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I wonder what's going to become of the old Norway Savings drive-thru when it's no longer needed for construction staging. It's an absurdly dumb use of Old Port real estate – if I were running Norway Savings Bank, I wouldn't want such a visible billboard in the middle of downtown Portland...

OK I haven't found renderings but I did find this historic photo of what the existing building used to look like, when it was a car barn for the Portland & Yarmouth Electric Railway (the left bay appears to have been demolished but I wonder if the sign on the pediment is still there under the...

This sounds like a challenge – 1,000,000 ArchBoston Bucks* to the first person who can find them on the internet *ArchBoston Bucks are not a real thing

If you look at Portland's FEMA flood maps, the eastern prom trail along the eastern waterfront is generally 12-13 feet in elevation, which is better off than the old B&M building, whose south end is at about 10' elevation and has been getting pretty wet this winter...

Ha ha – this is not true. Nobody's flying across the globe to get treatment at Maine Med the way people fly to MGH. No offense to MMC – several of my family members work there, and they would absolutely agree with this – but if you've got a serious cancer diagnosis and the world's best doctors...

Renderings have been posted on the Historic Preservation Board agenda. No on-site parking either – except a nice big indoor bike storage room on Gilbert Lane:

42 Atlantic Street – the former Munjoy Hill American Legion club – is getting an application for 26 affordable apartments in a new 4-story building. According to the application letter, the applicant is taking advantage of new zoning density bonuses that the city enacted in response to LD2003...

From the application letter I actually got the impression that the church is staying – the letter describes a conversion of office and performance space on the 3rd floor of the parish house, with 9 units in the existing structure and 12 more in a new addition. Here's the property in question –...

It's the time of year when new tax credit-funded affordable housing developments are trying to get planning board approval in order to score better in Maine Housing's competitive tax credit allocation process. There's another intriguing Historic Preservation application for an adaptive...

I'm suing the Acadian Orogeny for blocking my views of the sky with these tacky ugly mountains

So according to the scale on the site plan, it's 400 feet from the front door of Unit 7 to the outer edge of the parking lot, along a pleasant path lined with trees and your neighbors' front porches. At the Costco in Scarborough, it's a 600-700 foot walk from the front entrance to the outer...

I wonder if Suffolk is opening this new office to chase the Northeastern grad school projects on the former B&M site. Suffolk is a massive firm, and there aren't many local companies that have the bandwidth to take on such a big project in Portland. Suffolk is also an existing Northeastern...

You may want to call Acorn Engineering - I've noticed that they've been running point on several recent zoning requests and site plan approvals that have come through the city. They're not architects, they're engineers, but you'd need to engage an engineer anyhow if you're thinking about a...

Much as everyone appreciates the groundbreaking political commentary here, let's try to keep it on topic, folks. Discussions about your senile grandpa's favorite cable entertainment channel should go in this thread: https://archboston.com/community/forums/usa-politics-public-policy.58/

"I saw it on Fox News" is quite a self-own, so here's some more credible information about the MaineHousing program in Brunswick: https://www.pressherald.com/2023/05/15/hundreds-of-asylum-seekers-apply-for-brunswick-housing/ The reason the state financed the project this way is because they'd...

They received a "framework plan" approval, which allows some wiggle room but still requires some additional review for specific projects inside that framework before they break ground. My hunch is that if this proposal were bigger than the building in the framework plan it might be an issue, but...

It looks like this would only occupy the corner of the block, and not extend all the way to Pearl Street. That would explain why the "Pearl" elevation is a big blank wall, which otherwise wouldn't be allowed in Portland's zoning code. Similarly, the blank ground-floor wall on the "Congress"...

I've always wondered if a lot of the facade is still there under the stucco. On Congress, you can still see the granite columns are intact on either side of Moody Lords...

Are you guys joking? Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen independent coffee shops within a block of this site: Bard, Arabica, HiFi, Burkes, The Works, 88 Donuts... The Middle Street Starbucks shut down because they got out-competed by better coffee places, but I'm sure they'd...

This site would also be an obvious candidate for up-zoning to the R7 zone, which would allow even more housing there