{"id":3137,"date":"2010-09-24T13:02:38","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T20:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=3137"},"modified":"2018-02-06T17:02:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T22:02:37","slug":"when-exactly-did-we-become-%e2%80%a8the-%e2%80%9cother-portland%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/when-exactly-did-we-become-%e2%80%a8the-%e2%80%9cother-portland%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"When Exactly Did We Become \u2028The \u201cOther Portland\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"

October 2010<\/p>\n

\"colin08\"Standing in line at San Francisco Airport, I was asked by an attendant, \u201cWhat is your destination, sir?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPortland,\u201d I said proudly.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOregon?\u201d he asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMaine!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh,\u201d he said. He waved me to the line marked “International Flights.”<\/span><\/p>\n

When I indignantly said, “Maine is part of the United States,” he asked, “You mean we have an other<\/em> Portland?”<\/span><\/p>\n

True story, my fellow PWMers. And travel bloggers have surfaced with references to us as the \u201cother Portland.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Editor Hal Amen of matadortrips.com justifies the atrocity:<\/span><\/p>\n

Just to clarify\u2013my wife is from Winterport (near Bangor), and we lived in Portland [Maine] in 2007-2008 and loved it. Every time we\u2019re passing through on the way to her parents\u2019 place, we make it a point to stop into Standard Baking and pick up morning buns and an olive loaf.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding the title of my piece, \u201cGreen Guide to (the Other) Portland,\u201d I can think of three reasons why I went with that wording:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. To anyone outside of New England, Portland, Maine, is the \u201cother Portland.\u201d When I tell strangers, \u201cI used to live in Portland,\u201d no one ever assumes Maine. Simply put, PDX is much bigger and makes it into the news more often\u2026I\u2019ve run into folks who didn\u2019t even know there were two! There\u2019s also a story my wife tells, how her father\u2013from Winterport\u2013called the national number for a hotel chain to book a room in \u201cPortland.\u201d When they got down there, the hotel didn\u2019t have their reservation\u2013the operator had made it for Portland, Oregon!<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Matador had already published a \u201cGreen Guide to Portland,\u201d referring to PDX. The title didn\u2019t clarify which, but no one wrote in to say, \u201cMan, I clicked on this expecting to read about Portland, Maine!\u201d I found this a little funny, which prompted me to insert the tongue-in-cheek \u201c(the Other)\u201d into my title.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. I\u2019m an underdog guy. And Portland, Maine, currently feels like the underdog to Portland, Oregon, regardless of history. Which makes me love it all the more\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

This<\/em> from a writer with warm feelings toward us! At least our \u201cotherness\u201d has some cachet, Portland, Oregon, because every metropole lacking originality is copying your green \u201cnowhereness\u201d to the point where soon you won\u2019t have any more geographic identity than, say, Whole Foods.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, Bizarro Portland, you can keep your promiscuous proximity to California, and you don\u2019t even have an ocean to call your own. Even if you\u2019ve wrested Portland.com away from the former Blethen Maine Newspapers (marooning us with the happy-face MaineToday.com)\u2013even if your Oregonian license plate with the evergreen trees vaguely resembles ours\u2013you\u2019ll never take away our dignity. No one wears a black eye prettier than Portland, Maine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Colin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 2010 Standing in line at San Francisco Airport, I was asked by an attendant, \u201cWhat is your destination, sir?\u201d \u201cPortland,\u201d I said proudly. \u201cOregon?\u201d he asked. \u201cMaine!\u201d \u201cOh,\u201d he said. He waved me to the line marked “International Flights.” When I indignantly said, “Maine is part of the United States,” he asked, “You mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-3137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-october-2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14503,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137\/revisions\/14503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}