The first time I saw the West End was in 1978, when I was no more than a blushing college coed. I had driven to Portland from my parents' house in Bath on Christmas break to see a boy — a bass player I had met at a concert — for a date. As we walked around his Victorian neighborhood, I was at once struck by the thickening, almost viscous afternoon light. It was as though an alarm was going off in my brain, a wake-up call to see, I mean, to really see. At one point we came around a corner and were confronted with a gothic monstrosity — all brick and tower and iron latticework — bathed in that orange afternoon light.The sight literally took my breath away. I had grown up in a seafaring town. I had seen beautiful houses before, but I had never thought of them as alive like this. I said to myself at that moment that someday I would move to Portland and live in a turret and be a poet. And that turret would be in the West End.

Residential elitism is something we normally associate with more celebrated cities — New York, London, San Francisco. But even small burgs like Portland have their address snobs, and the West End seems to cultivate this feeling more than any other neighborhood in town. Some of it is merely geographic. First of all, the West End is located on the peninsula: a bragging right for any Portland inhabitant these days. In fact, there are those who don't even acknowledge life beyond Interstate 295, which separates the city proper from the suburbs.

But it's something more than location. Almost every other section of peninsular Portland — including the East End (also known as the Eastern Prom, Munjoy Hill, or the Hill, depending on your orientation), and Intown (some say Downtown) — has better water views. Here, you have to stretch and crane and then take your glimpses of the Fore River along with smokestacks, airport runways, and tank farms. And it's not that it's a rarified, exclusive enclave. The working stiffs surely outnumber the wealthy.

And sometimes this feeling even defies actual residence. Because even though I now own a house in the 'burbs and, pre-house, lived on the East End for eight years, I always have, and probably always will consider, myself a West End girl.

What is it then? What is that quiet smugness that comes from saying one lives in the West End? I thought I should go take a look again and see.

Returning to the old neighborhood on this spring afternoon, I elect to go via my preferred route, up Pine Street, past the longstanding Portland adult entertainment store, the Treasure Chest; by the neighborhood gay bar, Blackstone's; across Brackett Street at Cumberland Farms; and up West — an expansively wide and straight five-block-street — to the Western Prom and its grand manses, where much has remained unchanged for the past century.

The West End, which rises 175 feet from the sea and was formerly uninhabitable deep woods and swampland, was the last area of the Portland peninsula to be settled. Spurred by the city's mid-nineteenth-century prosperity, along with the need for housing after the Great Fire of 1866, a boom took place, resulting in one of the best-preserved Victorian neighborhoods in the United States. And, naturally, those with the most cash got the best front-row views, which is why you'll find so many of these massive homes' fa?ades fronting the sidewalk, facing the (once unspoiled) mountain vistas without benefit of towering gate or hedgerow. A stroll here is something like a mini version of Newport's Cliff Walk — minus the pounding surf — with the mansions lined up at attention, side by each. You can ogle to your heart's content.

The Western Promenade was named for the walk- and carriageway laid out there in 1836 by the city for its people. (A corresponding promenade was built on the East End at the same time.) And it remains for the public. Year-round, you'll find both residents and visitors — strollers, dog walkers, joggers, skateboarders, picnickers — idling along this grassy knoll that appears to fall away into the open sky and distant horizon. The whole package — the homes and the Prom and the park — would feel like a gated retreat, if it were not for the active comings and goings of the many who use this end of town for a little urban retreat, especially on spring afternoons like these.

Away from the Prom, the houses on the side streets remain impressive, but there's not a car or dog or anyone in sight. The only human I see as I meander is a slim-hipped, blonde-bobbed mom, who emerges from her John Calvin Stevens home (one among the seventy in the West End designed by this revered architect from the turn of the last century) on Bowdoin Street to call, "Trevor, Gabrielle, time for your swimming lesson" to two towheaded tots racing around the yard in Batman capes. The scene almost seems artificial, though; I half-expect to hear someone shout, "Cut!"

It's a different story once I head back toward town and encounter actual people on the streets: guys buying their lottery tickets at Vespucci's Market or smoking in front of the Ice House — a sometimes raucous neighborhood bar that managed to survive its "discovery" in the 1990s by slumming yuppies and is still known to many by its prior name, Popeye's — or kids running around on the Reiche School playground or being picked up in giant SUVs from Waynflete School, or the legions of waiters in their black-and-whites striking out from their apartments for the Old Port and the evening shift as the shopgirls trundle home.

A constant, no matter where you wander, is the West End's pervasive soundtrack: the persistent ring of hammer and saw, the thrum of renovation and improvement and the song of — well, yes — gentrification. But what strikes me as I look around is how the West End seems to absorb these upgrades without changing its character. Whereas other parts of Portland have been prettified or outright reinvented, the West End feels reassuringly the same (albeit with brighter paint and straighter beams). The recent real-estate boom has transformed the East End from the one-time dicey and spicy "Hill" into a haven for condo developers and young professionals who have snatched up and rehabbed many of the plain-wood-frame, working-class homes there. And who knows what the waterfront or even downtown is going to look like after all the development projects currently in the works are realized. But the beauty of the West End is that no matter how much new or old money gets poured into it, it seems to stay the same, whether you're hoofing it home from the Old Port after last call or tucking the Lexus into the carriage house for the night. The West End defies progress.

Another thing that is reassuringly the same is the type of hangouts this neighborhood seems to cultivate. In my day it was the West Side Café (now, the fabulous and popular new restaurant Caiola's), Aunti Leoni's sandwich shop (now an innocuous office storefront) and, later, Café Uffa. Today, it's Local 188 at Longfellow Square; the upscale food shop and deli, Aurora Provisions (formerly my late-night beer store, Pine Street Variety); and, perhaps, the current epicenter of the West End, OhNo Café, located at the corner of Brackett and Gray streets. Aptly named chef/owner Chris Cook says his clientele runs the full spectrum of humanity — from the 6:30 commuter crowd, who dash in for a quick coffee and one of his hot-off-the-grill breakfast sandwiches, to the nine-to-fivers to the second- and third-shifters, the construction guys, and any number of the many artists and musicians who live in the immediate area. Hangovers seem not uncommon in the late-morning crowd. Places like OhNo Café and Caiola's make me pine for the West End, as though I now lived in the Far East instead of Portland's East Deering. It makes me want to renew my West End girl status.

But why do I still cleave so to this idea of myself? I figured I'd toss it around with my good friend and ?ber West End girl, the writer Tanya Whiton, at one of the neighborhood's most stalwart and unchanging dining and drinking establishments. At Ruski's, on the corner of Danforth and Brackett, the ghost of secondhand smoke still hovers long after the state smoking ban extinguished the last cigarette.

Tanya has been a resident of the West End for more than a decade and still resents me a bit for deserting. She talks about how lower Brackett Street — once an approach to the Million Dollar Bridge and South Portland — has changed since the closing of the bridge and how quiet it has grown. There's still wilding on the streets and the occasional set fire on adjacent Salem Street. But it's much sweeter as a neighborhood now, she says. She knows or recognizes most everyone on the street, and she asserts there are more barmaids, dishwashers, artists, musicians, dancers, and painters in this square block than anywhere else in town.

I ponder this as an inebriated older woman at the bar insists, at full volume, that she smells scallops and would do anything for a fried scallop. At a hightop near the dartboard, some slacker chicks are drinking beers and having supper, looking wholly at home. A toddler amuses himself in the jungle of barstool legs, while his parents have a beer. (The sight of kids here is not uncommon.) This is a corner bar in the classic sense, a place that has "neighborhood" written all over it, the kind of place that's rapidly disappearing.

And the West End girl thing? I ask Tanya for her definition. She tells me of the first time a fella referred to her as such. What did he mean, she asked him. " 'Oh, you know, the West End, where the bookish girls live.' " We both smile.

Yes, the West End was, indeed, a romantic backdrop to all the small dramas of my becoming-a-writer youth. Every time I spilled out of my front door and shot down Pine into the heart of town to attend an opening or go to a club or to my job at Casco Bay Weekly or to review my first galleys, I knew I was living exactly where I wanted to be. Whether it was flirting with the cute counter boys at Aunti Leoni's or being languidly greeted by the two iguanas that used to live on top of the dryers at the Soap Bubble laundromat or splurging on a giant breakfast at the West Side after a killer deadline (enough protein to keep an underemployed bookish girl going for a couple of days), the West End always felt like mine. I had chosen Portland and had staked out the West End as my own. Pity the fools on the Hill and those in (gasp) the 'burbs for what they were missing.

Much has changed in the quarter century since that first stroll of mine around the West End. Economies have risen and fallen, booms have come and gone. And during that time, I lived in so many apartments around or in the West End I doubt I can remember them all. But it strikes me now, as I conclude my walking tour in the lengthening afternoon light (and, yes, the Francis Fassett House I saw on that first day still takes my breath away), that neighborhoods do not, any more than cities, exist in a bell jar, and the West End is no different. But the things that make Portland Portland and keep me fiercely devoted to this town do not change. And if I ever need to be reminded of this — like when I see a Dunkin' Donuts in the Old Port or the next load of a developer's glass and steel roll into town — all I have to do is take a walk in my beloved bricky West End and see that orange sun come bowling down West Street. Because every time I do, I know I am home.