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The economic forces that led to its construction are long gone, opening the door to new ideas

By TOM BELL, Staff Writer March 25, 2009

PORTLAND — After eight years of planning and discussion about the Maine State Pier, little had been achieved. An increasingly frustrated public wondered whether anything would happen.

"Indeed, at one time it seemed the project might be dead," Frederic Fay, an engineering consultant hired by the city of Portland, wrote in a report to city officials.

That was in 1922, the year work crews finally began driving 90-foot-long piles to support the new state-owned pier.

Today, many people are thinking the same thing.

The announcement in January that Ocean Properties had dropped plans for a hotel, offices and cruise ship terminal at the pier scuttled a decade-long effort to redevelop the eastern waterfront.

City officials are now starting the planning process over, holding four forums designed to gather public input on the pier's future before deciding what to do there. Those forums continue tonight and Thursday, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Ocean Gateway passenger terminal.

The past is playing a role in the debate.

"This is an area that has great historical significance, but little remaining historical fabric," said Scott Hanson, a staffer in the city's historic preservation program. "It is truly open to redevelopment, but carries memories of about 400 years of Portland history."

Hanson presented a history of the site at the first forum two weeks ago. He used a slide show of about 100 historic images, starting with a map of Falmouth Neck in 1690 showing the first European settlement clustered around India and Fore streets.

The pier site was originally a point jutting into the harbor, making it the city's prime spot for marine access, he said. The small coves on either side of the point were eventually filled in during the mid-1800s.

In the late 1840s, traffic surged when Portland became the primary winter port serving Canada. By the early 1900s, the bustling hub needed a modern facility to meet the growing demand of international commerce.

When the Maine State Pier was built in 1922, it replaced two deteriorating wharves that at the time were nearly as old as the state pier is today.

The pier served ocean liners and coastal steamers. Grain from Canada and the Midwest was loaded directly into freighters from the Grand Trunk Railroad grain elevator.

Sophisticated new hoists and locomotive cranes moved cargo between freighters and rail cars, which rolled on tracks that extended down the pier's entire 1,000-foot length and linked with one of six rail lines that served the city.

Immigrants who arrived by ship were processed at an immigration station located on the second floor of the building that remains on the pier today.

With trolley lines providing access from the pier to the rest of the city, the area served as Portland's transportation hub. Several hotels were built to accommodate travelers.

But the heavy flow of cargo and passengers did not last long.

By the mid-1930s, Hanson said, Canada began the long process of disengaging from Portland, first by extending a railroad to Halifax and later by building the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which opened in 1959, allowing large freighters to reach the Great Lakes.

By the 1970s, Hanson said, the Canadian link was severed.

The last of the city's three grain elevators was demolished in 1974. Much of the infrastructure that existed in 1922, such as the Grand Trunk passenger station and the rail yard, are now gone, replaced by parking lots.

The state pier and the Grand Trunk office building on India Street, Hanson said, are among the few remaining pieces of infrastructure from that era. Because the economic forces that led to the pier's construction faded away long ago, he said, it's hard for people today to understand the critical role the pier once played in international trade.

Tonight, the city is holding a forum that focuses on economic issues related...