{"id":9683,"date":"2014-04-25T12:54:59","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T16:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=9683"},"modified":"2018-02-06T16:30:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T21:30:37","slug":"the-secret-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/the-secret-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"colin08\"<\/a><\/p>\n

May 2014<\/p>\n

When we slide our chairs back in the Old Port, we sometimes bump into pieces of our lost geography. On Moulton Street, in the rathskellar of the Old Port Tavern, there\u2019s a bar, stage, and dining area. Lining it is the gray stone wall that was once Portland\u2019s ancient seawall, now part of the tavern\u2019s foundation.<\/p>\n

This urban relic predates the famed Rum Riot of 1855. Waves splashed inches from where you\u2019re sitting. Thinking in the negative, it means there was once no Commercial Street. No Chandler\u2019s Wharf, no DiMillo\u2019s, no R\u00edR\u00e1. It took dreamers to fill in the street and build new wharves where there was nothing but blue water before.<\/p>\n

True to its name, Wharf Street, home to so many bistros and clubs today, is where the wharves were.<\/p>\n

More remnants of the lost harbor wall run \u201cbeneath Fore Street almost to the [Casco Bay] Bridge,\u201d according to Portland Magazine<\/em> in \u201cUp Against The Wall: Back When Commercial Street Was The Atlantic Ocean.\u201d You can really see the old stones \u201ctowering up from a vacant lot at the intersection of Park and Commercial streets\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cFore Street was Portland\u2019s waterfront, the first street to be cobblestoned. From it bristled the wharves where trading vessels anchored.\u201d The railroad beds and Commercial Street were filled in for \u201c$80,000.\u201d<\/p>\n

The men\u2019s fashion store Seawall riffed on the energy of its 37 Wharf Street digs. \u201cMuch of the work I did during art school was informed by the idea of the drift, psychic geography, and treating the cityscape as something to actively engage with,\u201d says Daniel Pepice, who set up shop here beside his wife\u2019s, designer Brook DeLorme\u2019s, studio Brook There. Talk about finding your edge: \u201cWhen Brook and I decided to start a menswear brand [and chose Seawall as our trade name]\u2026I liked the idea that where our rolls of fabric were stacked and sewing machines hummed would [over a century and a half earlier] have been at the bottom of the harbor.\u201d Last summer, \u201cGurhan, the world renowned jewelry designer, paid us a visit.\u201d Inspiration steamed up from the stones. \u201cWe talked about the space and what compels people to take creative action.\u201d This summer, Pepice and DeLorme are extending their edge. \u201cWe are launching a new website\u201d for all the Seawall styles \u201cin collaboration with our friends at David Wood and Portland Dry Goods [including Barbour, Imogene + Willie, and Billy Reid, to name a few]. It\u2019s called Seawallshop.com<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the lower depths under Life is Good (the former Klaman\u2019s Bottles) are about to be occupied by Bonfire Country Brew Works, a saloon with 16 TVs, country music videos, and two dozen taps. Slip into the dark to visit the water walls and firewalls of subterranean Portland. See our new attractions section \u201cPortland After Dark\u201d on page 52 to tie up to the area\u2019s nightlife.<\/p>\n

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

May 2014 When we slide our chairs back in the Old Port, we sometimes bump into pieces of our lost geography. On Moulton Street, in the rathskellar of the Old Port Tavern, there\u2019s a bar, stage, and dining area. Lining it is the gray stone wall that was once Portland\u2019s ancient seawall, now part of […]<\/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":[82],"class_list":["post-9683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-may-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683","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=9683"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14449,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683\/revisions\/14449"}],"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=9683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}