20+ Years of Urban Design in Maine 2

I grew up in Orono Maine, a small college town in the middle of the state outside Bangor. We lived right on Main Street across from the road up to the schools. I walked to school every day and walked downtown to meet friends. The schools sat behind Main Street as they do in many Maine towns. The downtown had the town hall, police/fire station, post office, etc. all right there. Nice homes and churches lined Main Street close to town.

The state university main campus is on the other side of the Penobscot River which runs through the middle of the town. The University of Maine at Orono (UMO) is organized around a quad with the library on one end and the gymnasium on the other; mind and body. Students walk around, along and across the quad from class to class.

It's about the same distance, 1400 feet, from my house to Pat's Pizza (the original where Pat would stand behind the counter with his cigar and lip burn) as it is from the UMO library to the gym. This is the foundation for my personal sense of walkable neighborhood space and scale. I believe we can use these two examples to strengthen our state's town and city urban fabric ensuring economic success in the long term.

20+ Years of Urban Design in Maine 1

I've been working on solving Portland and Maine's urban design problems for over 20 years. My first urban design proposal was an article addressing how to build on Portland's existing at the time great urban fabric to create economic success during the 1992 recession. Since then I've outlined numerous urban design solutions for Maine and Portland in particular. Here is a link to the Pecha Kucha presentation I did last winter quickly summarizing my work in this area: 20 Years of Urban Design in Maine by Michael Belleau

The slide above represents the locations of the generations of my family. My great grandfather took big city tourists out hunting as a guide. My great grandparents raised my grandmother in Dover-Foxcroft, a small town, where they had a cow in their yard. My father went up to work during Med School summer and apparently got jaundice drinking the cows milk, a condition expertly diagnosed by his professor that fall.

My father grew up in Sanford, a small town from where he, at age 12, got dropped off on his own at the closest train station and went to Boston for the day. There, wandering the Commons, a group of kids playing baseball commandeered him to be umpire and then, when inevitably the calls did go someone's way, they yelled at him, sending him scurrying off. His dad, a manager at Stop and Shop, had a camp built on a lake nearby where where we kids went every summer.

I grew up first in the Boston/Cambridge/Lincoln PBS-ish world in Massachusetts before moving to Orono, a small town with a University. Many of my friends parents were professors and there was always an air of intellectualism about amidst the intense practicality of a rural environment. This combination of thinking while shoveling snow colored my future urban design outlook.

And now my kids are growing up in Portland on the "gold coast" as some of us Mainers like to snicker. They do, however, go to Bangor for winter vacations to hang out with my mother, their "Oma", and down to Shapleigh for summer vacations at camp and thus enjoy a similar geographical comprehension of the state.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 3

The endless high school hallway. It's even shown up in my dreams. At the end is doors to gym; turn left and up a few stairs and down more hallway to doors to the parking lot. Most kids in Maine grow up with this space as a dominant experience in their lives. Every weekday life's most intense moments may happen in such a space. Monotonous for the most part, hermetic and claustrophobic, moving through such a space can imprint a linear, film-like space/time memory of planning.

They're so introverted.

Such stale experience could stifle the creativity of our future planners. The double loaded corridor is always forcing it's super efficient layout on design. In the photo above, the lucky students actually get light at the end of the tunnel. Like the train tracks of the Industrial Revolution, we are forced to take only one path submissively. The same attitude led to the elevated highways crashing through our delicate pedestrian fabric and Jacobs battling Moses.

But in a true village there would be one library for everyone in town and students in all grades, and you would walk to it from a classroom building. Spatial experience would vary moving from place to place in the course of a day. Performances would take place in which ever size auditorium in the center that was the right size for the event whether it was a grade school day time event or a community night time one. This is not to say grade schools would not have their own dedicated spaces, just that buildings in town would be shared by all and not wasted, lying empty at times and built cheap because they are not important to all.

Our Maine towns should slice and dice this endless hallway by building separate buildings like a village with connected covered walkways where used often creating courtyards, town squares and landscapes for yankee pedestrian delight.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 2

Our concept of family, home, and place come directly from experience. If we grow up in an apartment-like place in the middle of a packed urban context then that is our comfort zone and what we consider normal. If we grow up in a small town town in a single family home then that is our normal. Experiences throughout our life add to this baseline but none can be as strong.

I lived as a teen in a house on Main Street in a small town in the middle of Maine- Orono- a college town. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to live outside of town as I could walk across the street up to school; I could walk down to Pat's Pizza, the IGA, or LaVerdiere's (LaVerdiere's Halloween commercial) . Most of my friends could walk to school or bike if they wanted to. My concept of place is rooted in this typical small town main street space. When we got our licenses we cruised around some but of course, we spent a lot of time parked downtown and hanging out with each other leaning against our cars with the Jensen triaxials cranking out hard rock . My urban experience was main streets and the campus at UMO.

Later I fell in love with the copper roofs and burnt orange medeival fabric of the Gamla Stan in Stockholm, the brick Back Bay of Boston, the canals in Leningrad, the Moorish courtyards of the Alhambra, and the Portland Maine peninsula. These experiences compliment the main street base line by adding intricacy and spatial complexity to the pedestrian possibilities.

Our Maine spaces can improve through the strengthening of our experiences growing up here. We can focus on how our kids walk to school- what can we do to make these walks safe, fun and social? In Orono I just walked across the street and started up the short street to school. In our Maine towns we can build sidewalks and bike paths from dense housing areas to schools in town with police warming glass huts at center junctions to watch over things. My Main Street had trees along the road with sidewalks leading through town and across the bridge up towards the university. Our kids could benefit from bike paths speeding along the street and cutting through the neighborhoods.

Our families crave the coffee shop, IGA, Pat's Pizza and LaVerdiere's type stores along our Main Streets. In high school we were bored and needed places to gather and do things. We loved finding places to just hang out and look at something. This could be a view over a river or pond or a view at the town. Spatial experiences were much sought after if I think about it now, looking back. It's up to us now to help create a variegated in town spatial experience for children to move through and build enjoyable experiences. My high school Main Street life did that for me.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 1

(I write this while sliding across the bright winter landscape on a train from Portland to Boston just passing a trailer park in Maine where a bright red classic very old truck lies tucked against the back of a trailer.)

It occurred to me the other night while driving through a blizzard to my sons basketball game how formative and memorable our high school sports experiences are. And how they shape our perception of communal space and place making.

As I peered through the windshield heavily obscured by the sticky snow, crusty wipers leaving the central drivers portion unswept and incorrectly designed sweep direction depositing a line of slush swept from the passenger side to the center of drivers vision, my memory jumped to my bus rides through the Maine countryside to high school basketball games in dead winter. Orono High School played up in class B back then and we travelled all the way to MDI (Mount Desert Island for you folks from away) to the east, Schenck and Stearns to the north (the Millinockets) and Dover-Foxcroft, Lincoln, etc. Quiet snow-filled rides home stopping at McDonalds for as many Big Macs as we could afford. If you were lucky and your girlfriend was a cheerleader you could sneak a little making out in.

Contrary to the suburban experience of moving from one heavily populated area to another, the Maine experience moves from one small town to another (even our "cities" are really small towns in disguise) through vast stretches of countryside, silent in the white winter nights. We had no electronic devices to pass the time so we looked, talked and slept on the bus. Being funny was a prized asset. The land opened up to pastoral sweeps and closed deep inside coniferous forests. Winding paths slowly climbing along rivers and bridges hung over the rocky ocean.

Many times the bus road along a rivers edge and you knew we were arriving because the houses got close together and an old big brick mill might appear before what passed as a Main Street with at least two businesses or much more came into view. Then we would turn off this spine and go behind this strip, off to the side and pull up to the local high school- often an old pseudo Georgian block- and enter a plain brick box gym through a side door with nothing but a parking lot and fields there covered in white.

Who were these people who lived here? What did their dad's do? Did they like their school? Would the crowd yell at us? And of course we would have heard about a special player or two, having been instructed by the coach to pay particular attention to them, and that stopping them would be key to victory. Coming out of the locker room, stepping on to the hardwood floor we would immediately spy the good player(s) and begin to estimate his talent. Is he too good for us? Of course he knew we knew about him and this gave him even more confidence especially in his "house". He would execute their warmup drills with as much nonchalance as possible and we would try our best to do the same.

Every gym is different and these spaces could arguably be considered the most important or having the greatest impact from a memory standpoint on us Mainers. Case in point, when our 8th grade team played Veazie (kids from Veazie can choose Orono or Bangor High), the gym was on the top floor of the police-fire-townhall-gym. That alone creates a nice Yankee sense of multi-use buildings and frugality. So there we were playing a game on the bouncing wood floor watching their top player, Lenny, warming up. First thing to notice was his shot was very accurate and curiously very flat- with almost no arc. The game began and one of our players with the most beautiful shooting forms, Charlie, jumps up and fires a perfectly arcing, back rotating, shot and- THUNK! The ball hit the ceiling only about a third of the way up it's projected journey. Guess whose shot did not have that problem?