It is a rainy day

This is from Quarry Road, near Morrill's Corner. Quite a view! Please click the picture to make it much bigger. Note the cruise ship at the State Pier looks like part of the skyline.

Old Port: Full

Also, nice to see all these bikes around on a beautiful summer day:

Mellen Street Market

Mellen Street Market is conveniently located on Mellen Street. This is in the Parkside neighborhood.

DiMillo's

Dim Lo's

Sunsetting

This photo in no way endorses the Franklin Arterial. Please visit the Franklin Reclamation Authority to learn more and join the fight to fix this urban blight.

WCSH6 Sidewalk Art Festival 2009

Here are some pictures from earlier today of the Sidewalk Art Festival, a great event held every summer that stretches from the corner of Free and Temple Streets all the way up to where Park Street meets Congress Street. 7 city blocks of car-free entertainment. From the event's website:

Approximately 300 artists and 40,000 visitors attend this festival. The WCSH 6 Sidewalk Art Festival is the oldest and largest one-day art show in Northern New England.

Urban Forest

These are a few shots of the empty lot on the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Forest Avenue. It was once home to a few houses, which were cleared for this Waterview at Bayside condo project several years ago, which fell through. The site was purchased by the same company, PowerPay, that is moving into the former public market building (source). They have yet to clear this little jungle (which is even taller since the time I took these pictures) but it is slated to become employee parking (despite the fact that the former public market building is attached to a parking garage).

Preble Street

If you're looking for volunteer opportunities, Preble Street is always welcoming help. Located in the Bayside neighborhood, but only two blocks from Monument Square, there is a large presence of social services organizations in this lower-income area. You don't see it in tour books or magazine articles promoting the city, but I would say that Portland has a pretty sizable homeless population, especially per capita.

Bonus picture from Oxford Street (just down the road from the above picture). I enjoy documenting sidewalks that are nearly impassable.

Leaving Town

This is the Granduer of the Seas, leaving after a day in Portland on Saturday. You can view the summer's cruise ship schedule here. About 70,000 people will visit town via cruise ships this summer, up slightly from previous years.

Around the Peninsula - August 18, 2009

Here are a few interesting things from around the local blog circuit that you may have missed...

• Portland Food Coma continues sharing some deep thoughts on local bars located within Asian restaurants.

• Tip of the hat to Portland Food Map on this post, reporting that Mainebiz reports on the old claim that we may have more restaurants per capita than San Francisco, maybe.

• Original Portland/Portland Photoworks proprietor Elliott Teel was interviewed in a Bollard story about the Parkside neighborhood, I recommend checking it out (the article, but Parkside isn't as bad as it used to be they report)

• Portlandtown covers the MS Harborfest of this past weekend with some great photos.

- Also, you may have noticed that I turned off comments for my new posts. I have been having troubles with some spam recently (I kept getting 30 different spam comments each day) despite having the word verification feature on. I'm working on the issue and will likely install the Disqus comment tool that is currently used on Walk Around Portland.

Details

Some details on the side of the Maine Bank & Trust building on Congress Street.