The Waterfront Up Against The Wall: Portland's Original Seawall. ByJonathan White.

Back When Commercial Street Was The Atlantic Ocean

Up Against The Wall

BY JONATHAN WHITE

HE NEXT time you enjoY' a meal or music in the Old Port Tavern, remember somewhere in the time-space dimension of Portland before 1852 - you're sitting in the ocean, where seagoing vessels once docked.

That same wall, against which musicians perform, is Portland's original seawall. It runs beneath Fore Street almost to the MillionDollar Bridge, where you can see the seawall towering up from a vacant lot at the intersection of Park and Commercial Streets.

From colonial days through the clipper ship era, Fore Street was Portland's waterfront. The first street to be cobblestoned, Fore Street followed the bank of the Fore River. From it bristled the wharves where trading vessels anchored. Along this narrow thoroughfare trudged teams of horses and oxen hauling loads of logs and lumber, barrels, masts, hides, and wool to merchant ships off-loading finished merchandise and raw materials. Foreign seamen jostled with black stevedores, downeast drovers, and frock-coated Yankee merchants beneath a nautical lacework of masts and spars. Alongside mercantile houses were slopshops selling seamen's clothes, sailor boarding houses, and taverns.

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Then, Portland entered a financial slump in the 1840s. City merchants determined that a railroad connecting Portland with Canada and the grain growing west would be just the thing to compete economically with other coastal cities. As a result, the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad (more popularly called Grand Trunk Railroad) was completed in 1853; the tracks run from India Street all the way to Montreal.

In preparation for the railroad bed, at a cost of $80,000, the wharves and tidewater of Portland's waterfront were filled in and a new business thoroughfare constructed to give the railroad direct access to. the docks. Thus, in 1852, Commercial Street first saw the light of day - 5,993 feet long and 100 feet wide, with 26 feet in the center reserved for railroad tracks. Nothing was the same again: The rails and Portland's new waterfront ushered in an era of tremendous commercial activity in the latter 19th century. And Fore Street, once splashed by the Atlantic and the site of Portland's mercantile hubbub, began to house the city's miscellaneous, secondary trade.

Jonathan White, managing editor of Portland Monthly, has written for The National Geographic Society, Down East, and numerous newspapers and magazines on the East Coast. An award-winning photographer, he lives on the Eastern Promenade.