February/March 2015 The Portland Observatory was built amid great fanfare at the top of Munjoy Hill in 1807. Like the Time & Temperature building, it flashed messages. Flags and pennants in coded patterns alerted locals to the identity of new ships arriving in...
Winterguide 2015 It shook me as I walked to work through a post-Impressionistic winter day toward Portland Magazine’s headquarters at 165 State Street. While the late Paul Black hadn’t actually painted our building (see bottom photo), he’d helped me see it. Memorably,...
December 2014 Imagine Bonfire of the Vanities with a Maine plot and setting. Carolyn Chute’s new novel, Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, is that kind of brilliant–full of mischief and a great holiday gift for readers who dare to scratch the surface of...
November 2014 The Ben Affleck blockbuster movie Gone Girl is the stuff of water-cooler talk. But if you really want to be in the know about Gone Girl, the trip will take you to Maine. And Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn is the first to acknowledge it. In a Huffington...
October 2014 You can’t beat Maine’s exotic émigrés, flying under the radar. One of them is Tom Joyce, a sales executive at Southern Maine Motors in Saco. “I used to work with the White House’s top-secret communications team during the Johnson and Nixon...
September 2014 Sitting in the dining room at the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport, guests are treated to chargers emblazoned with Colony Hotel Kennebunkport. But look closely. Every once in a while, like a four-leaf clover, a near-identical plate shows up among the place...
July/August 2014 Across galaxies of magic summers, members of the Penobscot tribe paddled open-ocean from Indian Island to The Indian Canoe Landing in Kennebunkport, their summer hunting grounds. The old landing still exists across the street from Mabel’s Lobster...
Summerguide 2014 So the General Services Administration (GSA) is selling Boon Island Light this summer. Bids start at $5,000 for this stick on a pile of rocks that’s always belonged to all of us, and to no one. At the Black Pearl, our family’s cottage on Gooch’s...
May 2014 When we slide our chairs back in the Old Port, we sometimes bump into pieces of our lost geography. On Moulton Street, in the rathskellar of the Old Port Tavern, there’s a bar, stage, and dining area. Lining it is the gray stone wall that was once Portland’s...
April 2014 Where do web pages go when they die? If you see Error: 404, it means the page isn’t there anymore. So much for the eternal promise of the Internet. We ran into a real-life analog of this recently when one of our staff members stopped at 30 Preble Street to...
February/March 2014 To celebrate the beginning of our 29th year, we’re proud to bring you “The Best of the Best.” Along with our up-to-the minute restaurant reviews, events listings, and arts coverage in departments like Goings On, Chowder, and Maine Classics, here...
Winterguide 2014 We’ll be a lot more creative when we start thinking of the Portland Pirates as part of the creative economy. My wish for the New Year is for both sides of the Cumberland County Civic Center versus the Portland Pirates to stop digging in their heels...
