For family reasons, I recently relocated from coastal Maine to Oslo, Norway.
My ongoing subscription to the Portland Press Herald has enabled me to follow the saga of the Portland Museum of Art’s ambition to launch a “$100 million capital campaign” requiring the destruction of 142 Free St.
The legal merits of the City Council’s decision to withdraw historic preservation protection for this handsome 1830 remnant of Portland’s own Greek Revival architectural legacy is now a matter for Cumberland County Superior Court to resolve.
What is not questionable is the moral vacuity of that decision.
The reason for the historic preservation of our built environment is to protect significant remnants of our shared past. Individuals and communities protect their shared memories because without them, we all drift rudderless in the seas of time.
An alternative to destroying “dated” buildings is adaptive reuse. European cities – and Boston, closer to home – are rich with examples of this; it’s one of the things that makes them so appealing to visit.
In the same Press Herald pages, I read of the growing number of our neighbors, ordinary working people struggling mightily (and, too often, unsuccessfully) to house themselves and their families. These are the people who pave our streets and construct our buildings and care for our children and forgotten infirm and elderly. Meanwhile, the rest of us well-housed middle-class folks mutter ineffectually about inflated real estate values.
Ordinary working people have had a tough time maintaining their dignity under our “aristocracy of merit,” the self-same aristocracy that produces entertainment ridiculing them with cruel stereotypes such as Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson and the Beverly Hillbillies. These people, upon whom we depend more than we know, need no art galleries to show them what an art treasure is. For them, the finest work of art is most likely the first intelligible picture painted by a small child whom they cherish. Would they value their “work of art” more than a painting produced by a famous painter, even if they had the leisure to peruse the Portland Museum of Art?
Persons whose careers are built on art criticism and curation benefit mightily from the expansion of art galleries. But the governance of Portland has a moral obligation to the city’s working people that far exceeds any imagined debt to that small minority of us who operate and visit art museums, however pleasurable or well-subsidized by tax benefits.
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