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: 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.