Edward Gorey in Portland, Maine!

I am pleased to take a few moments to remind folks of the opportunity afforded them by the current Edward Gorey exhibition showing at the Portland Public Library here in Maine. A longtime fan of Gorey’s artwork myself, I would hate to find out that any of you had missed out on this chance to see his work here in Maine – a definite rarity!
NOTE: Any image below can be clicked upon to see a larger version for more detail.

While Edward Gorey’s ties with Maine are tenuous at best, he is certainly a New England neighbor, lodging himself in the nearby regions of Cape Cod for the latter years of his life, and he was a great appreciator of New England Gothic sensibilities. He did a bunch of illustrations for author John Bellairs, some for stories which took place in Maine, such as the uber-creepy Johnny Dixon tale The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, a personal favorite of mine, which takes place near the island of Vinalhaven. There is also a panel in Gorey’s Cycling Cards series (included in Amphigorey Also) that depicts the “Apparition of demon cyclist that appeared in the sky over Gasket, Maine several times during the second week in November, 1911.”

But here ends the Edward Gorey trail in Maine, until now.

Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey is presented by the Bank of Maine, in partnership with the Maine College of Art (MECA) and Portland Public Library. The show opened Friday, October 5, 2012, and will be on display through December 29, 2012 in the Lewis Gallery at Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland, Maine. The exhibition is free of charge to the general public.

The show is phenomenal, a once in a lifetime chance to be able to see almost 200 original pieces by this master of the pen stroke, as well as some of the published results collecting those endeavors. I have done my best to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity, a gift from the show sponsors to those of us living here, and have visited the show almost a dozen times so far. Even with that many visits under my belt, I have yet to look at everything on display!

Although the Lewis Gallery is not gigantic, it is a pretty good size, and many of Edward Gorey’s pieces are intimate in size. They are made to engage the viewer. In fact a friend who works as a security guard at the exhibit describes the inevitable process of looking at the Gorey show. People come in, scan around the room casually, strolling along the rows of framed artwork. Then one of the pieces catches their eye. They stop. They step closer. They step even closer. Slowly, they begin to bend nearer and nearer to the piece, until their nose is only inches from the glass. He tells me this sequence of events is almost inevitable.

I can imagine why. Gorey’s art is made up of infinitesimal pen strokes in the pieces where he really gets going. While this creates a pleasing and engrossing texture when the pieces are reprinted in their respective books, the printing process invariably greys out the tones of the piece. When you see one of these illustrations in person, the effect is staggeringly dramatic. In the original, the tones of ink achieve a drama unavailable in the printed version. The darks are so dark, the details so keenly applied. One cannot help but look more closely, and inspect what one might have missed previously. The colors in his watercolor paintings are also delectable in person. One imagines the glass protecting the artwork is not just to keep dust off (they know some of us just want to EAT them whole).

My own relationship as a fan of Edward Gorey’s work began with the arrival of the series of John Bellairs books mentioned above, given to me as a Christmas gift by a family friend who was also a librarian. The stories were spooky yet I was unable to stop reading them. A few years later, someone else gave my family a copy of his pop-up book, The Dwindling Party. I was fascinated by the macabre storyline of family-outing-gone-wrong and the way it was paired with the playful pop-up book format. It perplexed and amazed my pre-teen mind. But it wasn’t until I began making my own art that I really began to explore Gorey’s work.

Set design for Giselle, Act II

As an avid bookreader, it’s no surprise that my own artistic leanings took off in the direction of book illustration. Edward Gorey was a tremendous inspiration in this respect. Not only did he do typography and book cover design, he also made extensive forays into set design, costume design, and all manner of formats to which his art could be applied. His house on Cape Cod was a live-in museum filled with his collected inspirations – saltshakers, finials, rocks, and other spherical objects. Today it has become the Edward Gorey House museum. He lived his art in all ways, so that one was unsure whether his art imitated his life or his art imitated his life.

Which makes it all the more shocking that someone might say dismissively, “I’ve always thought of him as an illustrator, not as an artist,” when Gorey was so much an artist that he lived his art, with gusto, aplomb, flair, and a curious passion. This is evident in his sketchbooks, four of which are included as part of the exhibit.

Early ideas for the Gashlycrumb Tinies

His finished work is as prolific as his ideas were, totaling to over 100 published books and projects within his lifetime. This exhibit showcases everything from early concept sketches to finely finished pieces, as well as some examples of the final printed products that resulted from his projects. Viewers will also be pleased to see early versions of cover art for some of his books.

In addition to this, he designed sets and costumes for countless theatre productions, some of which are also on display, and created popular animations and illustrated works for a wide array of artists ranging from Charles Dickens and John Updike to Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells. His hand-illustrated correspondence to his mother and his friends is also present as part of the show, a rare treat indeed.

For a supposedly reclusive person, Edward Gorey was constantly and actively involved in the world around him.

The mysteries of seaweed!

Gorey often worked in black and white, with occasional delightful forays into watercolor. Working in a single color seems a strange thing to fault someone for, though some folks seems to think it is a mark against Gorey’s work (no pun intended). This is ironic when one considers that Gorey’s epic use of delicate nib marks to create texture and definition is a skill many artists aspire to, and when one remembers that James Whistler himself considered his own monochromatic nocturnes to be extremely serious and worthy undertakings, and the fact that Albrecht Durer’s drawings and engravings are some of his most famous art pieces even now.

Illustration has always struggled against the stigma of not being “art.” It is the subject of what seems at time an eternal debate – it is, after all, one of the Big Questions: What is life? What is art? Why am I here? Where did this paintbrush in my hand come from? I think you will find the answers are purely subjective, in many cases, and gain narrow definition only at the exclusion of other potentials, which is hardly a way to live at all. To paraphrase a friend’s remark, should I feel sad if I am considered to be “only an illustrator”? Only if it turns out I'm a slipshod and artless one, I suppose.

Here’s to living one’s art, and here’s to the folks that are giving us here in Portland a chance to glimpse how the art of Edward Gorey became his.

Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey is on view from October 5 – December 29. The Portland Public Library is located in the heart of Downtown Portland Maine at 5 Monument Square and is open daily from 10am – 7pm Monday – Thursday, Friday 10am – 6pm and Satuarday 10am – 5pm. For more information, visit portlandlibrary.com/gorey

The show includes approximately 180 original works, including selections from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest, The Unstrung Harp, The Gilded Bat, and other well-known publications, drawn primarily from the extensive archives of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and significant private collections.

The City Has Ghost Streets : Part 4 - Winslow Park & Oakdale

Above Oakdale, facing downtown Portland, circa 1963.

Beneath today’s roadways, walkways, and structures are some extinct lanes and sites of Portland past, whose references are merely their ground coordinates. These comprise the city’s Ghost Streets. Though replaced, plowed under, or built-over, the souls of these Ghost Streets, institutions- even parks- bear silent witness to the lives and souls that inhabited and traversed them, and we need but only notice traces left behind. What clues remain today? This installment reveals glimpses of an area and a well-known crossroads in Portland’s Oakdale section. There has been a lengthy hiatus since the previous time Ghost Streets have been spirited from the great beneath here on the Strange Maine blog. This time, extensive archival work has permitted for the viewing of some remarkable aerial photographs, providing necessary context for an area that has undergone dramatic change.

Indeed, no street is an island. A look at a length of buildings along a thoroughfare easily connects to intersecting roads and proximate landmarks and businesses. Oakdale today is commonly associated with the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine; the neighborhood extends north toward the Woodfords neighborhood, west toward the eastern portion of the Libbytown neighborhood, and east to Back Cove.

Prior to major highway construction in the early 1970s, the section of Oakdale closest to downtown Portland had been densely residential. West of the intersection of Forest Avenue and Bedford Street, now covered by I-295 with its network of curved ramps, along with contiguous portions of the USM campus, were Winslow Street, Conant Street, and Lightfoot Street. At the confluence of Winslow Street and Forest Avenue was the original Winslow Park. The streets are gone, but the park has transmigrated to another side of the neighborhood. How does a park move to new digs? We shall see...

When studying transition through historic photographs, we find our bearings via recognizable structures and street schemes. At the center of the changed landscape among these Oakdale ghost streets is the present day USM Portland Campus Library at 314 Forest Avenue. The basic structure had been built as an industrial baking company, the T.A. Huston Company bakery, by Thomas Huston in 1919. For its time and place this was a large structure, and was strategically situated close to the Boston & Maine Railroad tracks connecting Portland’s Marginal Way to points north and south. The bakery’s specialties were pastries, cookies, crackers, and biscuits. In 1931 it was bought out by National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), who operated the manufacture until 1954. From the mid-1950s through just after 1990, the 100,000 square foot, 7 floor building served as warehouse space for building and plumbing suppliers (including Johnson Supply), a shoe company, and in the late-1980s as artists’ studio spaces. In 1991, the building was purchased by USM, which opened the renovated building as a library in 1993. With this reference point standing witness through its neighbors’ changes, the unfamiliar subjects in the photographs have an abiding fulcrum.

Aerial view of Forest Avenue, with intersecting Baxter Boulevard, circa 1960.
Note Winslow Park at lower left corner, Texaco gas station (253 Forest Ave.) immediately across the street, with 5-storey cannery behind (lower right). The photo below was taken in Winslow Park!

Below, the same view as above, from same vantage point, but taken today.

Winslow Park, in its original site, appears to have been a simple memorial and green space between the pre-highway (and thus larger) Deering Oaks and nearby Baxter Boulevard. The small park’s location and name had great significance. Just across Forest Avenue was Portland Stoneware Company (Winslow & Company), popularly known as the Old Pottery. Before the landfilling and highway construction in the late-1960s began, 253 Forest Avenue and its adjacent neighbors were commercial locations with industrial docks on Back Cove. The Cove was regularly dredged, to accommodate ships parallel to Marginal Way- west to Forest Avenue. According to the Portland City Guide (1940), Portland Stoneware had been established in 1846 by John T. Winslow (1820-96), and “for many years produced crocks, jars, and ornamental stoneware. In 1870, however, the pottery started mass production of more utilitarian objects and today [as of 1940] produces digester brick, tile pipe, wind guards, flue linings, and chimney tops.” The Old Pottery closed in 1946, and the successor to its address was the large Maine Canned Foods, Inc. Winslow Park’s original manifestation dates back to 1903, as a bequest to the city of Portland and one of the Portland Park System’s first neighborhood parks. The park covered barely two-tenths of an acre, on the triangle formed by the sharply-angled Winslow Street and the broader Forest Avenue. The continuation of Winslow Street, traversing east across Forest Avenue and heading into Portland Stoneware was the now-ghost-street Pottery Lane. The Old Pottery and Winslow Park pre-dated the bakery building. A critically important year to keep in mind is that of the Great Fire: 1866, after which many Portlanders began building homes and businesses (requiring building materials) in the Woodfords and Oakdale areas. Another key year is 1899: the merger of the cities of Deering and Portland.

Streets, Winslow Park, and Deering Oaks in 1914.

Now we come to the ghost streets that were filled with 19th century homes- just west of the intersection of Bedford Street and Forest Avenue. As the photographs (taken in 1924) attest, the architectural styles of the homes (Victorian and Greek-revival clapboard) match the immediate area- which is south of Deering Center and Woodfords, east of Libbytown. Winslow Street spanned Bedford Street and Forest Avenue, running southwest-northeast. Emanating eastward out of Winslow Street, from north, were Lightfoot, Conant, and Grand Streets. These short streets were flanked west by Winslow Street and east by the railroad tracks which became the basic footprint for highway I-295.

15 Lightfoot Street. Notice the bakery (today's USM Portland Library at left!)

22 Lightfoot Street

2 houses on Conant Street (above)

Winslow Market, 10 Winslow Street- near Forest Avenue.

27 Winslow Street.

Below: Mr. Rocco Nicolai, at 27 Winslow Street, in 1967.

58 Winslow Street

By the completion of highway I-295 (November 1974), a massive project with city-wide ramifications, a swath of elevated expressway effectively separated Oakdale from Parkside and the remainder of downtown Portland. Parallel road-construction projects included Franklin Arterial, extending Preble Street onto the landfilled Marginal Way, extending State Street through Deering Oaks Park, and creating the Libbytown interchange at Libby’s Corner. Numerous homes and several neighborhoods gave way to the new highway connectors. Among the casualties was Winslow Park, whose site had been taken by eminent domain in 1969. Today, the western portion of the I-295 southbound trestle stands over the park, and the southbound Forest Avenue onramp traverses the ghost of Winslow Street.

Above: Map from 1954.
Below: Forest City Motors, with bakery in background. Bedford Street at left, Winslow Street at right.

Below: today's view, compared to above in 1950.

Exponentially expanded in the past 25 years, the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine occupies much of the area immediately northwest of the intersection of Forest Avenue and Bedford Street. The Muskie School of Public Service (Wishcamper Building, opened in 2008) and its adjoining parking garage, and adjoining Abromson Community Education Center (built in 2004) stand upon the ghost streets of Winslow, Lightfoot, Conant, and Grand. Wishcamper is immediately upon the footprint of the corner of Winslow and Bedford Streets- for decades the site of Forest City Chevrolet. The core of the campus (between Beford and Falmouth Streets) is historic land in itself, having been part of Sir Ferdinand Gorges’ land grant, and later the Deering family estate. Payson-Smith Hall’s construction, begun in 1957, signified Portland Junior College’s transition into the University of Maine in Portland.

Below: Aerial view with Portland campus at center with new Luther Bonney Hall, circa 1965.

Above: Footprint of the original Winslow Park.

And yet there remains Winslow Park- the “new” Winslow Park. Through the early 1970s, the Winslow descendants successfully contested the elimination of the park and its memorial in Maine’s Supreme Court. The Court’s decision, in 1976, stipulated that the original plaque (from Winslow Street) be embedded in a stone upon a parcel of land at the corner of Baxter Boulevard and the Preble Street Extension. The New Winslow Park was dedicated on June 6, 1980. Visitors to the new park will notice the large 1902 plaque near a tall, modern sculpture. The present Winslow Park is situated at the edge of the expanse of 1970s roadway landfill- yet still just a short walk northeast from the Old Pottery.

The new Winslow Park
Above, with Back Cove in background. Note the 1902 plaque.
Below, with USM Library and Forest Avenue in background.

Now, with these reference points, landmarks, and coordinates, the known and overt are joined with the subsumed and hidden. As you merge from Forest Avenue onto I-295 south, or exit from I-295 for northbound Forest Avenue, you’ll know the path crosses through the Old Pottery that produced household ornaments and sewer ducts alike. Hurtling across the Forest Avenue overpass, your wheels bisect the airspace of the old Cannery that succeeded the Old Pottery in its place. And walking across the USM Portland campus that is south of Bedford Street, your steps meet the ghosts of sidewalks, houses, stores, and backyards past that trimmed Winslow, Lightfoot, Conant, and Grand Streets. So keep your eyes tuned, when noticing modern structures amidst old settlements. These indicate layers of built landscape. Your very being traverses the plains between the surface present and the foundations and footsteps of your predecessors. The City Has Ghost Streets.

Above, view toward downtown from USM Library.

Aerial view from east, above Back Cove. Notice the pre-I295 terrain, with the Cannery (former Portland Stoneware site) in foreground. Circa 1964.

Above: an inadvertent ghost street stroller, traversing the ether of Lightfoot Street. View from USM Library looking southwest.

summer reading

Summer in Maine! The time goes faster than you can say, don't get me stahhted! 'Nuff said. The weather outside is delightful and with all this extra daylight, it's always useful to have some ideas for outdoor activities. Between commuting to the daily grind (albeit with a Vacationland license plate) and those occasional weekend festivals around Maine, we need only be reminded of those simple and timeless pleasures.
Not passing up a chance to learn from history, StrangeMaine presents a few ideas drawn from the Archives of the Portland Public Library. You may recognize some of the landmarks...

Summer treats and walking with friends: Old Orchard Beach, 1937. A great thing to do on a lingering evening.


Sightseeing. Mainers can do this, too! Our versions of "stay-cations" include some great places. This was taken on Portland's Eastern Promenade, near Fort Allen Park in 1953.


Go for a spin in your faithful old car! This image was taken in 1944, though the car (called the "Deering High School Staff Car") is much older than that. Your passenger might even wind up with a foot on the windshield!


A carefree bicycle ride. Extra credit if you decorate the spokes! This was taken in 1953.


Baseball! Maybe playing it, maybe going out to the ball game. Here are the Portland Pilots in 1947. Back then, the place where Hadlock Field stands was called Portland Stadium. The firehouse on the left on the picture is still there, and the street in the background is Washburn Street.


Do some writing. In this fine weather, you can bring those literary projects outdoors! If your car doesn't have a rumble seat (and a pillow) , there are always lawn chairs. This picture is from 1938.


Sketching by the sea. Get out the charcoal, the watercolors, or the oils- and maybe a few kindred artists. Recording their impressions, these captivated folks were photographed in 1951.

The Beach. Well, of course. And we all have our favorites. Here's Portland's East End Beach in 1953.


Don't forget to keep plenty of water handy in that wicked hot weather. Or Moxie. Here's an aqueous-minded dog at the SPCA Pullen Fountain on Portland's Federal Street, in 1948.

Have a fabulous summer- and take lots of pictures, too!

Photographs from: Portland Press Herald Still Film Negative Collection, Portland Public Library Archives.

Review: Dirt by Mark LaFlamme

Mark LaFlamme’s Dirt: An American Campaign

SPECIAL NOTE! Catch Mark LaFlamme in a rare Portland appearance at the noontime Brown Bag Lunch lecture series at the Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland, Maine, on Wednesday, November 12th.

Graveyards, resurrected love, backroads intrigue – these ingredients cause no great stretch of the imagination for a confessed fan of fellow Mainer, Stephen King, and his predecessors, including Edgar Allan Poe.

Like King, LaFlamme is a tricky writer. He lures you in by seeming ordinary, but there is something residing in his texts, in his characters’ dialogues and inner monologues, that goes beyond that threshold of normalcy and expectations. Before I know it, he’s got me again. This is not an unhappy thing. The pages have to be turned, but this is a pleasure, as the story plays out before me – he’s done all the work. I cannot turn away until finally I reach the end.

This was true of the first LaFlamme book I read, The Pink Room, and remains true of his latest, Dirt. What makes this guy from Lewiston such a crafter of thought-provoking page-turners? I can only guess that it’s this – he is not afraid of hard work. This is a man who spends day and night pounding the crime beat for the Lewiston Sun Journal. Off the news desk, he writes books and short stories, which the rest of us get to read. He is not going to waste our time.

The greater world hasn’t picked up on him yet. He’s still mostly ours at this point, here in the state of Maine. This doesn’t stop him from weaving more widely traveled threads into his work.

In Dirt, LaFlamme focuses through the lens of the all-too-familiar worldview of the American Presidential campaign. Don’t look for the all-American glamour that comes from power in this story. It’s buried under dirt.

Maine Governor Frank F. Cotton is raging up through the ranks as a distinguished contender for the Republican nomination. His image is that of hardy Maine stock, hard-working, honest, stern but engaging. The press knows his son Calvin as a recent widower and a staunch white-collar environmentalist, a lawyer who pushes back against the big boys his father pals around with. What the press doesn’t know, and what Frank Cotton doesn’t want them to find out, is that his grieving son is also unable to wrap his mind around the death of his wife, Bethany.

While Frank Cotton has been running his campaign state to state across the country, Calvin Cotton has very quietly lost his mind, and fetched his lovely bride from her funereal box for one last lovely New England winter getaway.

It is Thomas Cashman’s job to fetch them both back, as privately as possible. He can’t think of anyone better to help than Billy Baylor. In his role as best-selling novelist, Baylor explored the theme of love after death thoroughly and repeatedly, until his career was interrupted by the death of his wife and young daughter in a random accident. Since then, Baylor hasn’t had much of a thought about anything but misery and beer.

Governor Cotton calls Cashman. Cashman finds Baylor. Together they track Calvin and Bethany, with the hounds of the press at their heels.

If you open one box of worms, you often find another. And another. And another. And boy do those worms like dirt.

I won’t ruin it for you – read it yourself.

(another) mystery photo !

In these balmy summer days, Strange Maine brings you yet another Mystery Photo. Can you guess where this is ?? (Image below can be clicked to enlarge)

EVENT: Loren Coleman at Portland Public Library

WHEN: Wednesday, March 5th from 12:00 noon to 1:00pm
WHO: Loren Coleman
WHAT: A free-to-the-public Brown Bag Lunch Talk with the author of The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates and Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
WHERE: Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland, ME, in the Rines Auditorium
FMI: 871-1700, ext. 759

The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman -- these are the names of the elusive beasts that have caught the eye and captured the imaginations of people around the world for centuries. Recently, tales of these "monsters" have been corroborated by an increase in sightings, and out of these legends a new science has been born: cryptozoology -- the study of hidden animals.

Cryptozoology A to Z, the first encyclopedia of its kind, contains nearly two hundred entries, including cryptids (the name given to these unusual beasts), new animal finds, and the explorers and scientists who search for them. Loren Coleman, one of the world's leading cryptozoologists, provides these definitive descriptions and many never-before-published drawings and photographs from eyewitnesses' detailed accounts.

Full of insights into the methods of these scientists, exciting tales of discovery, and the history and evolution of this field, Cryptozoology A to Z was when it appeared the most complete reference ever of the newest zoological science. It was picked at an ALA-American Library Association Youth Award for 2001.

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates is a comprehensive study of the astonishing variety of puzzling primates that are being reported by eyewitnesses around the world - but that science has failed to recognize. This fully illustrated volume not only contains the references, range maps, and typical footprints that appeared in the first edition, but it also contains a new, complete index and new preface that updates the discoveries made since this book was first published.

Loren Coleman, a nearly fifty-year veteran of cryptozoological field expeditions and research, has written 30 books on nature's mysterious creatures, including The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Mysterious America, and Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti, and has served as both on- and off-camera consultant to NBC-TV's Unsolved Mysteries, A&E's Ancient Mysteries, History Channel's MonsterQuest, Travel Channel's Weird Travels, and many more. He is a former adjunct professor and full-time researcher at the Muskie School, University of Southern Maine and lives in Portland, where he runs a cryptozoology museum. He is the driving force behind the blog at Cryptomundo, the world's most popular cryptozoology site.

Photo by Amber Waterman for the Lewiston Sun Journal.