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It is summer and happy hour on Wharf Street in Portland Maine presents the itinerant ambler with a cornucopia of delights.  There’s lots to eat and drink, and see. Maine – maybe because of the sometimes harsh weather and rocky coast – has always taken its fun seriously.  In the 1840s about a half million…

One of the most interesting groups of visitors we have led yet! Maine winters are cold and inhospitable, our growing season and summer are pretty short, right? Our local culinary traditions are supposed to be comparatively limited, too. Hold your horses for this one. Last week I led a group of exchange students from the…

What the heck is this? Or this? Look up and you’ll see these things all over the place on the waterfront in Portland, Maine.  Sometimes they are not even stars! What’s going on?  The answer is that these decorative metal pieces are not ornaments.  They serve an important function, literally keeping many of our turn of the…

Along with fiddleheads, which we shouted out recently, another Spring delicacy showed up locally in the past few weeks. But it’s not local, although it illustrates an interesting connection to Maine foodways, so bear with me. Harbor Fish has reciprocity agreements with a slew of fish markets nationwide and around the world, I’m not sure…

A Portland Macaroni factory, 1924 Combing through old tax photographs of Portland’s Old Port from 1924, I happened upon this gem, which emphasizes Portland’s strong tradition of Italian-American food, one of my top recommendations, depending upon where visitors are from. Check out the kid smiling at the bottom too, he’d be 107 or so today….

There is an old saying that it’s not always the prettiest woman or most handsome man that makes the best dance partner.  Sometimes, at a party, you don’t want flashy, you just want steady, reliable, and solid.  Portland has plenty of pretty buildings, a surfeit of them.  With our rich Victorian pedigree, this is easily…

Fiddleheads:  An outstanding example of Maine’s historical continuity, authenticity, and distinctively local culinary traditions! As I say on my food tours, this is opportunity knocking, fresh food in a small city with a short supply chain is as good as it gets, give them a try. Early spring is fiddlehead season in Maine. They are…

I love the West End of Portland.  It’s architecturally significant and varied and every architectural style in America in play between 1870 and 1920 is on display there.  The Old Port section of Portland is beautiful too.  I’d take either of those neighborhoods out for dinner and drinks.   But, for my money, if you want…

Did you know Portland, Maine has burned to the ground four separate times in its history?  We’re the newest old city that there is in New England.  Longfellow House, boyhood home of Walt Whitman (kidding…Longfellow) is pretty much the oldest building in town, built in 1786, just after the American Revolution.  Consider that the founding…

It’s Valentine’s Day in Portland, Maine, or as we refer to it, Valentine Bandit’s Day.   Every 14th of February the city wakes up to our downtown festooned in red hearts.  Who does it?  Where do they all come from?  Who has that much tape?  Somebody knows – multiple people know because there are 1000s of…

You might be a poet and not even know it.  Look at your feet.  Are they long fellows? Longfellow, the poet, is no stranger to Portland, Maine.  He was born here in 1805, in room 346 of the Residence Inn on Fore Street.  Well, okay maybe not, but the Longfellow home was where the Residence…

In 1923 voters of Portland approved a new city charter. As part of this change in the city’s form of government, a tax reassessment was completed in 1924. For this reassessment, every taxable property in the city was documented and photographed. The 1924 Tax Records Digitization Project is a collaboration between the City of Portland,…