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The parking lots on the north side of Thompsons Point Road are actually owned by MaineDOT, and they occupy the land that the highway engineers took in the 1970s for a failed freeway spur that would have gone through the Fore River Marshes to Westbrook: That freeway got axed when Clean Water...

I agree it's slowly recovering compared to 2 years ago, but even a 15-20% rate of remote work - which is likely to be permanent at this point - represents a major shift in how much office space people need. Portland's Class A inventory is about 2 million square feet of office space; 15 percent...

I'm pretty surprised they're trying to sell offices surrounded by a dead zone of parking lots, instead of trying to start with housing - which there's actually demand for - and making an attempt to turn it into a neighborhood where people might actually want to work. There's very weak demand...

Portland Housing Authority has published a project website for its COMB Block project, which would be a multi-phase, multi-building redevelopment of the land it owns between Cumberland, Oxford, Mayo, and Boyd (COMB for short). The first building is going for planning approval this spring; it...

Franklin Towers doesn't have a bunch of fake-Greek crap plastered over its facade like those other buildings, but it does have strong claims to being historic – and it's frankly more unique than a lot of old houses with Greater Portland Landmarks plaques in the West End. It's a great example of...

Are you insinuating that "historic preservation" is less concerned about history than it is about enforcing the aesthetic preferences of wealthy, elitist snobs? What in the world gave you that idea? /sarcasm

As far as I know, they still control the big former Mercy Hospital parking lot on the other side of Spring Street, which is over 1/2 an acre with an 85' height limit...

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...