Now is the time to head up to Maine to catch those color-soaked leaves and mountain vistas. And if you are looking for a San Francisco Bay-area atmosphere, but on a human scale, try Portland with its craggy seascapes punctuated by working lighthouses, its old port still on a busy harbor, its active art colony and great restaurants.
Downtown Portland lies on a peninsula jutting into Casco Bay on one side and the Fore River on the other. The preservation movement caught Portland just in time. The noble 19th-century brick and granite buildings on Commercial Street, the waterfront, have been restored as upscale offices, condominiums, restaurants and boutiques. A series of wharves jut out behind, some of them still serving the wholesale fish trade and the frequent departure of ferries to the plethora of islands, as well as Nova Scotia. Others have the more dubious function of berthing floating restaurants of indifferent quality.
Congress Street once was the main shopping district, and still retains high-end jewelry stores and the inevitable L.L. Bean outlet. The Maine College of Art anchors the center of the strip with a five-story, former department-store building, and the art spills over into galleries, coffee-shops and boutiques. The Portland Museum of Art is a first-class institution for its size, with a good installation of postimpressionists. It is about to expand its collection of 19th-century antiques and decorative arts into the adjacent McClellan-Sweat House, a magnificently restored mansion built in 1800.
The boyhood home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the author of Evangeline and Hiawatha, is right in the center of town and just reopened this summer after a careful restoration that included the duplication of original carpets, textiles and wallpaper. Built by the poet's grandfather in 1796, and given to the Maine Historical Society by his aunt, who lived in it until 1901, it was here that Longfellow grew up and lived until he went off to Bowdoin College. With the publication of his poems, Longfellow became the first media superstar in U.S. history. He found inspiration in the lands and legends of America and was so successful that his ballads were memorized by generations of schoolchildren and translated into many languages. Indeed, he became so well-fixed from his writings that he was able to resign his position as professor of foreign languages at Harvard and devote himself entirely to his poetry.
Portland may be the only city in the United States that employs a city organist, Roy Cornils. The city hall, a huge baronial pile, includes the 1,900-seat Merrill Auditorium, home of the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ. When installed in 1912 the Kotzschmar, with its 98 ranks, 6,613 pipes and five manuals, was the second-largest in the world. After a period of decline, the instrument was brought back to its stupendous glory by the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ. If you're lucky to be in town on Tuesdays, you can catch the free concerts by Cornils and other first-rank organists, or perhaps you can get to one of the noontime demonstrations on other days (check the schedules). The Merrill also is the home of the Portland Symphony and the Portland Opera.
When it's time to eat, the hungry traveler has any number of sophisticated choices, ranging from the ineffably exquisite to exotic ethnic. But for a touch of old-time Portland, you can't do better than to hike down to the Custom House Wharf to Boone's, tucked in among the wholesale fishmongers. Since 1898, Boone's has been turning out baked stuffed lobster, haddock, clams and oysters in an old swaybacked warehouse that looks as though it might fall down at any moment. Inside, it's a bright, family-style place. On a recent visit, a diner overheard a 12-year-old at an adjacent table order oysters on the half-shell with aplomb, and then instruct his younger sister on the correct way to disassemble a lobster. Boone's claims to have invented lobster stuffed with crab and cracker crumbs but, if they didn't, they've had so much practice that it's hard to imagine anyone doing it better.
Next door, Gilbert's Chowder House, equally ancient, gave prospective customers the feeling that they might get Shanghaied on the next clipper ship leaving the dock, but that didn't prevent the deck overlooking the slip from being crowded with happy diners. Farther down the wharf the Comedy Connection was chock-a-block with twentysomethings holding glasses in cocked arms and listening to the deep thumpa-thumpa-thumpa coming from the combo's bass.
On a recent visit in late summer, the full-rigged tall ship HMS Bounty (the 1960 replica) was tied up at the public wharf next to the Whaling Wall, a block-long mural of the whaling trade painted on the side of a warehouse. Constructed for the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando and featuring Capt. William Bligh's ill-fated journey to Tahiti, no breach of discipline has occurred lately. Meticulously built to the original plans in the British Admiralty archives, the Bounty now is a training ship berthed in Fall River, Mass., and makes weekend voyages giving tours to raise funds for its overhaul. Teen-age sailors who sign on for six months are promised long hours, low pay and good food. They learn not only seamanship but affection for the old vessel.
The visitor in search of expansive ocean views should head out to the East End where the Eastern Promenade, a sweep of green parkland, allows the stroller or the driver to take in the countless islands of the bay. The more curious can ascend the Observatory at Munjoy Hill. It's a small wooden look-out tower, built about 1800 and newly renovated. It was built to keep track of the comings and goings of commercial shipping traffic entering and leaving the harbor, but now it is a prime tourist attraction.
A little farther on, Back Cove reaches behind the city, almost cutting the peninsula off from the mainland. The basin is full at high tide and empty at low tide, a 9-foot range--not as high as tides up near the border of Maine and Canada, which may range up to 30 feet, but still hefty enough to cause strong currents in the cove. A stroll along the gravel path is pleasant enough, particularly the side away from the interstate highway.
Crossing over Tukey's Bridge that frames the cove, one can see a local landmark down on the point--the B&M Oven-Baked Bean factory, an industrial-style building from the 1920s with a tall brick chimney that belies the homey image of the product. Then it is time to head up to Freeport to visit that other Maine icon of the lowly legume--the factory store of the L.L. Bean Co.
Hold back on that urge to splurge, however; instead of zooming up U.S. 1 or I-95, take the much more amiable Route 88 that meanders along the coast. Here you will find examples of Maine's outstanding domestic architecture, white picket fences of elaborate construction, green forests and occasional glimpses of Casco Bay. Eventually you end up at the Yarmouth marina, and head down Main Street where there seems to be more historic and handsome church buildings than the population possibly could support. Yet on a warm Sunday morning, plenty of churchgoers were thronging the entranceways and parking lots of the devotional edifices. Here, too, are the buildings of the North Yarmouth Academy, founded in 1814, with multiple chimneys on the dormitories--fireplaces intended, no doubt, to help the young gentleman scholars ward off the sturdy Maine winters.
Minutes later, Freeport emerges in sight. It is an amazing phenomenon: an entire Federal village turned into an outlet mall. Virtually every structure in town has blossomed into a boutique of bargains featuring the most famous names in upper- and high-end consumer goods. It is not just the L.L. Bean store (open 24 hours) that started it all; every fashionable name in U.S. and European marketing has carved out a niche. Yet the amazing thing is that it almost looks like the quaint town it once was: trees are preserved; tight zoning restrictions have held signs down to subdued understatement and parking is in the rear as much as possible without entrances directly on the street. Even that nice old white house with the classical portico at the end of the street is, upon inspection, a McDonald's (drive-thru at the rear).
