Gallery One


Union Station Portland’s Union Station of 1888 was a grand entry point for the city built in the French Chateauesque style. In 1961, the building was demolished, launching Portland’s historic preservation movement. In its place is a strip shopping center, symbolic of the automobile-centered culture that was sweeping the country at the time.


Baxter Library The Romanesque Revival Baxter Library building of 1888 looks much the same today as it does in historic postcards, with the exception of the statues which decorated the roofline. Most recently a part of the Maine College of Art, the building is being redeveloped for as a mixed use project serving the creative community.


Congress Street Comparison This view of Portland’s Congress Street looking down from Mechanics Hall, shows how new construction in the late 1970s drastically interrupted the street wall leading downtown toward the Wadsworth Longfellow House, changing the character of the urban experience for the worse.


Boothby Square The granite fountain at Boothby Square, originally used to water horses, was returned to its original site in 2005. It now bookends a new work of public art by Shauna Gilles- Smith called “Tracing the Fore,” which refers to the original coastline of the city, filled in the 1850s to create Commercial Street.