the shoreline. This didn't exist. This was all filled. This was a turning basin. This was a repair basin. This has all been filled in. This is new. This is new. And then it ran there and across the upper four and then parallels this train track and then heads out to Westbrook and to points beyond. Now, one way of financing a lot of stuff was to use the lottery, which we've heard a lot about recently. And so this was a lottery ticket sold to raise money. Apparently, lotteries weren't quite as popular than as they are now, so it actually didn't. It fell short of the goal. And so they founded the Cumberland and Oxford Canal Bank to help pay for it. The other reason that it didn't do very well was that it was closed by ICE for several months of the year. So it wasn't generating any revenue then. And it was also incurring huge expenses because ICE obviously is not very good for canals with thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing and erosion. And then in the 1850s, trains rendered canals obsolete. And the CNO basically was defunct and stopped having canal boats on it by the 1870s. So none of the canal's infrastructure is even visible in Portland. And about the only thing that you can really see that remains that's easily accessible is the Songo lock up in Naples. But I included it here because it was an important part of the maritime infrastructure for 40 years. It took a lot of money and interest on the part of entrepreneurs in Portland. And it is remembered today in the form of the Canal Plaza, which was once home to the Canal Bank, which we'll see a little bit later. And it also offers a nice segue into the whole subject of the building of Commercial Street, which is perhaps the most obvious yet most often overlooked example of how maritime enterprise affected everyone in Portland. Now this is a later map by Rosemary showing the infilling of around 1852. This is Clay Cove, which I mentioned earlier. This is Broad Cove. These were both filled in. And then this is Back Cove. And you can see how much is filled in over there. So the area known as Bayside used to actually just be Bay. Wasn't beside anything. It was under it. Much of the area from Anderson Street to Deering Oaks Park in Northwest of Somerset and Fox was only filled in after 1866 on the Great Fire. Now even before that, the four river waterfront had undergone a major transformation when the railroad interests had urged the filling in of its somewhat sinuous coastline or shoreline, which basically looks like this. And that jagged line is actually Fort Street, which was 68 feet wide and ran from Meeting House Point, which is essentially where the Portland Company complex is today, to the Foot of Exchange Street. And during this time, Fort Street was the home to boarding houses for sailors, chandleries, taverns, and other kind of businesses that were related to that. But the first trains to reach town from the south were those of the Portland, Saco, and Portsmouth Railroad. His terminal was at the foot of State Street and around where commercial is now. And then at the foot of India Street, about a mile away, was the terminus of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, which was begun in 1848 and eventually linked Portland to Montreal by 1853. And it was the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, whose president was a Preble, that advocated most strongly for a crosstown connector and urged that the waterfront be filled in, and they even helped pay for the improvement themselves remarkably. So Commercial Street originally was 1.1 miles long and 100 feet wide, with a 26 foot right of way down the middle of the railroad tracks, which, as many of you know better than I, were still in evidence in the 1980s. Now, according to one report that I've read, it seems that the people responsible for designing the Mariners Church may have had a hand in designing or laying out Commercial Street. Our much boasted Commercial Street, which but recently was the pride of the city, has come to be a common laughing stock, lamented the Portland transcript in 1850. They went on to say, this is owing to the marvelously crooked manner in which it has been run. It is thought the persons who laid it out must have been in pursuit of the sea serpent at the time. It is said the streets of Boston were first laid out by cow pads. But we doubt if a cow could follow the line of Commercial Street without twisting her horns off. Old Forest Street, which was always accused of curving from the straight line, is a very straightforward street in comparison with it. Now, we suppose the new street was to be straight, since there is no earthly reason why it should not be, and many why it should. As it now runs, it is a disgrace to the city. It should be immediately straightened, and we are glad to hear that petitions praying for this object are to be presented to the city government. Now, the complaints seem to have been heeded. For all the subsequent reports about the street, simply lawed the development of new offices and warehouses, which proceeded at a brisk clip. And this is an interesting map, because it shows Commercial Street laid out, and this I guess must be a train trestle. And this is Commercial Street not entirely sinuous, but not entirely straight either. And then these little shaded areas are actually landed between the pre-existing wharves that haven't yet been filled in. So it was a very much patchwork affair, and they had to kind of work around the working waterfront, which is sort of typical of the way infrastructure projects are done. The difference is that they didn't make a lot of noise doing it the way they do now. So the most impressive of the new structures probably was the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad's new engine house at the foot of India Street, where according to the transcript, it looms up largely with its tinned dome. It will be a prominent object. And approaching the city upon the water side, it will be completed in January 1854. Now, here it says that this is called the Great Eastern Depot. And the reason it was called the Great Eastern Depot was because originally it was thought that Portland would become a port of call for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great steamship, a combination of paddle steamer and propeller ship, shown here in this lovely photograph from the 1850s, I believe, by Edwin Fox. And this was the largest ship in the world at the time and for decades after. And it was so big that it really couldn't be operated anywhere economically except to lay the Atlantic cable. So it's actually a very important ship. And you can still see the remains of what was intended to be the Great Eastern Pier along the promenade just past the Portland complex on the water. Now, commercial streets also home to the Thomas Block, which was built just before the Civil War and which I think is still one of the most alluring buildings in the city. And interestingly, it was financed by a group of seven merchants who named it for Elias Thomas, who was not one of them. But he was a wholesale grocer. And in acknowledgment of their gesture, he donated the clock that's now in there. I think they meant to write clock. Or maybe he was supposed to donate a block. I don't know. There seems to be a typo there somewhere. Anyway, it seems to follow a sort of gentle arc along the street. But in fact, it's actually eight distinct three bay units. And there's just the illusion of that curve. And for the first 110 years, the building featured double hung six over six windows that gave it a really nice sort of refinement that was lost to renovations in the 1970s when these were replaced with the single pane windows that give it a sort of vacant expression today. And if you go through the files of the Greater Portland Landmarks, you will see a wonderful letter addressing this very issue from Mary Lou Sprague from about 1983, I think, saying, you know, you really could have done a better job with the windows and the architect going, oh no, it looks great, really. And plus it would be really expensive, although he doesn't say that. Now, another one of the great buildings that was erected along the new commercial street was this JB Brown's sugar house from about 1854, 55. And Brown was, again, one of 19th century Portland's most successful entrepreneurs. And his crowning achievement, commercial achievement, was this molasses refinery called the Portland Sugar House, which was eight stories high. And within a decade of building Brown's wharf, there were 1,000 people employed here. There was a lot of drum being drunk in Portland at the time. And they were not just employed in the molasses trade, but in all aspects of the West Indies trade and Brown's trade with other parts of the world. And unfortunately, this magnificent structure, which probably would have come down anyway at some point, it was lost in 1866 during the Great Fire. Now, another one of Brown's great contributions, he was a patron of architecture, art, and learning. And to his more lasting credit, a pioneer in making the West End a fashionable place to live, because why would anybody want to live there otherwise? When he decided to build a house there in the 1850s, the area boasted a cemetery and a collection of shacks known as Hogville. And I won't say anything. I live on the East End. We were never called Hog Hill, heroin hill, but not Hogville. Now, Bramhall Hill had incredible views, better than those today, unless you really like the interstate and the airport and the chicken rendering plant and the oil tanks and all that stuff. But anyway, apparently it was treeless back in the 1850s. In any event, Bramhall bought a 10-acre parcel bounded by Bowden Street, the Western Prom, and Vaughan Street and about a line somewhere between Carroll and Pine Streets. And the architect for this was a guy named Charles Alexander. And he called the house simply Bramhall. And it's an Italian-ed villa, but that's really, we don't know much more about it than that, because as active as Brown was in Portland's commercial and civic life, his house was his castle. And there were virtually no written or visual descriptions of the property or even its contents. Now, he lived here until 1881. His widow lived there for another 20 years. And magnificent, though, it seems to have been, in 1914, some new people broke up the property and tore it down to build, I don't know, John Calvin Stevens houses or something. Anyway, it was enough of a draw to attract people up the hill from downtown and turn it into a more affluent ghetto than Hogville had been. My apologies, Wendell. So now, most Portlanders, I mean, if you haven't heard of Portland headlight, you probably haven't heard of the Great Fire. If you have, you probably have heard of this. So anyway, a large chunk of downtown was burned. I think 1,800 buildings. Fourth of July fireworks went wrong. So glad we have legal fireworks again, so we can do this all over again. But because of the prevailing winds, which are clearly from the Southwest, this was the track of the fire. And down here, basically, somewhere in this part is the Portland sugarhouse, it went. And then most of the property on the south side of Fort Street was saved. Most everything else in what's now the old port was destroyed. So you had sort of Thomas House was conspicuously saved, and the Mariners Church was saved as well. But meanwhile, right across the street from the Mariners Church, everything was burned to a crisp. So among the leaders, and this is just how ghastly things were, this is looking up, I guess, towards the eastern prom. And then here, looking down from the Munjoy Hill, this is Cumberland Avenue, this is Sheridan Street, this is Washington Avenue, this is a pier that used to be out in Back Cove, which has now been buried along with the rest of the fill to make way for 295 or something else. So anyway, right across the street, everything was completely burned down. And so Charles Quincy Klatt, who we last met playing with the windows over at the McFarland House, he undertook to spearhead the reconstruction of downtown. And according to his obituary, and he died only two years later, if that, Klatt supervised the construction of some 10 stores over the almost smoking ruins of those destroyed by the fire. All built of durable materials, ornamental to this city, all occupied, and this accomplished within the period of eight months. Now curiously, the Siemens Club, this building here, was not one of the more celebrated of Klatt's constructions. Although the Gothic revival movement had been around in the US for a quarter century, this is not the sort of building that the Portland's taste makers had in mind in 1866, 67. And according to the Portland transcript, splendid blocks are in contemplation, and ironed and glass will take the place of old fashioned wood and brick fronts. And Klatt's three-story, three-bay brick and wood trim building was not splendid or bricky enough, apparently. But today, the Siemens Club is, I think, among the most visually distinctive buildings in Portland, thanks to its large second-story Gothic windows with its pointed arches and the curved wooden ornaments above them, all of which are encompassed in a brick arch. Now, interesting thing about the history of the name of the Siemens Club, which I sort of waltzed into, thinking, oh, well, this is a maritime connection, no problem. It's actually a relatively recent name. In its first incarnation for about a year or two, it was actually occupied by a coffee, tea, and spice business. So yes, it is part of the maritime fabric of Portland. But for most of the next 60 years, it was actually home to a succession of tailor shops. And then it also served for a while around the turn of the century as a restaurant. And then it wasn't until 1942 that it was purchased by the Portland Siemens Friend Society and became known as the Siemens Club. And it only lasted as that for 17 years before the Siemens Friend Society moved their operations over to the YMCA. And so it was vacant for a while. And then it reopened as a restaurant called the Siemens Club, which is, I guess, where everybody knows its name from. And then in the 1990s, it was reopened as Bull Finis, the name coming from the high school nickname of movie director and Portland native John Ford. Now, among the casualties of the fire was the Portland Exchange. Not this one. This one had already been burned in 1854. But what a magnificent building. It's like the Pantheon in the middle of downtown. It would be so nice. And when they rebuilt that, they built this along the same lines. But it was on the wrong side of 4th Street, and it burned to a crisp, too. Now, it was on between exchange market streets. Now, among its tenants was the US Custom Office. Now, the Treasury Department decided to build a dedicated structure between Pearl and Custom House streets. This is the same exchange as burned. And interesting to me, particularly, this is the view from the commercial street side, which you actually don't see that often. And in fact, it was years before I realized, as I said, I live up on Montgerry Hill. And I drive down whatever street that is, 4th Street more often than commercial street. And for years, I just thought the 4th Street side was the main entrance to the Custom House. And it is if, in fact, you're just going directly into the Custom Hall, which is the main building. But this is the facade that people would have seen coming from the waterfront. And there's the view from 4th Street. And here is the main hall, which is not open very often, but sometimes it's open. And I really suggest that if you get invited to a party there or the Greater Portland Landmarks has an open house there, you should go because it's a magnificent, beautiful, beautiful interior. And it was a grand building dedicated to this one function for a couple of very, very good reasons. And as grand as it was, it was a very serious business. This mezzanine was actually patrolled by riflemen who oversaw the transactions of the shippers coming in to pay their customs dues. And so far, they know nothing untoward ever happened in that way. So the obvious question is, why would the government go through such trouble to house a building that is so fundamentally utilitarian in such an ornate structure? And the answer is twofold. The first is that during the 19th century, in fact, from 1790 to the start of the income tax in 1913, what historians might call the long 19th century, tariffs on imported goods accounted for the overwhelming majority of the federal government's revenue. In some years, as much as 95% of the federal government was paid for by income from trade. And this is why Richard Honowell, his post as surveyor and inspector of the revenue, was so important and remunerative. Now, in 1860s, Portland was generating nearly $1 million a year in customs revenue. So the people in the Custom Office were pretty well entitled to have a nice building in which to conduct their business. But the second reason, and I think this is a really important one in why I think the Custom House was housed in the exchange building that burned down. And that is the Custom House was the first building that visiting sailors from overseas would visit arriving in Portland. And this was essentially a case of ensuring that the United States and the United States government put its best foot forward and give the best possible first impression. And now that customs revenue accounts for less than 1% of the government's income, it's now out on some nameless suburban office park in South Portland. This is actually a fair point office, but it's got the lovely chain link fence and the lovely pickup trucks. So it sort of says a lot about the trajectory of the country. And of course, the US government's really not that interested in putting its best face forward anyway as they prove every single day on television. But I don't want to leave you with that image. It's too disturbing. So here's one of the canal bank offices built after the fire on Middle Street. And it's not the same. It's this building here in the middle. This is Blanche and Mimi now. This is not the same building as the one that houses urban outfitters today. But if you look at the top of that building, you'll see that the Lintel reeds canal bank building 1826, 1930. And it's right next door to Canal Plaza, which is named for the bank. So I hope I've given you a little bit of a taste of what Ai Wei Wei meant when he spoke of architecture and the urban fabric of Portland being a result of the cross-pollination of politicians, bureaucrats, and above all, entrepreneurs. Because it's these people who took such great risks to enrich themselves and Portland. And I think it's a wonderful thing that we have been able to preserve so much of this architecture and that it exists and lives in a way that we can interpret it and yet still maintain its functionality and make Portland the livable and wonderful city it is. Thank you. Now, at this point, I'm supposed to say, I'm happy to answer any of your questions. And luckily, there are lots of people here who know vastly more about any of this stuff, so I'll just direct you to them if I can't handle it. But if you do have any questions, I'm happy to play along. Yes? Court of Congress in Brooklyn. The building of Petitee Bank is actually part of the original premise. That's what I've heard. That's what I've heard, but I never really figured out what part of it it is. I've never actually figured out what part of it it is. It's obviously a different construction. OK. That's a little bit of a little tiny bit. OK. And then we're going to go around and see how it's done. Anybody else? Anybody else? Going, going, gone. Yes. Thank you again.