Historically, Bayside, a neighborhood like Monjoy Hill on the fringe of Portland, Maine’s downtown, served as the city’s “Zone of Emergence.” In 1944, it was declared in “need of renewing”; by 1970, barely a shell of Bayside remained. With tree-lined streets and Greek Revival, Italianate, and Second French Empire architecture, Bayside hardly fit the stereotype of a slum. This study not only examines Bayside’s changing socioeconomic configuration but also (within the context of the progressive housers’ rhetoric about deslumming) explores the Depression-era and post-World War II government-energized crusade against blight. Like Robert Fogelsong and Alison Isenberg find for larger cities, the study sees this Bayside-dooming campaign as having much more to do with saving the downtown from the threat of suburbia and white flight than with providing safe and sanitary housing and decent neighborhoods to the urban poor.
Also, see American Public Health Association (hereinafter, APHA), Committee on Hygiene, Allan A. Twichell, technical secretary, “Does Bayside Need Rebuilding? A Study of Housing Conditions in a Problem Area of Portland, Maine,” March 19 (Washington, D.C.: American Public Health Association, 1944), found in Comey Papers, Loeb Library, Harvard School of Design, Boston, Massachusetts (hereinafter, CP).
2.
and Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); on Porteous and Benoit, see author's written communication with Portland City Manager Joseph Gray, May 30, 2006.
3.
and Robert Fishman, ed., The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).
4.
Fishman, The American Planning Tradition, 65-65.
5.
Richards Map of Portland (1914), found in Portland Room of Portland Public Library, Portland, Maine; Sanborn Map and Publishing Company, Portland 1928 (New York: 1928), found in Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, Portland; and Portland, Maine, Assessors, 1924 Assessment of Portland, Maine, found in Portland Assessors Office, Portland City Hall, Portland, Maine (hereinafter, 1924 Assessment).
6.
and Lawrence J. Vale, “Public Housing and Private Homes: A Century of Tension (paper presented at the Ninth National Conference on American Planning History, Philadelphia, November 2001).
7.
On the social and spatial configuration of the antebellum “walking city,” see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
8.
Sanborn Map and Publishing Company, Portland, 1886 (New York: Sanborn Insurance Map Company, 1886), MHS; and City of Portland, Housing and Neighborhood Services, Norman Buttrick, project archaeologist, “Project MPHC 0403: Bayside Development District—Phase I, August 6, 2001,” in Portland Public Library (hereinafter, PPL).
9.
See also Richard Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), which includes Louis Wirth’s essay “The City as a Way of Life” (67-83).
10.
On American apartheid, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
11.
National Recreation Association, “Long Range Recreation Plan, City of Portland, ME,” January 19, 1943, CP.
12.
Also, see Tower Printing Company, Tower Directory of the City of Portland, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 eds.
13.
and Tower Directory, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 eds.
14.
Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langerbach’sAmoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon, 1978), looked at family, work, and residence in Manchester, New Hampshire, a city about the size of Portland; but it is mainly oral history. Heath’s The Patina of Place discusses work and family life in the context of New Bedford, Massachusetts’ triple-decker housing.
15.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census Tract Data, 1880-1930; and Tower Directory, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 eds.
16.
and Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
17.
See Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Garb’s study of working-class Chicago families notes that in the era 1870-1900, South Side stockyard workers made a host of sacrifices to purchase “affordable” small Chicago cottages usually bereft of amenities. By the turn of the twentieth century, the added cost of infrastructure made such real estate increasingly too expensive for the average worker, and renting became the only resort for most of the Eastern European immigrant class.
18.
Note that slum imagery has deep roots in urban industrialization going back to the early nineteenth century. Harold L. Platt, in his Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), discusses de Tocqueville’s vision of Manchester slums, as well as Engels’s and Dickens’s portraits of the social and environmental squalor of working-class housing, conditions bequeathed by industrialism.
19.
On early slum clearance or the lack of it, see Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
20.
See Heath, The Patina of Place, on New Bedford; Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), on Boston; and Ihlder, “Houses in Providence,” on Providence, Rhode Island.
21.
John F. Bauman, “Multi-Family Housing and Postwar Renewal in Portland, Maine: 1941-1980” (paper presented at the 2004 meeting of the Urban History Association Conference, Milwaukee, Wis., October).
22.
and on the modernist downtown, see Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
23.
Portland City Planning Board, Annual Report, 1942, CP.
24.
Comey biographical data, CP. See also introduction to Arthur C. Comey, “Maximum Building Height Regulation,” Landscape Architecture (October 1912): 19-24, in Ohlin Library, Cornell University. On Bartholomew and the “knowable city,” see Joseph Heathcott’s excellent article, “‘The Whole City Is Our Laboratory’”: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge,” Journal of Planning History 4, no. 4 (November 2005): 322-53.
25.
Portland Evening Express, January 17, 1949, News Clipping File, Portland Department of Planning Records (hereinafter, PDPR).
26.
APHA, Committee on Hygiene, “Does Bayside Need Rebuilding?”
27.
Portland City Planning Board, Annual Report, 1944, CP.
28.
On the President’s Conference and Ickes’s Housing Division, see Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
29.
APHA, “Does Bayside Need Rebuilding?”
30.
On housing and planning, see Peter Marcuse, “Housing and Early City Planning,”Journal of Urban History6, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 155-155.
31.
On wartime planning, see John F. Bauman, “Visions of a Post-war City: A Perspective on Urban Planning in Philadelphia and the Nation,” in Introduction to Planning History in the United States, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 170-190.
32.
Arthur Comey, “Summary of Urban Redevelopment,” Portland, Maine, September 1946, type-script, CP.
33.
Portland City Planning Board, Urban Redevelopment for Portland (Portland, Maine: Portland City Planning Board, 1946), CP.
34.
For the series on Bayside housing, see Portland Evening Express, December 6-12, 1948, Portland Department City Planning, Library, Portland, Maine.
35.
See Portland Evening Express, December 6-12, 1948, on people in Bayside living like animals. On communism and the postwar housing issue, see Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute Press, 2003).
36.
On the image of suburban housing, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
37.
and Fogelson, Downtown.
38.
See Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).
39.
On Tardiff, Pierce, Stevens, and Allen, see Obituary Files, MHS; also, on Carrol Pierce, see “Portland Investment Firm Observes 100th Anniversary,” Portland Sunday Telegram, December 27, 1954; and on Neal Allen, “Neal Allen Dies,” Portland Evening Express, June 25, 1976, p. 1.
40.
“Housing Expert Says City Could End Slums,” Portland Evening Express, January 11, 1949, PDPR.
41.
Portland Press Herald, April 8, 1949; Portland Press Herald, April 13, 1949; and Portland Press Herald, June 23, 1949, all from News Clipping File, PDPR.
42.
“Facing the Fact of Slums,” Portland Press Herald, June 24, 1949, PDPR.
43.
Portland Press Herald, January 22, 1949, PDPR.
44.
See Roger I. Creighton, “Rethinking Urban Redevelopment—the Viewpoint of a Small City,”Journal of American Institute of Planners 19 (Winter 1953): 95-100; and SCRAP, Annual Report, 1953, PDPR.
45.
For a chronology of Portland renewal history, see Bauman, “Multi-Family Housing and Postwar Renewal in Portland, Maine”; Slum Clearance and Redevelopment Authority, Portland, Maine, Annual Report, 1953, in Portland Department of Planning Library, Portland; and Portland Renewal Authority (hereinafter, PRA), Annual Report (Portland, Maine: PRA, 1965), in MHS Library. On DSCUR requesting a court decision, see City Planning Board to City Council, January 22, 1954, submitting Annual Report, 1953.
46.
Roger I. Creighton to City Council, December 11, 1953, submitting Annual Report, 1953, PDPR.
47.
Portland Press Herald, August 5, 1954. On Portland’s “Conservation Program,” see City Planning Board (Roger Creighton, planning director) to City Council, December 11, 1952, in Department of City Planning Library, Portland, Maine. Providence, Rhode Island, was especially impressed with Portland’s housing preservation program; see Donald Graham, executive director of Providence Redevelopment Agency, to Mayor Walter Reynolds of Providence, September 22, 1953, discussing “Minimum Standard Housing Code Enforcement in Portland, Maine: 1952,” Reynolds Papers, Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island.
48.
“Pastor’s Criticism Bares Controversy,” Portland Evening Express, January 28, 1954, p. 1.
49.
John Orr, Portland city manager, to HHFA Administrator Albert Cole, April 14, 1955, forwarding city’s Workable Program, PDPR.
50.
Slum Clearance and Redevelopment Authority and City Planning Board, “Preliminary Report: Bayside Park Urban Renewal Project ME. R-1, Portland, Maine,” March 1957, Portland Planning Department Library, Portland, Maine; see also Charles Horan, regional director of Urban Renewal, region I, to William Gelbach, director of Administrative Branch, HHFA, August 15, 1961, submitting Physical Progress Quarterly Report, record group 207, box a730, Urban Redevelopment Administration, subject File 1961-1965, National Archives and Records Service, College Park, Maryland.
51.
Portland Evening Express, November 18, 1955, PDPR; on 1954 act, see Roland Tyler to City Council submitting Portland City Planning Board, Annual Report, February 28, 1955.
52.
See “Harold Loring Civic Leader” (obituary), Portland Evening Express, February 11, 1985, p. 31; and “Man Who Criticized Slums Named to Renewal Board,” Portland Evening Express, January 8, 1963, p. 18.
53.
Ibid.; for data on demolitions, see Portland City Planning Board, “Housing Code Compliance Program for Portland, Maine,” Planning Board Report no. 20-68, March 1968, Planning Department Library, Portland, Maine; and Portland Planning Department (Philip Sieber), “Inventory of Housing Neighborhood Analysis and Housing Forecast,” Planning Report #55-73, March 1973, Department of City Planning Library, Portland, Maine.
54.
Portland Housing Authority, Annual Report, 1973, PPL; and “Public Housing Project to Get Speedy Kickoff,” Portland Evening Express, March 7, 1961, p. 1.
55.
PRA, Annual Report (Portland, Maine: PRA, 1965).
56.
“Deal Clears Way for Bayside Development,” Portland Press Herald, August 16, 2005, p. B1.
57.
On Pittsburgh in particular, see Arthur P. Ziegler Jr., Historic Preservation in Inner City Areas: A Manual of Practice (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Allegheny Press, 1971).
