Portland's Big Boom
The biggest wave of development in years is about to hit the city's East End between the Old Port and Munjoy Hill.
By Edgar Allen Beem
During the go-go years of the 1980s, Portland experienced a building boom during which banks and law offices popped up all over the downtown peninsula, the Old Port turned into a major retail and entertainment district, and condominiums, studios, and offices proliferated along the waterfront to such an extent that the city enacted a moratorium on non-marine development there in 1987.One of the urban areas left relatively untouched by all that renovation and construction was Portland's eastern waterfront, a transitional neighborhood lying east of the Franklin Arterial between the bars, boutiques, and bistros of the Old Port and the apartments, tenements, and townhouses of the increasingly gentrified Munjoy Hill.
