The Working Waterfront and the Lobster Economy
Near Portland, Maine
The waterfront you see today has been a working port for nearly four centuries, but the creature that defines Maine's identity on the plate was considered worthless for most of that time. Lobster was so abundant in the early colonial period that it washed ashore in piles after storms, and it was fed to servants, prisoners, and the poor. Coastal communities reportedly included clauses in indenture contracts limiting how often lobster could be served to workers, because people considered it humiliating food.
The shift began in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Around the middle of the century, traps began to replace hand-gathering, and lobster canneries spread along the Maine coast, allowing the product to reach markets far from the coast without spoiling. By the time the canneries were fully established, demand had begun the long climb that transformed lobster from poverty food into premium commodity. Today, Maine's lobster fishery is one of the most economically significant in the country, and Portland is its commercial hub.
Commercial Street, the road running along the waterfront just below here, was largely filled in over old piers around eighteen fifty to accommodate the expanding railroad and warehouse operations that the fishing and shipping industries required. Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine of the eighteen forties arrived to work those docks and wharves, forming the labor force that built the modern waterfront district. They concentrated in two neighborhoods: the west end of the peninsula, and the east end on Munjoy Hill.
The lobster boats that come in through the harbor mouth before dawn are part of a commercial fishery that has outlasted railroad empires, two world wars, and the decline of nearly every other major New England port. The working waterfront you see here is one of the busiest remaining in the Northeast, still centered on the same anchorage George Cleeve chose almost four hundred years ago.
