Pictures from the other Portland tell the story.

The Portland Press Herald and the Maine Sunday Telegram look back at a wonderful historic street of mixed-income housing.    In the 1960s, Franklin Street was destroyed to make way for an arterial that, it was hoped, would bring traffic to revitalize downtown.    

Here is the painfully sad  but well-told story of the automobile’s assault on the social infrastructure of a neighborhood of Portland, Maine.   Especially heart wrenching is the then-and-now slide show.   More hopeful is the newspaper’s ongoing coverage of the efforts of planners and citizens to remediate some of the damage.

How the Mt. Hood Freeway was defeated

This video by Brooklyn filmmaker Clarence Eckerson, Jr.  is a page from Portland 101 that provides ongoing inspiration for the challenges ahead.   “Defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway” outlines the proposal of the heavy hitting Robert Moses and links it up with today’s “ghost ramps.”   The rest is history…and Portland’s future for many years to come thanks to an exuberance of innovation and hope.  Nice shots of streetscapes and traffic calming devices.